Open Markets Action's Heartland Forum Tackles Regional Inequality

Last Saturday, five Democratic Party presidential hopefuls gathered at an event in Storm Lake, Iowa to present their platforms for revitalizing America’s farms and rural communities. Co-sponsored by the HuffPost, Iowa Farmers Union, Open Markets Action, and The Storm Lake Times, the Heartland Forum received wide coverage in the press, most of it focused on how all the candidates called for much stronger enforcement of antitrust laws against the corporations that dominate agricultural and food systems.

(See coverage of the forum in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Associated Press, and Politico’s Morning Ag.).

Another takeaway that received less press attention, however, was the candidates’ rejection of the widely held idea that regional inequality–declining rural populations, the extraction of wealth in Heartland communities, and growing concentration of wealth and power in a few coastal cities–simply reflects inalterable market or technological forces. Rather, speaker after speaker stressed the role of a wide range of public policies in depressing opportunities in rural America.

In doing so, they brought themselves into alignment with a pioneering body of work by Open Markets on the subject, including recent articles by Phil Longman and Claire Kelloway,

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren emphasized the role federal policies can have in exacerbating or ameliorating regional inequality. Responding to a question on making farming accessible for young people, Warren explained, “We need to reduce the student loan debt burden so that people don’t have to move to big cities where the wages are higher to pay them off.” Shortly before the forum, Warren released an agriculture policy platform that detailed how as president she would break up giant agribusinesses.

Amy Klobuchar, the ranking member on the Senate antitrust subcommittee, pointed out that because of lax antitrust enforcement, two seed companies control most of the market and four railroads control nearly all rail shipping (“the same number,” Klobuchar quipped, “as on the Monopoly board”). The Minnesota senator said that corporate consolidation also harms rural America as seen by media conglomerates and platform monopolies displacing local news sources, as well as pharmaceutical monopolies making it even harder for people to get access to insulin and other medical treatment they need.

Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro said part of the fix must be a new philosophy of antitrust enforcement that focuses on harms along a supply chain, to producers as well as to consumers. “We need to make sure that no matter where you live in this country, there are good job opportunities,” he added.

Former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, in the day before the Forum, released a position paper he called the Heartland Fair Deal. In that document, he wrote, “We have to put policies in place so a kid doesn’t have to move to a big city in order to have a chance for a good job.” At the event, Delaney buttressed that goal with a call for supporting community banks “to make the kind of loans in local communities that businesses need,” strengthening rural health care, and encouraging investment through changes in the tax code and opportunity zone programs.

Delaney strongly condemned the present situation, in which almost all new investment in America goes to a tiny fraction of the nation’s communities. “That’s not a country of opportunity,” he said. “That’s a country of birthright.”

Rep. Tim Ryan, whose Ohio district includes Youngstown and other once heavily industrialized communities, said that America’s Heartland cities and towns are “tied together politically” with rural areas. “We’re all suffering from the same thing,” he said.

Ryan said, “I’m looking at what’s happening in rural America with regard to the concentration of power and rural monopolies and you know what we call this in Youngstown? It’s a scam. It’s an absolute scam.”