WALMARTING THE FOOD CHAIN - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 37

Pertschuk, along with Carter appointee Patricia P. Bailey (a Republican who also was unhappy with
Miller's performance), tangled with Miller regularly. Among Miller's faults was his clear disrespect for
professional women. Under Miller, the FTC experienced massive budget cuts, staff reductions, and the
abolition of whole departments. The agency approved large mergers, failed to enforce antitrust and com-
petition regulations, eliminated antitrust reporting programs, and made radical changes in policy that have
facilitated fraudulent activities by corporations. 5
An example of Miller's philosophy was his response to a Bureau of Competition case regarding faulty
life equipment for seamen swept overboard. Miller said that there was no reason for the bureau to bring a
complaint against the company selling flawed safety gear, because if men drowned, the company would be
sued, and the market would correct itself. Of course, he also opposed class-action lawsuits. 6
Among the actions affecting food was the abandonment of oversight on advertising to children and the
failure to act on predatory pricing, a practice designed to drive competitors out of business. Miller refused
to allow the appeal of a decision in a case against the cereal industry that was the most significant mono-
polization case ever brought by the agency until that time.
The FTC had taken Kellogg, General Mills, and General Foods to court for engaging in practices that
excluded smaller companies from competing and for unfairly raising the price of cereal. After a lengthy
trial, the FTC lost the case in a decision made by an administrative law judge, but the trial staff wanted to
appeal the important and winnable case. They were forbidden to pursue it. As a result, the lack of compet-
ition in the grocery industry is many times worse today than it was in the 1980s. 7
It took just a few years to destroy the advances that had been made in enforcing competition laws during
the New Deal era. At that time, Congress and officials appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt developed
policies to encourage competition as a way to improve the economy during the Depression. These populists
believed that “natural monopolies” like the provision of water or electricity services were efficient, and
that capital- and labor-intensive industries should be larger in size, but that individual companies needed
to be forced to compete through strong antitrust laws. The end result was a more diverse and democratic
distribution of political and economic power that disappeared as a result of the reactionary policies of the
Reagan administration. 8
Barry Lynn, a journalist and writer, documents in his recent topic, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capit-
alism and the Economics of Destruction , the cunning changes made in the criteria used in antitrust invest-
igations. They were neutralized and replaced with ones that supported “economic efficiency.” Economic
efficiency is a theory developed by the conservative Chicago School of Economics based on the idea that
prices are lowered when resources are used to maximize the production of goods and services. 9
Lynn points out that when federal antitrust regulators look at mergers and acquisitions, they allow con-
centration under the guise of lowering prices for “consumer welfare.” He writes:
The radical nature of Reagan's attack on antitrust law is, in retrospect, astounding. . . . When the Reagan team
published its new Merger Guidelines in 1982, the document formalized two revolutionary changes: it redefined
the American marketplace as global in nature, and it severely restricted who could be regarded as a victim of
monopoly. From this point on, only one action could be regarded as truly unacceptable—to gouge the consumer.
Any firm that avoided such a clumsy act was, for all intents, free to gouge any other class of citizen, not least
through predatory pricing and the blatant exercise of power over suppliers and workers. 10
In a doublespeak that rivals Orwell's Big Brother, competition is touted as the holy grail, but all public
and private activities are directed at facilitating consolidation. The evisceration of antitrust law, usually
overlooked in critiques about the nation's food system, is at the core of its dysfunction. Shaped like an
hourglass, a small cabal of food corporations and retail chains stand between eaters and food producers.