Conor here: Many on the left seem eager to believe that Kamala would continue the one bright spot from the Biden administration: crackdowns from the DOJ Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission on things like concentration and price fixing.
Yet the Harris campaign has yet to voice any support for Jonathan Kanter (head of DOJ antitrust) or Lina Khan (FTC head). We’re getting a steady diet of stories about Kamala being caught between billionaire donors and progressives.
The plutocrats want Khan gone, and the Harris campaign declines to comment. Is there something, anything in Harris’ record that would lead us to believe she would stand up to the billionaires, or does her history suggest the opposite?
While many took Harris’ big August economic speech as a cause for celebration because she mentioned mergers and price-fixing, maybe I’m too pessimistic, but I think it’s actually cause for more concern. It was reminiscent of Obama who said nice things, but we know the rest of the story. The non-plan plan that emerged from Harris’ speech was evidence of this. I wrote the following when Harris unveiled her price gouging “plan”:
So Harris comes out with a non-plan to tackle price gouging. Her campaign can’t even explain what would constitute excessive profit, what a ban on price gouging would target, or how it would be enforced. Maybe the obfuscation is the point.
It’s really impossible to know what Harris supports since she has so few policy proposals and rarely speaks to the press, but here Matt Bruenig argues the price gouging proposal is either stupid or a bait-and-switch that too many are desperate to buy into.
By Matt Bruenig. Originally published at his website.
Ten days ago, Kamala Harris released her Lowering Costs Agenda (LCA), a five-page list of various policy proposals that all ostensibly relate back to lowering prices.
The LCA contains the following text about grocery costs:
Lowering Grocery Costs
Vice President Harris knows that rising food prices remain a top concern for American families. Many big grocery chains that have seen production costs level off have nevertheless kept prices high and have seen their highest profits in two decades. While some food companies have passed along these savings, others still have not. Price fluctuations are normal in free markets, but Vice President Harris recognizes there is a big difference between fair pricing and the excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business that Americans have seen in the food and grocery industry.
That’s why Vice President Harris and Governor Walz will work to enact a plan in their first 100 days to go after bad actors to bring down Americans’ grocery costs and keep inflation in check. They will work with Congress to:
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Advance the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries;
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Set clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive profits on food and groceries.
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Secure new authority for the FTC and state attorneys general to investigate and impose strict new penalties on companies that break the rules.
The document provides no further elaboration about what exactly is meant by “price gouging.” But given that the preface to this particular sentence states that grocery price levels are being inflated by big grocery chains who are excessively profiteering and then states that this plan aims to “bring down Americans’ grocery costs,” it would be reasonable to assume that Harris is proposing some kind of regulation that would penalize grocery stores for setting prices too far above their costs.
Explicitly imposing some sort of cost-plus rule on grocery store pricing is fairly controversial and so a number of articles were published either critiquing the idea or reporting on the reaction of various economists and industry spokespeople.
Rather than defend the idea of imposing some kind of pricing regulation to bring down grocery store prices right now, various writers have instead decided to defend the much narrower idea of banning certain price hikes in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster.
For instance, in The Atlantic, Zephyr Teachout defends the Harris plan by referencing these very narrow state laws:
Price gouging in the popular imagination has a “know it when you see it” quality, but it is actually a well-developed body of law. A typical price-gouging claim has four elements. First, a triggering event, sometimes called an “abnormal market disruption,” such as a natural disaster or power outage, must have occurred. Second, in most states, the claim must concern essential goods and services. (No one cares if you overcharge for Louis Vuitton handbags during a hurricane.) Third, a price increase must be “excessive” or “unconscionable,” which most states define as exceeding a certain percentage, typically 10 to 25 percent. Finally, the elevated price must be in excess of the seller’s increased cost. This is crucial: Even during emergencies, sellers are allowed to maintain their existing profit margins. They just can’t increase those margins excessively.
At Axios, Emily Peck does the same thing, telling us to “think bans on selling $10 bottles of water after a major hurricane” and explaining that this sort of very narrow anti-price-gouging regulation already exists in 38 states.
Insofar as we only have a single sentence in a five-page document to go on, it is pretty pointless to debate what Harris really meant. Indeed, because this section of this campaign document was probably cobbled together by a variety of people in the OMI-AELP-ILSR-MPU-Prospect policy bloc, it may not even have any specific authorial intent that can actually be discovered.
But if we interpret price gouging the way those defending it in the discourse do, then Harris’s proposal to regulate price gouging is not actually going to lower grocery costs right now. At best, it is a promise to keep them from rising too much during natural disasters that occur in the future, something that is already illegal in 38 states anyways.
I don’t mean to play dumb too much here. I understand that the election season is a period of intense dishonesty and bad faith. Campaigns have to balance a variety of conflicting constituencies, various discourse participants get really bought in either because they have been consulted or because they are fearful of an adverse election outcome, and so vagueness and misdirection is an intentional persuasion strategy.
In this case, it seems pretty obvious that, in saying she will bring down grocery prices by fighting price gouging, the Harris campaign and those in its orbit hope that regular people will like the sound of that because they don’t like the current prices and think that fighting “price gouging” means she is going to lower them while also hoping that the elite discourse can be mollified by insisting that “price gouging” actually refers to a much different policy that will do nothing to lower current grocery store prices.
So long as the streams don’t cross, it’s a messaging victory. But if you are someone like me who still does kind of like the policy discourse despite it at all, the whole thing is a very frustrating and depressing spectacle.
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I’m extremely cranky and cynical, and getting worse every day. Very biased against the democrat party. So there’s the background on these thoughts: I find it strange that Biden let Khan stick around this long and I bet if he still had a fully functioning brain, she would have been sacked already. There is no chance in hell Kamala will keep her around.
Disinterest in governing. It’s not just Biden but the neoloberal offspring of an earlier generation. The DNC was basically a repeat of the hoorah of the 2004 dnc. If Harris had USAA, they would have had her repeat Kerry’s line.
Harris like Biden will probably go “numbers, I’m a liberal arts type” and do little. Biden kept a Republican at the Fed because math scares them.
To me, the favorable descriptions of the Harris “price-gouging” plan make it sound like it was, um, generated by this specific (if a bit odd) old favorite of a Webpage:
https://perchance.org/pgk4gv0c6p
Unfortunate discourse hits the nail precisely on its head. The tortured tea leaf readings and divinations on the intended meaning and import of the use of the gerund ‘price gouging’ is irritating and frustrating to be around. Legal terms of art, traditiional usages, inferential meanings—gah!… It’s scientifically impossible to up-rez a tiny, fuzzy JPEG into a museum print filled with faithful detail. Writers, opiners, and pundits, please go worry a different scrap of language! It’s a political speech, FFS, take it as poetry or BS and leave it there.
What would be revolutionary is to set a basket of essential basic goods whose margins are fixed across the supply chain and supply of which is a legal obligation, meaning no manipulation of supply. Lol, would never happen.
These prices and the practiced chicanery behind them have been common knowledge for years. Harris has also been in the No. 2 seat for years. Why exactly does she need three months to even articulate what should already be A Plan? And how would the finger wagging she obliquely refers to change anything, if companies already regard any fines imposed after the fact simply the cost of doin’ bidness?
Aside: Anymore, I find I have to really struggle to avoid being completely cynical in commenting here, which also surprises and concerns me, as I’ve long considered myself an optimist. Many prepared comments I just cancel as just too grim, or of little merit, or stepping on site policies, or more often eclipsed by far more trenchant contributions by others. But would anyone be surprised were a cellphone video to emerge of Kamala assuring wealthy donors, “… nothing would fundamentally change**”?
**Aside from showing Lina Khan the door.
She’s about as serious as Biden when he promised to give us a public option in health care during his 2020 campaign.
There’s nothing in her political history to suggest a serious populist, anti-corporate streak in her thinking.
I think that it was the guys at Due Dissidence, Russ and Keaton, who showed the “price-gouging” clip of her speech and pointed out that she mispronounced “gouging.” She said “price-gauging.” She doesn’t even know what she is talking about.
It’s all bafflegab.
I am reminded that she is also opposed somehow to the massacre of citizens of Gaza and of terrorist attacks by illegal settlers (they’re all illegal) on the West Bank, all of which will go away with the magical pixie dust that will fall when she breaks through the Glass Ceiling.
Her economic policy will be Biden Administration cabbage soup, warmed up again.
Given that Gertrude Stein’s famous remark, There is no there there, is a desciption of Oakland, I’m extending There is no there there to the Berkeley Flats.
Yup. She’s a pawn, reading the words they give her to read. It’s disgusting.
This comment by .Tom from yesterday’s Links,
We got to watch some of the CNN Harris/Walz interview. It didn’t cause pain. Much of it was quite funny. We’ve been missing this drunk auntie spectacle since she was only allowed scripted stuff. I think she will be an ideal president for the USA. She is 100% puppet. The all are pretty close to that but there’s just no denying what Drunk Auntie Kam is. She will do what she’s told and either read a script or improvise word salad for the news media who will accept it and dress it up as just fine because their owners are the political donors who run the whole show. George Clooney and the class he spoke for knew exactly what they were buying when they chose her.
So here we are. It all makes sense and fits together perfectly. She’ll be perfect.
Kamalot the Musical! She might be a bit off key, but she know’s her lines.
Its only been a day, but the .Tom comment already has aged well.
What makes Kamala perfect is that she’s really easy to manipulate. She knows she’s stupid. They know she’s stupid, but they hide it for her. And that’s what they threaten her with, they’ll stop hiding that she’s stupid. She’ll do anything to keep their fake presentation of her going.
Is rather brilliant when you think about it, elevate a fool and then blackmail them about being a fool.
I don’t think she knows she’s stupid. Far from it. But, “they” know she’s stupid and “they” know how to flatter her and make her think their ideas are her’s.
Wouldn’t a stupid person not know they are stupid? Isn’t that part of being stupid?
RealClear Politics: Kamala Harris Is But a Cog in the Democrats’ Machine
I’ve read that Stein’s remark was not in reference to the city of Oakland but to a former residence that no longer existed.
Stein’s Oakland: Why There Was No There There Mills Quarterly
Prices are going up in sneaky ways. Recently purchased what was once called a hair clipper – those things barbers use to trim men’s hair. They’re not called that anymore, but manscaper seems to be the current most common replacement label, but even that was not 100% clear which can make price shopping more complicated than need be. I was trying to find my existing model but it was nowhere to be found, wasn’t displayed on the shelf. But there was a large selection priced about $50 and up, but a Remington was being discontinued at $17. When I open the box it was tiny, a fraction of the size of its picture, and the box was much larger than need be. Returned it, went online and found old reliable Whal Brad clipper for $16 at exact same store that wasn’t displaying it next to it’s $50 and up display. I can relate similar experiences with peanut butter! The larger sizes are becoming harder to find, forcing you to buy smaller packaged items that cost more in the long run.
Maybe it was tiny because it was intended for trimming “lower hair”. ;-)
Yep. But huge pic on much too big box – not to mention size of box – suggest otherwise. Add to that the change in marketing language (the traditional term clippers is disappearing). Why not “Men’s hair clipper”? Because anti woke?
Think “shrinkflation.”
Unfortunate discourse hits the nail precisely on its head. The tortured tea leaf readings and divinations on the intended meaning and import of the use of the gerund ‘price gouging’ is irritating and frustrating to be around. Legal terms of art, traditiional usages, inferential meanings—gah!… It’s scientifically impossible to up-rez a tiny, fuzzy JPEG into a museum print filled with faithful detail. Writers, opiners, and pundits, please go worry a different scrap of language! It’s a political speech, FFS, take it as poetry or BS and leave it there.
My take is that prices will go down due to total demand destruction (i.e. customers run out of both income and credit) from a much delayed recession.
If and when we get out of that recession the Administration (whichever one that is) will claim victory even though little was done before the recession, during the recession, or after the recession.
I think a year from now the “price gouging” discourse will be overcome by other economic events and no one will care about it.
I think that the way it works is: aggregate demand is reduced and businesses go bankrupt. Larger firms buy whats left out of bankruptcy and shed the non-profitable and marginal parts of the original firm (unless it’s a bank). The neighborhood loses a social asset. The regional or national oligopolies or monopolies get more market power and increase prices the way they always do. See Albertsons/Kroger. My take: prices don’t go down in a recession…they go down in a depression.
But tapped out consumers can’t boycott food which why some no doubt see it as a good business.
it might be more helpful to talk about the forces that are affecting food prices. There is competition in the grocery business so logically the source of the prices would be higher up where there is much less competition–the Archer Daniel Midlands, Tyson etc. Perhaps Kahn should be going after them instead of Gooogle and she’d have better prospects of her goal if nof of keeping her job. My experience as a shopper is that basics–milk, sugar, eggs etc–are priced very similarly across both discount and more upscale groceries whereas prices of highly processed things like frozen pizzas, chips etc tend to inflate faster. If RFKs “real food” pitch catches on this might be the true enemy of the food industry that is making us so fat and unhealthy. As with all things Dem you make the real competitors the targets to distract from the malefactors. Meanwhile most of the Repubs are against making anyone the targets.
Kamala’s sister says KH always wanted to be president but there doesn’t seem to be room in that attractive head of hers for anything other than ambition. We here in the US no little about true deprivation so that may be why our leaders have become so superficial and silly. The homeless and Appalachian poor seem to them to be weird aberrations.
Per Robert Crandall when he was CEO of American Airlines, “my pricing is held hostage by my dumbest competitor”.
We need to break up the Archer Daniel Midlands, Tyson etc. and hamstring their ability to match pricing. I.e. make them as stupid as possible.
So … it appears that nobody believes anybody today especially when everybody knows that they are all lying about everything.
Remember when we had a real, independent 4th estate? You know … a group of moral individuals who would call a lying liar out versus contribute to their obfuscation. Too bad we don’t have local media laws any more
One can easily surmise that Kamala is in principle and ideology opposed to whatever the deplorables might stand for. Working class America is too weird, too ugly, for the democratic party. One senses Kamala wants a 10-foot pole. Whereas, the Trump Republicans (to be distinguished from other kinds of Republican), are embracing the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, filling the stages with people who aren’t perfect and beautiful, a stance which would symbolically resonate with Christians raised on the sermon from the mount.
Imperfect sinner Trump with the anti-corruption platform, and Vance and RFK Jr as his Catholic consciences, is overturning the moneylenders tables, so an anti-gouging stance is a more natural fit.
Would you by any chance be interested in purchasing my bridge?
Not at face value. :)
The GOP is interested in power. They look for votes and will ram their policies through ruthlessly even if it means reinventing rules to get there.
The Democrat party is interested in money. They look for dollars and aren’t especially interested in governing, unless their funders want something in particular. Positive outcomes are often unintentional and often rolled back in the donors complain.
The sooner people realize that the FDR-LBJ era of the Democrat party is an outlier, and that core values of the party are where it started- Anderw Jackson- the better. Burn it down and start over.
A different take: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-price-gouging-vs?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=d5g60&triedRedirect=true
The phrase to start using in the debate about prices/inflation: compounding inflation.
And especially in a world where compounding interest is key in hyper-financialized economies.
“…Many on the left seem eager to believe that Kamala would continue the one bright spot from the Biden administration…”
Left? I don’t see any. Those who would support authoritarian, pro-oligarchy, bribe-taking, warmongers and supporters of genocide can hardly be characterized as “left”. The so-called far-left, AOC, Bernard Sanders et al. are telling us to vote for genocide, provocation of nuclear war, oligarchy and kleptocracy. The term “left” needs a working definition, as the meaning has shifted radically. Back in the day, the left wanted to overthrow the bourgeois capitalist government, and abolish private property, for example.
“…While many took Harris’ big August economic speech as a cause for celebration because she mentioned mergers and price-fixing, maybe I’m too pessimistic, but I think it’s actually cause for more concern…”
Indeed, not to mention that politicians cynically make empty promises in “election” years. I don’t think Conor is being pessimistic at all. I recall 20 plus years ago the attempt to break up Microsoft – nothing happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
The institutional corruption is deep-seated, I would boldly claim that it would be nearly impossible to affect a genuine anti-trust crackdown: Congress is legally bribed, SCOTUS has abused and perverted the interpretation of law many times, and the Exec branch is also notoriously lawless and corrupt – no matter which of the two factions control it.
I concur, there is no left, apparently never was.
At this point we have the incredible spectacle of Trump, who the fake left decried as psuedo-fascist and anti-democracy, now being closest to left principles and ideology than those who decried him. Quite remarkable.
But the DT and the Rs are the same – Pro Genocide, anti-labor, pro-oligarchy, pro war etc. Only desperate and gullible people will believe the DT’s BS for a second time. His first term showed the vast disconnect between the blah blah and the actual policy. The DT has been an ignorant, serially-mendacious, loud-mouthed, obnoxious asshole his whole life. Let’s face it, the US has no functioning democracy, no meaningful choice.
It is painfully obvious that no matter who “wins” Elections Inc., the Washington Consensus and Bipartisan Consensus will continue, the genocide will continue, provocation of China and or Russia will continue, the health care crisis will continue, monopoly and oligopoly market abuse, market manipulation will continue, price-gouging will continue.
No, I agree, voting in 2024 will not influence any outcomes.
However, where DT, R and Dems are identical in so many respects, only one is overtly anti-war, only one is overtly anti-corruption (and therefore anti-establishment), which makes DT more left leaning, on paper if not in reality, than the Dems. If we were to express the various stances across issues as a scatter plot of left/right, authoritarian/liberal we’d probably have Trump clustering somewhere to the left of the Dems and somehow in the liberal camp.
Even RFK Jr was commenting that somehow the Dems are now the party of authoritarianism, media control and censorship.
I would also say that even though RFK Jr and Vance are in opposition to the Catholic church (and the Pope) on the matter of Palestine and who knows what else, the fact of their Catholicism effectively puts socialists in the Trump WH, more so than if they had been, say, Methodists (Hillary) or Baptists (Kamala). Would this push the Trumpians even further left?
I am not a fan of Trump but he won the Republican party in a democratic election. He beat Clinton and I honestly do not know how he managed to lose to Biden….o yea the Corporate Media sat on the Hunter Biden lap top and ran a 4-5 year long anti-Trump campaign.
Bernie Sanders lost his two primaries due to undemocratic maneuvers by the DNC, corporate media and other party elites. The exit polls were all wrong in during 2016 and 2020 was a sham.
I do agree that there is not a left wing in the US. We were mostly dispersed during the GWoT. Richard Jensen (I think I have the name right) wrote a lot about this issue. I remember that he found solace on a church community. I found Buddhism. My other leftist “friends” found identity politics.
My vote will be based on the need to remove the Democratic Party from power, and not how I feel about either of these two ridiculous candidates. This Democratic party hid the senility of the president until they were ready to expose him in a too early debate so that then they could then panic and elevate the vice president. Why would they do that, simple because Harris could not have won the primary! A party that does that should not retain power.
Democrats control/partner with:
mainstream media/Hollywood,
the CIA/FBI/IRS/spooks,
the MICIMAT,
big tech,
billionaires, and
big Pharma
-THEY HAVE TOO MUCH POWER
Democrats abandoned:
anti-fracking,
socialized medicine,
and worker power (by directly stopping railroad workers from striking to improve their terrible working conditions, just as one example).
-THE PARTY NEEDS REPLACEMENT
Since my vote will be counted in California it will be represented as a vote for the Democrat party simply because of winner-take-all. But I will cast my vote for RFK as I look for what will do the most damage to the Democratic party’s hold on power.
My apologies if this comment inappropriate, I hope I didn’t offend …