To my relief, it wasn’t at all bad. The daily experiences, needs, and frustrations of working people received the proper emphasis. Here are the main things they propose to do:
Establishing a government program to sell generic drugs at a discount. This, says the caucus, will lower the price of insulin from $300 a vial to $50. I have long argued that the Democrats ought to make insulin free by paying the manufacturers a negotiated fee, just like they did with Moderna and Pfizer on the Covid vaccine (although that fee that would be considerably less than their current crazy profits). But $50 is closer to free than $300. It’s a start.Charging oil companies a tax on extra profits collected because of Donald Trump’s war, then refunding that money to consumers, which the caucus says could save families up to $324.Building millions of new homes, offering new homeowners $20,000 in downpayment assistance, and expanding rental aid. Requiring companies to offer double pay for overtime (Barack Obama expanded overtime pay, and Trump reversed that). Guaranteeing every worker two weeks of paid vacation.Cracking down on price-fixing among big grocers.Banning “surveillance pricing,” an insidious algorithm-driven process whereby companies use consumer data to set individualized prices, hoping to locate the maximum price consumers are willing to pay.But one promise not mentioned above caught my eye more than all the others: The caucus promises to crack down “on companies that abuse seed patents to make farming more expensive.”
The short version is that conglomerate seed producers—notably Monsanto, which was acquired in 2018 by Bayer, the aspirin people, for $66 billion—have patented various seeds that farmers use, requiring them to buy new seeds every year. Corteva Agriscience is the other seed producer that, with Bayer, controls thousands of seed patents. Their claims aren’t wholly without merit—they invest a lot of money in all this. And it’s true that seeds can be patented not only in the United States, but across Europe as well. But the extent of the U.S. patent claims costs small farmers a lot of money because they can’t reuse seeds, and it has led to intense market concentration. So, as the caucus says, it’s not the existence of seed patent laws that’s the problem. It’s the abuse and overuse of them.
First, it speaks to a rural constituency that Democrats have done a horrible job of talking to in recent years. On a substantive level, Trump has done nothing but screw farmers, especially soybean farmers, with his tariffs. But they still support him. They support him because they feel like he represents their “values.” And they feel that in no small part because Democrats never talk about farmers. Farmers basically don’t exist to national Democrats.
Second, it affords Democrats the opportunity to wage a good old-fashioned class-warfare fight, complete with the naming of the bad guys. As I wrote in my big 10,000-word piece for the March print issue of The New Republic, the Democrats need to create conflict. They need to identify villains—the big corporate entities that are making working people’s lives harder and harder. They need to name names. Naming the bad guys is the surefire way to make working people understand: If the Democrats are against those guys—the corporate bad actors who’ve been nickel-and-diming honest working folks—they must be on my side.
But focus groups and polls can’t tell you everything. Sometimes, you have to make something an issue. Politics is a way of creating a new majority where one didn’t exist before, and ripe but under-the-radar policy issues are a good way to do that. In seed patents, we find something that many people had no idea they should care about, because it doesn’t get much press and isn’t discussed daily on cable news. That’s intellectual leadership. That’s political guts. And the Democrats too rarely show political guts.
I applaud the 100 or so members of the Progressive Caucus for their class-driven agenda. But I hope they really mean it. I hope the mention of patent seed abuse wasn’t just a sop to one noisy member, to get him or her to shut up. Their path back to victory runs precisely through aggressive anti-monopoly issues like this one. As I’ve written a thousand times since George W. Bush was president, the point is not to follow the polls. The point is to change them.
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