THE MEAT SHORTAGE WAS FAKE
The Hartmann Report
Thom Hartmann
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2020
⏱️ 58 minutes
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Summary
Did America just get manipulated by the meat industry with a fake shortage scare that led to protection from legal liability and stay-at-home orders? If there was a meat shortage, why were we exporting so much meat to China?
Food and Water Watch's Tony Corbo is on the line with Thom- why has Trump's trade agreement with China opened the door for the United States to import chicken meat from China?- and could this lead to low-wage Chinese factory workers processing American chickens and sending them back?
And Caroline Henderson of Greenpeace USA has watched this president systematically take apart environmental regulations- she joins Thom to explain why on June 4th Trump instructed federal agencies to bypass environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act, and to ignore the economic benefit of protecting health. Is Trump's environmental agenda ultimately racist?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Tom Hartman program. |
| 0:15.0 | Well, it turns out it was all fake. |
| 0:19.0 | Meat shortage, that is. |
| 0:22.0 | It was all fake seriously the headline over at raw story |
| 0:26.9 | com it was a fake meat shortage the reality is and there's pieces of in today in the |
| 0:31.5 | New York Times and the wash and USA Today, today, pointing this out that the industry, when the meat industry, first of all you had COVID discovered in a bunch of packing plants. |
| 0:43.2 | Smithfield was at the top of that list. |
| 0:45.2 | Smithfield is the largest pork producer in the United States. |
| 0:48.2 | They are owned by the Chinese. Let that sink in for a minute. |
| 0:55.0 | And during the month of April, in the United States, we shipped 129,000 tons of pork to China. |
| 1:10.0 | So we get the infections. |
| 1:15.0 | The Chinese company that owns Smithfield gets the profit. |
| 1:20.0 | The profit doesn't even go to the United States. |
| 1:24.0 | We get the infections, we get to pay for the hospitalizations, |
| 1:28.0 | we have our people die, and China gets 129,000 tons of pork in just one month, just the month of April, |
| 1:38.0 | when this was just like exploding. |
| 1:40.0 | And so word gets out about the meat packing plants. I think probably, you know, |
| 1:47.2 | credit where credits do. Rachel Maddo really was the one who broke this story in |
| 1:50.6 | a big way over on MS ABC, the meat processing industry immediately started issuing |
| 1:58.6 | press releases saying there's going to be a meat shortage. Which freaked people out. |
| 2:03.5 | Wendy's was like, oh my God, you know, |
| 2:05.5 | we're going to have to dial back on burgers. |
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