The progressive left’s inflation fantasy

Government spending is primarily to blame, and Biden wants to double down

Wealthy democratic socialist Bernie Sanders is always a useful idiot for establishment Democrats, and his proposed windfall tax on corporate profits is another tool in the toolbox. Gage Skidmore photo.

It’s pretty obvious I’m no fan of globalist business interests that care not one scrap about the United States of America. Mammoth corporations like Amazon, Disney, Coke, and Nike are globalist brands, and it should be noted that they also don’t care about capitalism.

The Democratic Party loves them, though. Democratic Party corporate consultants help Amazon defeat unions (though Global Strategy Group, a major advisor to liberal Democrats AND to oil companies, came up short in Staten Island this past week with workers voting to form Amazon’s first union), and liberals just love it when Disney takes on Ron DeSantis and Coke criticizes Georgia’s voting laws. They become so giddy about their corporate friends that they would love to buy the world a Coke.

But there’s reality and there’s politics. The party finds itself in a bind—outside of black voters, its base constituency is an amalgam of affluent cultural liberals that does not represent a majority of the electorate. Working class voters in general deserted the party years ago; even union voters have parted ways to some degree, and, as their policies and their union-busting show, the Democrats have written off both workers and unions.

To win, though, the Democrats need class warfare and so they still couch their political language in terms of taking on millionaires and billionaires and of fighting anti-worker corporations in their campaigns, though increasingly it’s the Democrats who are the very millionaires and billionaires they talk about taking down.

So far, it’s worked well enough because for too many years the Republicans were a chamber of commerce country club whose only devotion was to the corporate bottom line and the fat cats who ran them. That led the party establishment into a dangerous accommodation of globalism for many years, as the regular headlining of Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton at Clinton Global Initiative galas made clear. The GOP has changed, but that’s hard baggage to shake.

Anyway, the Democratic Party has taken to finding all sorts of villains for runaway inflation, “Putin’s gas hikes” in particular, “temporary” pandemic-induced supply-chain shortages, and, of course, the big bad bogeymen—those big corporations who have gouged the consumer and laughed all the way to the bank.

In other words, their own partners.

Inflation is largely a result of corporate greed and avarice, the Biden administration tells us, what with record corporate profits and all. And there comes establishment brown-noser Bernie Sanders, right on cue, screaming for a 95-percent tax on windfall profits, calculated as the difference between 2021 profits and an average profit level in the five years leading up to the pandemic. It’s poppycock, but this is exactly what the Democratic establishment wants him to do. Bernie and the administration and the corporations he bashes all know it will go nowhere, but it’s good politics.

So allow me, at least a little, to defend for once the big bad corporations from the charge that they are the root cause of inflation, and that it can mostly be traced back to corporate greed.

Yes, we have big profits but ….