Over at Thinkprogress, they have a chart up that makes me weep bitter tears for our democracy; they are bragging about the stratospheric profits bloated and insatiable US corporations are enjoying lately at everyone else’s expense; you really have to see it to believe it:
That’s right. A purportedly “liberal” blog is falling all over itself to say that the obscene corporate profits they are shamelessly touting amount to a good thing, somehow. Although we all now have absorbed the aberrant idea that corporations are people, it seems a stretch that even the most Village-addled liberals are so enamored with sky-high corporate profits, and let me tell you why. Corporations aren’t people; quite the opposite, and each percentage point tells the story.
Corporate profits are, of course, the difference between the cost of what something sells for and what it’s really worth. Thus, everything above a few percentage points is a kind of theft, whether it be from consumers, employees, the environment, or the future. In a functioning free market, the company with the lowest profits would win; why would anyone want to throw away more of their hard-earned cash just to fatten executives and shareholders, at the expense of getting a good deal for their money?
Ah, but that isn’t they way things work anymore. Here, we have a Democratic (as it were) President’s media toadies cheering the fact that fat cats are fleecing just that much more money from their long-suffering underlings. USA, USA!!!! And, instead of greeting that nauseating statistic with the disdain it so richly deserves, we get the above graph, wherein the wanton theft from the larger economy, sixty full percentage points above the second worst performer, that widely revered Man of the People, Warren G. Harding, presented to liberal blog readers as some kind of triumph.
What does a nearly 8o% increase in corporate profits, the largest in history, really mean? Unfortunately, a lot of things, none of them good. It means outsourcing. It means union-busting. It means no-bid government contracts. It means extracting resources for far less than their actual value, much less the damage said extraction causes the planet. It means price gouging, particularly in a recession. It means, essentially, everyone paying more for less, at a time when they can least afford to. In short, it means that the Obama Administration ought to be ashamed of its craven duplicity in pretending to care about ordinary people, and Thinkprogress, if it were smart if not ostensibly liberal, would STFU, and start talking about the wonders of Dodd-Frank or some such.
The fact that corporate profits are so absurdly high and growing at such an alarming rate isn’t the only reason that President Obama and the Democrats are in a fight for their political lives at the moment, but if they lose, that graph belongs on their headstones.
