Beak Capitalism, Part 3: Un-Clucking the System
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Hi, I'm Tom Keen, inviting you to join me for the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. It's about making you smarter every business day.
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Joe, why did the chicken join the Revolutionary War?
I have no idea.
Because it didn't want to be cooped up under British rule.
Okay, but setting aside the terrible puns, wasn't it really about taxes?
Joe, Joe, why did the colonial chicken refuse to pay British taxes? Because it didn't want to put all its eggs in King George's basket. Should I keep going?
No, I'm good. I'm good. Thanks. I'm good.
Okay, fine. To understand chicken and the current landscape of the U.S. economy and the companies in it, it helps to go back in time and revisit a few key moments in U.S. history.
Going back to the founding, Americans were actually suspicious of the power of large corporations. And one reason for that is that it used to be that the government would grant corporate charters, right? There's this history in the United States before general incorporation statutes. that corporations are really creatures of the state. And so there was always the suspicion that if they grew to be too powerful, the kind of abuse that they could bring to bear on the lives of ordinary people was really extensive.
Doha Meki is the principal deputy assistant general in the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. That's a long title. It means she's the second highest ranking official there.
Today, the U.S. government has a whole constellation of laws, acts, and agencies all aimed at ensuring that America's economy remains fair and competitive. One of the most important is where Doha works, the DOJ.
The antitrust division is one component of many at the Justice Department. And our specific mandate is to enforce the antitrust laws and essentially to guarantee and vindicate the economic liberty of all Americans. And we do that by enforcing the federal antitrust laws, the best known of which are the Sherman Act and the Clayton
Act. You've probably heard of these before. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was famously deployed in the breakup of Standard Oil back in 1911, which is still probably the country's most well-known antitrust case. And the Clayton Act arrived soon after that. But America's approach to antitrust has constantly changed over time.
And chicken, with all its accusations of price gouging and unfair labor practices and just huge corporate concentration, seems to be a perfect poultry petri dish to experiment with some new ways of looking at antitrust.
Welcome to part three of Beat Capitalism, our ongoing exploration of the U.S. economy through the medium of chicken. In this episode, we're asking how we can solve some of the problems that big chicken creates. Can we actually uncluck the system?
So a little bit of history. Actually, the relationship between agriculture and antitrust goes back to the beginning. Farmers were one of the big supporters of the Sherman Act, the first antitrust act. statute passed by Congress.
Michael Cades is deputy assistant attorney general for the antitrust division at the DOJ. He works alongside Doha, but recently he spent a lot of time focused on agriculture because it turns out the DOJ has a long history with the food industry.
And early on, the Department of Justice brought a number of cases against meatpackers. And along about 1914, Congress looked at the way the Supreme Court was handling that act and was not happy. So they passed the Clayton Act, which was supposed to broaden the enforcement powers of the division. They also created the Federal Trade Commission. And the
first thing the president asked the newly created Federal Trade Commission to do was study the meatpacking industry.
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