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corporate monopolies
Boycott Major Retailers to Show Them We Have the Power
If politicians won’t hear the voices of average Americans who are being shafted by corporate America, we have to deliver our message to corporate America directly.
Feb 28, 2025
A grassroots movement is calling on all Americans to abstain from shopping with major retailers—including Amazon—today, February 28, as part of an “economic blackout.”
The purpose is to send a clear message: We have the power. We don’t have to accept corporate monopolies. We don’t have to live with corporate money corrupting our politics.
We don’t have to accept more tax cuts for billionaires. We don’t have to pay more of our hard-earned cash to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or the other billionaire oligarchs.
Consider this a test run. If lots of people participate, I’m sure a longer one will be organized.
We don’t have to reward corporations that have abandoned their DEI policies to align themselves with President Donald Trump’s racist, homophobic, misogynistic agenda.
We have choices.
Most Americans are struggling to keep up. Most live from paycheck to paycheck. Most can barely afford housing costs, food prices, and pharmaceuticals—kept high by monopolies, and fueled by private equity.
If politicians won’t hear the voices of average Americans who are being shafted by corporate America, we have to deliver our message to corporate America directly.
From midnight February 28 to midnight March 1, please: No Amazon, no Walmart, no Best Buy, no Target, no Disney, no Google, no Facebook. Don’t spend on fast food, major retailers, or gas.
Avoid using credit or debit cards to make nonessential purchases.
Buy essentials such as medicine, food, and emergency supplies, of course, but make those purchases at small, local businesses.
Consider this a test run. If lots of people participate, I’m sure a longer one will be organized.
(Today’s economic blackout is an initiative of The People’s Union USA, which describes itself as a “grassroots movement dedicated to economic resistance, government accountability, and corporate reform.”)
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How US Policy Devastated Small Dairy Farms and Boosted Corporate Monopolies
"Corporate consolidation is at the heart of our food system's dysfunction," said one policy analyst.
Jan 31, 2023
Food & Water Watch on Tuesday released an analysis of the U.S. dairy farming industry—the climate and food justice group's third in-depth report on the economic costs of food monopolies—revealing how corporate consolidation has helped push small family farms out of business over the past two decades, while worsening the climate emergency.
In The Economic Cost of Food Monopolies: Dirty Dairy Racket, Food & Water Watch (FWW) explains how factors including the gutting of farm supply management policies and higher production costs have helped cause rapid consolidation in the dairy sector, with 70% of family-scale dairy farms shutting down between 1997 and 2007.
"Corporate consolidation is at the heart of our food system's dysfunction," said Rebecca Wolf, food policy analyst for FWW. "Corporate-directed policymaking is throwing America's dairy industry into crisis. Family-scale dairies are collapsing at an alarming rate, and those that manage to hang on face rising costs, negative returns, and mounting debt, while consumers are sold an illusion of pastoral, sustainable milk products."
Just 30% of U.S. milk is now produced at family farms, while 83% of milk sales are controlled by just three dairy cooperatives: Land O' Lakes, DFA, and California Dairies, Inc.
In addition to forcing small farms to shut down, the consolidation of the dairy production industry has "serious climate implications," said FWW, with the shift to factory farms resulting in the doubling of annual methane emissions from the sector between 1990 and 2020.
"We can and must build better, more sustainable systems that support people, communities, and the environment," the group tweeted.
\u201cIn addition to polluting air and water, our research shows that the growth of megadairies is bad for small farmers. We can and must build better, more sustainable systems that support people, communities, and the environment. https://t.co/BIzjauXfUI\u201d— Food & Water Watch (@Food & Water Watch) 1675191692
FWW traced the loss of family-scale farms back to factors including the loss of dairy price supports in the early 2000s, which caused production prices to rise even more sharply than they previously had for two decades, while sale prices rose far less quickly. This left the average family farm almost entirely unable to turn a profit—doing so just twice between 2000 and 2021—and in many cases, forced them to eventually close.
The "disastrous 1996 Farm Bill" also ended commodity grain supply management policies, allowing oversupplies to flood the market and "ushering in the era of factory farms," with family farms unable to compete with large facilities. Milk production rapidly increased since 1997, further driving down sale prices.
"We need prices that are fair, covering our cost of production and giving us a return to maintain our businesses and make a living. Overproduction and consolidation in the industry are making this increasingly difficult if not impossible."
Wisconsin dairy farmer Sarah Lloyd told FWW that dairy farm families "have our backs against the wall."
"We need prices that are fair, covering our cost of production and giving us a return to maintain our businesses and make a living. Overproduction and consolidation in the industry are making this increasingly difficult if not impossible," said Lloyd. "We need to manage the growth of dairy supply and we can do this with solid dairy policy that looks out for farm families and rural communities and not corporate profits."
The report argues that "there is a clear way forward," making recommendations including "a comprehensive federal supply management program that actively works to match supply with demand and does not use the export market as a dumping ground for oversupply."
"Curbing overproduction can bring a higher price to farmers through the market instead of through taxpayer-funded government payments and bailouts," reads the report. "It will also reduce the pressure to expand herd sizes and thereby avoid more factory farms and the entailing climate emissions."
FWW also called Congress to "stop the megamerger frenzy among agribusiness" by passing legislation to halt agribusiness mergers and ultimately ban factory farms, phasing them out and investing in a "just transition" for factory farm workers by 2040.
"The next Farm Bill is a critical opportunity to reverse course, by restoring supply management and reforming the farm safety net," said Wolf. "Passage of the Farm System Reform Act and Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act will help ensure we stop digging a deeper hole by halting consolidation and factory farm proliferation."
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Is Populism Making a Comeback? What You Need to Know About Its History--And Its Future
The 19th century populists gave us co-ops and worker's rights. Here's how we can build on their work to solve 21st century problems.
Jun 03, 2015
You may have noticed. In our political discourse, suddenly the term "populism" is everywhere.
In April, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid joined 5,000 other political leaders in a call to make "big, bold, economic-populist ideas" the center of the 2016 presidential campaign. Outlets as disparate as The New York Times, The Nation, Time, and Fox News apply the label to politicians across the political spectrum.
Elizabeth Warren, known for her fiery critiques of Wall Street, is termed a populist. Hillary Clinton has a new-found interest in economic populism; Bernie Sanders has long worn the label. Even right-wing firebrand Ted Cruz gets the label, and Bobby Jindal applies it to himself. As Robert Borosage, head of the Campaign for America's Future, put it, "We live in a populist moment."
The term populist harkens back to the movement that formed in the 1880s in response to the extremes of wealth and power in the Gilded Age. As Lawrence Goodwyn describes in his book The Populist Moment, farmers found themselves in perpetual debt at the hands of local merchants and corporate monopolies. Many lost their land. They decried the concentrated wealth of the banks and big business and advocated policies that favored working people over the elites. Millions were attracted by the idea of forming cooperatives where they could buy goods and sell their produce at fair prices.
By 1892, the movement had broadened to include urban workers and became the People's Party. At their founding convention, they enthusiastically embraced a platform that included a progressive income tax, the secret ballot, direct election of senators, the right of citizens to create initiatives and referenda, shorter hours for workers, antitrust legislation, postal savings banks, and shifting the power to create money from bankers to government.
In the 1896 presidential race, the People's Party made common cause with William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee. Bryan was defeated, and it looked like the populists had lost.
In fact, their ideas were only beginning to take hold. The next three decades saw much of their 1892 platform enacted. Their hope for cooperatives flowered in much of the Midwest. But they didn't get everything they hoped for and they didn't break the bankers' hold on creating money.
Since the heyday of populism, many of its policies have been watered down and the flood of money in politics has eviscerated the effects of others. Now, the concentration of wealth and power is much like that of the Gilded Age. Americans are again awash in debt.
So we should not be surprised that populist ideas are making a comeback. We hear those ideas in the Occupy movement's demands to rein in Wall Street and rectify our country's extreme inequality. We see them in the grassroots opposition to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision that allows corporations to spend at will on our political process. And they are echoed by the millions mobilizing for a $15-an-hour minimum wage. The dangers of concentrated wealth and power have once again captured the public imagination.
The prospect of enacting a populist agenda is daunting. The power of Wall Street banks, giant oil companies, big pharma, and big ag seems overwhelming.
But the original populists also faced daunting challenges--cotton monopolies, Standard Oil, the railroads, and a financial system rigged against them. They came together, learned the issues, and shaped the nation. Now it is our turn to advance the populist call for economic fairness, real democracy, and a dignified life for all.
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