Don’t take my word for it — they’ll tell you themselves.
Today, CEOs of big corporations are playing the tricky “Inflation Blame Game.”
By Jim Hightower | May 4, 2022
for Assorted Ideas, Large & Small
Publicly, they moan that the pandemic is slamming their poor corporations with factory shutdowns, supply chain delays, wage hikes, and other increased costs. But inside their board rooms, executives are high-fiving each other and pocketing bonuses.
What’s going on?

The trick is that these giants are in non-competitive markets operating as monopolies, so they can set prices, mug you and me, and scamper away with record profits. In 2019 for example, before the pandemic, corporate behemoths hauled in roughly a trillion dollars in profit. In 2021, during the pandemic, they grabbed more than $1.7 trillion.
This huge profit jump accounts for 60 percent of the inflation now slapping U.S. families!
Take supermarket goliath Kroger. Its CEO gloated last summer that “a little bit of inflation is always good in our business,” adding that “we’ve been very comfortable with our ability to pass on [price] increases” to consumers.
“Comfortable” indeed. Last year, Kroger used its monopoly pricing power to reap record profits. Then it spent $1.5 billion of those gains not to benefit consumers or workers, but to buy back its own stock — a scam that siphons profits to top executives and big shareholders.
Or take the fast-food purveyor McDonald’s. Executives bragged to their shareholders that despite the supply disruptions of the pandemic and higher costs for meat and labor, its top executives had used the chain’s monopoly power in 2021 to up prices, thus increasing corporate profits by a stunning 59 percent over the previous year.
And the game goes on: “We’re going to have the best growth we’ve ever had this year,” Wall Street banking titan Jamie Dimon exalted at the start of 2022.
Hocus Pocus — this is how the rich get richer and inequality “happens.”
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
more from assorted ideas, large & small
- How To Make Your Small Business MemorableBecome a familiar business in your community. Discover how to make your small business memorable and make a lasting impression on consumers.
- Common Testing Doctors Use To Find CancerIf your doctor’s worried that you have cancer, there are specific tests they’ll order. These are a few of the common tests doctors use to find cancer.
- Can Bromance Turn Into Romance?Hollywood would have us believe that bromance is simply a close, Platonic friendship between two men. But what if there’s more to it than that? What if bromance can turn into something deeper, something more
- What Bromance Means Now As Barriers Come Down“Bromance” is a term that’s become increasingly popular in recent years, describing a close, platonic bond between two men. While the concept of bromance has been around for centuries, it’s only recently that it’s become
- What Black History Means to the 19th StaffBlack History Month has been reserved to acknowledge and commemorate the achievements of our ancestors, their great contributions and what they’ve done for the world. Growing up we learn about the likes of Frederick Douglass,
[…] WHAT’S BEHIND INFLATION? GREEDY CORPORATE EXECUTIVES […]