Rein in Corporate Monopolies

Prioritize Working People & Locally Owned Businesses

Big corporations have been extracting wealth from rural landscapes and people for centuries, through mining, timber, industrial-scale farming, opioids, and any number of other industries. They strip the resources, underpay their workers, take the profits, and leave behind poor and polluted communities when they leave. They wield tremendous power over federal and state governments and successfully lobby for laws and regulations favorable to them, not to the rural regions they exploit. Rural America is where our food, fiber, water, energy, and many other critical resources come from; it is time to prioritize the needs of the people who live there rather than the greed of extractive corporations. 

Ongoing Priorities

  • Strengthen and enforce antitrust and anti-monopoly laws to curb concentrated power that corporations exert over rural life and economies, from seed to supermarket.
  • Provide tools and opportunities for people to build a good life, from a living wage to fair market prices.
  • Ensure workers have the right to organize and that public investment in economic development protects the rights of workers in those projects.

Strengthen Economic Competition

Stop Rural Preemption and Anti-Whistleblower Laws: “Right to Farm” & “Ag-Gag”

Reform Mandatory Commodity Checkoff Programs

Regulate Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)

Stop Taxpayer Funding of Industrial Animal Agriculture

Limit Offshore Industrial Aquaculture

Ensure Equal Rights for Food and Farm Workers