Even as Republican members of Congress accuse Joe Biden of failing to secure the nation’s southern border, Mexico is facing a growing problem of securing its northern border. Guns from America are pouring into Mexico, arming violent drug gangs.

Mexico has tried just about everything to stop the flow of firearms from the north – passing strict gun control laws, imposing stiff penalties on traffickers, and pleading with U.S. authorities to stop the trafficking – but nothing has worked. So now it’s doing what any litigious American would do: it’s suing.

Mexico announced Wednesday it’s seeking at least $10 billion in compensation from America’s 11 major gun manufacturers for the havoc the guns have wrought south of the border. It alleges America’s gunmakers know their products are being trafficked to Mexico and are expressly marketing their weapons to Mexican criminal gangs – designing guns to be “easily modified to fire automatically” and be “readily transferable on the criminal market in Mexico.”

The deluge of firearms from the United States to Mexico – on average, more than 500 every day – is contributing to mayhem there. Killings have become a routine part of the Mexican drug trade. In Mexico’s recent midterm election campaign, 30 candidates were gunned down by criminal gangs. In 2019 alone, at least 17,000 homicides in Mexico were linked to trafficked weapons.

Yet Mexico’s lawsuit is likely to face tough going in the United States, where the easy accessibility of guns is also wreaking havoc but where gun ownership is considered a constitutional right and gun purchases are skyrocketing.

In addition, American gunmakers have erected a fortress of legal protections. In 2005, the gun lobby got congressional Republicans to enact the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Firearms Act, banning most lawsuits brought against gun manufacturers for marketing and distributing their products.

At a more basic level, American capitalism considers any market to be an opportunity to make a profit. After all, a buck is a buck (or, more precisely, 19.98 pesos, at today’s exchange rate). In America, buying and selling are hallmarks of freedom. For government to prohibit a sale is to intrude on the “free market.” For another government to bar its consumers from buying American goods is to violate “free trade.”

Alejandro Celorio, a legal advisor to Mexico’s foreign ministry, estimates the damage to the Mexican economy caused by trafficked guns to total 1.7% to 2% of Mexico’s gross domestic product. What’s left unsaid is that Mexico’s illicit drug business is also a boon to the Mexican economy, adding billions of dollars each year in foreign sales, mostly to American consumers eager to buy thousands of kilos of methamphetamines, heroin, cocaine and fentanyl each year.

Freedom of contract, it’s called. We sell them guns that kill them; they sell us drugs that kill us.

But this isn’t trade in goods. It’s trade in bads. There’s death on both sides.

The merchants of such death – American gunmakers like Glock, Smith & Wesson, Beretta USA, Barrett, Century International Arms and Colt; Mexican producers of methamphetamines, heroin, and fentanyl; and the wholesalers and traffickers connecting buyers with sellers on both sides of the border – are making piles of money. Free market ideologues will argue that as long as everyone is getting what they want, these trades are efficient. Yet vast numbers of people are dying.

The Republicans who protect gun manufacturers and who are criticizing Joe Biden for failing to secure the southern border from migrants who are desperate to come to America should take note of this tragic irony.

The flood of guns from America into Mexico is helping fuel much of the crime, violence, and corruption pushing thousands of Mexicans to seek a better life north of the border.

It’s also enabling the flow of dangerous drugs from Mexico to America that are killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, many in states and congressional districts represented by those same Republicans.

Guns, dangerous drugs, and desperate migrants are inextricably connected. The answer to solving one of these problems lies in responding to all three.

We’ve become so inured to Donald Trump’s proto-fascism that we barely blink an eye when we learn that he tried to manipulate the 2020 election. Yet the most recent revelation should frighten every American to their core.

On Friday, the House oversight committee released notes of a 27 December telephone call from Trump to then acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, in which Trump told Rosen: “Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R congressmen.” The notes were taken by Richard Donoghue, Rosen’s deputy, who was also on the call.

The release of these notes has barely made a stir. The weekend news was filled with more immediate things – infrastructure! The Delta strain! Inflation! Wildfires! In light of everything else going on, Trump’s bizarre efforts in the last weeks of his presidency seem wearily irrelevant. Didn’t we already know how desperate he was?

In a word, no. This revelation is hugely important.

Rosen obviously rejected Trump’s request. But what if Rosen had obeyed Trump and said to the American public that the election was corrupt – and then “left the rest” to Trump and the Republican congressmen? What would Trump’s and the Republicans’ next moves have been? And which Republican congressmen were in cahoots with Trump in this attempted coup d’état?

Make no mistake: this was an attempted coup.

Trump knew it. Just weeks earlier, then attorney general William Barr said the justice department had found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have overturned the results.

And a few days after Trump’s call to Rosen – on 2 January – Trump told Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find” votes to change the election outcome. He berated Raffensperger for not doing more to overturn the election.

Emails released last month also show that Trump and his allies in the last weeks of his presidency pressured the justice department to investigate totally unsubstantiated claims of widespread election fraud – forwarding them conspiracy theories and even a draft legal brief they hoped would be filed with the supreme court.

Some people, especially Republican officeholders, believe we should simply forget these sordid details. We must not.

For the first time in the history of the United States we did not have a peaceful transition of power. For the first time in American history, a president refused – still refuses – to concede, and continues to claim, with no basis in fact, that the election was “stolen” from him. For the first time in history, a president actively plotted a coup.

It would have been bad enough were Trump a mere crackpot acting on his own pathetic stage – a would-be dictator who accidentally became president and then, when he lost re-election, went bonkers – after which he was swept into the dustbin of history.

We might then merely regret this temporary lapse in American presidential history. At best, Trump would be seen as a fool and the whole affair an embarrassment to the country.

But Trump was no accident and he’s not in any dustbin. He has turned one of America’s two major parties into his own cult. He has cast the major political division in the US as a clash between those who believe him about the 2020 election and those who do not. He has emboldened state Republicans to execute the most brazen attack on voting rights since Jim Crow. Most Republican senators and representatives dare not cross him. Some of his followers continue to threaten violence against the government. By all accounts, he is running for president again in 2024.

Donald Trump’s proto-fascism poses the largest internal threat to American democracy since the civil war.

What to do about it? Fight it, and the sooner the better.

This final revelation – Trump’s 27 December call to the acting attorney general in which he pleads “Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” – should trigger section 3 of the 14th amendment, which bars anyone from holding office who “engaged in insurrection” against the US. The current attorney general of the United States, Merrick Garland, should issue an advisory opinion clearly stating this. If Trump wants to take it to the supreme court, fine.

Despair is worse after a brief period of hope. I don’t know about you, but I was elated earlier this spring when it seemed as if Trump and COVID were gone, and Biden seemed surprisingly able to get the nation rapidly back on track.  

Now much is sliding backwards. It’s not Biden’s fault; it’s Trump’s ongoing legacy.

The new Delta strain of the virus requires, according to the CDC, that we go back to wearing masks inside in public places where the virus is surging, even if we’re fully inoculated.

This would be nothing more than a small disappointment and inconvenience were it not for Republicans using it as another opportunity to politicize public health.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy responded to the new CDC recommendation with the kind of unhinged hyperbole Trumpers have perfected. “The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state,” he said.

Republican politicizing of public health will get worse if the Delta variant continues to surge. At some point vaccines will have to be mandated because being inoculated is not solely a matter of personal choice. Herd immunity is a common good. If infections mount, that common good can only be achieved if nearly everyone is vaccinated.

But those eager to exploit the virus’s resurgence – the know-nothings, Trump wannabe’s, vilely ambitious political upstarts, Tucker Carlsons and similarly cynical entertainers – are already howling about “personal freedom” threatened by “socialism.”

The investigation into the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 is further evidence of how far the Republican Party has descended into opportunistic treachery.

We need to know what happened and why if we are to have half a chance of avoiding a repeat. Just as with the history of systemic discrimination and brutality against Black people in America – which Republicans are calling “critical race theory” and trying to ban from classrooms – the truth shapes our responses to the future.

Here again, the dispiriting aspect of the present moment is Republican denial and obfuscation.

As Officer Michael Fanone – who suffered traumatic brain injury on Jan 6 when rioters attacked him – testified yesterday at the start of the hearings, “What makes the struggle harder and more painful is to know so many of my fellow citizens — including so many of the people I put my life at risk to defend — are downplaying or outright denying what happened.”

With the exception of Rep. Liz Cheney – whom I never expected to hold up as a model of integrity – Republicans are eager to divert the public’s attention. Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik declared at a press conference yesterday that “Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility, as speaker of the House, for the tragedy that occurred on Jan. 6.”

This is absurd on its face. The Speaker of the House shares responsibility for Capitol security with the Senate majority leader, who at the time of the attack was Mitch McConnell. If Pelosi was negligent – and there’s zero evidence she was – McConnell was as well.

Stefanik and other Republican leaders don’t want the public to know about Republican members of Congress who were almost certainly involved in the travesty, either directly or indirectly. The list includes Representatives Jim Jordan, Mo Brooks, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Andrew Biggs, and McCarthy himself. Senator Josh Hawley also seems to have been on the know, given his fist-salute to the rioters.

And then there’s Trump himself, cheerleader and ringleader.

All should be subpoenaed. All, presumably, will fight the subpoenas in court.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to stage rallies for his avid followers as he did last weekend in Phoenix, where he declared “Our nation is up against the most sinister forces… This nation does not belong to them, this nation belongs to you.”

Wrong. America belongs to all of us. And we all have a responsibility to protect its public health and its democratic institutions. The real sinister force is the Trump Republicans’ cynical exploitation of lies and anti-scientific rubbish to divide and divert us.

Months ago, it seemed as if this darkness was behind us. It is not.

You’d think President Biden and the Democratic Party leadership would do everything in their power to stop Republicans from undermining democracy.

So far this year, the GOP has passed roughly 30 laws in states across the country  that will make voting harder, especially in Black and Latino communities. With Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans are stoking white people’s fears that a growing non-white population will usurp their dominance.

Yet while Biden and Democratic leaders are openly negotiating with holdout senators for Biden’s stimulus and infrastructure proposals, they aren’t exerting similar pressure when it comes to voting rights and elections. In fact, Biden now says he won’t take on the filibuster, which stands firmly in the way.

What gives? Part of the explanation, I think, lies with an outside group that has almost as much influence on the Democratic Party as on the Republican, and which isn’t particularly enthusiastic about election reform: the moneyed interests bankrolling both parties.

They fear that a more robust democracy would make it easier for the majority of Americans who aren’t wealthy to raise taxes on the wealthy to finance all sorts of things the majority may want, from better schools to stronger safety nets. 

So at the same time white supremacists have whipped up fears about nonwhites usurping their dominance, America’s wealthy have spent vast sums on campaign donations and lobbyists to prevent majorities from usurping their money.

They’ve already whipped up resistance among congressional Democrats to Biden’s plan to tax capital gains at 39.6% — up from 20% — for those earning more than $1 million. And they’re on the way to convincing Democrats to restore the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes, of which they’re the biggest beneficiaries.  

In recent years these wealth supremacists, as they might be called, have quietly joined white supremacists to become a powerful anti-democracy coalition.

Some wealth supremacists have backed white supremacist’s efforts to divide poor and working-class whites from poor and working-class Black and brown people, so they don’t look upward and see where most of the economic gains have been going and don’t join together to demand a fair share of those gains.

By the same token, white supremacists have quietly depended on wealth supremacists to bribe lawmakers to limit voting rights, so people of color continue to be second-class citizens. It’s no accident that six months after the insurrection, dozens of giant corporations that promised not to fund members of Congress who refused to certify Biden as president are now back funding them and their anti-voting rights agenda.

Donald Trump was put into office by this anti-democracy coalition. According to Forbes, 9 percent of America’s billionaires, together worth a combined $210 billion, pitched in to cover the costs of Trump’s 2020 campaign. During his presidency Trump gave both parts of the coalition what they wanted most: tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks for the wealth supremacists; legitimacy for the white supremacists.

The coalition is now the core of the Republican Party, which stands for little more than voter suppression based on Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and tax cuts for the wealthy and their corporations.

Meanwhile, as wealth supremacists have accumulated a larger share of the nation’s income and wealth than at any time in more than a century, they’ve used a portion of that wealth to bribe lawmakers not to raise their taxes. It was recently reported that several American billionaires have paid only minimal or no federal income tax at all.

Tragically, the Supreme Court is supporting both the white supremacists and wealth supremacists. Since Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined in 2005 and 2006, respectively, the court has been whittling away voting rights while enlarging the rights of the wealthy to shower money on lawmakers. The conservative majority has been literally making it easier to buy elections and harder to vote in them.

The Democrats’ proposed “For the People Act” admirably takes on both parts of the coalition. It sets minimum national standards for voting, and it seeks to get big money out of politics through public financing of election campaigns.

Yet this comprehensiveness may explain why the Act is now stalled in the Senate. Biden and Democratic leaders are firmly against white supremacists but are not impervious to the wishes of wealth supremacists. After all, to win elections they need likely Democrats to vote but also need big money to finance their campaigns.

Some progressives have suggested a carve-out to the filibuster solely for voting rights. This might constrain the white supremacists but would do nothing to protect American democracy from the wealth supremacists.

If democracy is to be preserved, both parts of the anti-democracy coalition must be stopped.

Imagine a world where workers have real power. In this world, workers are paid a living wage, are protected by a strong union, and wield enough political clout to ensure Congress passes pro-worker laws. Corporations can’t treat them like robots and abandon communities to find cheaper labor elsewhere. It is a world of low inequality, where workers have a bigger share of the fruits of their labor.

This world is America in the 1950s.

This world was far from perfect. Black people and women were still second-class citizens. Windows of opportunity were still small or shuttered. That’s why it’s not enough to just go back in time. We must build upon it and expand it.

For the past 40 years, this world has been dismantled. The voice of workers has been steadily drowned out in both the workplace and on the national political stage by the voice of big corporations. 

This massive power shift wasn’t the result of “free market forces” but of political choices. Now, it’s time to make the political choice to strengthen the voice of all workers.

Start with one of the biggest sources of worker power: unions. Every worker in America has a legal right to join a union free from interference from their employer – a hard-fought victory that workers shed blood to secure. But corporate America has been busting unions to prevent workers from organizing.

In Bessemer, Alabama, for instance, Amazon used every trick in the anti-union playbook to prevent its predominantly Black workforce from forming the first Amazon union.

Most union-busting tactics are illegal, but the punishment is so laughably small that it’s simply the cost of doing business for a multi-billion dollar company like Amazon.

In addition, 28 states now have so-called “right-to-work” laws on the books, thanks to decades of big business lobbying. These laws ban unions from requiring dues from non-union workers, although non-union workers still benefit from these union contracts. This obviously makes it much harder for workers to unionize.

Corporations are also misclassifying employees as independent contractors and part-time workers, so workers don’t qualify for unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, or the minimum wage, and don’t have the right to form a union. 

And corporations are waging political fights to keep employees off the books: Uber, Lyft, and other gig companies shelled out $200 million to get Proposition 22 passed in California, exempting them from a state labor law cracking down on misclassification.

It’s a vicious cycle: corporations crush their workers to protect corporate bottom lines, then use their enlarged profits to lobby for policies that allow them to keep crushing their workers – preventing workers from having a voice in the workplace and in our democracy.

This vicious cycle began in the 1980s, when corporate raiders ushered in the era of “shareholder capitalism” that prioritized shareholders above the interests of other stakeholders. 

They bought up enough shares of stock to gain control of the corporation, and then cut costs by slashing payrolls, busting unions, and abandoning their home communities for cheaper locales – all to maximize share values. The CEO of General Electric at the time, Jack Welch, helped pioneer these moves: in just his first four years as CEO, a full quarter of GE’s workforce was fired.

The Reagan administration helped block legislation to rein in these hostile takeovers, and refused to lift a finger to enforce antitrust laws that could have prevented some of them.

I wish I could report that the Clinton and Obama administrations reformed labor laws to make it harder for corporations to bust unions. But either because Bill Clinton and Barack Obama lacked the political clout to get this done or didn’t want to expend the political capital, the fact is neither president led the way. 

The result of these political choices? Corporate profits have soared and wages have stagnated.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can turn the tide by making new political choices that restore the voice and centrality of American workers.

The most important is now in front of us: It’s called the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. 

Passed in the House in March with bipartisan support, the PRO Act is the toughest labor law reform in a generation. 

It prevents misclassification of full-time workers, bans corporations from harassing or intimidating workers who want to form a union, prohibits employers from replacing striking workers with non-union workers, and beefs up penalties for breaking existing labor laws, among other provisions empowering workers.

Beyond the PRO Act, American businesses need to be restructured so workers have a say at every level. At the top, that means a voice on corporate boards. In many European countries, worker representation has been shown to boost wages, skills, and corporate investment in communities. 

At the local level, we should make it easier to establish worker-owned cooperatives, which have been shown to increase profits, wages, and worker satisfaction.

And our trade and foreign policy can center on American workers without falling into the kind of xenophobia and nativism Donald Trump promoted.

Reversing 40 years of shareholder capitalism won’t be easy. But remember this: you, the working people of America, outnumber the corporate executives and big investors by a wide margin. Together, you can change the rules, and build a world where workers have real power.

Within hours, Jeff Bezos will blast off into space, a week after Richard Branson went up. Another small step for billionaires.

Once upon a time, long long ago, people with names like John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Buzz Aldrin, and Sally Ride blasted into space. None was selected on the basis of income or wealth, but on skill and rigorous training. Their heroism – and we regarded them as national heroes – symbolized America’s technological prowess and egalitarianism.

I remember as a kid talking with other kids my age about becoming an astronaut. It was something any of us could aspire to if we had enough guts and gumption. The astronauts of that time came from middle-class and blue-collar families. They’d gone to public schools. They were like the rest of us, but their bravery and skill justified their status as national heroes.

The space program itself was quintessential American. In a way, it seemed as if all of us were going into space, risking our lives for the nation, and becoming the first to land on the moon. Yet our pride was not of the nativist variety. We won the space race because we had worked harder, longer, better. Our astronauts were backed by teams of scientists, aeronautical engineers, and aerospace workers who took great pride in their work, and we took pride in all of them. Again and again, we used the term “we” to describe the achievement, a common good.

Today’s space race could not be more different. Bezos, Branson, and Elon Musk, the third billionaire racing into space, aren’t “we.” There’s no common good in their achievement. They symbolize the extreme apex of wealth today, some of it gained by paying their workers rock-bottom wages and shutting out competitors. They’re closer to the robber barons of the first Gilded Age – Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller – whose conspicuous fortunes were founded on wage suppression, union-busting, and monopolization, and whose toys were the first motor cars and airplanes. The new space venturers are not backed by widely-celebrated teams of scientists, engineers, and workers. There is no collective pride in their achievement.

When Branson came down to earth last week, the New York Times wrote admiringly that “billionaire entrepreneurs are risking injury or death to fulfill their childhood aspirations — and advance the goal of making human spaceflight unexceptional.” And it quoted Eric Anderson, chairman of Space Adventures Limited, a company that charters launches to orbit, saying “They’re putting their money where their mouth is, and they’re putting their body where their money is. That’s impressive, frankly.”

Rubbish. If Branson, Bezos, and Musk – or Eric Anderson, for that matter – are advancing anything or anyone, it’s the prospect of making boatloads of money by selling future seats to other people able and willing to pay huge sums for the thrill. At a time when America and the world face existential crises ranging from climate change to raging inequality to deathly pandemics, these ventures into space aren’t impressive, frankly.

If some kids today are inspired by Branson, Bezos, and Musk, the inspiration is more about accumulating money and power than making the nation proud, more about propelling themselves forward than propelling America or the world forward. Sure, it takes some bravery to belt yourself into a rocket next to a few other billionaires who have paid tens of millions for the privilege, but that doesn’t come close to heroism.

We’ve privatized almost everything else, but no one can privatize heroism.

Last Thursday, 39 million American parents began receiving a monthly child allowance ($300 per child under 6, and $250 per child from 6 through 17). It’s the biggest helping hand to American families in more than 85 years.

They need it. Even before the pandemic, child poverty had reached post-war records. Even non-poor families were in trouble, burdened with deepening debt and missed payments. Most were living paycheck to paycheck – so if they lost a job, they and their kids could be plunged into poverty. It’s estimated that the new monthly child allowance will cut child poverty by more than half.

But every single Republican in both the House and Senate voted against the measure.

After I posted a tweet reminding people of this indisputable fact, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah responded Friday with a perfectly bizarre tweet: “If you’re one of the 39 million households receiving their first Child Tax Credit payment today, don’t forget that every single Democrat voted against making it larger.”

Hello? Did we just go through the funhouse mirror?

In point of fact, when the American Rescue Plan was being debated last February, Lee and Senator Marco Rubio did propose slightly larger payments. But here’s the rub: They wanted to restrict them only to “working parents.” Children of the unemployed would be out of luck. Yet those kids are the poorest of the poor. They’re most at risk of being hungry without a roof over their heads.

In a joint press release at the time, Lee and Rubio said they refused to support what they termed “welfare assistance” to jobless parents, warning against undercutting “the responsibility of parents to work to provide for their families.” Then Lee, Rubio, and every other Republican voted against the whole shebang – help for working and non-working parents. And now Lee wants to take credit for wanting to make the payments larger to begin with? Talk about both sides of the mouth.

As we move toward the gravitational pull of the midterm elections – and polls show how popular the monthly child payments are – I expect other Republicans to make the same whopper of a claim.

But underneath this hypocritical Republican rubbish lie two important questions. The first: will a payment of up to $300 per child every month – totaling up to $3,600 per child per year – invite parents to become couch potatoes?

That seems doubtful. Even a family with three kids under six would receive no more than $10,800 a year. That’s way below what’s needed to pay even subsistence expenses, and still far below what a full-time job at the federal minimum wage would pull in.

But even if the payment caused some parents to work a bit less, it’s far from clear their children are worse off as a result. Maybe they benefit from additional parenting time. 

Which only raises a second question: should children be penalized because their parents aren’t working, or are working less than they would without the child payment?

This question has been debated in America for many years – ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt first provided “Aid for Families with Dependent Children” (AFDC) in the Social Security Act of 1935.

It can’t be decided based on facts; it comes down to values. We know, for example, that child poverty soared after Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans ended AFDC in 1996 and substituted a work requirement. Many people – myself included – look back on that decision as a horrible mistake.

But many of its proponents call it a success because it resulted in additional numbers of poor adults getting jobs and thereby setting good examples for their children of personal responsibility. In the view of these proponents, a country where more parents take responsibility to provide for their children is worth the collateral damage of a greater number of impoverished children.

Since the 1990s, the Republican view that public assistance should be limited to families with breadwinners has taken firm hold in America. Only now, with the American Rescue Plan – put into effect during the worst public health crisis in more than a century and one of the fiercest periods of unemployment since World War II – has that view been rejected in favor of a universal family benefit.

It’s too early to know whether this about-face is permanent. The Act’s payments will end a year from now unless Congress passes Biden’s proposed $3.5 trillion addition. Almost every Senate Democrat has signaled a willingness to go along. But here again, not a single Senate Republican has signed on.

Let’s be clear. Mike Lee’s Republican Party – the putative party of “family values” – doesn’t support needy families. It supports a pinched and, in these perilous times, unrealistic view of personal responsibility – children be damned.

Friends, 

You’re hearing a lot about inflation these days. Don’t buy it. Every time the economy gets a bit of wind in its sails and workers get a little wage increase, conservatives scream about inflation and price increases.

In reality, there’s no inflation. The economy still has huge room to grow without pushing up prices. We’re still 7 million jobs short of where we were in January 2020. Retail and office space is empty. Factories aren’t near capacity. 

In addition, companies can easily outsource extra production they need. Meanwhile, unions are so weak as to negate the possibility of wage-price inflation. 

The price increases we’re witnessing now are because of supply bottlenecks, as supply catches up with pent-up demand. 

To the extent we need to worry about anything, it’s industrial concentration. Too many US industries are dominated by a handful of corporations, which have the ability to push prices higher. That requires antitrust enforcement. 

But inflation itself – structural, accelerating price increases – is a total mythology. 

Don’t fall for the scare-mongering.