Restore the American Dream

Floor Speech

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Pennsylvania for yielding. I am so grateful for his leadership every single day on behalf of hardworking Americans across his district and across our country.

Mr. Speaker, something is wrong in this country. Families go to the grocery store and they can't afford milk or eggs or cereal that their kids like. Poor and working-class people are struggling under the weight of inflation. They can't make ends meet, and at the same time, the richest 1 percent and corporate CEOs are still taking home record profits.

A recent poll confirmed that two-thirds of Americans think: one of the biggest problems facing us today is that a handful of corporations have too much power. The numbers back this up.

Despite rising costs that are squeezing poor and working people across the country, corporate profits are bigger than ever. It is a simple story of corporate monopolies price gouging consumers.

Let's start with eggs because I like to eat eggs every morning. I think there are a lot of people who like eggs and look at the price of eggs. It is a staple.

Before the pandemic, the price of a dozen eggs hardly ever went over three bucks, but in 2022 and 2023, we saw record-high prices for eggs.

Now, according to Farm Action, this price increase was because dominant egg producers used inflation and avian flu as a cover-up to extract profit margins as high as--wait for it--40 percent on a dozen eggs.

This should come as no surprise because there is a long record of collusion in the egg industry. In 2023, a jury found that Cal-Maine and other egg producers actually did collude to fix egg prices.

Let's look at diapers, another issue that is so big for so many families across the country.

Bloomberg reported in July 2021 that the cost of Pampers nearly doubled from 25 bucks for 200 diapers to $40 for 168 diapers, and that price increase was just in 6 months. More money for fewer diapers.

It is true that there was a shortage of some diaper materials during the pandemic, but--guess what--those shortages stopped, and you didn't see the prices stabilize. You didn't see the prices of key materials coming back to normal.

When you go to the store and you see diaper brands like Huggies and Luvs and Pampers, the real story is, turn them around and see who they are owned by because all of these different brands that are on your grocery shelves are owned by only two companies: Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark, accounting for about 70 to 80 percent of the market. Even as the cost to make diapers has gone way down, these companies are still keeping the prices high, and they are reporting record profits.

Mr. Speaker, I will go to healthcare because it is another place where my constituents and people across the country are talking about the high cost of healthcare. We have seen big insurers, private equity, and other big corporations buying up hospitals and other healthcare providers. My home State of Washington has been particularly affected. A handful of healthcare systems now control 90 percent of the hospital beds in the State of Washington.

Some studies have found that these mergers are especially bad for people in rural areas because it actually causes smaller clinics to eliminate services like obstetrics or pediatrics, or even to close entirely. All of this has led to unprecedented corporate control over healthcare in my home State and across the country.

People across the State and across the country are seeing the negative effects of this increased corporate power in their daily lives. A family physician who worked at a clinic in my district testified that the quality and availability of care decreased after the clinic was bought by a large national healthcare network. Another witness testified that the price that her insurer paid for monthly infusions to manage her chronic illness nearly tripled from $24,000 to $74,000 per visit without any increase in the quality of care.

The president of the Washington State Nurses Association testified that he had seen increased costs and decreased access to care for his patients. All of these stories confirm what we now know: Corporate greed in healthcare or in any industry raises costs and makes life harder for Americans.

It does not have to be this way. As elected officials, it is our job to ensure that government is keeping these corporations in line and keeping prices low for the American people.

I will tell you a story about what government can do when we fight corporate power. In 2015, two grocery store chains merged: Albertsons and Safeway. They wanted what corporations always want in these big mergers and that is more money for themselves, their CEOs, and their shareholders. They said that the deal would be better for people in my home State of Washington and across the country. They claimed that the merger would pass on savings to consumers and not line the pockets of CEOs, but what actually happened?

Well, here is what actually happened: Instead of streamlining, dozens of stores were closed. Those closures created food and pharmacy deserts, making it harder for many people in already underserved communities to get fresh food or get their prescriptions. Older adults, students, people with disabilities, people in rural communities, low- income residents, those are the ones that suffered the most. Workers at the stores that closed, by the way, also lost their jobs. Despite all of those corporate promises, workers and consumers were the ones who suffered. That is what happens when government does not challenge corporate power and monopolies. We lose.

When Albertsons announced in 2022 that it was going to merge this time with Kroger, people were rightly worried. They were worried that the prices would go up, they were worried that there would be fewer choices and deserts in their communities, and that more grocery stores would close. When asked about the merger, one Washingtonian told The Seattle Times that she was worried that her local store would close. She said: If there are no other grocery stores that I can walk to, I don't know what I am going to do. This is my store. Another said that he worried that the merger would make it so that these guys' prices would go sky-high. Workers worried that it would be harder for them to bargain for better pay and working conditions, that store closures would mean layoffs, and that their families would face uncertainty and hardship once again.

This time something was different. My colleagues and I urged the Biden administration to challenge the proposed deal, and the Federal Trade Commission agreed that we could not allow another bad merger to go through.

The FTC and many State attorneys general, including in my State, challenged the deal. While that challenge is still in court, we have delayed and will continue to work on blocking this bad deal.

This is just one of the stories of what can happen when an administration, when a government takes on corporate greed the way that the Biden-Harris administration did, the way that Democrats have done on everything from egg prices to collusion by landlords driving up rental prices.

I will be honest, I am worried that the Trump administration may not keep up these fights against corporate power, especially as we see the proposed cabinet being stacked with people who have close ties to Wall Street. We certainly saw the last Trump administration conduct the largest corporate tax giveaway in history, putting hundreds of millions of dollars into the hands of big corporations like Verizon and Facebook and Amazon while shorting regular Americans.

We have seen the extreme conservative appointees on the Supreme Court accept lavish gifts from their big business buddies, while overturning government efforts to clamp down on corporate power.

We cannot allow the next administration to repeat these mistakes. We need to hold their feet to the fire. We need to make sure that they are working in the interest of all Americans, not just big corporations and the wealthy. We don't want a situation where the wealthiest in this country, once again, get gold bars and working people get maybe 8 weeks of groceries. That is bread crumbs. That is not what middle- class working people and poor people across America deserve.

That is why I have a lot of real solutions to these problems. My Stop Corporate Capture Act would give the people, not big corporations, a say in government. My Stop Anticompetitive Healthcare Act would give the government the power to challenge hospital mergers and protect access to quality healthcare. Of course, my Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act would make sure that the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share.

When we take on corporate power, we win for the working people. When we lower prices, we win for working people. We allow people to put food on their table. We can raise wages, so Americans don't have to work three jobs to get by. We can stop corporations from being so big that they don't care if they are failing consumers, and we can make sure that government works for all of us.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague Representative Deluzio from Pennsylvania for his leadership on this issue and on so many issues facing us today.

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