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Tuesday, February 21, 2006 |
There is no such thing as a free market. Everything is regulated, not to provide the cheapest product to the customer, but to provide the most profits to commerce and the big companies with monopolies.
ChicagoTribune: "Hein Hettinga is a dairy farmer but he doesn't spend his days milking cows.
He sells his milk for half the price you pay.
By controlling all stages of production, Hettinga says he can produce milk so efficiently that he and his customers can make a hefty profit at dirt-cheap prices. Such vertical integration, as it is known, is increasingly popular in agriculture as farmers and processors try to find ways to eliminate costs and increase revenues.
In the highly politicized world of dairy, efficiency could carry a price. Major dairy cooperatives and milk processors successfully persuaded federal regulators to write new rules that would prohibit the business practices that Hettinga has so successfully put in place.
Hettinga, an outspoken 64-year-old who emigrated from Holland to California at age 7, said the pending regulations were an effort by dairy heavyweights such as Dean Foods and the Dairy Farmers of America, the nation's largest dairy cooperative, to monopolize the milk business."
When farmers only produce milk but don't process and market it, they are at the mercy of the corporations that buy their milk, even when these are 'Cooperatives'.
So here we have a successful business that works with a profit and sells cheap to the customer, and yet it is attacked by Cooperatives that work along the same principle (producing, processing, marketing) but are less efficient.
11:54:27 AM 
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NYTimes: "In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.
Though the National Archives are not allowed to reveal which agencies are involved in the reclassification, one archivist said on condition of anonymity that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency were major participants."
11:11:24 AM
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