“There used to be 11 equipment dealers, now there are two. There used to be 18 feed mills and grain elevators, now there are 3. There used to be eight vet clinics, now there are two. There used to be three sale barns, now there are none. There used to be regional stockyards in Omaha and Sioux City, now there are gone. There used to be two creameries, now there are none. There used to be a vegetable cannery, now it’s gone. There used to be a large pork slaughtering facility, now it’s gone.” “We used to get three bids on cattle. Then there are two mergers, and now we get one. They told us we were short on weight, we needed one more month of feed. We took them back one month later and were docked for being too heavy.”

This will gut the FTC. FTC is trying to finish a study that already showed how pharmacy middlemen mark up cancer drugs by up to 4000%. It's also suing them for allegedly competing to raise insulin prices. If this passes I have no idea what'll happen to that study and lawsuit.

https://twitter.com/mikedebonis/status/1916923317677588938

Take the lawsuit. The draft bill purports to transfer FTC lawyers and lawsuits to DOJ -- but it doesn't transfer the laws that FTC enforces, or authority to enforce those laws. Look, page 98 -- employees, assets, funding -- but no authorities.

Mr. Bezos, when I think about “free markets and personal liberties” I don’t think about the Post editorial page. I think about this vending machine in an Amazon Fulfillment Center, which is stocked not with chips but with painkillers.

https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1894757287052362088

I think about how workers at poultry processing plants are forced to work so fast, so hard, that their hands stop functioning.

1/ Dear everyone who just went to the grocery store and saw this,

There’s a person in the government who could flick his pen and start an investigation into what the hell is going on with eggs. His name is Andrew Ferguson. He’s the new head of the @FTC. Has he done it? No 2/ “Isn’t this just avian flu?”

If that were the case, you’d expect egg production to have collapsed. But production appears to be only modestly down from before the pandemic in 2021…

1/ Two years ago, I stood in the dairy aisle of the last grocery in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. It's the poorest place in the US, with the lowest life expectancy. But the store, like a lot of independent retailers, was vibrant. Signs in English & Lakota. School pride gear on walls. 2/ We walked up to the manager's office. The owner, a fourth-generation grocer named R.F. Buche, brought out a list of products: eggs, lettuce, cereal. His customers paid 30-50% *more* for them than the people served by the nearest big box stores.

The Kids Online Health and Safety task force released its report today. Here are the *default* settings that we think social media companies should adopt to protect teen mental health online. A lot of the discussions around teen mental health have focused on content moderation. This report is a reminder that design - the structure of these platforms - is a key factor to consider.

1. Last week I visited Biloxi, Mississippi and Bayou La Batre, Alabama. The docked boats might look nice. To the shrimpers it was the opposite. "These boats shouldn't be tied up. They should be out working." Some of the boats we saw had been idle for 2 years. 2. I spent Friday with shrimpers from Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, whose families work the water from Texas up to North Carolina, some for four or five generations. A few decades ago, 800 ships docked in Bayou La Batre alone. Now it's 300. Many of those are docked & idle.

1/ Today @FTC brought and settled charges against Rite Aid for using a biased face scanning system that led to employees falsely accusing people of crimes they did not commit. We impose a 5-year ban on Rite Aid using face surveillance. My statement: ftc.gov/legal-library/… 2/ We allege that false matches resulted in people being followed in stores, banned from stores, kicked out of stores, detained, searched, denied prescription drugs, and called in to police — in front of their kids, bosses, and families.

People think Joseph Welch or Margaret Chase Smith were the first to confront Joe McCarthy in the U.S. Senate.

In reality, Dennis Chávez, the first U.S.-born Hispanic senator, preceded them.

On the last weekday of Hispanic Heritage Month, I'd like to share part of his story. Chávez was born in a dirt floor house with no running water. He left school in the 7th grade to help his family.

He became the fourth most senior senator, chair of its most powerful subcommittee, and a tireless advocate for the poor, Native Americans, and gender pay equality.

35 years ago last night, my mother, brother and I landed at JFK on a long Lufthansa flight. My father had gone ahead of us; our mom didn't know if we had utensils at our new home, so she asked our flight attendant if we could keep the cutlery. She quietly said yes. There weren't heavy winter coats in Lima, so when we arrived we wore little wool overcoats sewn from my great-grandfathers' suit jackets. We fell asleep in my dad's friend's car and woke up in the glow of a McDonald's. I thought the burgers had rice in them. It was dried onions.

1/ We talk a lot about the latest implications of the latest technology. I think we need to take a step back and ask: Who’s being left behind?

A few points from my first speech as commissioner @FTC🧵 2/ We can't leave people behind because of the language they speak. Yet software used by social media and messaging companies to help detect fraud is trained on English by a factor of 10:1. For languages like Cherokee or Diné, it’s 1000:1.

See @Roprajo/@SebastinSanty/Budhiraja:

1/ In a competitive market, companies compete to lower prices. It appears that in the insulin market, companies compete to *raise* prices. 2/ Today, @FTC announced that we will use every tool at our disposal to investigate what's going on with pharmacy middlemen, drug manufacturers, and insulin prices.

A few points from my full statement, which is below and linked at the end of this thread.

1/ A family walks into a pharmacy in West Virginia. Their child has cancer. The pharmacy has the medicine behind the counter. But when that pharmacist calls the pharmacy benefit manager for the family’s insurance, they are denied authorization to give the family the medicine. 2/ Instead, they're told that the medicine can only be dispensed by the PBM’s mail order specialty pharmacy. The family was to go home and wait *two weeks* to receive the medicine for their child in the mail.