RUSH: This is Jay in Almont, North Dakota. Welcome, sir. Great to have you here.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. It\u2019s an honor to talk to you, and I\u2019ve been a longtime listener, but I\u2019ve been dealing with this cattle market that we\u2019ve got in rural America, and it\u2019s getting pretty disgusting when our cattle prices are in the bottom cellar when these slaughterhouse and packinghouses are making record profits.<\/p>\n
And we can\u2019t make our ends meet out here for expenses and stuff with these prices. And the reason why our prices are low the way it looks to me, is we\u2019re bringing in so much foreign beef because all the foreign slaughterhouses — or the slaughterhouses that are owned by foreign countries — are bringing their cattle in before ours and we can\u2019t get ours in.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Now, I need to ask you something. There\u2019s not a cattle shortage, right? Let\u2019s talk about beef. There\u2019s not a cattle shortage, right? There are plenty of head. That\u2019s not the problem with the beef.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yeah.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/live-rush-limbaugh.pantheonsite.io\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/APP-042320-Cows.jpg\")
RUSH: The beef shortage is the slaughterhouses. The news we\u2019re getting is the slaughterhouses have been shut down because so many people working there have developed the virus, and there\u2019s no way to keep the slaughterhouses open. Is that not right?<\/p>\n
CALLER: I realize there\u2019s some slaughterhouses that are being closed, but they\u2019re not all closed. Plus, it\u2019s mainly the pig industry that\u2019s having a lot of trouble. In the cattle industry, we\u2019re still slaughtering cattle. It\u2019s just that they don\u2019t get it to the store fast enough, \u2019cause people are buying it up fast.<\/p>\n
But the reason is, our markets are lower now than they were in the seventies, and they should be going up instead of down. They shouldn\u2019t be going the wrong way. We should be able to sell our cattle for a decent price so that we can make a living on the family farm here.<\/p>\n
RUSH: So I just need to ask: You\u2019re a cattle farmer, you\u2019re in the industry?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yeah, we raise cattle. We raise cattle for feeders. We raise butcher cattle, too, that we can take to the slaughterhouses, but they ain\u2019t giving us a fair price. They\u2019re way off the mark. We\u2019re making maybe a couple hundred dollars if that. I\u2019ve been losing money the last few years because our costs are more. But they\u2019re making record profits.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This has been a problem that precedes the coronavirus?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Oh, yes. In the last five years since they got rid of country origin labeling, that\u2019s when everything started going down.<\/p>\n
RUSH: You\u2019re being killed by imports? Is that what your original point was?<\/p>\n
CALLER: We import twice as much as we export, twice as much. We don\u2019t need to import cattle. We\u2019ve got enough cattle here. If we do need any more, they can bring some cattle in, but we can\u2019t be losing money on the family farm.<\/p>\n
RUSH: All right. Well, look. Pardon my naivete. Why, if we don\u2019t…? If we\u2019re not short of cattle, if there\u2019s plenty of cattle to satisfy the American demand and desire for beef, why are we importing a bunch of beef that is acing out domestic suppliers? If the question sounds naive to you, I\u2019m sorry, but please answer it \u2019cause it doesn\u2019t make sense to a lot of people.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Well, it doesn\u2019t make sense to me, either, but the packinghouses are owned by foreign countries like Brazil. The biggest one is Brazil.<\/p>\n
RUSH: A-ha! A-ha! So the slaughterhouses, the packinghouses are owned by the countries from which the other beef is being imported?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yes.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Do the Chinese, by any chance, own some of the slaughter and packinghouses?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Well, if you look at Tyson, it says “a multinational ownership.” Multinational, I don\u2019t know what that means. Does that mean foreign people, \u2019cause they won\u2019t say American people.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Ahhhh.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/live-rush-limbaugh.pantheonsite.io\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/APP-042420-f-COVID-3.jpg\")
CALLER: But multinational… I\u2019m assuming Chinese owns Tyson, too, part of it. But we\u2019re just… I mean, I\u2019m at the end. I mean, we don\u2019t know what to do with these cattle.<\/p>\n
RUSH: The Chinese do own a huge slaughterhouse packing concern called Smithfield.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yeah.<\/p>\n
RUSH: That\u2019s a famous Chinese name. You go to Beijing and you look, and the name Smithfield is gonna be all over the Beijing phone book. You would be surprised at what a common Chinese name Smithfield is out there, Jay.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yeah.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Jay, did you expect President Trump to do something about this?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Well, I heard he did mandate keep people working at these packinghouses. He made it mandatory that they gotta keep people working there so we can keep \u2019em open so we got meat on the shelves for the American people here.<\/p>\n
RUSH: No, no, no. I mean before the virus, did you…? I assumed but I need to go back. Did you vote for Trump? No wrong answer.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yes, I did.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Did you expect Trump to do something about this, \u2019cause Trump was, you know, “Make America Great Again! Stop this unfair trade practice stuff that\u2019s been going on.” Did you expect him to do something about all this unfair foreign competition you\u2019re dealing with?<\/p>\n
CALLER: We\u2019ve been hoping things were gonna change, but we\u2019re actually the… The people raise —<\/p>\n
RUSH: No, no. No wonder you\u2019re gone wrong. You said you\u2019ve been hoping and change. That\u2019s Obama\u2019s slogan.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Well… Well, I called the USDA, Sonny Perdue. I had him on… I didn\u2019t get him on the phone, but I called people that represent him there, \u2019cause you can\u2019t talk him, and they didn\u2019t even what a slaughterhouse was. They had to ask what a slaughterhouse —<\/p>\n
RUSH: Wait a minute. People at the USDA did not know what a slaughterhouse was?<\/p>\n
CALLER: No. And —<\/p>\n
RUSH: Tell people what the USDA is. The USDA is Department of Agriculture, right?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yeah, they put the stamp on the meat saying it\u2019s American beef, but that\u2019s not always the case, either.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Now, did you say you produce feeder beef, or do you actually produce consumer beef?<\/p>\n
CALLER: I raise cattle for feeder. I\u2019ll sell feeder cattle or I sell butcher cattle.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Okay. Butcher cattle. Butcher versus feeder.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/live-rush-limbaugh.pantheonsite.io\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/APP-040820-COVID-Stores-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yeah, you can raise either one. You just gotta sell them at a different point in time. The feeders, they go to about 800 pounds — they sell \u2019em at 800 pounds — and the “fats” are around 1,300. That\u2019s when they\u2019re ready to be butchered and put on the grocery shelves.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Right. Right, right, right, right, right. Of course, I only buy USDA prime, and that\u2019s in even more tough demand.<\/p>\n
CALLER: That\u2019s what we raise here in North Dakota.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Yeah. I\u2019m sure.<\/p>\n
CALLER: (crosstalk) prime meats.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Look, I\u2019ve been distressed — honest to gosh — from the earliest days of the shutdown. I have been opposed to this shutdown from about three weeks into it. It rubbed me the wrong way. Took me three weeks. I guess I understood it when it happened, because they were telling us that this virus was the Andromeda Strain and everybody who got it was gonna die.<\/p>\n
It turns out that I don\u2019t think its mortality rate is anywhere near what they originally thought or told us. But I have been bothered by this shut down, and I\u2019ve shared this with you all from about three weeks into it, from a personal — deeply affectedly personal — standpoint. You… I say “you.”<\/p>\n
I have to go various places for medical treatment, and everyplace I go is a ghost town. And you drive by some places, cities, whole cities are shut down, and behind every shutdown business there is a human story. It could be somebody\u2019s lifelong dream. It could be somebody decided to go into business because they had nothing else to do.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a reason behind every business, and every one of them shut down, and every one of them is in the process of being ruined. And as I drove by them, I would see the faces. I don\u2019t know the actual people that owned them, but I would see the faces. It just broke my heart that we were doing this to ourselves.<\/p>\n
And the longer it went on, the more unacceptable it became to me and the more incredible and inexplicable it became to me. And I kept asking, “Do people not realize what\u2019s going on here? How in the world do they expect we\u2019re gonna recover from this if this has no end in sight?” At the time, there was no end in sight to this.<\/p>\n
At the time I\u2019m talking about, they hadn\u2019t even begun to talk about — the president nor anybody had begun to talk about — reopening, and then here came the stories of all the industries that are suffering, and the cattle business was one of them, and the food supply chain.<\/p>\n
And because the penchant of the U.S. media right now is as much apocalyptic reporting as they can come up with, the food chain was destroyed. They were miles and miles… People were lining up in their cars for miles at food banks in Miami and Tuscaloosa and… You never saw the pictures of it.<\/p>\n
You just got the stories. So the picture was painted of Dust Bowl, Depression-era America. And it just infuriated me, and it made me sad. You talk about empathy? I was overflowing. When I saw the stories about the cattle business, the entire meat food supply chain and the trouble that was brewing there? That\u2019s serious, serious stuff.<\/p>\n
And I wondered, “How much of this is explicitly tied to the virus and why?” So we got a partial answer. Some of this has been going on before the virus hit in the cattle business. What\u2019s happening to the oil business? I don\u2019t know that people have been able to hear \u2019cause there been just smothered with news, but the oil business has been trashed.<\/p>\n
And in every one of these instances of a closed business, of a closed industry, of a damaged this or that, you gotta ask, “Who\u2019s benefiting from this?” because somebody is somewhere. You don\u2019t know who, and you don\u2019t know how unless you actively start thinking about it and applying yourself to it.<\/p>\n
You realize okay, this happens for whatever reason. Maybe the shutdown\u2019s valid. But it happened, and then here come the exploiters and people who want to keep it shut down to exploit it, turn it into some sort of advantage either economically or politically — which, okay, fine. Welcome to real life.<\/p>\n
But the number of people that are actually going to be ruined in this process, not just temporarily harmed or temporarily pained. You look at the number of people who are gonna be wiped out (chuckles) and then you look at all the people advocating for it! It\u2019s mind-boggling to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
RUSH: I have been opposed to this shutdown from about three weeks into it. It rubbed me the wrong way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":299275,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n