Month: August 2025

What’s Behind Rising Beef Prices?

Those who enjoy a breakfast of steak and eggs are feeling better about half of their plate. Egg prices have come down sharply in the past year. But now beef prices are the problem, soaring well beyond the level of other foods.

Most analyses of the situation point to two primary culprits. The first is drought, which parched grazing land and caused hay prices to spike. When these conditions emerged a few years ago, ranchers responded by slaughtering cattle sooner. Initially, this increased supply and pushed prices down. But now the herds are smaller and output is down, putting upward pressure on prices.

The other culprit are tariffs, especially those Trump capriciously imposed on Brazil, a major source of U.S. red meat imports, to punish the country for prosecuting former president Jair Bolsonaro in connection with a January 6-type attempted coup.

A federal court in Minnesota is focusing on another cause: collusion among the major beef producers to keep prop up prices. Starting in 2020, groups of beef buyers filed several lawsuits that came to be consolidated in a multidistrict action against the giants of the industry.

The litigation alleged that from at least 2015 Cargill, JBS, Tyson Foods, and National Beef Packing Company agreed among themselves to reduce live cattle purchasing and slaughter volumes for the purpose and effect of increasing their margins. The plaintiffs alleged that the companies accomplished and perpetuated this agreement through collusion at trade association conferences and industry events between executives and key employees, and through ensuing collusive relationships. This anti-competitive activity, the plaintiffs argued, caused them to pay artificially and illegally inflated prices for boxed beef, which in turn elevated prices for consumers.

Plaintiffs have achieved a series of substantial settlements. In 2022 JBS agreed to pay $52.5 million to direct purchaser plaintiffs. Earlier this year, JBS said it would pay $83.5 million to settle allegations it had conspired with other processors to suppress the prices paid to ranchers. Earlier this month, Cargill and consumer indirect purchaser plaintiffs announced that they had reached a settlement, but details have not yet been announced.

Along with conspiring to keep prices high, the big beef producers have been accused of colluding to depress wages of their employees. A 2022 lawsuit filed in Colorado has resulted in another series of multi-million-dollar settlements, including a $72 million payout by Tyson Foods and $55 million by JBS. Cargill and National Beef Packing coughed up another $43 million.

JBS, Tyson Foods, and Cargill have also been connected to illegal child labor via the hiring of underaged workers by Packers Sanitation Services to do dangerous cleaning work at their plants.

Despite their lawsuit payouts, it is likely that the beef giants have not completely mended their ways and are still finding ways to push up prices and push down wages. Drought and Trump’s tariffs are not the whole story behind rising beef prices. Plain-old corporate greed is also playing a role.

Private Litigation to the Rescue

It used to be the case that federal prosecutors and regulators were the first to bring action against a corporate abuse, and plaintiff’s lawyers followed that with a class action lawsuit designed to obtain additional relief for harmed parties.

In the new Trump era, the federal government is increasingly abdicating that role. As Public Citizen points out, the Justice Department and other agencies have dropped scores of investigations of corporate lawbreaking.

Or else the DOJ is employing leniency practices that let companies off easy. For example, federal prosecutors just notified Liberty Mutual that the company will not be charged under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act despite evidence that its subsidiary in India paid bribes to officials at six government-owned banks. Under the declination deal, no charges will be filed if Liberty Mutual disgorges $4.7 million in profits.

Future enforcement actions against companies are growing less and less likely as a result of deep staffing cuts at many regulatory agencies and because some of those agencies are now led by Trump allies pursuing a MAGA agenda.

The courts, especially at the appellate level, are doing little to impede this retreat from enforcement. The U.S. Supreme Court is, in effect, cheering it on.

Yet there is also good news from the courts: those plaintiff’s lawyers are not backing down. Here are some examples of their efforts:

A federal judge in New York just gave final approval to a settlement in which Mastercard agreed to pay $26 million to resolve allegations of racial and gender discrimination in its hiring practices.

A federal judge in Illinois gave final approval to a deal in which Cargill is paying $32 million to settle litigation in which it was accused of improperly sharing internal information with other turkey processors to limit price competition. In another case in the same court, a group of poultry processors agreed to pay $41 million for their anti-competitive practices.

Last month, a state jury in California awarded $314 million in damages to Android mobile device users who sued Google for transferring data from their devices without their consent for information harvesting and surveillance purposes.

DuPont became the latest chemical company to settle litigation relating to PFAS contamination when it agreed to pay $27 million to upstate New York residents whose drinking water was tainted.

General Motors agreed to pay $150 million to end a case involving the sale of vehicles with hidden engine defects that caused excessive oil consumption.

Capital One paid $425 million in a lawsuit alleging it deceptively advertised its 360 Savings accounts as high-interest products.

Phillips 66 is paying $12.5 million to resolve a lawsuit in which workers at its refineries in California claimed they were not given proper meal and rest breaks and were not compensated for time spent donning and doffing personal protective equipment.

These are but a small sample of the steady stream of class actions brought in federal and state courts on behalf of consumers, workers, and communities. Corporations and their allies have long disparaged such cases as frivolous lawsuits and have sought to limit them through so-called tort reform.

Today, nonetheless, they are increasingly the primary way in which corporate misconduct is being addressed.

Note: Violation Tracker documents more than 5,000 class action lawsuits in a dozen categories.

Debunking Debanking

There are plenty of reasons to be critical of the big banks. They hit customers with illegitimate fees. They misuse personal information. They pay meager interest on savings accounts. They do too little to help struggling mortgage holders. Some such as Wells Fargo have a history of creating bogus accounts to generate revenue. Many have been accused of manipulating foreign exchange markets, enabling tax evasion by the wealthy, and helping bring the U.S. economy to the brink of collapse in the late 2000s.

In Violation Tracker, Bank of America has by far the largest cumulative penalty total: $87 billion. JPMorgan Chase is second with $40 billion; Wells Fargo and Citigroup are also among the ten most penalized corporations.

Apparently oblivious to all this, Donald Trump recently launched a tirade against the banks that focused on a bizarre accusation: that they refuse to do business with people with right-wing political views, especially Trump himself.

In an interview with CNBC, Trump claimed that JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America had refused to accept deposits from his company after his first term as president. “The Banks discriminated against me very badly,” he moaned.

Trump’s account may very well have been fictional. If not, it conveniently ignores the idea that the banks may have shunned him because he was a bad credit risk, and for a period of time after January 6 there was a chance he would end up in prison.

Aside from his personal grievances, Trump’s comments appear to be connected to a move by his administration to address what right-wingers claim is a practice of “debanking” – denying banking services to people based on their political views. There is, of course, no evidence that banks apply an ideological litmus test to potential customers.

Instead, the debanking assault seems to be an effort to undermine rules governing transactions with individuals who might be connected to illegal activities such as money laundering and the financing of terrorist activities. As part of their due diligence, banks are supposed to consult lists of people who may be tied to such activities.

During the Obama and Biden Administrations there were also efforts to discourage banks from doing business with crooked operators in areas such as payday lending and cryptocurrencies. These efforts, known as Operation Choke Point, have come under frequent criticism from MAGA world.

The banks themselves would like to weaken their due diligence obligations. That probably explains why they chose not to scoff at Trump’s criticism. A JPMorgan spokesperson said: “We agree with President Trump that regulatory change is desperately needed.”

If anything, the regulations governing bank practices need to be more stringent. All too often, financial institutions are found to be deficient in their anti-money-laundering efforts. U.S. and foreign banks have paid out billions of dollars in fines and settlements to resolve cases brought by federal and state regulators.

Big banks have also been accused of doing business with disreputable individuals such as one very much in the news these days: the late Jeffrey Epstein. In 2023 JPMorgan Chase paid $290 million to settle a lawsuit brought by victims of Epstein who alleged that the bank turned a blind eye to indications of his sex trafficking because he was such a lucrative client.

If debanking means that financial services are denied to the likes of Jeffrey Epstein, I’m all for it.