Monopoly Round-Up: The Enshittification of the American Hamburger

Matt Stoller Sep 07, 2026 on Substack

The U.S. cattle industry is in trouble, and Trump’s plan to bring in imports may turn the American burger into mystery meat. Plus, a judge once again rules that Google keeps its monopoly.

Lots of news, as usual. Google escaped from an antitrust remedy, as another judge decided not to break up the company after ruling it’s an illegal monopoly. Plus, AI firms are telling ghost stories about the end of the world, the New York Times slimed me and then retracted it, and the National Basketball League penalized a billionaire the way the justice system should.

But before getting to all of that, I want to delve into an important fight during the past few weeks over that most basic of American symbols, the hamburger. Yes, that lovely simple food is under attack.

Here’s how.

A few months ago, the Chinese government began blocking Argentine beef imports because of contamination by chloramphenicol, a dangerous antibiotic prohibited in most countries, including the U.S. It also warned Australian cattle producers that it was about to impose large tariffs to protect its domestic industry. At roughly the same time, the European Union rejected imports of Brazilian beef for food safety reasons.

Three huge meat exporting nations now have large reserves of frozen surplus beef, and not the nice kind of quality chops and steaks, but the processed remainder. And now, that huge quantity of remnant beef is headed to the United States, and it’s about to go into your hamburger.

You might be asking why that would be. Doesn’t America have its own major beef industry? Don’t Americans prefer local U.S.-raised product?

The answer is corruption and monopoly power. Because we’re not really talking nation-states, but global meat corporations, in particular a giant packer named JBS, which dominates the Brazilian and Australian industries. JBS was a small Brazilian firm, until its founders, the Batista brothers, grew it into the world’s largest beef company. How? Well many ways, few of them clean. For instance, roughly ten years ago, the brothers spent time in jail in Brazil, after admitting they bribed politicians.

On August 20th, the co-founder of JBS, Joesley Batista, met with Donald Trump. His company has all this frozen beef on hand, so presumably, he asked Trump to temporarily reduce tariffs on foreign beef. Did he have a good case? That’s beside the point; Batista was the largest donor to Trump’s inauguration, with a $5 million gift from JBS subsidiary Pilgrim’s Pride.

The next day, Trump announced a plan to import three hundred thousand metric tons of lean beef trimmings into the U.S. at below market prices. These lean trimmings will be ground with fattier trimmings to produce ground beef, going into things like hamburgers, tacos and spaghetti sauce. It’s a huge amount to import, equivalent to roughly 1.2 million head of cattle, and slated to come in the next 90 days. The idea is to cut prices to consumers just before the midterm elections.

This plan probably seemed fine on paper. U.S. consumers would get cheaper beef, and Trump gets to reward a contributor. But it fostered a political storm for the GOP. Last week on Organized Money, we had on Mike Callicrate, owner of Ranch Foods Direct, to talk about the impact this decision had among domestic cattle ranchers, who are among the most supportive constituencies of Trump and the GOP.

They are really mad. Here’s why.

The cattle industry has been in crisis for a very long time, with half the ranches disappearing because it’s just not possible to make money anymore. There are four meatpackers that control 85% of the industry, and as Callicrate observed, they don’t really compete over cattle purchases. Instead, they use a variety of tactics to punish cattle ranchers and keep their prices low.

Over the last generation, the industry has undergone a structural shift.

Traditionally, when prices for cattle are high, ranchers will expand their herd, in what’s called the “cattle cycle.” It takes a few years to breed a new cow, so the rancher must believe that the price will remain high for the investment to make sense. Over the last decades however, every time ranchers expand their herds, packers find a way to manipulate prices lower by the time the new cows are ready to be sold. And so the cattle cycle has ended. Ranchers are simply shrinking their herds, and going out of business. You maybe read that the U.S. cattle herd is at 90-year lows, this is why.

Finally, with the shrinkage of domestic cattle, prices have started to go up for the rancher. For the first time in a very long time, ranchers are making money. Indeed, last month, a Cattle on Feed report came in showing a lack of supply, which would have given the ranchers more leverage.

But the tariff announcement, plus the border reopening to Mexican cattle despite the possibility of the screw worm disease, temporarily crashed cattle futures. And that has a psychological effect on ranchers selling their animals, who begin to panic. If they had considered expanding their herds before, they likely won’t do so now. And that means after a few more years, there just won’t be much domestic cattle ranching anymore, the U.S. will mostly import beef.

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