NOBULL: RE: Obama’s Game of Chicken — The administration, for all intents, ended up implicitly condoning these inju stices

The Plantation

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/november_december_2012/features/obamas_game_of_chicken041108.php?page=1

"Interesting" excuse by DOJ.

The Daily Yonder–Bill Bishop’s take on it:

http://www.dailyyonder.com/friday-roundup-chicken-game/2012/11/16/5493

• The Chicken Game — The Washington Monthly reviews the failure of the Obama administration to break up or limit the control the power of meat packers in a good, long review of the subject.

Reporter Lina Khan reviews the history of the administration’s failures and concludes:

Administration officials who took part in the hearings say two factors thwarted their attempts to protect farmers from exploitation by processing companies. One was a deliberately obstructionist Republican-controlled House set on derailing countless reforms, not only in agriculture, and on protecting big industry from any tightening of regulation.

The other factor the administration blames is the weakened state of America’s antitrust laws. In the past, antitrust law was used to promote competition and to protect citizens from concentrated economic power. But today, enforcers say they are handicapped even when confronting markets that are no longer competitive. “However desirable, today’s antitrust laws do not permit courts or enforcers to engineer an optimal market structure,” the DOJ wrote in its recent report on the 2010 agriculture hearings. Far-reaching actions—like the Wilson administration’s challenge of the meatpacking industry ninety years ago—are, they say, simply unimaginable under today’s narrow antitrust framework.

But, she continues:

One wonders, though, whether the administration’s actions—taken as a whole—did not set the farmers back as much as would a loss in court. By documenting the big processing companies’ exploitation of independent farmers, then failing to stop that exploitation and retreating in almost complete silence before entirely predictable resistance from the industry, the administration, for all intents, ended up implicitly condoning these injustices. The message to the processing companies is, after all, absolutely clear: you are free to continue to act as you will.