In an apparent reference to Harris' admittedly vague plan to forbid "price gouging" on food, Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social, "Kamala will implement SOVIET Style Price Controls," one of several policies he claimed would make inflation "100 times WORSE."

The Republican National Committee joined in, sharing the New York Post's Saturday headline "Kamunism" on X with the caption, "Comrade Kamala."

Harris singled out two industries, beef and pharmaceuticals, that have attracted scrutiny from plenty of Republicans.

In December, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) introduced legislation restricting how pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), a middleman industry that negotiates prescription drug prices for insurance plans, can operate.

Grassley is a longtime critic of PBMs' and pharmaceutical companies' pricing practices, going so far as to accuse some companies of price gouging. "As a leading advocate for lowering drug prices in the U.S. Senate, I've hauled Big Pharma and pharmacy benefit manager executives before Congress, led a two-year bipartisan investigation into insulin price-gouging, and advanced bipartisan reforms to lower the cost of insulin and many other prescription drugs," Grassley wrote in an October 2022 op-ed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

He sounds a whole lot like Harris, who said on Friday, "I'll lower the cost of insulin and prescription drugs for everyone with your support, not only our seniors and demand transparency from the middlemen who operate between Big Pharma and the insurance companies, who use opaque practices to raise your drug prices and profit off your need for medicine."

There are likewise a number of Republican lawmakers who have advocated for federal intervention to stop price gouging in the beef industry. Grassley joined Sens. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in February 2023 to reintroduce the Meat Packing Special Investigator Act, which would create a new special investigator in the Department of Agriculture to crack down on meatpacking giants' anticompetitive practices.

The trio argued that concentration in the meatpacking industry, which is now dominated by just four companies, has enabled corporations to at once squeeze independent cattle ranchers with lower purchase prices, and then charge consumers higher and higher prices in supermarkets.

Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans, wrote to the Federal Trade Commission in September to encourage strict scrutiny of a potential merger between the supermarket conglomerates Kroger and Albertsons.

"The track record of grocery consolidation in our state does not bode well for Alaskans' food security, affordability, and our dedicated workforce," the pair wrote.

And just in case some have forgotten, the main reason for supply chain issues was the fact the world was undergoing a global pandemic called Covid-19, which Trump himself declared as a national emergency in 2020 - which should have triggered the existent state law protections that obviously went unpursued.

So they are just going to rebrand all the stuff they were going to smear Bernie with? That's lazy.

It's also stupid. All Trump is going to do is cause American to be educated about what they didn't know: During emergencies, like the Covid Pandemic, states already have laws to keep companies from doing exactly what they did - price gouge consumers solely because they could. Yet state attorney generals didn't do one single thing to hold these companies accountable as inflation wreaked havoc on household budgets even though laws were on the books.

So Harris is asking for federal laws towards the same ends - protecting consumers from being exploited during specified emergencies, and Trump is dumbly calling it communism. All Americans know that inflation began to spike while the pandemic was still raging, but how many know that their state should have held guilty companies responsible for the very pricing practices they admitted openly in earnings calls and investor reports?

Details,

This is the piece of the price gouging issue the GOP is trying to ignore and keep hidden from the general public:

So I continue to ask, who is (are) this GroundWork? And what is the basis of their assertions?

The "basis" of their assertions are contained in every single linked document with the exact information being reported by them.

#26

Completely irrelevant to the topic and subject matter at hand, precisely because the information being presented comes from verbatim quotations published by the companies themselves along with statistics taken from official government releases.

I could care less what an "About" tab says about the compilers of information unless there is some open and public dispute over the veracity of the information they present.

Everything else is tangential BS, imo and not worthy of discussion within the context of the topic. If you want to bitch about Groundworks, then start a thread about it. Please stop distracting from the topics with your extraneous meanderings, wholly unimportant to almost anyone but for you. Try keeping a journal instead.

#26 pt. 2

Perhaps had you used Google instead of complaining about having to watch a video (I do sympathize with you in this area. I too, prefer to read information than see it in video form) you would have found answers for your questions without taking the entire thread down a rabbit hole.

Groundwork Collaborative (GWC) is an American 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank and progressive advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., that, according to its website, works to "change economic policy and narratives to build public power, curb private power, and create an economy that works for all of us."[1][2] The organization is best known for research, analysis, and media commentary on economic issues, such as inflation, student debt, housing, and the U.S. labor market.[3][4][5]

Groundwork has been described as a "left-leaning think tank" and a "nonprofit that is critical of corporate behavior" by the Washington Post, and a "progressive economic policy group" in the New York Times.[6][7][8]

*History

Groundwork is led by Lindsay Owens, an economic sociologist who served as a senior economic policy advisor to Senator Elizabeth Warren and deputy chief of staff and legislative director to former Representative Keith Ellison and Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal.[9] She was recently named to the Washingtonian's "Most Influential People Shaping Policy" list, noting that "Owens is known in media circles for her skills in communicating ways to better understand inflation and corporate profiteering."[10] The organization was founded in 2018 by Michael Linden.[11] Linden also served as the executive associate director at the Office of Management and Budget from May 2022 - June 2023.[12][13]

In January 2021, Lindsay Owens became interim executive director and was named the organization's executive director in June 2021.[14]

Previous notable Groundwork employees include Janelle Jones, former chief economist at the Department of Labor, and Angela Hanks, former acting assistant secretary for Employment and Training Administration at the Department of Labor.[15][16][17]

Stick a sock in it Msgt. Your underwhelming "statistics" have already been laid bare by actual pandemic numbers:

Americans spent 25% more on food at the start of 2024 compared to 2020. During that time, the country's ten largest grocery and restaurant brands saw their profits skyrocket. Then they took their fattened profits and collectively spent $77 billion on stock buybacks and dividends to enrich executives and wealthy shareholders. They used inflation as cover to get rich while we paid the tab. Kudos to VP Harris for focusing on corporate price-gouging. This is a big deal." - Robert Reich