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Dear Assistant Attorney General Varney:
We appreciate that, after years of inaction, the Antitrust Division is taking a focused and aggressive approach to competition and antitrust issues under your leadership. We are writing to share our concern regarding consolidation and anticompetitive practices in the dairy industry and to ask for your continued focus in this area.
As you know, the price that farmers receive for their milk has bottomed out over the last year, plummeting from $19.301cwt to $11.30/cwt, a drop of 41%. As a result of these plunging prices, family dairy farms across the country have gone out of business or will soon be shutting down. This is a disaster not only for the thousands of rural communities that rely on the dairy industry for support but also for the many consumers who want fresh and locally produced food.
This letter gives me a glimmer of hope; maybe, just maybe, offical Washington is coming to realization of the damn fool thing they've done in forgeting the lessons of history and allowing the "remonopolization" of the U.S. economy. I suppose the Sherman Antitrust Act will now be superceded by legislation bearing the names of the Senatorial lions of our age: same old, same old...best we small folks can hope for is we may eek out some modest improvement in our miserable lot... later, Nate Wilson.
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