What We Have is Not Capitalism; It's Corporatism

And it's the exact opposite of a free market.

When corporations have turned farmers into debt-enslaved peons with no control over their own land, for politicians to speak of "family farms" is an obscenity.

Lina Khan in the Washington Monthly:

In most other industries, labor law protects workers from such forms of manipulation and exploitation. Farmers, though, aren’t protected under labor law because—at least until recently—it was assumed that open market competition enabled them to take their business to another buyer. Today, however, even as they become more like employees, laboring for a single company, the law still treats farmers as if they were their own masters. “The shift to vertical integration means that farmers no longer own what they are producing,” explains Mark Lauritsen, director of the food processing, packing, and manufacturing division at United Food and Commercial Workers, the union that represents workers across many industries, including agriculture and food processing. “They are selling their labor—but they don’t have the rights that usually come with that arrangement.”

The specific type of contract and the payment scheme offered by companies vary by sector, and the hearings indicated that the worst practices are generally found in the poultry industry. What applies across the board—in cattle ranching and dairy and hog farming—is the stark and growing imbalance of power between the farmers who grow our food and the companies who process it for us, and how this imbalance enables practices unimaginable in any competitive market.

Watts, the farmer who drove from North Carolina to attend the Alabama hearing, says he and his fellow poultry farmers are independent only in name. “What I can make through my work is entirely dictated by many hands before it ever gets to me,” he said in an interview. “My destiny is no longer controlled by me.”

Farmers and activists have been fighting to restore fair agriculture markets since the 1980s with little to show for it. Both Democratic and Republican senators have periodically introduced legislation to level the playing field for independent farmers and ranchers, but those measures have repeatedly collapsed under the weight of corporate lobbies.

SNIP

It is no stretch to assume that, from the perspective of the White House, the choice to abandon an apparently failed effort to protect independent farmers from such abuses may have seemed politically pragmatic. But over the longer term, it may prove to have been a strategic political failure. By raising the hopes and championing the interests of independent farmers against agribusiness, the administration effectively reached out to the millions of rural voters who don’t normally vote Democratic but whose ardent desire to reestablish open and fair markets for their products and labor often trumps any traditional party allegiance. Instead of translating that newfound trust into political capital, the administration squandered whatever goodwill it had begun to earn. Worse, the administration’s silent retreat amounts to a form of moral failure. Having amply documented the outrageous abuse of fellow citizens, it decided it was not worth expending more political capital to right this wrong.

The message to the farmers, it seems, is also clear. “A lot of farmers have gone pretty quiet around here,” Staples said, “from being scared.”