Companies are raising prices well above increases in their costs. The only antidote is to finally take action against corporate power.
In a time of high inflation, you hear a lot about companies “passing costs” on to customers. In order for companies to maintain their God-given right to earn a profit, they must raise prices to offset the cost of producing goods and getting them into peoples’ hands. And thanks mostly to the hidden risk, exposed by the pandemic, of neoliberal gospels like just-in-time logistics, deregulation, and offshoring, prices really are going up.
But there’s something else mixed in with this latest bout of inflation. Companies aren’t just passing costs onto us. With corporations using inflation as a cover for raising their prices, you and I are passing profits onto companies.
“Executives are seizing a once in a generation opportunity to raise prices,” reads a Wall Street Journal story explaining that around two-thirds of the largest publicly traded companies are showing profit margins higher today than they did in 2019, before the pandemic. Over 100 companies show profit margins of 50 percent or more above those 2019 levels.
In other words, inflation is being enhanced by exploitation. Profiteers are using the frenzy around higher prices as an excuse to reel in much more than increased costs. President Biden has only tiptoed around calling this out and taking action. But telling a story about corporate price-gouging and sustaining a push against it is a key component to resolving the crisis—and, perhaps, reversing Biden’s slump.
https://prospect.org/economy/fighting-the-inflation-profiteers-biden-kennedy/
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