Feb. 2, 2024 ❧ "Greedflation" is real, Appalachia fights a pipeline, and Elon's first brain-chip
Plus: a double feature of GOP racism, Pakistan's prime minister sentenced, an Indiana bill to erase trans people, a bizarre Taylor Swift conspiracy theory, and what's the deal with Groundhog Day?
All the news in the following briefing was revealed to us by the humble North American groundhog.
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
“GREEDFLATION” IS VERY REAL
Over the past few years, there’s been a heated debate about what, exactly, is causing the current wave of inflation—you know, the one that’s driven the cost of basic necessities like food and clothing sky-high. People on the progressive left, like former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, tend to argue that corporate greed plays an important role, dubbing the whole phenomenon “greedflation.” Meanwhile, apologists for capitalism—like the editors of The Economist—dutifully resist any conclusion that points the finger at corporations, saying that “Greedflation is a Nonsense Idea.”
According to a new economic analysis, though, The Economist is dead wrong. Greedflation exists, and it can be measured. In fact, there’s evidence that more than half of the inflation in the United States today is directly related to corporate greed. In a new report from the nonprofit Groundwork Collaborative, researchers compared publicly available statistics about the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to comparable data from the Producer Price Indexes (PPI), cross-referencing how much manufacturers paid for their raw materials vs. how much consumers paid for products in the eventual sticker price.
What they found was remarkable: in 2023, the input prices for manufacturers rose by just 1 percent, but consumer prices rose by 3.4 percent. Meanwhile, as Federal Reserve officials have publicly admitted, “the labor share of income has declined over the past two years and appears to be at or below pre-pandemic levels, while corporate profits as a share of GDP remain near postwar highs.” The study concludes that 53 percent of the inflation in the United States during the last two fiscal quarters came from corporate profits, and says that “As costs go down but revenue stays high because of higher sticker prices, corporate profit margins expand on the backs of American consumers.”
In practical terms, what this suggests is that companies initially raised their prices in response to real increases in the cost of production, many of which were caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and other global crises. More recently, though, they realized they could simply keep their prices high, even after their own costs came down, and thus rake in unprecedented super-profits. The Groundwork Collaborative study uses one simple item—diapers—to illustrate how this process works:
Diaper prices have increased by more than 30 percent since 2019 from, on average, $16.50 to nearly $22. Wood pulp is a major input in diapers and other paper products, like toilet paper and paper towels. Wholesale wood pulp prices soared by 87 percent between January 2021 and January 2023. Yet between January and December 2023, prices declined by 25 percent. Using their pricing power, P&G and Kimberly-Clark have kept diaper prices high for American families, allowing their profit margins to expand considerably. In P&G’s October 2023 earnings call, its CFO, Andre Schulten, said that high prices were a big driver of profit margin expansion and 33 percent of their profits in the previous quarter were driven by lower input costs.
In other words, we don’t have to speculate about whether greedflation is real or not, because executives openly admit it is. They brag about it! And since that’s the case, the solution is fairly clear: stop letting them charge whatever prices they want, whenever and however they want. Require corporations to justify their price increases on basic goods, and prohibit any that are clearly unreasonable. Senator Elizabeth Warren had the right idea with her Price Gouging Prevention Act of 2022, but its scope was limited to “abnormal market disruptions” only. There’s room to go a lot further. In the meantime, can we offer you one of our signature “Death to The Economist” stickers?
FIGHTING BACK
APPALACHIANS STAND UP TO FOSSIL FUELS
In Virginia and West Virginia, a group of activists have been locking and chaining themselves to heavy machinery, risking arrest and physical harm for the sake of the environment. They’re called Appalachians Against Pipelines, and they’ve been fighting to stop the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) since 2018. The MVP is an enormous natural gas infrastructure project, designed to be 304 miles long and transport more than 2 billion cubic feet of methane gas per day, much of it from shale fracking. It’s a monstrosity that should never have been considered, let alone approved. As climate change causes wildfires, floods, and other disasters at an ever-increasing pace, we need to be shutting fossil-fuel production down, not creating more of it—and pipelines are dangerous in and of themselves, with a similar one exploding and shooting flames 500 feet into the air in Oklahoma this week. By one estimate, the MVP will cross “almost 1,146 streams, creeks, rivers, and wetlands,” risking pollution to each and every water source if it happens to leak. However, the pipeline is a beloved pet project for Senator Joe Manchin, who shoehorned provisions about it into the most recent federal debt-ceiling agreement. So it’s fallen to ordinary people living in Appalachia to pick up where their elected officials have failed them, and try to stop it.
The persistent, fearless direct action these “pipeline fighters” have taken is extraordinary, to say the least. You can find their press releases on the anarchist website It’s Going Down, as well as their social media feeds, and it seems like every few weeks one of the group’s members sneaks onto a work site, locks and chains themself up, and shuts down construction. In 2019, 76-year-old Glenna Benjamin, the movement’s so-called “Raging Granny,” disabled a pipe loader for five hours, an accomplishment at any age. This week, an indigenous land protector who goes by the name “Mama Julz” chained herself to a helicopter that’s used to transport pipeline workers, throwing another wrench in the works. They just keep coming, and that’s only the activists on the front lines. The movement has also inspired creative solidarity demonstrations around the country, like the protestors dressed as opossums who recently turned up at the DC offices of Washington Gas, one of the pipeline’s stakeholders.
These actions have had an impact, too. As Katie Myers reports for Grist, the MVP is now “six years behind schedule [and] about half a billion dollars over budget,” in part because of the protests. Equitrans, its owner, is rumored to be considering selling the project before it’s finished. According to Myers, although 94 percent of the pipeline has now been built, “remaining construction is over rugged terrain, with hundreds of water crossings left to bridge,” making it uncertain if the MVP will ever be completed. And even if it is, companies may be hesitant to build similar pipelines elsewhere if they expect this kind of resistance.
Unsurprisingly, Appalachians Against Pipelines have faced retaliation for their efforts. Last November, Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC sued several members for millions of dollars in damages, in a case that’s still ongoing. The courts have also intervened on the company’s behalf criminally, setting bail for one activist at $35,000 when he was arrested after locking himself to an industrial drill—an absurd amount, for what’s essentially a nonviolent misdemeanor. To deal with these financial challenges, the group has a donations page, along with a 40-track fundraising album called “STOP MVP” with contributions from dozens of local musicians. If you can, why not lend them a hand? After all, it’s only the future of a livable planet at stake.
SONG OF THE WEEK
On “To The River,” the folk musicians of the SUN SiNG Collective create a “no pipeline anthem” for our times:
I’ll take you to the river, tell you what I hear
I hear the thunder in the distance
I hear the river say it clear
“Here come that company man,
Here come that big machine
Here come the murder of the mountain
Here come the in-between.”
I’ll take you to the river, I’ll show you the truth
Every life is water, running through you
What are you gonna hold to? What are you gonna do?
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ In a Congressional hearing on Wednesday, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) repeatedly asked a Singaporean businessman if he's Chinese. The hearing was about social media platforms and their child safety policies, and the long-suffering Asian man in question was Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok. Cotton pulled out his best J. Edgar Hoover impression for the event, badgering Chew about his nationality and political affiliations:
COTTON: Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?
CHEW: Senator, I’m Singaporean. No.
COTTON: Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?
CHEW: No, Senator. Again, I’m Singaporean.
This is just a short excerpt from their full, excruciating exchange. Cotton, who apparently skipped “world cultures” day in fifth grade, kept trying to ferret out any hint of Chineseness he could find, asking Chew what passports he has (Singaporean), where he’s a citizen (Singapore), and even what he thinks about Tiananmen Square. All of it was completely irrelevant to the subject of the hearing, which, once again, was child safety. Cotton has uncorked a really vintage form of racism here, premised on the idea that all Asian people are essentially the same, and that sinister Chinese agents might be lurking around every corner. It’s hard not to feel embarrassed for his constituents back home, who deserve someone less ignorant to represent them.
❧ Speaking of racist smear campaigns by elected representatives, conservative politicians are calling for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to be deported after she made comments at an event addressing Somali Americans in Minnesota, which were mistranslated. Addressing the ongoing Somali civil war and the breakaway republic of Somaliland, which claims independence from the rest of the country, Omar was misquoted by the conservative Minnesota outlet Alpha News as having said that people from her nation of origin are “people who know they are Somalians first, Muslims second” (the website acknowledged that the translation was unverified). Republican lawmakers, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), immediately called for Omar, who is a United States citizen, to be deported from the US with Greene accusing her of “admitting she’s working as a foreign agent for a foreign country.” This would be a massive stretch even if the translation was of Omar’s comments was accurate. But it was not. Somali translators quickly pointed out that Omar’s comments were not translated correctly, with the use of the term “Somalian,” a term Somali people do not use for themselves, being a dead giveaway. What Omar actually said was: “We are people who know that they are Somali and Muslim. We are people who support each other.” But it doesn’t matter — Greene is still pressing ahead with attempts to censure Omar and remove her from her committee assignments for comments she didn’t even say. It’s hardly the first time Omar’s Somali background has been used to suggest she’s un-American or a terrorist, and it surely won’t be the last.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ The Chicago City Council has voted for a ceasefire in Gaza. The resolution came after a contentious public meeting, which ended in a 23-23 deadlock before Mayor Brandon Johnson cast the deciding vote, saying simply that “we are looking at 25,000 Palestinians who were killed during this war and the killing has to stop.” Chicago is now the largest U.S. city to call for a ceasefire, following at least 48 others including Detroit, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Atlanta. By weighing in on the side of peace, Johnson has shown the moral leadership that Democrats in Washington—like Senators Chuck Schumer and John Fetterman—conspicuously lack. Of course, an individual city has little or no power to directly change U.S. foreign policy, but this is still an important sign of shifting public opinion on Palestine, which can effect real change. Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal, spluttering with indignation, has added the entire city of Chicago to the ever-growing list of people, places, and things that are secretly Hamas. As a rule of thumb, when you’ve pissed off the Wall Street Journal, you know you’ve done something right.
❧ A new bill is winding its way through the Indiana legislature that would effectively write transgender people out of legal recognition. H.B. 1291, introduced by Fort Wayne Republican Chris Judy, would change the word “gender” in state laws to “biological sex,” meaning that, according to The Indy Star, “The state would recognize a person's gender based on their sex organs rather than how they choose to identify.” This may sound innocuous, but it has wide-ranging implications that will make existing as a trans person in the state extraordinarily difficult. According to 19th News:
[The] recently proposed bill…would require men and women to be identified by their “biological sex” across different areas of the state code — like student housing, voter registration information, opioid treatment programs, hospital discharge notices, and how missing persons are documented. The bill would also require that residents applying for driver’s licenses and other forms of official identification mark their sex assigned at birth instead of their current gender.
Indiana is the latest of ten states that have either passed or proposed laws that would effectively require trans people to be identified by the wrong gender in order to participate in everyday life. As ACLU attorney Harper Seldin, himself a trans man, says:
“What [these laws are] meant to do is to lay the framework for … anytime the states want to distinguish between sexes and have sex-segregated spaces, that they can force trans people to either be with their birth-assigned sex, which for most trans people is not really an option, or they can not be there at all…I live my whole life as a man. Everyone knows me as a man. The idea that I, 17 years into my transition, in my 30s, can go into a women’s bathroom, I think would be alarming to me and all the women I found there.”
❧ Elon Musk claims the first Neuralink device has been implanted in a human brain. We say “claims,” because details are currently scarce. All we really know is that Musk tweeted on the 29th, saying that “the first human received an implant” and is “recovering well,” with “promising neuron spike detection” from the device. It’s worth taking this with several grains of salt, since Musk has a long track record of hyping technologies that never actually materialize, like the mission to Mars that was supposed to happen in 2021, the Hyperloop, or functional Twitter moderation. He currently says Neuralink implants will allow “control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking,” but, well, let’s wait and see. If the implants really do work, they’ll open all kinds of serious ethical concerns about privacy, safety, and consent, since in theory any computer technology can be hacked and surveilled. That’s bad enough when it’s your laptop, but having someone run a ransomware attack on your brain—or for CEOs like Musk, paywall bits of it—would really be dystopian. In the meantime, recall that Musk is a notoriously unreliable egotist who once fought a legal battle to include something called “Fart Mode” in his Teslas. Please keep this fact in mind, and think twice before letting his company conduct experimental brain surgery on you.
⚜ LONG READ: Why do Republicans think the popularity of Taylor Swift is a “Pentagon psy-op?” In the Huffington Post, Liz Skalka, Arthur Delaney, and Igor Bobic write:
It’s a conspiracy involving the deepest of deep states: The world’s most popular entertainer, America’s most popular sporting event and the president of the United States. Its goal, according to theories circulating in the outskirts of MAGA world, is to covertly compel fans to throw the 2024 election to the Democrats. Right-wing speculation reached a fever pitch this week around pop mega-star Taylor Swift and boyfriend Travis Kelce after Kelce’s team, the Kansas City Chiefs, qualified for Super Bowl LVIII on Sunday, a victory the two celebrated with much-photographed postgame smooch. A day later, The New York Times ran a piece noting President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is hoping for Swift’s endorsement.
Those two seemingly unrelated events — and the possibility that Swift would use her massive star power and huge online reach to help Biden beat Donald Trump — are driving right-wing media into a meltdown. And that one of the country’s biggest celebrities will use her fanbase to help Biden is already being treated as inevitable by some of the right’s biggest influencers…
For years, right-wing conspiracists have pushed the notion that Swift, who began her career in the conservative world of country music and was once referred to as “Aryan goddess” by white supremacists, is somehow a Democratic “agent” because she endorsed Democrats in the 2018 midterms and Biden in the 2020 presidential election. (Swift has admitted she regrets not getting involved in 2016.) Kelce, for his part, appeared in a Pfizer commercial promoting the COVID vaccine. COVID shots have long been the subject of right-wing conspiracies, with adherents falsely believing the government is covering up adverse reactions or that the vaccines harbor microchips.
Now, high-profile conservative figures are promoting the unfounded idea that Swift, the NFL and the Democratic Party are together involved in a “psyop” campaign to deliver the election to Biden. Fox News host Jesse Watters recently suggested that Swift was a “front for a covert political agenda” and bizarrely called her a “Pentagon asset” — which, of course, the Pentagon denied.
By that logic, Swift’s appearances at Chiefs games isn’t to cheer on her boyfriend or even to promote her tour — it’s really to get the country to vote blue in November.
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months,” former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has embraced far more dangerous conspiracy theories than this one, tweeted Monday.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Imran Khan, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, has been sentenced to 14 years in prison. The verdict, related to alleged corruption during Khan’s time in office, comes on the heels of a previous 10-year sentence for leaking state secrets, handed down on Tuesday. For Khan, who’s 71 years old, the combined 24 years is effectively a life sentence. The trouble is, there’s significant evidence that Khan’s legal and political downfall was influenced by the meddling of the U.S. State Department. In The Intercept, investigative journalists Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain have reported extensively on this issue, showing how leaked diplomatic cables reveal a concerted attempt to pressure Pakistani officials and remove Khan from power, partly in retaliation for his “aggressively neutral position” on the war in Ukraine. In fact, the leaked documents The Intercept has received suggest that the espionage Khan was sentenced for on Tuesday didn’t happen at all. Full details of the events in question haven’t become public, and it’s too early to draw conclusions without further investigation—but this case certainly looks fishy, and the fact the verdicts came down mere days before Pakistan holds elections, from which Khan has been barred, doesn’t help.
❧ The Italian government is officially returning the first airplane ever built in Ethiopia, nearly nine decades after it was stolen during Mussolini’s occupation of the country. The bright-red plane, built in 1935 and named “Tsehay” after the daughter of the then-Ethiopian emperor Selassie, is a symbol of national pride. In 1936, amid Fascist Italy’s bloody occupation of Ethiopia (famously one of two African nations that had was not colonized by European powers), Italian forces commandeered the plane and brought it back to the Italian Air Force Museum where it resided until this week. “Despite its exile,” says the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation, “‘Tsehay’ remained an emblem of Ethiopia's pioneering spirit in aviation, immortalized within the annals of Ethiopian historiography.” Its return came as part of an Italy-Africa summit, under which the Italian government unveiled an aid plan aimed at clean energy production in Africa. Somewhat ironically, the move comes under the auspices of Italy’s most far-right leader since Mussolini, Giorgia Meloni, who describes the plan as a way to prevent African migrants from coming to Italy via the Mediterranean. While clean energy production is very important, it’s probably not going to solve the flow of migration out of Ethiopia, which is currently in the midst of a brutal civil war that had created almost 900,000 refugees as of September 2022.
⚜ LONG READ: As the Israeli bombardment of Gaza continues, thousands of displaced people have sought to flee to Egypt, which is helping Israel to enforce the blockade of the strip. In Mondoweiss, Shahd Safi, a 23-year-old Gazan man who has had several friends and family killed in airstrikes describes how “Egyptian border officials are charging Palestinians in Gaza thousands of dollars to escape death in Gaza”:
Before the Israeli war on Gaza, I lived a peaceful life, going every day to Al-Aqsa University in pursuit of my studies. My school has now been bombed by the Israeli military even though it was full of displaced Palestinians from northern Gaza. The bombing campaign killed a number of the displaced, turning the place I used to study, laugh, and feel joy into a horror movie.
My friend and classmate, Nadia Abd El-Latif, was killed during the Israeli onslaught due to a direct Israeli airstrike on her house. The same thing happened to other friends and colleagues — Mahmoud Al-Naouq, Yousef Dawwas, and Muhammad Hammo. My teacher, Refaat Alareer, was killed in the same way, as was my cousin’s husband, along with her seven-year-old son. All of these deaths have left me drained. After over a hundred days, Israel’s war is still ongoing, and my soul feels worn.
These 115 days make up 2,760 hours spent living with acute fear and anxiety, with no idea whether we’ll be among the survivors or not. But since the bombing began in October, I have been trying — in vain — to think of a way out of Gaza…
Egypt has closed its borders with Gaza many times during the war and has made the price of leaving Gaza unbelievably high. Since my mother is half-Egyptian and half-Palestinian, this was incredibly heartbreaking to me. Egypt is an Arab country neighboring Palestine, with which we share a common history and culture. How can they do this to us? There are many Palestinians in Gaza who have Egyptian blood and hold Egyptian nationality. Yet even those Egyptian citizens residing in Gaza are being asked to pay at least $1,500 to be let through the Rafah crossing to escape death.
Over 80% of people in Gaza live below the poverty line, and many wouldn’t be able to pay even $100. What is even worse is that if you do not have an Egyptian passport, the current going rate to pass through is $10,000 — and even then, if you somehow manage to find the money, you’ll still have to wait for days or even months to leave. Recently, the Egyptians claim to have decreased the amount to $5,000 per person, yet the struggle remains the same.
A small number of wealthy, influential people in Gaza can, in fact, pay such amounts to leave. Others are resorting to seeking donations through crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe and LaunchGood, and I do not blame them. They have no other way to avoid the bombing and save their lives.
WHY DO WE TRUST GROUNDHOGS TO PREDICT THE WEATHER?
Today is Groundhog Day—the day when the nation turns its lonely eyes to the sleepy town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to a site known as “Gobbler’s Knob” to watch as a man in a suit and top hat prematurely awakes a large, hibernating rodent named Phil to inquire about the weather. If you live in North America (especially Pennsylvania, the groundhog-worshiping state from which both writers of this news briefing hail), this probably seems completely normal. You presumably know how this ritual goes: If Phil awakes from his slumber to see his shadow, we’re in for six more weeks of winter; if not, spring is but six weeks away! Indeed, what could be more sensible?
But if you can believe it, not all societies rely on burrowing mammals for meteorological predictions. So where did this practice come from, and why do we keep doing it?
Punxsutawney Phil made his first forecast in 1887 (you’ll be surprised to learn that there has been more than one groundhog that has taken up the job over the years). But the idea of using shadows to predict weather goes all the way back to early Christian celebrations in Europe, particularly Candlemas—which falls on February 2, smack between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. According to History.com, “In certain parts of Europe, Christians believed that a sunny Candlemas meant another 40 days of cold and snow.” Germans put their own spin on the holiday, determining whether the day was “sunny” based on whether hedgehogs and other small animals saw their shadows.
When German immigrants settled in America during the 1700s and 1800s, they brought this odd form of meteorology with them. Pennsylvania’s German communities (known, confusingly, as the “Pennsylvania Dutch,” a spinoff of the word “Deutsch”) brought this tradition with them. And because the region does not have hedgehogs, they began to use the Northeast’s native groundhog as their “seer of seers.” Thus, Punxsutawney Phil.
Each year, a coterie of besuited men and a throng of thousands of onlookers stride up to the Knob to witness his predictions. How accurate are they? According to the National Weather Service, Phil is actually wrong more than often than he’s correct. Over the last ten years, he’s correctly predicted the weather only four times out of ten and his track record was little better before that. Despite this, Punxsutawney Phil remains the go-to guy.
Meanwhile, other towns around the nation have their own celebrations with their own groundhog sages. More than 100 towns around North America have their own designated groundhog meteorologist that they turn to each year. Many seem to enjoy Phil’s same level of job security: One Nova Scotia groundhog named Shubenacadie Sam remained employed even after he escaped his pen and bit a journalist in 2018, as was Jimmy the groundhog after he chomped the mayor of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin right on the face. (These groundhogs must have one hell of a union!)
It seems rather irresponsible to leave such an important task up to a creature who appears to have little intuition. But, hey, Nate Silver’s predictions are also wrong more often than not, and he still has a job!
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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