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Welcome to You’re Probably Getting Screwed, a weekly newsletter and video series from J.D. Scholten and Justin Stofferahn about the Second Gilded Age and the ways economic concentration is putting politics and profits over working people.

We want to start by further highlighting Austin Frerick’s new book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. I had a blast hosting Austin at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis last night to discuss Barons and JD will be leading a discussion with him this Sunday, April 7 in the Gleeson Room at the Downtown Library at 529 Pierce St. in Sioux City, Iowa. You can find other events Austin is doing here and you can buy the book here (or at your local bookstore). Below is a summary of Barons that Austin provided.

~ Grocery prices are at a record high, farm workers can’t afford the food they harvest, and local markets and coffee shops across the country are closing their doors—all while a few tycoons grow richer and richer by the day. Why does our food system benefit so few at the expense of so many? How did it get that way, and what can we do to change it?

In Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry agricultural and antitrust expert Frerick tells the stories of seven corporate titans, their rise to power, and the consequences for everyone else. Take Mike McCloskey, Chairman of Fair Oaks Farms. In a few short decades, he went from managing a modest dairy herd to running the Disneyland of agriculture, where school children ride trams through mechanized warehouses filled with tens of thousands of cows that never see the light of day.

Along with McCloskey, readers will meet a secretive German family that took over the global coffee industry in less than a decade, relying on wealth traced back to the Nazis to gobble up countless independent roasters. They will discover how a small grain business transformed itself into an empire bigger than Koch Industries with ample help from taxpayer dollars. And they will learn that in the food business, crime really does pay—especially when you can bribe and then double-cross the president of Brazil.

These and other stories in Barons are examples of the monopolies and ubiquitous corruption that define American food. The tycoons profiled in the book’s pages are hardly unique: many other companies have manipulated lax laws and failed policies for their own benefit. The food barons are the result of the deregulation of the American food industry, a phenomenon that has brought about the consolidation of wealth into the hands of few to the detriment of our neighborhoods, livelihoods, and democracy itself.

With Barons, Frerick paints a stark portrait of the consequences of corporate consolidation, but also shows that we can choose a different path. The book deftly illustrates how a fair, healthy, and prosperous food industry is possible if we take back power from the barons who have robbed us of it. I hope you will consider reviewing the book or speaking with Frerick.

Austin Frerick is an expert on agricultural and antitrust policy. He worked at the Open Markets Institute, the U.S. Department of Treasury, and the Congressional Research Service before becoming a Fellow at Yale University. He is a 7th generation Iowan and 1st generation college graduate, with degrees from Grinnell College and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.