Oh, happy day! Thanksgiving, I mean – our annual pause for family gatherings to celebrate the rich and tasty diversity of America’s harvests.

There is, however, something decidedly distasteful that has steadily been forcing its way onto our dinner tables: Raw monopoly power. This concentration of market control in the hands of a few domineering conglomerates is decimating farm families, swindling food industry workers, and gouging consumers. Economists have a technical term for what food industry profiteers are doing to us: The term is “stealing.”

Farmers know the evil of unrestrained monopolists all too well, for they are relentlessly squeezed by two sets of them. First, everything they must buy to produce food – from seed to tractors – is controlled by non-competitive giants that charge rip-off prices. Second, when selling their products, farmers and ranchers are boxed-in by corporate cartels that only offer take-it-or-leave-it, go-broke prices.

Then, this same anti-competitive system turns on us consumers, charging grossly-inflated grocery prices that give them monopoly profits and even more market power.

This Thanksgiving dinner is a good time to tally up the ever-widening monopoly spread separating you from farmers:

* A Butterball turkey costing you $2.42 a pound, pays the farmer 6 cents per pound.

* Potatoes costing $4 a bag returns only 55 cents to farmers.

* Wheat farmers only get 13 cents from a $4.50 loaf of whole wheat bread.

* Top sirloin steak cost $16.50 per pound, but ranchers get under $4.

* Even simple lettuce is $2 to you, but pays only 29 cents to farmers.

The very idea of Thanksgiving is that We’re All In This Together. So let’s get together and bust these greedheaded monopolies. For connections, go to Family Farm Action: farmaction.us.

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