Claire Kelloway writes about the overwhelming control exerted by delivery apps, and the sustainability of restaurants in the midst of this era.
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We grieve with the many families and communities who have lost loved ones to anti-Black violence. And we join Black organizers, leaders, and activists in solidarity since the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police.
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday used the Defense Production Act to declare meatpacking plants to be essential facilities and allowed the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to reopen plants shuttered due to outbreaks of COVID-19 among workers. The Open Markets Institute, Food & Water Action, and Family Farm Action Alliance, joined by the undersigned, share the president’s desire to ensure a robust supply of food to every American family. Unfortunately, we believe this order is the wrong way to do so.
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The Open Markets Institute calls on Congress, the Trump administration, and federal and state law enforcement agencies to use their various powers to impose an immediate ban on all mergers and acquisitions by any corporation with more than $100 million in annual revenue, and by any financial institution or equity fund with more than $100 million in capitalization.
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The Open Markets team has long been the leader in America in highlighting the ways in which concentration of production capacity can make industrial, financial, and information systems subject to catastrophic crashes.
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Open Markets recognizes the value of a vibrant, well-staffed, and aggressive FTC to enforce the antitrust laws and promote vigorous competition. However, Sen. Hawley’s plan at best misses the mark and at worst would undermine the goals of the commission. Two aspects of his proposal are especially dangerous.
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Open Markets Reporter Daniel Hanley conducts a close review of the court ruling that approved the $26 billion mega-merger reveals a number of mistakes in Judge Victor Marrero’s reasoning, which means there are several excellent legal arguments on which states could appeal the ruling.
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Food & Power Reporter Claire Kelloway reports on an investigation into an allegation that agribusiness giants Bayer, Corteva, BASF, Cargill, and others tried to crush an online ag retailing startup, the California-based Farmers Business Network (FBN). The allegation represents an abuse of market power by leading agribusinesses to maintain control over seed and agrichemical markets in an era of retail disruption.
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Personalized pricing was a popular topic at the National Retail Federation’s annual convention in New York City this month, reports Food & Power Reporter Claire Kelloway. Grocery stores can leverage a combination of data analytics and customer identification and tracking tools to offer real-time individual pricing and promotions, both online and in-store. While the practice may still be in its infancy, some experts believe that personalized prices will become the standard in food retail and beyond.
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Open Markets Policy Director Phil Longman presented a groundbreaking plan to reform health care prices, in the cover story for the current issue of the Washington Monthly. Longman proposed a system that we’re calling Medicare Prices for All. The basic idea is simple: Have the federal government mandate that the prices Medicare pays for health care apply to all health care plans.
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Claire Kelloway reports that the USDA thwarted a decade of efforts to help farmers seek justice for discrimination, retaliation, and unfair treatment by meatpackers. Trump’s USDA introduced new criteria to determine whether a meatpacker violated the Packers and Stockyards Act. This latest proposal omits several critical farmer protections from the previous rule and introduces new language that could codify abusive industry practices.
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K. Sabeel Rahman, the president of Demos, joined Open Markets Institute researcher Udit Thakur to talk about the pitfalls of managerialism in policy-making, and what a truly democratic think-tank ecosystem might look like.
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The Open Markets Institute Team wishes you a happy holiday season! We know a lot of you will be taking advantage of these quiet cold days to catch up on your reading. Obviously, we hope this will include some time with Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. Our team is proud to have supported this important new history of how Americans debated economics in the 20th Century. But many other works also inspired us over the last year, and we hope you’ll have the time to read a few of them.
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The Farm System Reform Act would halt construction of new concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and phase out all large CAFOs by 2040, while also holding corporate meatpackers more accountable for environmental degradation and farmer exploitation.
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Baldwin, Florida, a town of roughly 1,600 residents west of Jacksonville, lost its last grocery store in 2018, writes Claire Kelloway. Baldwin’s store resembles other collective and community-driven efforts to combat rural food deserts, which were partly created by predatory big-box stores. It also revives a forgotten notion that government should provide open and accessible food markets, which were a central part of municipal planning and responsibility through the 19th century.
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The use of digital technology in health care has enormous promise, to be sure. But The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Google’s Project Nightingale also revealed a potential dark side to the projects. Ascension, it noted, “also hopes to mine data to identify additional tests that could be necessary or other ways in which the system could generate more revenue from patients, documents show.”
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The Wall Street Journal reported that Google plans to start collecting the health data of millions of Americans as part of a cloud-computing deal with Ascension, one of the largest health systems in theUnited States. This comes after Google’s recent announcement that it plans to acquire Fitbit, the maker of fitness-tracking devices, which will give Google access to the personal health data of millions of Fitbit users. Yet, even if Google lives up to its promise not to use health care data for nefarious purposes, a big problem remains, and it should be getting more attention. Google’s growing size alone makes it an ever more tempting target for hackers.
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Open Markets Food & Power reporter Claire Kelloway covers how after U.S. and Chinese trade officials reached a deal to lift China’s five-year ban on U.S. poultry imports, the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) submitted a final rule permitting China to export chicken to the U.S. from birds raised and slaughtered in China for the first time in the agency’s history. She argues that the only clear winners in this grand bargain are multinational meatpackers that can profit from selling the lowest cost poultry, no matter where it came from.
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