Friday, June 02, 2023
65% Of Public Says Trump Committed A Crime
About 232,000 Workers Filed For Unemployment Last Week
The Labor Department released its weekly unemployment report on Thursday. It showed that about 232,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits in the week ending on May 27th. Here is the official Labor Department statement:
In the week ending May 27, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 232,000, an increase of 2,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 1,000 from 229,000 to 230,000. The 4-week moving average was 229,500, a decrease of 2,500 from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised up by 250 from 231,750 to 232,000.
It's Not Inflation Driving Up Prices - It's Greedflation!
The idiots in Washington don't seem to understand the real cause of today's rising prices. Robert Reich, in this post, tries to explain it for them in simple language:
Okay, the House has passed the debt-ceiling deal, and the Senate will follow suit. So the economic crisis is over. Right?
Not quite, because another and more serious economic crisis is brewing: While the Fed continues to raise interest rates to counter inflation by slowing the economy, big corporations continue to raise prices. Greedflation is stalking the economy.
The latest data shows that the average company in the S&P 500 stock index increased its net profit margin from the end of last year. Wall Street analysts forecast that profit margins will keep expanding in the second half of this year.
The Fed has raised borrowing costs at 10 consecutive meetings, increasing its benchmark rate to over 5 percent. Yet inflation has barely slowed. Why? Because the Fed’s rate hikes barely affect big corporations that continue to raise prices to fatten their profits.
I want to emphasize that it’s their profit margins that continue to increase. Corporations aren’t raising prices to cover increased costs. The Producer Price Index dropped 2.3 percent for the 12 months through April. The prices of oil, transportation, food ingredients, and raw materials continue to drop as the shocks stemming from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine fade. Wage gains still lag behind price increases. Wages and salaries in the Employment Cost Index, a broader measure of worker compensation, have been trending downward for a year.
No, big corporations are raising prices because they can — because they have enough monopoly power to do so. With just a handful of companies dominating each market, it’s easy to implicitly agree they’ll all raise their prices.
They’re not plowing those profits back into investments that would make the economy more productive. They continue to sink them into stock buybacks, which reward executives and big investors but do nothing for the economy.
(By the way, corporate economists argue that businesses couldn’t be padding their profits; if they could, they would have done it before the inflation of the last two years. But businesses have been using the cover of inflation to justify price increases, so consumers accept them. According to Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, businesses “are confident that they can convince consumers that it isn’t their fault, and it won’t damage their brand.”)
Inflation is not being propelled by an overheated economy. It’s being propelled by overheated profits. So it makes no sense to fight inflation by trying to slow the economy with high interest rates. In fact, this strategy is dangerous — especially now that Congress and the administration are on the verge of reducing anticipated federal spending by about $55 billion next year and another $81 billion in 2025. This one-two punch will take the wind out of the job market but not out of corporate monopolies.
The good news is that even the establishment media is finally catching on. In just the past few weeks, both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have featured lead stories highlighting inflation driven in large part by corporations raising their prices to fatten their profits.
This opens space for shifting the burden of fighting inflation from workers and consumers to corporations.
As I’ve suggested before, instead of relying on the Fed to “tame” inflation via fewer jobs and lower wages, Democratic lawmakers and the Biden administration should seek legislation that puts more of the onus of fighting inflation on big corporations. Such legislation would:
— Allow the Justice Department to bust up monopolies (and prevent further consolidation through mergers and acquisitions) when three or fewer corporations have more than half the sales of a particular market.
— Direct the Federal Trade Commission to find that any such corporation has engaged in unlawful price gouging whenever it has raised prices higher than the rate of inflation, and impose a fine that would claw back those unlawful gains.
— Permit the Treasury Department to impose a windfall profits tax on large corporations, above a specific reasonable rate of return or profit margin.
If Republicans won’t go along, Biden and the Democrats should make this a major campaign issue for 2024.
They should ask the public: Do you want more jobs and higher wages, or do you want large corporations making fatter profits by raising prices?
Thursday, June 01, 2023
Allred Is Within 5 Points Of Cruz In Texas Senate Race
These charts reflect the results of a recent University of Texas at Tyler Poll -- done between May 10th and 21st of 1,413 registered Texas voters, with a 3 point margin of error.
The results should please Democrat Colin Allred. Just shortly after announcing his candidacy, he is only 5 points behind incumbent Republican Ted Cruz. And 14% of voters say they don't know which they'll vote for.
Add to this the fact that Cruz has a negative 8 point favorability rating, while Allred has a positive 2 point rating. While most Texans already have a solid opinion of Cruz, about 48% say they don't know enough yet about Allred. Allred has several months to define himself to the voters.
It will still be tough to beat Cruz in red Texas, but I think these numbers show that Allred has a reasonable chance to win.
Which GOP Candidate Is The Worst Demagogue?
Which Republican candidate is the worst demagogue? Personally, I think it's Trump. But in this post, Robert Reich makes a good case for DeSantis:
As you know, Congress has just a few days to raise the borrowing limit before the government goes into default on its debt, which would most likely set off a global financial crisis, and potentially throw millions of Americans out of work.
I wouldn’t have negotiated with Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans if I were president. I would have relied on Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and continued to pay the nation’s bills with IOUs.
But I’m not president, and the deal worked out Saturday between Biden and McCarthy is the only deal in town. To oppose it now is to opt for chaos.
So I was alarmed by the decision by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to oppose the agreement.
“Our country was careening toward bankruptcy” before the deal was struck, DeSantis said on “Fox and Friends” on Monday, “and after this deal, our country will still be careening toward bankruptcy.”
DeSantis’s broadside comes just as McCarthy is trying to round up Republican votes to approve the deal this week. And it puts pressure on Donald Trump to come out against the bill as well. Will he?
There’s much debate about the capacity of the Republican Party to govern. As you know, I’m of the view that it’s rapidly turning into a White Christian Nationalist party, divorced from democracy. DeSantis’s opposition to the debt-ceiling deal is an example.
DeSantis comes as close to a fascist as any politician in modern American history. To my mind, he’s more dangerous than Trump because DeSantis knows exactly what he’s doing and where he wants to take the country — into tyranny, bigotry, and ultra-nationalist culture warfare — while Trump is motivated by nothing more than Donald Trump.
A test will be whether Trump follows DeSantis into opposing the debt-ceiling deal.
What do you think?
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