Three years ago, the Biden Justice Department’s antitrust division sued a company called Agri Stats that should have made us all wonder what capitalism even means anymore. After all, is it a capitalist system when one company can get every participant in a market to give them proprietary information about inventory, production costs, pricing, and profit margins, allowing those participants to know exactly what their competitors are doing, enabling them to restrict supply or raise prices without consequences? 

The initial lawsuit against Agri Stats, which dealt in data for broiler chicken, turkey, and pork processors, described a collusion machine, complete with clip art of little stick figures pulling profits upward. Nearly all participants in these markets subscribed to Agri Stats, giving them perfect information to use in price-setting. The lawsuit included an incredible quote: “An executive at Smithfield, a pork processor, summarized Agri Stats’ consulting advice in four words: ‘Just raise your price.’”

Agri Stats tried to dismiss this lawsuit, and the judge ruled for the government. A trial was supposed to start in Minnesota this month. But this is the Trump administration, where corporate misconduct goes to die. And so the Justice Department entered into settlement talks, and the final settlement was announced on Thursday. Unlike in the Ticketmaster case, the state partner plaintiffs (California, Minnesota, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah) all joined the settlement.

The settlement agreement is so dense and packed with exceptions that it’s hard to fully parse. But the continued existence of a company that facilitated price fixing for 40 years is confounding. And the reality is that the settlement’s intention to open up the conspiracy by allowing farmers, grocery stores, and restaurants to also buy Agri Stats data essentially sentences the company to make more money, without meaningfully halting the ability to price-fix.  

More from David Dayen: Lawsuit Highlights Why Meat Has Been Overpriced for 40 Years

“The fact of the matter is there should be no Agri Stats. It exists because it provides an efficient system of coordination for an oligopoly market,” said Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. “It is laundering the cartel, and it’s unclear to me that this settlement does much to prevent it from continuing to do so.”

The Justice Department’s claim is that letting retailers see weekly production data and prices will have a beneficial impact. “The Justice Department’s settlement forces Agri Stats to make its reports available to ALL buyers and sellers to ensure every level of the food supply chain operates on an even playing field,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in his announcement. “This settlement means that meat prices will go DOWN for consumers.”

The causal connection of this is not that clear. First of all, restaurants and groceries will now have another input for their business: a price sheet of potential meat suppliers that they will have to check against to guard against price-gouging. In a low-margin business, some retailers will be able to afford that new input and some won’t. Those who don’t buy Agri Stats reports will be at a competitive disadvantage. And while the reports are supposed to be offered on “equal terms,” a subscription service that might be an important tool for a meat processor could be prohibitively expensive for an individual restaurant or mom-and-pop grocery store. In this sense, the settlement favors the big guys.

At best, the Agri Stats reports would be a comparison-shopping tool for buyers of meat. But that will only work to the extent that there’s a competitive marketplace for the product. In a monopoly with a single supplier, comparison shopping is useless. Even in an oligopoly, knowing the going rate for collusion isn’t going to help keep prices down.

Previously, Agri Stats had a “give to get” policy, where processors could only receive reports if they submitted their own information. Opening up the market technically would allow anyone to access the reports, which could break up the ability to maintain a cartel. But Hepner said there would be rational reasons for processors to keep Agri Stats’ business model going, because it’s so lucrative. “When competitors in a marketplace know that it’s in their best interest to comply, enforcing the cartel isn’t necessary,” he said. “It’s in everyone’s best interest to coordinate.”

There are other problems with the proposed final judgment, which is riddled with exceptions. Meat processors are not supposed to share some competitively sensitive information with each other through Agri Stats, on the grounds that some of this data really would inspire collusion. But processors could make that information publicly available in a place that the public is unlikely to ever encounter it, like on a website whose URL is never given out. That way, the data-sharing can be facilitated.

Most importantly, Agri Stats would still be able to issue its most critical reports, which ranked processors against their competitors on various metrics. These are the reports that tell processors when to cut supply or raise prices relative to others. Processors in the past have handed out bonuses for finishing higher in the Agri Stats rankings. If processors still fall over one another to push themselves higher, the market won’t be effectively reformed.

Furthermore, Agri Stats consultants could continue to meet with processors. We know from that Smithfield executive quote and extensive scenarios in the initial lawsuit that Agri Stats’ consulting advice amounted to always telling processors to raise prices. That’s how the company shows its value to the industry—by raising revenues across the board. Technically speaking, the settlement says that Agri Stats will commit to not giving price advice. It’s impossible to understand how that would be enforced: would a Justice Department lawyer be sitting in the room while Agri Stats consultants meet with processors? And there are subtle ways that consultants can arrive at price advice (talking about inventory or other inputs, for example) without explicitly saying so.

All of the complicated stipulations about the new Agri Stats don’t address the fact that the old Agri Stats was doing something illegal. And failing to hold them accountable for that invites other price-fixing across the economy. “It’s a betrayal of the public interest to not seek a liability opinion that would begin to deter conspiracy coordinators in other industries,” Hepner said. “Given that the complaint addressed two decades of illegal conduct to hike food prices, one might reasonably expect punishment, not permission.”

Under the Tunney Act, a settlement of this type must be approved by a federal judge. We’re seeing right now an effort by several states to use this mechanism to overturn a corrupt merger settlement. But that would be the first such use in history, and compared to the overt pay-to-play scenarios in that case, the Justice Department has covered its tracks and depicted the slap on the wrist as a clear win for consumers. 

There’s a parallel with the Airline Tariff Publishing Company, an airline-owned organization that publishes up-to-the-minute airfares for over 500 airlines numerous times per day. The Justice Department sued ATPCO in 1992 for price-fixing, but it ended in a settlement that didn’t fundamentally change the business. Agri Stats appears to have found a similar lifeline in the form of the Trump administration. Your wallet will notice.

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David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90.