Can the Black Lives Matter Movement Inspire a More Inclusive Pride Month?

It’s time for an overdue conversation about how anti-Blackness has often manifested within queer spaces.

by Giulia Heyward

June 24, 2020

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Pride Month was always going to look different this year—at least, once the pandemic hit.

When the novel coronavirus arrived to America earlier this year, states and municipalities implemented physical-distancing measures to mitigate its spread; universities sent college students home; and businesses were forced to furlough or fire millions of employees due to the economic fallout. Naturally, more than 500 parades and festivals scheduled for June’s Pride Month were cancelled in major cities across the world, from New York City and Washington, D.C., to London and Paris.

Then, on May 25, police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, sparking mass protests and riots. Countless Americans decided to get out of their homes and onto the streets—furious over police brutality and widespread racial injustices.

Quickly, it became apparent that LGBTQ people were playing an outsize role at the protests, where pride flags have been common fixtures. This makes sense: Gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals have also been victims of systemic oppression. In the 1960s, for instance, it was common practice for cops to threaten and harass gay bars.  

No doubt, that was part of what compelled so many in the community to speak out. On May 29, four days after Floyd’s murder, more than 100 LGBTQ organizations released a joint statement condemning racial violence. “We understand what it means to rise up and push back against a culture that tells us we are less than, that our lives don’t matter,” they said.  

But while LBGTQ groups have emphatically supported the Black Lives Matter movement, some civil rights activists argue that they haven’t done enough to stamp out racism within their own community. “The statement is great for solidarity,” said Earl D. Fowlkes, Jr. “But it’s empty if there is no action behind it.”  

Fowlkes is the founder of the Center for Black Equity, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing equality for Black LGBTQ people. One of the biggest obstacles they face, he told me, is not just acceptance in straight society—but in white LGBTQ society.

In 2017, for instance, Philadelphia’s Commission on Human Relations ordered 11 gay bars to take a training course on the city’s anti-discrimination laws after there were reports of them denying Black people entry for vague dress codes and bartenders giving preferential treatment to white gay men. One bar owner was caught on YouTube saying racial slurs.

Unfortunately, stories like these are all too commonplace. In 2018, an Atlanta gay bar owner posted on Facebook that “if the South had won, we would be a hell of a lot better off.” Fowlkes told me of an incident from two weeks ago when a group of Black men were seated at a different section of a D.C. gay bar than the rest of the white patrons. CBE was contacted about it as a potential discrimination case. “It happens all the time,” he told me.

Yet some queer people are more at-risk than others. According to the Human Rights Center, Black transgender women face the highest levels of fatal violence within the LGBTQ community—and are less likely to turn to the police for help for fear of revictimization by law enforcement personnel. 

But with LGBTQ organizations now thrusting themselves into the national fight against racism, it’s time for them to take a hard look inward. 

One of the ways they can start is by refashioning this year’s Pride Month in yet another way: by embarking on a long overdue conversation about how anti-Blackness has long manifested within queer spaces. That might mean a departure from the joyful and triumphant marches in years past—we are still in a pandemic, after all—but it may spur some much-needed progress on an issue that is too often neglected. 

In the 1960s, community centers or meet ups didn’t exist for LGBTQ people as they do now. This meant that bars were one of the few, if not the only, spaces where police officers knew they could openly target gays and lesbians.

For a long time, this was simply the way things were. Police would barge into these establishments to harass and beat up the patrons. “Gay people just took it,” historian Lillian Faderman, author of The Gay Revolution, told me. “They would scurry off, people who were let go by the police would run off.”

Until, one day, they stopped taking it.

On June 28, 1969, a group of police officers showed up at the Stonewall Inn—a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York—for what they probably thought would be yet another routine night of harassing patrons. But this night ended differently. A fight broke out between the cops and everybody else. More people resisted, others joined in the pushback. At some point, someone threw a brick through the bar’s window, igniting the famed Stonewall Riots. 

Who, exactly, threw that first brick remains unknown. The two main suspects, however, shared something in common: Marsha P. Johnson, a prominent figure during this period, was a Black trans woman. Sylvia Rivera, who was present at the first fight, was a Latina trans woman. Witnesses have also described what the majority of the people at Stonewall looked like that night: drag queens or gay men of color. In other words, Black LGBTQ people were some of the first who resisted brutality and oppression on behalf of the entire LGBTQ community.  

Images from that night shocked the nation—and shifted the public consciousness about the treatment of gay people. Shortly thereafter, a movement was formed. Over the next few years, more than 1,500 new LGBTQ organizations were created. Still, it took decades of sustained advocacy to gain traction. By 1999, then president Bill Clinton enacted Proclamation 7203, turning the month of June into a federally recognized holiday. Pride Month was born.

But as the LGBTQ community continued to make progress—through increased representation in politics and media, through legislative actions, executive orders, and court rulings to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination—its non-white members have often been left behind.

A 2013 study found that while LGBTQ youth are more likely than their straight counterparts to be homeless, and that the bulk of homeless youth are LGBTQ people of color. Other studies have shown that Black LGBTQ people are more likely to commit suicide. At the same time, Black queer people have amassed far less political capital. A recent study from the Victory Institute found that 77.4 percent of all openly LGBTQ people in elected office are white.  

The increased acceptance of white LGBTQ Americans in mainstream society is at least partly due to the fact that the vast majority of media depictions of queer life—which have helped change the culture—have historically been white-centric.  

Groundbreaking films that found mass audiences have tended to focus on white gay men, such as The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), My Own Private Idaho (1991), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Call Me by Your Name (2017). The few films about queer people of color—such as Tongues Untied (1989) or The Watermelon Woman (1996)—have generally not been as widely seen. In essence, Black LGBTQ people have always been left out of the aesthetic representations that have helped to normalize the white LGBTQ experience.

For this reason, Cleo Manago coined the term “same-gender loving” for Black gay men and lesbians in the 1990s as a separate identity, due to how isolated many felt in traditional LGBTQ spaces.  

Pride Month festivities have been no exception. Even after the 2015 landmark Supreme Court ruling declaring same-sex marriage a constitutional right, and Pride marches became an established mark of the beginning of the summer in major cosmopolitan cities, many noticed that they seemed awfully white.

Non-white queer people have complained they aren’t always as welcomed at Pride events by their white counterparts. Moreover Pride celebrations have often whitewashed the fact that the early leaders of this movement were people of color, such as Johnson and Rivera.  

Black LGBTQ people felt even more alienated in 2017, when a proposed addition to the pride flag of brown and Black stripes to represent racial diversity received immediate backlash from white, gay members of the community.  

Of course, queer people of color don’t just face racism from inside the LGBTQ community. They have to face it from the rest of the world, too. Indeed, Black queer people are more susceptible to assault and discrimination and the very forms of bigotry and police brutality that the Black Lives Matter movement is fighting against.

Just two days after George Floyd’s death, a Black trans man named Tony McDade became the third victim of a fatal officer-involved shooting in Florida in the past two months. That’s why Black LGBTQ activists argue that the anti-racism and queer-rights movements are deeply intertwined. 

“We know that queer liberation also means Black liberation,” Tyrone Hanley, senior policy council for the National Center for Lesbian rights and a black queer man, told me. “There is a desperate need to look inside and re-examine how LGBTQ communities reinforce white supremacy and anti-blackness.”  

That means reimagining Pride Month. It means placing Black and brown issues at the forefront of the agenda. It means no longer allowing LGBTQ spaces or marches where queer people of color are invisible, nor ignoring the plight of this vulnerable population.

There are already signs of progress. Roughly 30,000 people rallied in West Hollywood on Sunday to protest police brutality and systemic racism, with a specific focus on Black LGBTQ people.

The COVID-19 pandemic made this year’s Pride Month look different. But the entire LGBTQ community’s commitment to tangible anti-racist action should be what does the trick next year—and every year after that.

Giulia Heyward

Giulia Heyward is an editorial intern at the Washington Monthly.

Can COVID-19 Get Congress to Finally Strengthen U.S. Antitrust Law?
A new bill from Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez strikes at the myths behind mergers.

by Robert H. Lande and Sandeep Vaheesan
May 21, 2020

Elizabeth Warren/Flickr

If it wasn’t clear that corporate consolidation was a problem before the COVID-19 pandemic, there should be absolutely no doubt now. Mergers have severely subverted the U.S. economy’s resilience and undercut the national response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Mergers contributed to the loss of 600,000 hospital beds between 1975 and 2017 (from 1.5 million to around 900,000 beds nationwide) and likely deprived the government of an emergency stockpile of ventilators. And now, with millions of businesses on the ropes due to the crisis but with many of the very largest corporations flush with cash, another wave of mergers and acquisitions may be imminent. Facebook has purchased GIF-creating site Giphy. Amazon and Uber are reported to be near acquiring the movie theater chain AMC and food delivery service GrubHub, respectively.

To stem this tide, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren have proposed the Pandemic Anti-Monopoly Act, which would halt mergers and acquisitions by large corporations and private equity funds for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis and its aftermath. Other Congressional progressives, including Washington Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal and House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline, have called on House leadership to include a merger moratorium in the next rescue package. The sponsors understand that the principal lifeline for distressed small and medium-sized businesses and workers should be federal aid, not acquisitions by large corporations and powerful financiers.

The merger moratorium represents a major rethinking of federal merger policy. Although Congress enacted a strong anti-merger law. in 1950, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have maintained a lax posture toward consolidation since the early 1980s. They have permitted nearly all mergers to proceed and blocked them under only extremely limited circumstances. For instance, out of the 78 mergers proposed between 2015 and 2019 that involved two firms worth more than $10 billion each, the DOJ and the FTC successfully stopped only three of them. The result of permissive merger policy has been a dramatic increase in concentration across industries and markets. This tolerant attitude toward consolidation is built on a series of myths and has been deeply damaging to the public.
Myth 1: Mergers Eliminate Wasteful Redundancies and Produce More Efficient Businesses

Mergers are often justified on the grounds of eliminating redundancies and improving the productive efficiency of firms. In their 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines, the DOJ and the FTC said “a primary benefit of mergers to the economy is their potential to generate significant efficiencies.” This story rests on false assumptions and little or no evidence.

In fact, by eliminating redundancy in the name of efficiency, mergers can leave the economic and social system unprepared for natural disasters, pandemics, and other systemic shocks.

The current crisis has shown how health care mergers have eliminated essential excess capacity. But the problem overall is not limited to this moment in time. Consolidation in the seed industry has left the United States and the world more vulnerable to the ongoing crisis of climate change. As Monsanto (now part of Bayer) rolled up the industry, it focused on selling the most profitable seeds and discontinuedmany less popular seed lines—food sources that may be essential as farmers try to adapt to climate change.

Equally disconcerting, corporations themselves do not become more productive following mergers. A reputable body of findings shows that mergers often result in a loss in productivity. As then-Judge Richard Posner said in a 2015 interview: “I wish someone would give me some examples of mergers that have improved efficiency. There must be some.”
Myth 2: Current Merger Enforcement Protects Consumers

The DOJ and the FTC state that protecting consumers is the principal purpose of merger enforcement. Former FTC commissioner Joshua Wright asserted that mergers “often generate significant benefits for consumers—lower prices and higher quality” and that the two agencies successfully identify and address the small fraction that would hurt consumers.

A closer look at the record, however, does not warrant applause for the DOJ and the FTC’s efforts against mergers. The best study on the effect of mergers on consumer prices is Professor John Kwoka’s meta-analysis of post-merger evaluation studies. He evaluated the impact on prices from mergers that were not successfully challenged. Of the 42 mergers subject to credible post-merger evaluation, thirty-four resulted in price increases. His review also found that there were adverse quality effects from many of the mergers.

Kwoka’s research is consistent with what other scholars have concluded. For instance, hospital consolidation has consistently led to higher prices and been a key driver of rising health care costs.
Myth 3: Merger Remedies Preserve Competition

Even on the rare occasion that the DOJ and FTC do “challenge” mergers through legal action, they generally settle the matter and do not stop the consolidation outright. To address the loss of head-to-head rivalry, as well as other antitrust concerns, the agencies often agree to resolve the lawsuit on the condition that the merging corporations sell a line of business or other business assets to a third party or observe rules of fair dealing. They confidently predict these remedies will “preserve competition.”

In reality, these attempts to “remedy” illegal mergers have a poor track record. The FTC itself has recognized that its remedies too often fail, and Professor Kwoka has found they typically lead to significantly higher prices.

One of the most spectacular remedy failures involves the 2015 merger between the grocery chains Albertsons and Safeway. In exchange for not suing to block the merger, the FTC required the two corporations to sell stores in more than 100 local markets. These stores were sold to a small regional chain Haggen, which became nine times larger due to the acquisition. Haggen experienced major operational problems following this huge overnight expansion and soon went bankrupt. In the bankruptcy process, Safeway/Albertsons reacquired many of the stores it had sold to Haggen.
Myth 4: The Current Merger Review System Offers Transparency and Guidance to Businesses and the Public

DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim and FTC commissioner Christine Wilson have stressed that they aspire for transparency and predictability in their decision-making.

But the current merger review system is a model of opacity and subjectivity. One leading antitrust attorney said “there are few government functions outside the CIA that are so secretive as the merger review process.”

The agencies rely on an “effects based”approach in which they attempt to predict how a proposed merger likely will affect consumers going forward. This open-ended, speculative exercise invites aggressive lobbying from corporations and encourages them to assemble an army of economists and lawyers to make the case for their mergers behind closed doors, as ProPublica reported in a 2016 story.

Despite being the nation’s top antitrust enforcer, Delrahim used this system of secrecy to help shepherd T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint through to completion in April. Behind the scenes, he effectively served as federal matchmaker for the two wireless carriers and Dish, which purchased some assets from the merging parties with the aim of becoming a telecom company.

The 2013 merger between American Airlines and US Airways painfully illustrates this system in action. The DOJ initially sued to stop this merger that would reduce the number of national airlines from five to four. After a flurry of lobbying activity by the two airlines and their political allies, the DOJ abruptly permitted the merger in exchange for the two airlines selling landing and takeoff rights at seven major airports.

This remedy, however, failed to address the colossal harms from losing national airline, as laid out in the original DOJ complaint. The merger, which the DOJ earlier said would result in “presumptively illegal” levels of concentration on more than a thousand routes, was allowed to go through and subsequently led to higher airfares and fees.
Myth 5: Corporations Need Mergers to Grow

Mergers—even the very largest—are often justified on the basis that they permit corporations to expand their operations and enter new markets. Antitrust enforcers and scholars assert that mergers are a critical way for businesses to grow.

Yet mergers are not the only, nor even the best, way for corporations to grow. Instead, they could hire more workers and invest in plant and equipment and new technologies. Unlike buying and swapping existing business assets, investing in new facilities expands the capital stock of the economy and creates new jobs. Allowing companies to grow through the easy game of buying existing firms actually spurs businesses to strategize toward consolidation and awayfrom investments in production capacity and the latest technology.

A good case in point came after the Obama administration forced AT&T to abandon its takeover of T-Mobile in 2011. Neither wireless carrier stagnated. As a matter of fact, both firms improved their service and invested in their networks, and an independent T-Mobile instigated vigorous competition among the four national carriers.

All of this is important because the federal antitrust agencies, relying on false assumptions, have for too long not enforced anti-merger law. Their tolerance of consolidation has produced an economy that is fragile and now struggling to respond effectively to the current crisis.

The merger moratorium proposed by the progressive powerhouse of Ocasio-Cortez and Warren, alongside other Congressional Democrats, is a chance to change the existing pro-merger policy regime and abandon the associated fictions. It is high time Congress restores a strong anti-consolidation norm in federal antitrust law. The Pandemic Anti-Monopoly Act is the perfect place to start.


Robert H. Lande

Robert H. Lande Venable Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law.
Sandeep Vaheesan

Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute, has published widely on the political economy of antitrust law, including its misapplication to workers.

How the T-Mobile-Sprint Merger Legitimizes Monopoly

A federal judge has just deepened America’s corporate concentration crisis.

by Sandeep Vaheesan

February 11, 2020

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Judge Victor Marrero’s Tuesday ruling that let T-Mobile take over Sprint just deepened America’s already dire corporate concentration crisis. By allowing the nation’s third- and fourth-largest wireless carriers to combine, Marrero has dealt a clear blow to competition in the wireless market and empowered all corporations seeking dominance through mergers and acquisitions.

The Obama administration wisely said no to consolidation that would reduce the number of national wireless carriers to just three. Indeed, the deal will effectively create a new carrier with more than 100 million users. As the states in the case argued, that will likely cost subscribers roughly $4.5 billion annually, as the market will effectively be concentrated between just T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration—and now a federal judge—have rejected the Obama-era policy and permitted a dangerous new level of concentration. Tuesday’s decision underscores the need for bright-line rules that deter harmful mergers and acquisitions and instead direct business strategies toward product improvement and investment in new capacity.

Equally disconcerting, the judge’s decision subverts the Clayton Act, the principal federal anti-merger statute. Passed in 1914 and strengthened in 1950, the law expanded the scope of business activities covered by the Sherman Antitrust Act and outlawed mergers that threaten to reduce competition or tend to create a monopoly.

Judge Marrero’s ruling permits otherwise illegal mergers if the merging corporations can establish productive efficiencies or show that one of the corporations involved is a “weakened competitor.”

But the Supreme Court clearly rejected these defenses in a series of rulings in the 1960s because they are contrary to the text and purpose of the Clayton Act. While there is a limited “failing firm defense”—which allows a merger that would create a less competitive market if the company is in danger imminent business failure—Sprint didn’t satisfy its requirements, nor did Marrero purport to apply it. Sprint may not be doing as well as its executives and shareholders would like, but it is not on the verge of collapse or insolvency.

Marrero’s ruling, therefore, leaves it to state attorneys general to keep anti-merger law alive and protect the public. They’re now the best positioned to take a stand and appeal this decision to the Second Circuit—the most important thing they can do. It is critical they send a strong message to all corporations that they will uphold the law. Powerful firms in concentrated markets shouldn’t be allowed to consolidate even further.

Sandeep Vaheesan

Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute, has published widely on the political economy of antitrust law, including its misapplication to workers.

Why Are Farmers Destroying Food While Grocery Stores Are Empty?

Turns out letting “efficient” monopolies control our food supply was a terrible idea.

by Claire Kelloway

April 28, 2020

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For many Americans, grocery shopping has become an intensely stressful experience. To maintain social distancing, people must queue before entering stores. Once inside, they must scramble to find increasingly scarce products, including household staples from milk and eggs to pork and beef. Others can no longer afford to go to grocery stores. Instead, they wait for hours to get goods from food banks that are also running short on supplies.

But in a seeming paradox, farmers are destroying their products—including many of the same goods that stores lack. Dairy Farmers of America, the country’s biggest dairy co-op, has called many of its members and instructed them to dump their milk. The cooperative has estimated that farmers are now dumping up to 3.7 million gallons of milk per day. Sanderson Farms, a chicken processor, smashes 750,000 eggs each week. Farmers have been plowing their produce into the ground.

How is it that Americans can face shortages, and in some cases go hungry, while farmers face a glut so large they’re deliberately wasting food? A number of recent stories have noted that America’s food supply chain has proven unable to adjust to the new COVID reality. In particular, food processors and distributors that serve shut-down commercial customers, like restaurants, aren’t able to retool in order to send food to retail outlets like grocery stores, where demand is high. But that just begs the question: why is the supply chain set up in this now obviously risky way?

Decades of consolidation have made food systems more vulnerable, say experts. Beginning in the 1980s, the federal government allowed more agribusinesses to merge and grow largely without restraint in the name of efficiency—before, antitrust and other policies helped keep these industries decentralized and competitive. Consequently, a small number of giant, often vertically integrated, firms, produce and distribute the bulk of food in the U.S. Their hulking and specialized supply chains are not so efficient in the face of disruption.

Dairy Farmers of America, for example, now controls 30 percent of all raw milk in the United States. (I wrote about consolidation in the dairy industry for the Monthly here). In the meat industry, roughly 50 factories process 98 percent of the nation’s beef. The same holds for pork: Following industry consolidation in the late 1980s and 1990s, the portion of U.S. hogs slaughtered in massive, million-head capacity plants rose from 38 percent to 88 percent in just two decades.

Losing even one of these large plants can rattle entire livestock markets (as ranchers saw when a fire took out a Kansas beef plant this summer).

“The portion of U.S. hogs slaughtered in massive, million-head capacity plants rose from 38 percent to 88 percent in just two decades. Losing even one of these large plants can rattle entire livestock markets.”

Larger plants also concentrate more workers in close quarters, causing some of the largest clusters of COVID-19 outbreaks among workers in the country. At least 15 massive meat-processing plants shut down this month, reducing production capacity by 20 percent for both pork and beef. Experts now predict meat consumer shortages within a month and farmers are euthanizing livestock to deal with a sudden backlog of animals.

“If you pull out one little thing in that specialized, centralized, consolidated chain, then everything crashes,” said Mary Hendrickson, a rural sociology professor at University of Missouri. “Now we have an animal welfare catastrophe, an environmental catastrophe, a farmer catastrophe, and a worker catastrophe altogether, and we can trace a lot of this back to the pursuit of efficiency.”

Hendrickson argued that a more diverse network of both small and regional meat processing plants may have been able to mitigate risks and absorb production from closed facilities. “What if we had regional pack facilities like we used to have? Would we have 20 percent of the pork processing capacity closed because of worker sickness?” she asked. “It would just be less likely.”

But it isn’t just bottlenecks. Consolidation also drives inflexibility. Farmers increasingly raise foods on contract for one dominant buyer that can dictate what they grow and how (Heinz, for instance, has their tomato farmers use Heinz crafted seeds). Large swaths of foods may be raised for one specific plant that serves just one purpose, such as bottling milk for grocery stories or processing cheese for restaurants. While highly specialized products and plants create consistency, these rigid supply chains cannot easily redirect their products to different uses if things go awry.

Take the case of eggs. Farmers such as Kerry Mergen in Minnesota raise laying hens on contract. Mergen’s 61,000-bird operation was specifically designed to supply eggs for pre-cracked fluid-egg mixes, used almost exclusively in food service. Most of what they produced went to one Cargill plant that temporarily shut down this week due to lost restaurant and food-service customers. Even though grocery stores report egg shortages, grading eggs for retail requires special equipment and likely new contracts with a different large buyer. Instead, the corporation that Mergen raised hens for, Daybreak Foods, decided to euthanize his flock and sell the birds to a rendering plant to become pet food.

Shifting entire business models built around serving restaurants or adjusting to sudden systemic labor shortages is no easy task for any system. Some foods are trapped in particular channels because the FDA requires different labeling for consumer-facing goods. And even if all surplus foods could make it to grocery stores, it’s not clear that home cooks’ demand for fresh fruits and vegetables could match that of restaurants. When it comes to storing or donating extra vegetables, government and food bank cold storage is already maxed out, in part because the USDA bought up frozen meats that would have been sold to China, as part of the agency’s trade war relief effort earlier this year.

All this taken into account, experts like Hendrickson still contend that less centralized food systems with a stronger mix of public, nonprofit, and private players could more readily adapt to the COVID-19 crisis. For example, the smallest and most local food providers, such as local farms providing community supported agriculture (CSA) shares, have reacted quickly to the crisis and benefited from a spike in demand for direct food sales. These businesses are not tied to complicated purchasing contracts and often work with multiple buyers and distribution channels, including direct access to consumers.

“If you look at what the small farmers are doing, they’re changing on a dime to online ordering systems and delivery,” said Hendrickson. “Those organizations that have the most flexibility and latitude to change are going to be really important in the future.”

Finally, public food infrastructure could play a critical role in supporting mid-sized producers, responding to shocks, and serving communities cut out of consolidated supply chains. Michelle Miller, the associate director of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems, pointed to the critical role that the U.S. Department of Agriculture played in managing disruptions to food systems following the Dust Bowl drought and Great Depression. She also touted the benefit of public food wholesale markets, or food terminals, that provided accessible markets for producers of all sizes to sell their products, even if their normal buyers are no longer accepting their product.

Unfortunately, when the U.S. embraced pro-corporate policies that allowed massive corporate consolidation, it also cut back on programs that help buy up and distribute food to those in need. “There is some basic infrastructure that used to be in place that is no longer, as the food system became privatized and vertically integrated,” said Miller.

Now, as COVID empties grocery shelves and renders many Americans food insecure, the Trump administration is trying to temporarily revive a similar kind of public investment in the agricultural system. After ignoring months of warnings that they should act, warnings that may have helped prevent some of the waste and shortages had they been heeded, the Department of Agriculture now plans to buy up $19 billion in goods to help the sector and provide food to those in need. But the government can’t fix decades of neglect overnight. Before it can have an impact, this money will have to move through a system that’s poorly equipped to handle a crisis.

To prepare for the next disruption, we need a long-term solution. And that means we need not just a better public system for distributing food, but vigorous antitrust enforcement. Otherwise, no amount of money will allow farms to adjust to sudden shocks.

Claire Kelloway

Claire Kelloway is a reporter and researcher with the Open Markets Institute and the primary writer for Food & Power, a website covering corporate concentration in the food system. Her writing on food and agriculture has appeared in ProPublica, Civil Eats, Pacific Standard, and more
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