“You should be suing Walmart [instead of IBP], they are the problem. They tell us what they will pay and we have no choice but to pay you less”
– John Tyson was at the 2002 NCBA convention to announce his intent to purchase IBP, the biggest beef packer in the world. Callicrate informed him of the cattlemen’s lawsuit against IBP for unfair market practices.
“It has been brought to such a high degree of concentration that it is dominated by few men. The big packers, so called, stand between hundreds of thousands of producers on one hand and millions of consumers on the other. They have their fingers on the pulse of both the producing and consuming markets and are in such a position of strategic advantage they have unrestrained power to manipulate both markets to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of over 99 percent of the people of the country. Such power is too great, Mr. President, to repose in the hands of any men.”
–These words were spoken on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Wyoming Senator John B. Kendrick in 1921
