Dear media: while you’re clutching your pearls trying to “balance” reporting on Donald Trump’s plan for a fascist takeover via Project 2025 with Kamala Harris’ proposal to ban grocery price gouging, maybe you should take a look at what’s staring you in the face.
This week, Bloomberg reported that during the federal antitrust lawsuit against Kroger’s proposed purchase of the Albertson’s grocery chain, Kroger’s senior director for pricing testified about a March 2024 email to his bosses saying, “On milk and eggs, retail inflation has been significantly higher than cost inflation.”
Common Dreams pointed out, via Rakeen Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, that "execs all over the economy were saying this stuff on their earning calls back in 2021."
Earlier this month, I reported that the Federal Trade Commission reported similar findings. FTC chair Lina Khan called for an investigation, saying, “I’ll be asking [the] commission to join me in launching an inquiry into grocery prices, to shed light on why it is that prices and profits remain so high, even as costs appear to have come down.” I also cited a March, 2024 article from The Hill titled, “FTC calls out profits as a driver of grocery prices.”
In other words, Kamala Harris is not making up her claim about price gouging. Nor is her plan to stop it from some radical socialist playbook that's the leftie counterpart to the truly radical, 900-page democracy-destroying plan for a second Trump administration aka Project 2025.
None other than Axios (you can’t get more mainstream than that) has a good ‘splainer: Market correspondent Emily Peck reported that banning price gouging is being wrongly conflated with Soviet-style price controls. “If banning price gouging is communist, then the U.S. went Marxist long ago. Most of us live in states that already have bans in place,” Peck wrote. She noted that 38 states, including Texas, California and New York have laws prohibiting companies from jacking up prices during emergencies, such as charging $10 for a bottle of water after a major hurricane.
A national ban on price gouging would also give the federal government “more power to go after big global corporations that are hard to pursue at the state level,” Peck said.
So maybe outlets like The Washington Post could avoid headlines like this, from a Catherine Rampell column: “When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?” Or Rampell calling Harris’ plan “a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food.”
Peck debunked such fear mongering. She wrote that a bill sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren is probably close to what Harris would propose. That bill, which bans price gouging nationally, “largely mirrors state laws – but is limited to companies with at least $100 million in revenue.”
I’m not holding my breath waiting for the corporate media to shine too bright a spotlight on corporate price gouging. But when companies like Kroger tell us who they are, let's all believe them the first time.
