David Obey: “this amendment attempts to restore full funding of the President's requests for antitrust activities of the Justice…”

“this amendment attempts to restore full funding of the President's requests for antitrust activities of the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission. We have had a series of efforts in the Committee on Appropriations to try to deal with the fact that we have an every increasing concentration of economic power in all of our areas of our economy. For example, four companies currently control 81 percent of the cattle purchases and beef processing and wholesale marketing, and in 5 years we have seen the margin between the price paid to farmers and wholesale price for beef jump 24 percent. Four companies now control 56 percent of the pork market. The margin between the wholesale price of pork and the price paid to the farmer has jumped by more than 50 percent. We have the same problem with poultry. We offered an amendment in the full committee, when the agriculture appropriations bill was before it, to try to deal with the problem of economic concentration, to give the Agriculture Department more power to do that, along with the Justice Department, and the majority party voted us down. Mr. Chairman, we now are seeking to do the same thing in other areas of the economy. I would like to read something that Justice Marshall wrote a long time ago. He wrote this, Antitrust laws in general and the Sherman Act, in particular, are the Magna Carta of free enterprise.…”