Errol Schweizer

@grocery_nerd's must-read newsletter shows a letter from Albertson's demanding that they will not accept price increases due to the tariffs. If done, this conduct almost certainly violates Section 2(f) of the Robinson-Patman Act. substack.com/home/post/p-16…

For the full Albertsons tariff letter and useful analysis of the current tariff debacle (including a good proposal for how to do tariffs right), read @grocery_nerd's piece here: substack.com/home/post/p-16…

Raising hens in cages on massive farms is cruel to animals and pollutes local waterways, but the justification has always been that it produces cheap eggs. That is, until recently. Why did conventional egg prices rise so much higher than cage-free eggs? washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/04/uns…

@winstro2 @maanvissingh @BobFergusonGov @AGOWA open.substack.com/pub/groceryner…

>24hrs ago now. Latest news is they’ve taken Lelo to the Tacoma ICE facility. Please spread the word & act NOW to help get Lelo free! @maanvissingh @grocery_nerd @BobFergusonGov @AGOWA

Best history I’ve seen yet on how the egg industry changed from a very diversified and resilient system responsive to markets to the consolidated exploitative system, driving up historic high prices, that we have today

Speaking of free markets encroaching on personal liberties… Instacart is now offering a price-setting service for grocery stores, and they’re advertising the ability to set food prices for individual consumers based on their willingness to pay. From @Capitol_Forum:

With polls showing voters increasingly worried about the economy and lack of action to bring down prices, I wanted to re-up this great analysis of what's driving up egg prices. Avian flu is only a minor player. Profiteering by highly concentrated companies is the real answer.

@FarmActionUS @AFergusonFTC 10/ Most charts are from the @FarmActionUS petition: farmaction.us/wp-content/upl… The consolidation chart is here: issuelab.org/resources/4054… The case I quoted is here: casetext.com/case/in-re-pro… And you should follow @musharbash_b who led this research for Farm Action

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

Musk’s attacks on federal workers pose an existential threat to the whole labor movement, all workers, and the broad Left It’s alarming that most people don’t yet understand the stakes 🧵

THEY'RE KILLING THE ANTI-SCAM POLICE SO THEY CAN SCAM YOU AND LET THEIR ROBBER BARON BUDDIES GET AWAY WITH SCAMMING YOU

“I don’t buy the sad violin music, I still think Albertsons is a dominant operator with significant cost advantages over competitors with a lot of really strong stores and a strong supplier base,” said @grocery_nerd, fmr VP of grocery for Whole Foods. Great from @clairekelloway

In any other country, a billionaire donor like Musk installing loyalists to seize federal agencies, access private citizen data and information about his competitors, and gut working class policies to fund his own tax cut would be called a coup.

Ending with another favorite bit from this piece: “Pepsico does not innovate. They do line extensions, variations on themes. Cool Ranch everything. Hotter Cheetos. Taco Bell mashups. Brute force taste and sensory microtargeting and habit formation. Phillip Morris on MSG. They are all about conquest and domination, scaling up to own categories with their core assortment.” “…Phillip Morris on MSG” Thank you 🙏 for the wisdom and insight @grocery_nerd

What are the ways forward for climate action under Trump? National policy is foreclosed. But a lot can happen at the state and local level. @aldatweets and I argue that we must embrace green economic populism, tackling the cost-of-living crisis and the climate crisis together 🧵

@BalanceCrafting 🤔

Weird it's like short-cut empire-building through M&A is correlated with killing a firm's ability to competently compete on the merits and innovate through technological transitions

Weird it's like monopoly tactics are correlated with killing a firm's ability to make things.

Trump is threatening Panama and wants to take control of the canal. So it's time for a little history lesson on US imperialism and Panama: The US wanted to build a canal through the Isthmus of Panama in the 19th century. But they had a problem: the land required for the canal - the Canal Zone - belonged to somebody else, Colombia. Colombia said the US could build and operate the canal, taking over earlier failed efforts by French constructors, so long as Colombia retained sovereignty over the Canal Zone. US negotiators rejected this position and insisted that the US must control the Canal Zone. Colombian legislators refused, just as any nation would refuse the prospect of a foreign government exercising sovereign control over a strip of land bisecting their country. The idea is quite obviously absurd. So the US did what they always do: they intervened militarily. The US invaded Colombia in 1903. They supported a separatist insurgency in the Panama district, and forcibly blocked Colombian troops from containing it and reestablishing control over the area. The separatists declared an independent state, with US support, and immediately gave the US what they wanted: total sovereignty over the Canal Zone. In other words, the land for the Panama canal was obtained under conditions of imperialist intervention. And it was orchestrated by Theodore Roosevelt, who perpetrated several other imperialist interventions in the region during his presidency. The US governed the Canal Zone as its own sovereign territory - effectively a colony - until 1979, when it switched to joint control with Panama. It was only restored to full Panamanian sovereignty in 1999. As for who built the canal, it was created by 75,000 workers, most of them Afro-Caribbean from the West Indies, who laboured under extremely harsh and dangerous conditions, undertaking one of the most challenging engineering tasks in history. Some 28,000 workers died on the job. Without those workers, and without their extraordinary sacrifice, the canal simply would not exist. The Panama canal does not belong to the US. It belongs to the people of the region and they have a right to sovereign control over their own territory.

Tesla lays off 2,688 Texas employees immediately following having 2,639 H1B visas approved in 2022-23 Abbott begged Elon to come to Texas, offering him tax breaks to do so, while keeping our property taxes high -resulting in taxing seniors out of their homes. Follow the money.

Sorry but it must be said. Certainly the best post-president humanitarian ever, but his presidency officially killed the New Deal era for the Dems and ushered in neoliberalism

If you love your country, and say you would die for your country… then first do math and reading for your country.