Biden's Inflation Spin is Ridiculous
Plus: The geopolitics of Counter-Strike.
“Donald Trump’s social media account on Monday shared a video referencing a ‘unified reich’ in a post about how the country will change if he becomes president again,” Politico reports.
Much ado about nothing, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt insists: “This was not a campaign video, it was created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court.”
Is that true? Probably. Is it still a perfect little illustration of the dangers of today’s GOP drinking deep from the unfiltered swamps of the online far-right? Definitely. Happy Tuesday.
Darn Those Capitalists!
Corporate greed is to blame for irritatingly persistent inflation—that’s Joe Biden’s story, and he’s sticking with it.
“President Biden’s top economic priorities are fighting inflation and lowering costs for the American people,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates wrote in a Monday memo. “Standing up to corporate price gouging is at the core of that fight.”
Bates goes on:
As major corporations, many seeing record profits, overcharge the American people—in some cases keeping profits elevated despite inflation falling—President Biden is taking unprecedented action to deliver relief for middle class families. . . Every day, the President fights for hardworking families on Main Street, which is why he’s calling out corporate interests who are overcharging Americans.
This has been the White House’s all-purpose inflation line for years. Is it politically useful? Sure, maybe—trying to get Americans to associate literally anybody else with inflation is a win in Biden’s book, and anti-corporate saber-rattling is hoary old boilerplate for Democrats.
It’s also ridiculous. Are corporations greedier today than they were before the pandemic? Or are corporations by nature profit-maximizing entities just as workers are by nature wage-maximizing ones? Corporate profits are at record highs; so are wages.
Research by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco just last week cuts directly against Biden’s claims, per Reuters:
While markups for motor vehicles and petroleum products did rise sharply during the 2021-2022 inflation surge, markups across the entire spectrum of U.S. goods and services have been relatively flat during the post-pandemic recover, the bank’s latest Economic Letter showed.
“As such, rising markups have not been a main driver of the recent surge and subsequent decline in inflation during the current recovery,” wrote the bank’s research chief Sylvain Leduc and colleagues Huiyu Li and Zheng Liu. . .
Fed policymakers, and many economists, say the inflation surge can be better explained by the combined effect of supply chain disruptions and a drop in labor supply during the post-pandemic recovery that occurred just as consumer demand rose.
And why did consumer demand rise so much, by the way? In large part because of the massive amounts of pandemic-era stimulus the government pushed into the economy under both Biden and Trump. Was all that spending necessary to stave off a more devastating economic collapse? Maybe! That was the fear at the time, and it’s impossible to know what would have happened if Congress had opted not to push the gas pedal all the way down. Additional inflationary pressure is the price you pay not to find out.
It’s a bummer for Biden (and for the country!) that he’s having to pay the political bill on inflation sparked by both his predecessor’s spending and his own, and bad-faith rabble-rousing from Republicans who voted for much of that spending themselves must be hard for the president to take.
But would it be so Pollyannaish to wish Biden would run with the true story—that the current run of inflation actually represents the best possible outcome of a post-pandemic economic recovery that has exceeded expectations in every other way? That paying more at the pump and in the grocery store hurts—but that there’s no better antidote to that pain than a big beefy paycheck? Doesn’t class-war demagoguery actually hurt Biden’s ability to make the case that, vibes aside, the economy is actually doing well?
—Andrew Egger
Agree that Biden should take a break from shaking his fist at the robber barons? Or think we’re crazy and it’s just good politics? Either way, let us know:
And if you’re not already hanging out with us on the daily, we hope you’ll give us a try:
E-Guns and E-Geopolitics
You’ve got to read Martyn Wendell Jones on the intersection of the weird online world of first person shooter Counter-Strike and the real-world war in Ukraine:
IF YOU ARE A MILLENNIAL LIKE ME, or you’re a person of any generation even slightly familiar with esports, you’re probably aware of Counter-Strike, the longstanding tactical first-person shooter (FPS) franchise. CS, as it’s frequently abbreviated, pits a squad of terrorists trying to plant and detonate a bomb against a squad of counter-terrorists trying to stop them. (If you would like a fuller introduction to the game or a reminder of what it’s like, check out this delightfully entertaining video from Girlfriend Reviews on YouTube.) Counter-Strike’s premise was first developed in 1999 as a mod for one of the foundational FPS titles, Half-Life, and since then, CS has grown to become the world’s preeminent competitive shooter. More recently, it also has gained many unfortunate real-world interfaces with the ongoing war in Ukraine . . .
On the interpersonal level, players initially made a show of solidarity with one another across the lines of national hostility. Russians and Ukrainians have often played for the same teams. As the Battle of Kyiv filled newscasts with images of black smoke and lines of tanks in February 2022, Counter-Strike’s then-undisputed GOAT, a Ukrainian who goes by the nom de guerre s1mple, gave a moving speech while receiving an award at an event in Katowice. “I want you to know that esports is outside of politics,” he said, standing on stage with teammates from both countries. “Right now, I stand with my real friends. . . . All of us want peace for Ukraine and for [the] whole world. All of us [are] scared." But two years into the conflict, his stance has evolved. “I would never join [a team with] four Russian players,” he told an interviewer in mid-February this year. “I think every Ukrainian should understand this.” . . .
It’s obvious that esports can’t be separated from their geopolitical contexts. (Any public discussion of Counter-Strike is incomplete without mentioning that the Saudi Public Investment Fund owns most of Counter-Strike’s online ecosystem, that Saudi Arabia is hosting a global tournament in Riyadh later this year, and that an organization with the fund’s backing hired a bunch of talented but aging European players to create a superteam to play under the Saudi flag, all to further the regime’s sportswashing campaign.) But CS exists most comfortably in that abstracted world of angles and timing, a place of escape on the computer. It is discomfiting to think about how many players have been sent to the actual front lines of the war in Ukraine, with some soldiers even allegedly decorating their real AKs to resemble the digital cosmetics that can be applied in Counter-Strike.
Catching up . . .
After Raisi’s death, elections pose tricky test for Iran’s rulers: New York Times
With Europe’s support, North African nations push migrants to the desert: Washington Post
ICC prosecutor seeking arrest warrants for Israeli leaders is ‘absurd,’ Netanyahu says: ABC News
Judge rebukes witness in Trump New York trial: ‘Are you staring me down?’: Axios
A jarring generation gap: America is divided on values, economics, politics: Axios
Trump Media and Technology Group lost more than $300 million in first public quarter: Politico
Quick Hits
1. Can Nikki Haley Do the Right Thing?
How Nikki Haley decides to treat Trump in the months ahead could decide the election, A.B. Stoddard writes for the site:
Since leaving the race on March 6, Haley has disappeared from the public eye, save for an announcement that she has joined the Hudson Institute. On Wednesday she will give a foreign policy address there, and what she says could provide a clue about her intentions.
At a recent gathering she hosted for roughly a hundred of her campaign donors, Haley offered none. Noted in the reporting about the two-day gathering in Charleston was that Trump was only mentioned in passing. Politico reported: “The only time Trump’s name came up during the presentation to donors was in the context of the early state primaries the former president won before Haley bowed out of the race, according to attendees.”
Those donors are eager to see Haley run again in four years. But that will be determined by what she does this year. Haley has spent eight tortured years shamelessly flip-flopping on Trump—attacking him in the 2016 campaign then becoming his ambassador to the United Nations, predicting January 6th would be the end of him then declaring she would not run for president if he did, then running for president anyway when he did. . .
It is highly unlikely Haley would endorse Biden, but she doesn’t have to. She doesn’t even have to go as far as Liz Cheney, who has as yet not endorsed Biden but has said, “We can survive bad policies. We can’t survive a president who goes to war with the Constitution.”
But it would be a great service to the republic if Haley just went as far as Mike Pence and simply refused to support Trump. That alone would signal a critical bloc of voters that his candidacy remains unacceptable. And while some of them will vote for Trump in the end, many won’t.
2. The Crime Backlash Continues
For Politico, Jonathan Martin examines just how far the backlash against the post-2020 progressive policing trend will go:
With its ubiquitous hipster coffee and IPAs, enduring live-and-let-live ethos and a politics so deep blue that the homeless guy outside the Whole Foods in the Pearl District solicited patrons to buy him a beer by bearing a “Fuck Trump” cardboard sign, Portland is hardly ripe for a Republican takeover.
But on Tuesday, the voters of Multnomah County, the surrounding jurisdiction and a county that has not voted Republican for president since 1960, could replace their incumbent district attorney, Mike Schmidt, with a man who was in the GOP until after Donald Trump became president.
“What I hear when I’m knocking on doors, is ‘Hey, I consider myself very liberal but this is out of step — we’re not getting served well,’” said Nathan Vasquez, a longtime prosecutor in the county office and now unaffiliated voter who’s challenging his boss, adding: “People definitely want public safety. It doesn’t mean people are wholly abandoning the idea of criminal justice reform. They just want it delivered in a pragmatic, practical way.”
Should Vasquez prevail, it would represent more than the rejection of a progressive prosecutor. It would be the culmination of simmering local frustration with crime, homelessness and drug abuse and a resounding correction to the shift left on criminal justice that took place here and in so many cities in 2020.
It should also get the attention of Democratic lawmakers everywhere. They’ve mostly found success by elevating abortion and MAGA, the party’s best one-two since Dobbs, but their vulnerabilities on quality-of-life issues remain and could prove particularly acute with the broader presidential electorate this fall.
Cheap Shots
It might as well be a law of politics: If you’ve got a leaking problem, expect the press to hear about it when you try to crack down:
1) “'Donald Trump’s social media account on Monday shared a video referencing a "unified reich" in a post about how the country will change if he becomes president again,' Politico reports.
Much ado about nothing, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt insists: 'This was not a campaign video, it was created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court'.”
Which is yet another excellent illustration of why the nation (though not all of its occupants) deserves the fate that it gets if P01135809 gets back into office. There should be universal outrage. There is not. There should be mass revulsion at the imagery of it. There is not. And there should be a clear denunciation and vigorous repudiation from his team. There is not. More and more I feel like I am the passenger strapped into a car being driven by a very drunk driver, careening at obstacles until it inevitably hits one (or more) with tragic results, but can do nothing to stop the ride or take the keys away from the impaired driver.
2) "This has been the White House’s all-purpose inflation line for years. Is it politically useful? Sure, maybe—trying to get Americans to associate literally anybody else with inflation is a win in Biden’s book, and anti-corporate saber-rattling is hoary old boilerplate for Democrats. It’s also ridiculous. Are corporations greedier today than they were before the pandemic? Or are corporations by nature profit-maximizing entities just as workers are by nature wage-maximizing ones? Corporate profits are at record highs; so are wages."
Oh, so it's all really that simple. Got it.
Even in my most lockstep Republican voting days I knew this was apologizing for the worst excesses of Big Business, giving them a free pass in the name of making money as if that's all that matters with them and they are shielded from both blame and accountability otherwise if they are successful. To take just one branch from that tree, I see now that Target is joining McDonald's and some others in lowering their prices somewhat, on some items, because they say they feel our pain with inflation. Gee, swell, and thanks. Maybe. The obvious question is, if they are doing so now (because they can afford to), why didn't they do it sooner? Maybe there are some unstated ulterior motives. Like, say, good public relations? Maybe spin-and-deflect from other issues they are facing? Perhaps to draw people into their businesses to buy still more things that they don't necessarily need and that weren't on their purchase list? Bottom line: they are doing it for themselves first and foremost, and for the rest of us much lower down the list. That too is hoary old boilerplate. But you know that.
It's blackly humorous that the voters angry about inflation might replace Biden with Trump, whose policy proposals are all wildly inflationary.