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After corporate media lied America into a war and a financial crisis, data show they lied about a main source of price hikes — and brutal policies followed.

by Andrew Perez, Matthew Cunningham-Cook, and David Sirota, The Lever

One year ago, as price hikes were becoming a major national concern, the world’s third-richest man touted his newspaper columnist asserting that corporate profits were not a driving force behind inflation — blaming temporary COVID-19 pandemic aid instead.

While Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and others were trying to steer the inflation discourse away from a focus on business profiteering, there was already data showing that most of the price increases Americans were experiencing could be attributed to larger corporate profit margins.

New York Times app showing story on inflation (viewed on an iPhone against a print edition)

Those figures were hardly surprising: Corporations that had been permitted to grow into oligopolies during the era of lax antitrust enforcement were now able to leverage their outsized market power to hike prices — and to do so with less fear of competitors undercutting them. It’s a reality that has since been recognized by a Federal Reserve study, a top economist at UBS, European central bankers, and, most recently, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

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Economic Justice