Edward Lotterman

The movie “Network” is 50 years old, but the iconic sentiment, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” is common. Households and sole-proprietor businesses like farmers see price-fixing and similar collusion all around them. They are “mad as hell,” but it is up to Congress if they will “have to take it.”

Despite President Donald Trump’s assertions that grocery prices are down, the last consumer price index showed that “food eaten at home is up 1.6%” since he took office and 5.5% over a year earlier. Turkey is up 25% over the last year. “Meat, fish and poultry” is up 5.2% from a year ago, with 2.2% of that between Inauguration Day and September.

Ground beef, a mainstay for many, was up 11.5% over 12 months and 14% since January. No, that’s not a mistake. The price fell from September to January but then bounced back up. Thus many consumers are mad as hell.

So farmers also are angry. Despite Trump saying the Chinese had promised to buy 12 million tons of soybeans this year, none have moved. Yet prices of inputs for 2026, especially fertilizer, are high relative to prospective crop prices.

Beef is one bright sector. Slaughter cattle prices are near record highs. Breeding herds are recovering after shrinking numbers during a decade of drought. But operations fattening cattle say that the gap between what they receive from packing plants and what consumers pay is widening further.

Members of Congress from farm states listen to their constituents. There are hearings on why fertilizer prices are so high. Others question why meat packers, both for beef and pork, seem to have growing market power allowing them to grab a larger share of profits. Members of key committees are speaking out and introducing legislation to fix problems.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, is a key one speaking up on both issues. With a farm background, he has represented Iowa in Congress for a half-century following 16 years in the Iowa Legislature. Thus, when he challenges monopolistic abuses that raise farm input costs and lower farm product prices, he speaks from some authority. But in his condemnations, he misses a key variable – what Congress has done in the decades Grassley himself has been in Washington. That is nearly nothing.

Grassley’s degrees, a B.A., M.A. and most of a Ph.D., all are in political science. So he probably never learned a key incident in Spanish history that fits him and his congressional colleagues to a tee.

Islamic Moors occupied Spain for centuries, but were driven out in the 1400s. In 1492, they gave up their last holdout, the city of Granada and its stunningly beautiful Alhambra palace. As the surrendering Moorish king rode away, he looked back and shed a tear at what was lost. His harsh mother was pitiless: “You do well to weep like a woman for what you would not defend like a man!”

That is precisely what Congress needs to hear now. Why stage great street theater about monopolies raising meat and fertilizer prices in 2025 when successive Congresses and presidents did nothing to stop their growth since the early 1980s? In 1980, the biggest four beef packers had 38% of the total market. By 2020, it was 82%. Yet history shows it is easier to prevent monopolies from being created than to break them up after they become entrenched.

Moreover, while both parties have blame, in recent decades the GOP has been far more cozy with monopoly power than the Democrats. This is a shame, given that antitrust was a central issue for the Republican Party before World War I. Teddy Roosevelt was the greatest “trust buster” of all time. After Abraham Lincoln, Teddy was the greatest GOP president ever. He dared to call out “malefactors of great wealth,” something no one in either party will do today.

To better understand all this, review some basic microeconomics.

“Perfect competition” has many small producers, none of whom have any power to set prices. Every seller is a price taker in a market with many buyers.

Monopoly is the opposite. There is only one producer who, facing no competition, sets prices wherever they want. They choose a quantity and price giving the greatest profit. That is visible to disadvantaged buyers right now, whether purchasing beef roasts or ammonium nitrate fertilizer.

Abusively high prices are not the only problem. The quantity of output produced is smaller than what is optimal for society as a whole. Resources are used inefficiently. Greater quantities of resources are used up to produce one unit of product than would be in a competitive market. Finally, monopolies foster less innovation. Without the stimulus of having to compete with other producers, there is little reason to look for ways to do things better.

Understand there are few real-world examples of perfect competition and few of pure monopoly. At the first end, there is “monopolistic competition” in which some but not all of the conditions for pure competition exist. At the other, there is oligopoly. Just as “oligarchy” is rule by a few people instead of one person in a monarchy, so oligopoly is a market with only a few producers who compete little.

Most large sectors – airliners, steel, automobiles, motor fuels, locomotives, chemicals – are oligopolies. So are meats and several other food categories. So are fertilizer, seeds and farm chemicals.

When there are only a few producers, the danger for society is that these combine, agreeing to conduct their business as if they jointly are a monopoly. Such collusion is what angry senators are investigating right now. It is what Teddy Roosevelt fought 120 years ago. It was the heart of the 1903 Northern Securities Co. decision from the Supreme Court that broke up a three-railroad “trust” put together by St. Paul’s own James J. Hill.

Curbing monopoly power long was important to Republicans. Richard Nixon saw it was time to break up the regulated monopolies in telecommunications. His Democratic successor, Jimmy Carter, did the same for airlines, railroads and trucking, reforms that were finished by Republican Ronald Reagan.

But that changed with the new century. Democrat Bill Clinton’s Justice Department saw anti-competitive practices by Microsoft. It filed suit to break Microsoft into two companies – one for operating systems and another for applications, just as Standard Oil and International Harvester had been broken up a century earlier. In 2000, the government was clearly winning the case in court, but as soon as George W. Bush was inaugurated, the case was dropped.

That was the turn of the tide of any GOP antitrust action. With the 2010 Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court that legalized payoffs to politicians, anti-competitive collusion and price-fixing was given a free hand. Congress has stood by. They can hold all the hearings they want and pass all the bills calling for further study they want. But unless the president in the Oval Office and majorities in the House and Senate agree to promote competition, citizens should not expect much.

St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

Every once in a while I come across a passage in a book that hits me with the force of revelation. Here’s one: “A person’s way of being human is the most authentic expression of their belief or unbelief. A person’s life speaks more about their faith than what they think or say about God.”

That passage is from Tomas Halik’s book “The Afternoon of Christianity.” Halik is a Czech sociologist, priest and philosopher. When the Czech Republic was communist, he served in the underground church; after 1989, he was a close friend and adviser to Vaclav Havel and an admirer of Pope Francis. I like the passage because Halik is cutting through the categories we commonly use to define people.

That is a rarity. These days a pollster or a social scientist might call you up and ask some superficial questions and put you in a box like “believer” or a “none” (a person without belief). And somehow people are content to accept and live within these crude categories of separation.

Once you put people into categorical boxes, you are inviting them to see history as a zero-sum conflict between this group and that one. And sure enough, today we live in a political, cultural and religious war between two impoverished armies.

On the one side are the Christian nationalists, who practice a debauched form of their faith. Christian nationalism is particular rather than universal. It is about protecting “us” against “them” — the native versus the immigrant. It is about power more than love. It is about threat more than hope. It is rigid and pharisaical rather than personal and merciful.

On the other side are the exhausted remains of secular humanism. That humanism started out trying to liberate people from dogma, but it has produced societies in which people feel alienated, naked and alone. It has failed to formulate a shared moral order that might help people find meaning and solidarity in their lives. It is so enfeebled that it is being replaced by the religion of the phone — by shallow, technological modes of living.

A way out

When I read Halik’s passage I immediately glimpsed a way out of this stale and life-deforming culture war. That passage reminds us, first, that the categories in our heads are inadequate for the great diversity of human questing we see around us.

In my experience most believers have their periods of unbelief. Two people who call themselves evangelical Christians can think and behave in very different ways. Crude labels like “believer” or even “evangelical Christian” do not accurately summarize most real-life humans.

Meanwhile, the category “none” is itself an idiocy. How does this negation capture the lives of people who conduct their own spiritual adventures outside of a faith tradition? Most important, human beings have a lot in common that those categories don’t see.

Halik’s passage reminds us, second, of what matters most. To get a little preachy, it’s not the propositions that come out of our mouths but the care that flows from our hearts. It’s how we each try to fulfill the task of being human.

The passions of the heart

If there is one thing I have learned in my adult life it is that the passions of the heart precede and are greater than the machinery of reason. The theologian says that deep down each person possesses a yearning soul. The cognitive scientist says that deep down each person possesses unconscious layers from which desires flow, where 99.9% of our thinking gets done. Whether your language is spiritual or scientific, the bottom line is that the energy that animates the world emerges from the human depths, from the mysterious regions where passions form.

When you look at people only at the shallow level of their stated beliefs, you see ideologies that are likely to clash. But when you look down into the depths, you see struggling people in all camps, wrestling with impulsions they can barely control or understand.

Some of these impulsions are dark and destructive — hatred, resentment, the lust for power. But human beings are also oriented toward the good. All human beings seem to possess desires for greater understanding, belonging, meaning, beauty and love.

Theologians naturally describe these longings in religious terms. “Humans were created by God in God’s image and the desire for God was implanted in the structure of our humanity,” Halik writes. In his own book “Passions of the Soul,” the former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, writes, “If we are growing in spiritual maturity and discernment, what we desire is always to go on growing and to go on desiring.”

Nonbelievers may use different language, but I believe most will recognize these spiritual longings. I have lived through decades of nonbelief and now more than a decade of belief. In both phases I ached, like most people, for a transformation of the heart — to gradually be a better person deep inside, to gradually be a better presence in the world. Coming to faith didn’t sate these longings; if anything, it has inflamed them.

Seen in this light, we’re not warriors clashing, we’re sojourners exploring. Each of us start with our own foundational truths — Christian, Jewish, rationalist, whatever. Each of us is swept along by the currents of our own traditions. But each of us longs to grow, to become better versions of ourselves. In the day-to-day realities of pluralist life, each of us stumbles and falls, and hopefully we help one another along our parallel and intertwining pilgrimages toward a horizon that we will never reach — at least in this world.

Pilgrimage metaphors instead

Which brings me to the third point inspired by that Halik passage. Today, we’ve been trained to think in battleground metaphors — believer versus nonbeliever, MAGA versus the wokesters. But if we’re going to get out of this nasty age of ours, we’re going to have to see the world through pilgrimage metaphors instead.

In the Book of Exodus, Moses asks to see God’s face, but God shows him only his back. Perhaps that’s because you don’t see the face of one you are following. The early church father Gregory of Nyssa argued that Christians are meant to attend Christ in exactly this way — to follow, to move in the direction of Jesus’ movement. Christian faith, Halik argues, is a journey toward and with Jesus, who said, “I am the way.”

You can choose to live your life in the trenches, going nowhere, and good luck with that. Culture warriors are static, and their certainties are terrifying. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert once observed that human beings are works in progress who think they are finished. But people who see themselves as pilgrims know they are unfinished; they know they are still on a journey that will change them. They embrace the dynamic, forward flowing nature of life. If they are clawing at anything, it’s not one another but the brambles that block their common path.

I got to meet Halik this past week at a conference sponsored by the Faith Angle Forum, which brings theologians together with journalists. I attended because I’m looking for a form of Christianity that is more attractive and compelling than Christian nationalism and which we can use to pry people away from that nationalism.

A better way to be faithful

Led by these wise people like Halik and Williams, I now see glimmers of a better way to be faithful in the world. St. Augustine advised us to follow what seems delightful, and in this pilgrim’s way of living I see the delight of pluralism. The world is too complicated to have all its truth encompassed by any single tradition — by Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Enlightenment. You can plant yourself in one and learn from them all.

I see the delight of self-forgetting. As so many sages have told us, if you dive down to the deepest realms of yourself, you find there a desire for self-transcendence that leads you to a highway straight out of self — toward loved ones and friends, toward God. You’re no longer trapped in your small, insecure, self-absorbed self; you’re outward facing, maybe not thinking about yourself much at all.

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I see delight in humility. I love Williams’ definition of humility as a “capacity to be a place where others find rest.” Williams adds that the people Jesus calls blessed “are those who live in welcoming stillness yet are at the same time on fire with longing for the well-being of the neighbor and the healing of the world’s hurts.”

I see, finally, a glimpse of the America I thought I knew. For centuries we have been a hopeful people, a people on the move, defined more by our future than our pasts. Sometimes this relentless passion for growth has led toward gaudy materialism and even exploitation. But American history has been at its best when the passion for spiritual and moral growth has been just as strong. When people have said: I want my heart constantly enlarged, my nation constantly moving toward fairness.

Somehow MAGA has swept in and made us a frightened nation, stagnant, callous and backward. I don’t think this alien cultural implant can last forever. Eventually Americans, restless as any people on Earth, will want to replace threat with hope and resume our national pilgrimage. When that cultural and spiritual shift occurs, a lot will change in our religious and political life.

David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.

Two public artists are launching projects in Stillwater this week through a new “micro-residency” program at the Art and Water Space, an environmental arts studio run by the nonprofit A House Unbuilt.

During the rest of November, artist and storyteller Michael Venske plans to record conversations with residents to create a “sonic tapestry” exploring people’s connections to Stillwater and the St. Croix River Valley. Also starting this month, artist Olivia Morawiecki will begin “Wrap Me in a Blanket,” a multimedia installation in Lowell Park exploring grief, memory and community.

Based on the corner of Main and Nelson streets in Stillwater, A House Unbuilt aims to support artists and art-making focused on relationships between communities of people and the natural worlds they live in, said founder Victoria Bradford Styrbicki.

Venske and Morawiecki are the organization’s first resident artists, and Styrbicki hopes the program will bring new cohorts of artists to Stillwater several times a year.

A performing artist and choreographer, Styrbicki initially founded the organization in 2012 as a dance company in Chicago, and it has since morphed into a broader visual arts nonprofit. But in a way, she said, the organization’s current work is conceptually similar to a sort of choreography.

“How can we move community into action or into agency?” she said. “I think of the work that I do…in the model of beginning people together, coming to work through a system or methodology together, but not necessarily all having the same outcomes or trajectories. Supporting each other as we go down different paths.”

Tree chimes

During Morawiecki’s residency, she plans to wrap an entire tree, from its trunk to each limb, in wool, then hang chimes from the branches. Visitors are invited to dedicate a chime in a way that honors their grief, whether in relation to a lost loved one, a life phase or other intangible sense of mourning, she said.

“One of the purest things we can do for each other is show up and be present with people who are struggling or going through grief,” Morawiecki said. “The idea of having a public space which exists to say, ‘There is grief and I can sit with that for myself and for others’ — that really resonates with me.”

The chimes, and the sound they make, are also important to the symbolism of the project. Just as people do, chimes respond to touch and to the presence of one another, she said. And whereas we commonly think of grieving as a private process, Morawiecki wants to explore grief as more collective and communal.

Visitors can find information about dedicating a chime on Morawiecki’s website, citizenparlor.com.

But whether or not someone chooses to engage with the project in that way, she said, she hopes the work “gives them some element of comfort or a connectedness to know that somebody else is making time and space for what they’re holding,” she said.

‘Sonic tapestry’

Meanwhile, Venske plans to set up times to visit places like senior centers and schools, plus to spend time at Main Street businesses and in the Art and Water Space studio. People will also be able to participate in the project by recording their own voice memo and sending it to Venske on his website, michaelvenske.com.

After he stitches these interviews together into the final ‘sonic tapestry,’ Venske and A House Unbuilt plan to host a listening event sometime next year.

“The ability to just ask a general open-ended question and see where it runs is really appealing to me,” he said. “People have their lived experiences, their feelings, connections, roots, history in this place. For an outsider to come in and say, let’s talk about this place, what can you share — and let’s just talk about what comes up.”

Although it’s not the subject of his residency work, Venske, like Morawiecki, is also known for a focus on grief: He hosts the show “Your Funeral Music” on WFNU Frogtown Community Radio, in which he and a guest listen to and discuss the music the guest would want played at their funeral.

But whether the topic of conversation is a person’s own legacy or perhaps their memories in downtown Stillwater, Venske said he’s particularly drawn to audio as a way to capture stories.

“How we say things and the way we (hear) things when we’re not watching — when we have to listen — forces our brain to hear things in different ways and pick up the nuance in someone’s voice, the way they approach a difficult topic,” he said. “You can connect with someone on such an emotionally deep level when you can just hear them, hear their voice, hear how they’re reacting to what they’re describing or a memory they have.”

“I really want people to feel like they’ve been heard,” he said.

More information on A House Unbuilt and the Art and Water Space micro-residency program is online at ahouseunbuilt.com.

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Something for everybody today — a magical novel, Japanese resettlement, Bob Dylan and Harmon Killebrew, and two kinds of poetry.

“Down Here”: by Sherry Roberts (Osmyrrah Publishing, $20)

(Osmyrrah Publishing)

In 2023 Sherry Roberts introduced readers to Ariel in her novel “Up There.” Ariel has the gift of levitating and riding the wind. After an accident she turns her back on her powers until she returns to her Minnesota hometown of Cosette. “Down Here” is  a sequel as magical as the first book. Ariel has stayed in Cosette, married nice, caring Ruddy and has a daughter who carries the same gift of wind riding as her mother. Ariel remembers how she was considered a freak in school because she wore weighted shoes that kept her grounded. Now, she is trying to keep her daughter Meri from the same problem while also training the 5-year-old to ride the winds that Ariel, sometimes, can summon. Ruddy hates it when his wife and daughter step into the sky, but he can only be their steady rock when they come down.

Meri is good at following her parents’ rules about not going Up There alone, but she can’t resist the lure of her mother’s impulsive cousin Trouble, who has certainly earned her name. Trouble is obsessed with finding the farm home where matriarchs of Ariel’s maternal Hamilton family lived. Roberts takes us deep into the Hamiltons’ background, including which women had the gift, which chose to use or not use it, and how difficult is was for Up There to be understood by the men in their lives.

There are lyrical passages taking us with Ariel and Meri as they drift on breezes at night. And when a terrible storm hits, it’s up to Ariel to make a big decision.

Roberts writes contemporary fiction and cozies. “Up There” won the Minnesota Indie Author Project.

Teaser quote: “Standing with Ruddy on the edge of the meadow, she buzzed with excitement, energized by the swirling air. Here she felt the ultimate connection with Up There — her name for the wind and sky that swept her out of this world and into another. In Up There, Ariel could be strong and fearless, the complete opposite of how she felt on land.”

Enmity and Empathy: Japanese Americans  in World War II”: by Ka F. Fong (Minnesota Historical Society Press, $34.95)

This is an in-depth history of Japanese-Americans and their allies fighting discrimination in wartime Minnesota and the lesser-known narrative of resettlement that followed the internment camps, highlighting how diverse groups stood together amid turmoil. Resettlement efforts included college education and military service, leading Japanese-Americans from western states to the Upper Midwest, markedly increasing their numbers in Minnesota. The author is professor of Asian Studies at St. Olaf College in Northfield. He is producer, director and writer of the film “Beyond the Barbed Wire: Japanese Americans in Minnesota.”

“Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed: A Kind of Biography”: by Ron Rosenbaum (Melville House, $32)

Rosenbaum, a longtime journalist and columnist for national publications, draws on his history with musician Bob Dylan to discuss a side of the Minnesota native that is often ignored — his various religious conversions. What did Dylan’s Jewishness, his mysticism, and his visits with psychics have to do with it all? The author also offers a key to reading Dylan’s late-career lyrics, which some have called unintelligible. Rosenbaum was a young journalist in the 1960s when he encountered Dylan and his music. He was one of the few to interview Dylan in those years, doing a long interview in 1978 for Playboy magazine. This is a dense book, probably best appreciated by Dylan fans who want to go into the man’s psyche as it relates to his music.

“Remembering Harmon: A Tribute to Harmon Killebrew”: by Jim Bark (Outskirts Press, $14.95)

(Outskirts Press)

The author, who’s written books about the Minnesota Twins and Roberto Clemente and Henry Aaron, gives us statistics and anecdotes about the player Bark calls “one of the greatest home run hitters of all time.” Killebrew, who died in 2011, played for the Minnesota Twins from 1961 to ’74. This slim paperback pays tribute to his talents with chapters about his career statistics and comments about him from other MLB players. For instance, Dave LaRoche, a Killebrew teammate in 1972: “(Harmon) was a total gentleman and soft spoken. He had a short quick swing with a big follow through… Solid player, teammate, and family man.”

“Phoenixbirds”: by Jane Dickerson (Calumet Editions, $19)

(Calumet Editions)

In her second poetry collection, St. Paulite Dickerson writes of climate change, birds, and the heartache of losing her daughter (“I’m supposed to die before her, my forty-year-old deaf daughter who/hopes to join the dogs & other pets in heaven…”) and salutes avians as in the poem “Robin’s Egg Blue”: “It’s a luxury to write/about a bird, any bird, when the world is full of anguish,/especially this bird, so fearless or feckless that it will build a nest/anywhere, even in plain sight…”

Dickerson’s previous collection, “The Orange Tree,” was a finalist for the Midwest Independent Publishing Association award. She is a mentor for the Minnesota Prison Writers workshop and a freelance editor.

“Humor, the Wonder Drug”: by Ken Mogren, illustrated by Joella Goyette (MSI Press, $16.95)

(MSI Press)

Ken Mogren, who is retired from a business career, offers humorous poetry such as “Joint Custody” (about who gets the dog), “Grumpy Grandpa’s New Tattoo,” and “Small Town Cafe in the Morning” (“A guy who always has a joke to tell/Gets full attention when he has the floor./Alas, he can’t remember very well/And might tell the one he told the week before.”)

Mogren, who lives in Winona, got the idea for the book after a reader of his previous Spunky Grandmas humorous collections told him she sometimes ran out of conversation while visiting her mother in a nursing home. Reading funny stories filled the gap, brightening her mother’s day. Goyette’s cartoonish illustrations are big and bold.

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