Blog For Iowa

16 minutes – I lifted this video from JD Scholten’s weekly newsletter “You’re Probably Getting Screwed.”

Hope you felt a tremor this week. The once solid ground of old style Democrats were shaken by the upset victory in New York City by Democratic Socialist Zohran Momdani. Momdani is running on a platform to make it more affordable to live in his city, NYC. When you say that it almost seems like that should be a basic tenet, but those who run the country have made just living almost unaffordable as they cut taxes and cut deals for the wealthiest among us.

Momdani proposes to pay for his proposals by raising taxes on those wealthy. These are people who have been getting favors from the government right and left in recent decades. But in order to better the whole, some may have to pay more. Expect this to be loudly condemned from America’s mostly right wing media.

Momdani struck a nerve that has been more exposed than ever since January 20th. That nerve that every one of us non-billionaires have that is getting rubbed raw every time politicians bend over to do yet another favor for the wealthy. Once upon a time, We had political leaders who worked on leveling the playing field for  all. Now it is massively tilted.

As the chattering class goes on and on about the horrors of Momdani’s platform, regular Americans are thinking “affordable rent? Free busses? Affordable child care? Where do I sign up?” 

As I was reading about Momdani’s come from nowhere win, I received the weekly newsletter from JD Scholten and Justin Stofferahn “You’re Probably Getting Screwed”   I have been getting this substack for a while, but this week in light of the Momdani win and the totally autocratic maneuvers of the Trump regime, the newsletter seemed to ring a loud bell.

While Trump is grabbing headlines, behind the scenes our economy continues to monopolize and consolidate. Our safeguards are destroyed and rules put in place to stop such things from happening are ignored and violated out of sight. Thank goodness someone is watching.

As our oligarchic media focuses our attention on the mad king’s newest power play, folks like Scholten and Stofferahn try to keep us informed. This week their focus was on consolidation in the food industry that will cause selection to fall and prices to rise:

Earlier this month, United Natural Foods Inc. (UNFI) was the victim of a cyberattack that took some of its systems offline. This has prevented the largest publicly traded grocery wholesaler from completing orders to the nearly 30,000 stores it supplies across the country. While cyberattacks are a common threat in today’s digital world, consolidation makes them much worse.

As Forbes contributor Emil Savegh put it, “A single breach had turned into a national supply chain shock.” UNFI is the largest supplier to Amazon-owned Whole Foods and the retailer has experienced some of the most severe shortages from the cyberattack. But Whole Foods is not alone as thousands of independent grocers, co-ops and regional chains like Cub (which is owned by UNFI) were also impacted. Even fifty-three military commissary stores reported ordering delays as a result of the cyberattack.

UNFI’s dominance, unsurprisingly, has been built through mergers and acquisitions. The most significant was in 2018 when as a response to Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, UNFI acquired Supervalu, a massive grocery wholesaler that owned several grocery chains including the aforementioned Cub and Shoppers Food and Pharmacy stores. UNFI had originally said it planned to divest itself of its retail holdings and did move quickly after acquiring Supervalu to sell or close some locations, but has mostly held onto that portfolio. Prior to the Supervalu purchase, UNFI had built its dominance in the natural and organic market by acquiring companies. According to an analysis by Claire Kelloway of the Open Markets Institute, between 2000 and 2018, UNFI acquired 19 distributors, manufacturers, and private label suppliers.

And they also focused on the doings of our public watchdogs that are supposed to be keeping an eye on businesses to stop monopolies and oligarchies. But as the video above shows we have a problem of “who watches the watchers?” in that area. 

Scholten and Stofferahn take on Big Law, United Health Care and Medicare Advantage, Corporate Tax Breaks and the FTC where they explain how a massive merger between Mars and Kellanova (have you even heard of Kellanova?) just slides on through: (5 minutes)

Think of all this in the light of the MAGA congress trying to shove Trump’s Big Bad Bill through during a holiday week with a major distraction in Trump’s incredible screw up in the Middle East. Very possibly we wake up next week, on the anniversary of our nation’s founding, with a new King.