Organization for Competitive Markets

by Richard Oswald The Occupy Wall Street Movement has been called “a potent political and cultural conversation”. On the other hand Occupy movements in cities like Washington DC have been called over reported and under attended. That is definitely not the case here because Occupy Langdon has been completely off the radar screen, totally undiscussed, and one hundred percent unreported. Until now. I’m breaking this thing wide open. Here around…

by Fred Stokes At the OCM Annual Conference in St. Louis in August of 2009, Phil Weiser, Deputy to Antitrust Chief Christine Varney, and J. Dudley Butler, Administrator of the Grain Inspection and Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA), laid out an ambitious and historic plan to reform the agricultural marketplace. For the first time in our nation’s history, there was to be a joint DOJ/USDA initiative to restore a competitive…

Thomas F. “Fred” Stokes Executive Director Seeking to help U. S. farmers and ranchers or bent on selling the industrial model to a skeptical public? When I first saw the list of the founding members of the new U. S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, all sorts of alarm bells went off. The list includes such groups as; American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), American Soybean Association (ASA), Cattlemen’s Beef Board(CBB), Federation…

by Randy Stevenson, President The value of history is the lessons learned from it. In looking at the activities of beef industry today, one of the best history lesson comes from certain events around the turn of the last century. The Sherman Antitrust Act had been passed in 1890. In the following decade it was mostly ignored by the Executive Branch of the federal government. In about 1885, prior to…

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Phil Weiser spoke to the crowd at OCM’s annual conference in held August 7th in St. Louis, Missouri. Weiser Addressed the need for a competition policy agenda for agricultural markets. Philip J. Weiser Deputy Assistant Attorney General Antitrust Division U.S. Department of Justice Remarks as Prepared for the Organization for Competitive Markets 11th Annual Conference St. Louis, Missouri August 7th, 2009 Download Entire Speech I. Introduction:…

Lincoln, Nebraska – The Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM) expresses its pleasure at the announcement today by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Attorney General Eric Holder that they will hold the first ever joint workshops on agricultural market competition. The announcement states: “The workshops will address the dynamics of competition in agriculture markets including, among other issues, buyer power (also known as monopsony) and vertical integration.” This is the…