If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I've got good news and bad news for Trump. The good news: you can get elected by promising to do something about the cost of living crisis, and the president actually has a lot of ways to improve people's daily costs. The bad news: everything you could do to fix working people's cost of living will make an oligarch worse off.
This is the essential conundrum of Trumpismo: to keep his base happy, he needs to make their lives better; but to make their lives better, he'll have to make oligarchs angry. The oligarchs' wealth bonanza caused the cost of living crisis. Oligarchs' pleasure causes our suffering, so alleviating our suffering will reduce their pleasure.
This means that while Trump can promise help with prices, all he can deliver is union-busting, ICE lynchings, and pointless wars, none of which have any hope of materially improving the lives of working people. Indeed, all of this stuff makes working people materially worse off, as wages fall, crops rot in the fields, and gas prices shoot through the roof.
Trump would dearly love to find an ox he can safely gore, but all the good oxen are owned by his oligarch chums. Trump can't punish Ticketmaster, because the billions Ticketmaster steals from the WWE, F1 and football fans in his base all land in the pocket of oligarchs who own stock in Ticketmaster, and Trump can't afford to upset those oligarchs:
Indeed, I can't think of a single corrupt racket that Trump can afford to do something about. Not even the only cost of living metric that can approach gas prices in the hierarchy of American electoral salience: grocery prices.
Your grocery bill went up because oligarchs price-gouge you. Eggflation was caused by Cal-Maine, the monopolist that owns every brand of eggs in your grocer's fridge, who jacked up prices because they knew they could:
Pepsi and Walmart conspired to force every retailer to jack up the prices of all Pepsi products (including Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Aquafina, etc) at every retailer's store, so that Walmart could also jack up their prices and still undersell their competition (naturally, Trump let them get away with it):
This stuff isn't exactly a secret. Grocery store owners hold earnings calls with their investors where they boast about the fact that they can raise their prices far in excess of their increased costs, and blame it on inflation:
They boast about their "personalized pricing" swindles, whereby they use surveillance data to figure out how desperate you are and jack up the prices you see in their apps:
Trump has the power to put a stop to all of this, but still, he can't, because his oligarch pals would squeal, and when they squeal, Trump jumps. In theory, Trump has lots of power, but in practice, Trump can't do anything.
Which brings me to the cost of meat. Meat inflation has raced ahead of other forms of food inflation, even as the payments to ranchers and other producers fell sharply, leading to waves of bankruptcies:
Partly, that's because meat processing is controlled by cartels, with 85% of all the beef being processed by four packers, and nearly every chicken going through one of four poultry processors. These middlemen jack up prices to grocers while colluding to push down the payments to their suppliers.
How do they rig those prices? After all, it's very illegal for these four companies to get together around a table to rig prices. Instead, they use a "price consultancy" called Agri Stats that does the price-rigging for them. Every week, the packers send a detailed list of all their costs and prices into Agri Stats, and Agri Stats "advises" them all to raise all their prices at once, and anyone who doesn't play along is pushed out of the Agri Stats cartel. Everyone wins – except families paying for groceries:
Agri Stats has been doing this since the Reagan years, but they grew steadily more brazen, until, back in 2023, Biden's DOJ brought history's most obvious, easily won antitrust case against them:
And wouldn't you know it, Trump just settled that case, in a way that will make Agri Stats much, much richer and give them far more opportunities to rig prices:
Under the terms of the settlement, Agri Stats must "allow" restaurants, farmers, and other parts of the supply chain to pay it for the data it consolidates. This will allow more parties to collude to rig prices, and provide more income to Agri Stats. As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, they've been "sentenced to make money."
Agri Stats isn't the only "price consultancy" that is used to launder a price-fixing cartel that's driving up the cost of living for all Americans, including Trump's base, in order to make oligarchs better off. Companies like Realpage do the same thing for residential rents:
Trump can't do anything about any of these scams, not without goring some oligarch's precious ox. But, as Dayen points out, there are dozens of Democratic state Attorneys General who can kill Trump's sweetheart deal for Agri Stats using the Tunney Act, which gives them standing to sue to force a federal judge to review the settlement and determine whether it is fair.
Whether any AG will seize the moment remains to be seen, of course, but it would be very good politics to do so – after all, the path to political power in America runs through credible promises to do something about the cost of living crisis.
I'm on a tour with my new book Enshittification: catch me next in Brooklyn, New Orleans and Chicago! Full schedule here. Tune into tonight's event with former FTC chair LINA KHAN at 19hET via the Brooklyn Public Library's livestream.
As the Marxist pamphleteer Adam Smith wrote in his Leninist textbook The Wealth of Nations, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
For a commie, that Adam Smith sure had a fine grasp of the business mindset. Price-fixing conspiracies are as old as the lumber barons who gouged Noah, and they're illegal as hell.
But price-gougers gonna gouge, and for most of the past 40 years, regulators have been monumentally disinterested in protecting the public from these ripoffs. All our regulators asked was of the price-gougers was that they come up with the thinnest, least-convincing comb-over and in return, these regulators would pretend not to notice the glaring bald-spot shining through.
The one weird trick that these guys have hit upon is to use industry-wide "pricing consultancies" – clearinghouses that pretend to offer individualized price advice to each seller in a market. In reality what these companies do is aggregate all the prices charged by every major seller in the market, then advise all of them to raise their prices in sync:
When we talk about "greedflation," we don't just mean one seller – a major grocery chain, say – raising prices because they know they've got a regional lock on their market. That happens, but far more pernicious is when all the sellers get together to raise the price of goods, via a brokerage that lets them pretend (unconvincingly) that they're just getting "price advice."
Take Agri-Stats, a conspiracy in plain sight that gathers in pricing from all the major meat processors and then tells them all to jack up the price of meat:
Then there's Realpage, a conspiracy that gathers rental prices from all the landlords in your town and "advises" them all to jack up prices. Landlords who don't obey this "advice" get kicked out of the conspiracy:
These "price consultancies" are the reason you can't afford a hamburger or your apartment anymore. During the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission was working towards a nationwide ban on this stuff:
Of course, after Trump took office, his FTC canceled all that work and instead set up a snitch line where FTC employees could report on each other for being "woke." And, you know, fair: making sure that no one who works for the federal government has a pronoun is far more important than making sure you can afford to eat dinner and sleep indoors.
But (as the saying goes) the states are the laboratories of democracy. State legislatures are (sometimes) stepping in to fill the voids where Trump has failed the American people. That's what's just happened in California, the world's fourth largest economy, where Governor Newsom has just signed AB325 into law, and banned these price consultancies:
https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB325/id/3269757
Specifically, the law makes it "unlawful for a person to use or distribute a common pricing algorithm if the person coerces another person to set or adopt a recommended price or commercial term recommended by the common pricing algorithm for the same or similar products or services."
As Matt Stoller writes, this may seem like small potatoes, but it's actually a huge ideological victory, and marks a major new milestone in the long fight to slay the political ideology that welcomes oligarchy:
Stoller recounts the history of this pro-oligarch movement, and describes how it began by rejecting earlier Supreme Court decisions that banned price coercion – like when a cartel forces its members to adopt higher prices. The Chicago School – the faction of economists who took over the world in the Reagan years – rejected any kind of politics that took account of the role that power played in the economy. They insisted that if workers accepted a starvation wage, it was because they had a "revealed preference" for going hungry – and not because they needed a union to force their bosses to pay them enough to live on.
The Chicago School replaced this kind of power-centric analysis with something they called "efficiency":
If you were coerced by a dominant supplier, but an economist showed there was no loss of output, then that was just vigorous competition. Gradually, the notion that the antitrust laws protect business from economic violence fell away. The result is an economy of coercion machines, from Amazon to pharmacy benefit managers to RealPage.
The mere existence of a law – in 2025, nearly half a century into the neoliberal era – that mentions "coercion" marks a profoud shift in ideology, a recovery of the idea that we are always under threat of "a conspiracy against the public…some contrivance to raise prices."
In a way, this just proves how right Trump is: the American way of life really is under threat from the radical Marxist ideology…of Adam Smith.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
