Memo to Brian Kilmeade: “Show Me Evidence of Corporate Price Gouging!”

Like most monetarily motivated “conservative” talk show hosts Brian Kilmeade, New York born and raised suffers psychogenic blindness resulting from years sequestered within the confines of the Liberal New York culture.” (i.e. telling Trump he “should learn to lose” and that he (Kilmeade) had not seen any proof the 2020 election had been stolen; telling Republicans to “get past questioning election results” and to “stop calling the media ‘anti-Trump’.”

Brian Kilmeade’s latest guffaw gaffe occurred on his June 5 radio show when he played the recording of Biden blaming inflation on corporate greed. Kilmeade demanded to be shown evidence of such conduct. Well, here are just a few astounding examples of corporate cannibalization of the American consumer:

Sugared soda is 92% water. Sugar free soda is 96% water. According to Business Insider, a can of soda costs a mere 16 cents to produce. According to Brex, a good profit margin falls between 5% and 10%. The typical restaurant markup for a glass of soda is a shocking 1,150% (Business Insider, October 15, 2020). 

1.      [You can check normal profit margins for a host of consumer products at Brex.com “What is a good profit margin? Industry averages and how to improve yours.” ]
2. Profit margins on Dominos pizza (each) have been 35.73% in 2022 and 39.56% in 2021. Brex’s listed normal profit margin for restaurants and diners is 10.57%. It is common for pizzarias to charge an 800% profit on each pizza sold. 
3. A blind consumer can see the reduction in product size of just about everything with an increase in cost per unit – “shrinkflation.” Don’t tell us this is a “supply chain” problem.  It’s blatant corporate price gouging. 

But the above examples are only the thin veneer of a history of American Corporate corruption that has swindled the American consumer for over a hundred years. Here are a few examples:

1. Edwin Howard Armstrong (December  18, 1890 – February 1, 1954) was an American electrical engineer and inventor who developed FM (frequency modulation) radio and the superheterodyne receiver system. Armstrong was driven to suicide by RCAs President, David Sarnoff, who strangely proclaimed “I did not kill Armstrong.” Sarnoff was heavily invested in AM radio and conducted what is now Lawfare for 20 years against Armstrong to prevent the better quality FM receivers from interfering with Sarnoff’s AM monopoly. Armstrong, bankrupted and discredited by the corporate cabal, jumped to his death out of a hotel window. 
2. Ida M. Tarbell who single-handedly took down the Rockefeller massively corrupted oil monopoly resulting in the first federal anti-trust laws. 
3. Brooksley Born, former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, laughed to scorn by a congressional committee by both Parties, and such financial “luminaries” as Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke,  Robert Rubin, and Lawrence Summers for trying to bring under control the amok financial system and warn them of an impending disaster. She resigned before the 2008 mortgage crisis – warned about by her and seven other international finance experts – ruined millions of citizens financials. Two years after congress passed cosmetic remedies, the same congress cancelled those remedies again giving Wall Street and the Fed carte blanche guaranteeing “more frequent and more catastrophic financial disasters.” – Brooksley Born.  
4. Major General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor recipient, book “War Is a Racket!” 1935; 19 pages.
5. Charles Higham “Trading with the Enemy: An Expose’ of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1944“; 1983; 277 pages. The shocking expose’ of how American industrialists financed Hitler’s rise to power, enabled the Nazi to conduct The Blitz against London that killed thousands of civilians, built and operated the ball bearing factories in Germany that cost the lives of thousands of American air crews, then sued for reparations from the U.S. government for damages after the war. 
6. David Stockman, President Reagan’s Chief Budget Officer, book The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, 2013; 768 pages. Stockman summed up his detailed analysis of Wall Street and the Fed as “a casino in a whore house.”
7. G. Edward Griffin’s “The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve;” 2010; 608 pages.
8. Daniel Ellsberg’s “The Pentagon Papers” 1971; exposes the extent of the Political-Military-Industrial (Corporate) Complex and how citizens’ taxes were wasted for political-military expediency.
9. Craig Whitlock’s “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, 2021,”368 pages. Exposes the same Political-Military-Industrial (Corporate) waste of the best American lives and every Americans’ tax dollars in a 20-year unwinnable war. 

If this collection of evidence against Congress and both Political “Parties” (clubs) – isn’t enough direct evidence of corruption, collusion, and treason to send congress to prison for multiple life sentences-  doesn’t revolt you to the extent of becoming an Independent or Non-affiliated voter nothing will –  Amen to America. 

So, Brian Kilmeade and all of your counterfeit conservative ilk, save your rhetoric for the Pavlovian party members suffering the same psychogenic blindness.