Today on the show, our guest is Joe Maxwell. Joe is a former lieutenant-governor of Missouri. He ran and won that office in 2000, and served for a four-year term. Before that, he was in the Missouri legislature for about a decade. Today, Joe is the executive director of the Organization for Competitive Markets, a national nonprofit public policy and advocacy organization that represents family farmers and rural America in the fight against corporate agribusiness monopolies. He also recently helped to found something called Family Farm Action, which we’ll talk more about. Joe is a fourth-generation family hog farmer in the northeastern part of Missouri, and he joins us today from his home in Mexico, Missouri. Joe, welcome to the show.

So, we felt, as Farmers Across the Country, an organization of competitive markets, has many members in Oklahoma, our Board member, former state senator Paul Meggie is there. We really felt that we had to stand up and fight, in spite of the fact that early polling said that there wasn’t any way we could win.

Our standing up and saying, “Enough’s enough, we’re not going to let corporations be in the Bill of Rights that protects individual’s rights.” And so we stood up, and before we knew it, others were joining, and felt empowered to take a position against corporate ag. And then, the rest is history, as they say. We beat them 60% to 40%. We won in every congressional district.

During some of the worst hog price crisis’s, we saw family farmers getting, in 1998, got eight cents a pound for a hog, and the pork chop at the retail grocery store didn’t drop a penny. “How can that be?” Folks will say. Well when you only have two or three people buying and selling pork in the United States, they can do whatever they want. They collude, they drive the price down for the farmer, and drive the price up for the consumer. And so that’s what’s happened in America.

Over 60% of the market, in the hog market, is controlled by four corporations. The largest one in America is Smithfield. China owns … The country of China, invested to buy and own the largest pork producer, and pig producer, in the United States, Smithfield. JBS, which is Brazilian, using what we believe is illegal loans and manipulation of stock prices, purchased the pork division of Cargill. That’s either the second or third largest pork producer in the United States. So when you look at it, these companies that are abusing and driving farmers from the land, that are screwing the consumer by over-charging them, they’re not even US corporations anymore. They’re foreign corporations getting away with stealing from farmers and consumers.

Note that Monsanto, which I’ve not always been a fan of, but at least it was US, is getting ready to be merged and bought out by Bayer, a foreign corporation. And if you look at the purchases, and these acquisitions and these mergers on the input side, again, it’s the story of foreign corporations controlling the price that farmers have to pay. And they gouge that farmer on the input side, and the other side of these foreign multi-national corporations drive down the price, leaving the farmer very little options, other than to become a contract roller for those companies, a surf on their own land, or get out of business. And the consumers are harmed because when there’s too few people actually manufacturing and selling food products in the marketplace, they’re colluding. That is evidence …

There’s two cases going right now in the chicken industry, where the evidence is pretty clear, that the largest processors of poultry have been colluding on price and screwing the consumer out of about $1.10 per chicken. So you can think about the billions of dollars that the consumers had to pay because the market is not working.

But there is hope, and we are excited at OCM. We’re a 19 year old organization, we’ve never seen a better time. We’ve got Senator Grassley as the chair of judiciary, and Senator Lee as the chair of the sub-committee on anti-trust. Both of them, last year during two US senate hearings, said, “Enough’s enough.” Senator Grassley actually called these acquisitions and mergers tsunamis, and at the same time, we just saw Senator Warren and the democrats come out with the Better Deal, which has a platform against monopolies.

So we’re encouraged, when you ask folks like Senator Warren on one side, and Senator Lee on the other, and there’s probably not anyone else that can be that far apart ideology-wise, coming together on an issue. We are encouraged that we can, if the people will speak up just like we did in Oklahoma. And we’re not alone. We just need to join together and let our voice be heard and say, “Enough’s enough.” Whether you’re a consumer or a farmer, it’s time to end this big is better concept, and we need to have justice in Washington D.C. 

I think democrats have failed. I think we failed the people. I work on a bi-partisan basis. I just got through bragging on Senator Grassley and Senator Lee. But is it [inaudible 00:13:35] to the democrats and the democratic party, I think they have failed, time and time again, to hold up what their party was founded on.

You may recall, in 1792, we had Thomas Jefferson and Madison join together because they wanted to speak out against concentration. They wanted to speak out against the National Bank, and the concentration of wealth in this country, and inform the democrat party, the years of the little guy policies of the democrats. Did they evolve? [inaudible 00:14:11] democrats to go back to their roots. We are encouraged because we do see republicans moving [inaudible 00:14:20] party, but individual [inaudible 00:14:22] republicans wanting to right this injustice, and if the democratic party would join in, we really believe we can have true economic justice for everyone in this country.

If you enjoy this podcast, please consider making a donation to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Your financial support, not only underwrites this podcast, and helps keep it ad-free, but it also helps us produce all of the research and resources that we make available on our website, and all the technical assistance we provide to policy makers and citizens. Every year, ILSR’s small staff helps hundreds of communities challenge monopoly power and rebuild their local economies. So please take a minute and go to ilsr.org and click on the donate button. That’s I-L-S-R dot org. And if making a donation isn’t something you can do right now, please consider helping us in other ways. One great thing you could do is rate and review this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ratings help us reach a wider audience, so it’s hugely helpful when you do that. Thanks.

One of the trends that we have seen as the economy has grown increasingly consolidated, and as politicians have ignored, in many cases, that consolidation and what’s happening across the country, is that there’s this growing geographic divergence. There are a handful of cities, mainly on the coast, that have been doing fairly well, but then when we look across much of the country, the rural areas, the small towns, the heartland cities, they’re falling behind.

There’s growing poverty, very precarious employment, communities and institutions are afraid, and there’s a lot of despair in those places. As you look to growing numbers of elected officials and people running for office, who are beginning to speak to these issues, this issue of having an economy that works for people, where there’s real opportunity, where farmers and small businesses and workers can sell their produce, and sell their labor and get a fair price, because there’s competition. When you see Senator Warren and Senator Lee and other folks who are beginning to talk about this, what are the kinds of policies that OCM believes that we need to adopt in order to correct this problem and bring the whole country up?

What happens when there’s concentration, is there’s this handful of companies have such a strangle-hold on the economy, on the markets, that they can just abuse that opportunity. They can deny small businesses the opportunity. You take in the seed industry, we mentioned the inputs. Look at the numbers, small business men and women that have been driven out of their business, in the seed side of inputs. But the same is true on small manufacturers within our communities. Or look in Pennsylvania at the industrial belt, at how concentration and globalization has driven men and women off the line at the workplace, at the company, and off into the unemployment lines. And now the say, “Well unemployment is the lowest it’s been in so long.” Yeah, that’s because people are hustling two or three jobs just to feed the kids. There’s just no justice in that. And it goes against the very values and ideals of this country, and that was given to us through our economic policy.

OCM believes the first and foremost thing is that we have to enforce the laws that are on the books. Back when we had the big trusts, the Steel Trust, the Whiskey Trust, the Packer Trust, all these trusts, they didn’t have corporations then, they had these trusts. This guy named Teddy Roosevelt, who later became president, that was the original trust buster. He got it. A republican president, a former governor of New York, and he said. “I’m going to bust those trusts, because I’m going to give people opportunity.” And that began a wave from his era, all the way through 1921, where laws were passed that say, “Look, you gotta have safeguards in the marketplace, because ultimately, if you just let the biggest win, they’re going to abuse the people, they’re gonna abuse the working families, they’re gonna abuse the farmers, they’re gonna abuse the small businesses.”

Second, on these acquisitions and mergers, our department of justice, they need, not only to enforce the current laws, but they also need to have additional tools to be able to look back on acquisitions and mergers, to ensure that the results that the company’s committed to the people of this country, that they were going to result in more jobs, more economic growth, if they allowed the merger, that those companies are delivering on those promises. And if not, the department of justice needs the teeth in the law, so they can fine or disrupt that company that they allowed to go forward.

We need to ensure in the Packers and Stockyard Act for farmers … Packers and Stockyard, that’s the anti-trust laws that protect farmers. When it was passed in 1921, it was called the Farmer’s Bill of Rights. We need to ensure that it continues to protect farmers against predatory and retaliatory practices. Right now, if a chicken contract grower speaks out against the company, they lose their contract and they therefore go bankrupt and lose their family farm. No company should have a right to retaliate against someone because of their free speech rights in this country. But yet that goes on, and we need to strengthen those laws and reinstate those laws. Those would be the priorities that OCM says we should go after first. And we call on every elected official to do so, and we call on every citizen. This Family Farm Action, which is our political arm, we call out every citizen to hold that elected official accountable. If they don’t stand up for people, and they don’t stand up for economic justice, then throw their butts out in this next cycle.

It was shortly after that that several supreme court decisions came down that began to weaken that law. Finally, in 2005, the supreme court ruled in favor of the corporations, and took all the rights away from the farmer. Instead, the farmers not only had to show harm to themselves, but they had to show harm to the general marketplace. Well, no farmer can do that. How do they get the resources to hire those economists that have to come in and testify? Where do they get the money to hire the lawyers to take on a big corporation, which has millions and millions of dollars that they can spend on attorneys. So it was over time, about 2005, the courts made that final ruling, and we’ve been pushing to pass the GIPSA Rules. On the nineteenth of October, the USDA will close out their decision on whether or not we will have those original safeguards put back in the law. And we call on Secretary Perdue to do the right thing for Americans, for the consumers, and mostly for US family farmers and ranchers, by finalizing those rules. GIPSA is the Grains Inspectors Packers Stockyard Administration. 

Now, I’m gonna tell you something. That sounds just great. But those big companies, they don’t give a hoot about the consumer. When they drive those efficiencies, have those acquisitions and mergers, layoff people, stop the ingenuity, or the research and development, do they lower the price of those goods to consumers? Absolutely not. What they do is put that money in their pockets, and go home laughing all the way, because of that change. Every president since Ronald Reagan, democrat or republican, has kept that rule, that guideline in place. And it denies the market the opportunity to work for the benefit of the consumers, the businesses, the farmers, the ranchers, and for the people.

So Family Farm Action is a C4 organization, and we’re able to lobby the halls of the states, and of the capital. And we’re also able to politically engage out there in campaigns. We felt very strongly, as a team, coming together with Family Farm Action, that we needed to give political muscle, and to join in with folks like the National Farmer’s Union, who’s a partner, who also lobby’s to join in with our National Sustainable Ag Coalition, who has a great team. We felt we needed to add additional political voice.

What’s the outlook? Well, we think that it’s great. Our experience in Oklahoma, when we started this podcast off, what we knew then was that somebody had to stand up. What we know today is the same is true, if we’re gonna get something done about this concentration, and the abuse of the marketplace, and the abuse of the consumers and farmers. So Family Farm Action is out looking for candidates. And they’re out there.

We’re delighted with Austin Frerick, up in the Iowa third district. There was just a national story done on him. We’re delighted with former deputy undersecretary Lillian Salerno, who’s announced [inaudible 00:30:50] for congress down in the Dallas area. We’re delighted with Drew Edmondson, announced and is running for governor in Oklahoma.

There are candidates around this country that are speaking up and demanding economic justice, for all citizens, regardless of where they live, whether that’s rural, or urban, or suburban, regardless of the color of their skin, or the faith that they believe in. We believe America, and those candidates believe, that in America, we stand for the basic principle and the value that everybody should have the right and opportunity to prosper in a great country like America.

I think Barry Lynn, someone I work with, he’s an advisor on OCM, he’s a board member of Family Farm Action. Barry Lynn’s book Cornered. It is a great read for understanding this over-all monopoly, and the power of those monopolies.

I think also, just Google a guy by the name of Matt Stoller. Matt’s a tremendous reporter, a writer, has many articles out there. Leah Douglass is another name, that does a tremendous job of writing, and capturing, and being able to speak to these most complicated issues, in ways of which, almost any of your listeners would quickly grasp and say, “Oh my Gosh, this is going on in America. Why?”

This show is produced by Lisa Gonzales, and Nick Stumo-Langer. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Disfunction_Al. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Stacy Mitchell. I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.