The Senator Professor Warren Policy Shop and Idea Factory continues to operate at full capacity. First, a little something-something from the Des Moines Register:

Warren has not shied away from confronting those affected by her policies, delivering them directly to those industries' doorsteps. Just as she announced her plan to break apart the nation's largest tech companies before heading to one of the industry's largest gatherings, Warren is announcing her plan to take on corporate agriculture days before traveling to Iowa to speak at a rural issues forum. The companies she names in her plan — Tyson, Dow-DuPont and Bayer-Monsanto — are some of the key players in Iowa's economy.

In the Medium post, Warren argues small farmers are unable to get ahead "because bad decisions in Washington have consistently favored the interests of multinational corporations and big business lobbyists" over their own. "Iowa feels this very directly," Warren said during a recent interview with the Register in which she discussed the ways monopolies and near-monopolies are "fundamentally changing our economy." "The number of purchasers of soybeans or hogs has shrunk dramatically," she said. "The number of seed providers has shrunk dramatically, and the diversity of the seeds (offered) has shrunk. Concentration in those industries has put a real squeeze on small- and medium-sized farms in Iowa."

The temptation will be great for people to hang the deadly Wonk label on her, an especially painful tag for a woman. But to do so is to ignore the fundamental theme that all of these proposals have in common: a multi-front attack on the monopoly power as an enemy of the poor and middle class, as well as a source of the perversion of our democratic institutions, from elections to the politicians those elections produce. This is simply monopoly agriculture's turn as the bullseye, and she's slotting in the masters of that universe in the place of Google and Amazon, whom she targeted last week.

Warren's proposal names Tyson — which employs more than 9,000 people in Iowa — in calling for the breakup of companies that have started to control nearly all aspects of farming, including feeding, slaughtering and transporting. The Department of Justice has not revised its guidelines on these types of vertical mergers in 35 years, Warren notes. "Chicken farmers have gotten locked into a 'contract farming' system in which they take on huge risks — loading up on debts to build and upgrade facilities — while remaining wholly dependent on Tyson for everything from receiving chicks to buying feed to selling the grown broilers," she wrote.

U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren speaks to supporters at the home of former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Jim Smith and Janet Breslin-Smith in Salem, NH on March 15, 2019. Barry Chin/Globe Staff Getty Images

In addition, as part of the anti-corruption element of this overall message, Warren announced that she was taking aim at one plutocrat in particular. From the Washington Post:

Warren has just introduced in the Senate a sweeping measure called the Presidential Conflicts of Interest Act, which requires the president, vice president and their close family members to divest in all financial interests that create conflicts of interest and place them in a blind trust. The bill would also bar presidential appointees from participating in matters involving the president’s financial interests and would require the president and major-party presidential nominees to release three years of tax returns. “Corruption has always been the central stain of this presidency,” Warren said in a statement emailed to me. “This bill would force President Trump to fully divest from the same Trump properties and assets that special interests have spent two-plus years patronizing to try and curry favor with this administration — all while lining the President’s pockets.”

I admit, having watched a lot of presidential campaigns and how they are presented by much of the elite political media, I understand that it's possible that these now weekly doses of healthy fresh green vegetables from the Warren campaign can be run through the alchemical trivialization of campaign journalism as some kind of drawback.

It was clear even from the Barr press release that Robert Mueller was tossing a lot of what comes next into the lap of the Congress, and here is a member of the Senate minority, and a presidential candidate, taking Mueller up on that. There is no point in being gun-shy on this stuff. Corruption, after all, remains a central stain on this presidency*. Also its central fact and its central animating energy.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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