Senator Ted Cruz’s Thanksgiving Festival of Fear
Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took to Twitter to blame President Biden for shortages of side dishes this year. Why? Because he found (and didn’t read, apparently) a Yahoo News article with a headline that fit into the narrative he pushes about America The Terrible.
Hundreds of people took the time to tell Twitter Ted he was wrong, and I’m sure he is okay with that. The poison he spewed was out there for chowderheads to see and savor. The bad feelings --as opposed to facts-- are what’s important these days in Trumpian circles.
Ol’ Cancun Cruz wasn’t the only one warning the nation about a diminished feast in 2021. Fast Company, Good Morning America, People Magazine, and Fortune, among others, all felt obliged to warn their readers that Lil’ Timmy might not get seconds on pumpkin pie this year.
Buried deep into the New York Times story about how costly the holiday was going to be was this note:
Granted, last year the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner for 10 was the lowest it had been since 2010, according to the American Farm Bureau, whose annual survey of large dinners will be released Nov. 18. But because of the pandemic, fewer people bought for big gatherings, and turkey prices were kept low to entice shoppers. This year, turkey prices are likely to hit record highs, and the cost of many foods has jumped sharply.
Also mentioned in the Times story was the expected:
“...premiumization” of Thanksgiving ingredients, with many cooks shopping for turkeys that are fresh, organic, free-range or processed in ways that elevate them beyond an inexpensive frozen bird.
People are more concerned with what they’re eating. Some of them aren’t even eating turkeys anymore. I’m guessing the makers of Swanson's TV dinners aren’t happy about that.
My do list this week has involved gathering up groceries. I got everything I wanted and didn’t see anything weirder than the glazed eyes of people mentally trying to remember everything they needed. The shelves were stocked. There were plenty of all the fixings needed for a traditional dinner. Some prices were up, some were down.
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In addition to the great shipping shortfalls of 2021, inflation is also part of the Biden plan to ruin America, according to Republicans. Yes, indeed, in between celebrating the ‘tyranny’ of mandated vaccines and selling out to the Chinese, Democrats supposedly have had time to make everybody’s holidays less happy this year.
Except… for those darn pesky facts...
Cory Doctorow gathered more facts about (much of) the inflation and discovered the underlying truth that market concentration is as responsible as any other factor. Most key industries are dominated by five or fewer companies.
Giant companies are hiking prices because they know that they have a monopoly, and because they know that their customers will accept higher prices because "everyone knows we have an inflation problem."
That's not a conspiracy theory. Corporate execs are bragging about this stuff on their earnings calls, as Dominick Reuter and Andy Kiersz write for Insider.
Colgate-Palmolive CEO Noel Wallace: "What we are very good at is pricing. Whether it’s foreign exchange inflation or raw and packing material inflation, we have found ways over time to recover that in our margin line."
"Good at pricing" is my new favorite euphemism for profiteering.
Unilever CFO Graeme Pitkethly: "Consumer-facing price is the last lever we normally use to manage inflation. We find that taking several small price increases is more effective than one large price jump."
Unilever was already staggeringly profitable before the pandemic; it has *increased* its profits by 4-5% since.
Its archrival, Proctor and Gamble, has also figured out how to raise prices rather than taking a narrower margin, as CFO Andre Schulten puts it: "We have not seen any material reaction from consumers, so that makes us feel good about our relative position."
Retailers are getting in on the act. Kroger CFO Gary Millerchip: "We’ve been very comfortable with our ability to pass on the increases that we’ve seen at this point, and we would expect that to continue to be the case."
In other words, we don't face higher prices because of supply shocks or labor demands - supply shocks and labor demands are the pretense that corporate America is using to hike prices.
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Conservative culture wars aimed at Thanksgiving are about a century old.
Right wing revisionist history holds that the earliest harvest celebrations were, in fact, a celebration of the Pilgrims’ throwing off the shackles of socialism in 1623 after two years of misery. That’s right, even when the country’s economy was agrarian, the battle against socialism was being fought. Somebody should have told Karl Marx.
At Slate, Lawrence Glickman tells the tale:
The first use I’ve found of the argument that Pilgrims found success by rejecting socialism appeared in 1920, a time when, according to an editorial in the South Idaho Journal, the story had “special significance” as “theories of socialism are running rampant throughout the world.”
But the narrative of Thanksgiving as a vindication of free enterprise capitalism was widely popularized in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and gained momentum in the postwar years, as critics of expansive Rooseveltian liberalism sought to find a usable past to justify their dislike of his popular New Deal.
By claiming that the Pilgrims rejected a philosophy that they analogized to New Deal liberalism and embraced free enterprise capitalism, these critics sought the sanction of history for their view that, as a political columnist wrote in 1952, “in recent years this love of liberty has been subordinated to an alien philosophy of security” and “the siren song of the welfare state.”
In the days of the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Freedom From Want” goal was the one that drove the right wing crazy. Since the exact words (along with Freedom from Fear) weren’t included in the Constitution, [those] “goals are by no means part of what we commonly consider the American heritage.”
In other words, little Timmy not getting a second piece of pumpkin pie was once considered part of the natural order by conservatives. Until Democrats took the White House.
Do all American families deserve a November Thursday off work to sit around a groaning table together—or just some, who’ve earned their cranberries and sweet potato casserole the right way? There’s a lot at stake in that debate, and those who talk about free enterprise Thanksgiving know it.
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