I list three statements. Tell me who said them.
Who Said What?
A. “Actions must be taken immediately to protect Consumers, combat Illegal Monopolies, and ensure these Corporations are not criminally profiting at the expense of the American People.”
B. Meat packers are “corporate criminals” and Tyson Foods is abusing its “corporate market power and raking in record profits by jacking up meat prices.”
C. Meat packers are using “their position as middlemen to overcharge grocery stores and, ultimately, families.”
Those are three statements from three different politicians.
Given the statements are so similar, any of the three could have said any of them. In fact all three could have said all of them.
The unpleasant answers are A: Warren, B: Biden, C: Trump.
Q: Unpleasant?
A: Yes. Especially for Trump supporters. How else do you describe Trump sounding just like Warren and Biden?
Beef Is Now Political Red Meat
The Wall Street Journal discusses the statements in its commentary Beef Is Now Political Red Meat
President Trump is doing his best Biden-Warren imitation these days, as he tries to shift blame for rising prices. On Friday he ordered his Justice Department to investigate meat-packing companies for driving up the price of beef.
Beef prices have increased 15% over the past 12 months, and Mr. Trump called this “fishy” on social media. He told the DOJ to investigate meat packers for “illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation.” In other words, round up the usual suspects. Memories can be short in these frenzied times, so maybe Mr. Trump has forgotten that Mr. Biden also directed his Justice Department to scrutinize meat packers for anti-competitive behavior.
Readers might want to know the real reasons sirloin prices have shot up. The U.S. cattle herd has been shrinking for years owing to drought and rising costs for ranchers. Meat packers have turned to Mexican cattle to meet Americans’ growing demand for beef. But the Department of Agriculture this spring suspended Mexican cattle imports after the screwworm parasite was detected in herds south of the border.
A winnowed cattle supply has driven up prices. Live cattle prices have soared 24% over the past year, which has compressed meat-packers’ margins. Their profits have fallen, not increased, Mr. President. The Administration’s 50% tariff on Brazil and quotas on Argentinian beef imports also contribute to higher prices.
The real beneficiaries of higher beef prices have been U.S. ranchers, not meat packers. Ranchers have been pressing the Administration to continue its ban on Mexican cattle imports and to use his national-security authority under Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act to restrict beef imports, as if Argentinian steaks endanger the homeland.
Mr. Trump garnered angry moos from ranchers when he proposed last month to increase the quota for Argentinian beef to help lower prices. It was a good idea. Even better: Remove all quotas and tariffs. As Joe Biden learned the hard way, attacking business won’t reduce the price of hamburger.
Sad Reality
Joe Biden never learned anything about the price of food (or the price of anything else).
Neither did Warren, and neither will Trump.
Trump’s Economy Now
The political reality is simple: “It’s Trump’s economy now.”
Trump loved attacking Biden. Now Trump is in the same hot seat, giving the same feeble replies as Biden and Warren.
Consumers saw through Biden’s lies. And Now Trump is telling the exact same lies as Biden.
Spare me the accurate sap about inflation being higher under Biden. It was. So what? Trump ran on a pledge to fix things and didn’t.
Housing is extremely unaffordable and the price of food keeps rising.
Housing may only be fixed by a hard recession. Part of the food problem is Trump’s inane tariff policy drives up the price of fertilizer, farm equipment (via parts, steel, and aluminum tariffs), and the price of food itself.
Labor Supply
The price of food and eating out is also a function of labor supply.
Please recall Trump’s immigration raids at meat packers. The Cult cheered.
ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Do They Do Now?
On July 27, 2025, The New York Times reported ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Do They Do Now?
For more than a decade, Glenn Valley’s production reports had told a story of steady ascendance — new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone. Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska.
“It’s a wipeout,” said Gary Rohwer, the owner. “We’re building back up from ground zero.”
It had been almost three weeks since dozens of federal agents arrived at the factory’s door with a battering ram and a warrant for 107 workers who they said were undocumented immigrants using false identification — part of a wave of workplace raids carried out by the Trump administration this summer.
Rohwer, 84, had always used a federal online system called E-Verify to check whether his employees were eligible to work, and Glenn Valley Foods itself had not been accused of any violations. Rohwer was a registered Republican in a conservative state, but he’d voted for a Democrat for the first time in the 2024 election, in part because of Trump’s treatment of immigrants. Rohwer couldn’t square the government’s accusations of “criminal dishonesty” with the employees he’d known for decades as “salt-of-the-earth, incredible people who helped build this company,” he said.
“I’m still furious about what happened to our people, but we have to keep the machines running,” Rohwer said. “We need more people trained and ready to go.”
“Trained by who?” another manager asked. “We lost every supervisor out there. If you ran a machine or checked temperatures or did anything important, you’re gone.”
Glenn Valley paid well, with an average hourly wage of almost $20 and regular bonuses, but the work was repetitive and demanding. Employees who came mostly from Mexico and Central America stood on a manufacturing line for as much as 10 hours a day, six days a week, and processed hundreds of pounds of meat through dangerous machinery in a cold factory.
Ever since videos of the raid spread across social media, Rohwer had answered dozens of calls from strangers who accused him of “stealing American jobs.” But Nebraska was experiencing a work shortage, with only 66 qualified workers for every 100 positions. Almost every one of the company’s new applicants was also a Hispanic immigrant.
The Homeland Security Department had accused many of the company’s former employees of working under stolen IDs, which E-Verify didn’t always catch if the ID number itself was valid. Rohwer had met with officials after the raid to ask for a better system, and they told him to keep using E-Verify. One agent gave the company a hotline number to call for hiring questions. Hartmann tried it once and waited on hold for 57 minutes before giving up.
“They said the only thing we can do is verify, verify, verify,” Rohwer said.
“But we’re already doing that,” Hartmann said. “How do we avoid ending up in the same situation?”
“They arrested 76, which doesn’t include the ones who were too shaken up to come back,” he said. “How does that happen if you E-Verify and do everything right?”
That’s a free link if you want to read the rest.
What’s the cost of meat packing labor now? What’s the cost of harvesting? What’s the cost of labor at small restaurants?
Trump won’t change, so don’t expect Trump to fix anything. Do expect more Bidenesque excuses as his own policies drive up prices.
Related Posts
November 9, 2025: Trump Labels Those Against Tariffs as “Fools”, Proposes $2,000 to Everyone
Trump proposes another massive wealth redistribution scheme.
Hooray! Free money.
November 10, 2025: Trump Proposes 50-Year Government-Backed Mortgages, I Propose Something Else
The FHA head said the proposal is a “complete game changer.” Yeah right.
November 10, 2025: Consumer Sentiment Drops Again, Current Conditions Hit New Record Low
What’s the matter with these people? Trump says the economy is humming.
“The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under ‘Sleepy Joe Biden,’ and the prices are way down,” he said of his predecessor in remarks to reporters last week.
“We had the greatest economy in the history of our country,” Trump said of his first term in an interview with Norah O’Donnell for CBS’ “60 Minutes” a week ago. “But my second term is blowing it away.”
Hoot of the Day
Trump says he does not want to talk about affordability because it’s great.
Excuse me, but if affordability was great, Trump would not shut up about it.
Instead, he sounds just like Biden. The cult cheers.
TRUMP = BIDEN
Drought explains the price of meat skyrocketing (maybe); it doesn’t explain the cost of all the other food. Especially when food is MUCH cheaper in other countries- and the quality is higher! So the core issue is absolutely price fixing.
Imagine how life would be if Trump wasn’t so modest. Unendurable. He’d be forever boasting about what an incredible job he’s doing instead of the rare occasions where, after trying to deflect the praise, he’s forced to accept credit for another huge success.
Trump could direct the DOJ to begin the process of breaking up the meat packing oligopoly to increase competition and reduce prices. Trump could end tariffs on foreign beef producers to increase competition and reduce prices. Trump could get the beef industry leaders together to determine what changes in federal policies might entice them to grow their herds. Or he could tweet stuff.
He will tweet and then TACO.
It takes about 18 months to get a beef cow to the market. Tariffs have nothing to do with the current outrageous costs of domestic beef, unless you mean that the meatpackers are jacking up the price of domestic beef to equate to foreign beef prices which have to pay a tariff (which the meatpackers can only do because they have monopolistic control of the market and are engaging in anti-competitive behavior). The fact that both sides of the political aisle disagree with you should raise a question in your mind whether you are wrong and there is anti-competitive behavior. Grok thinks you are WRONG.
So Mish here is one for you: Which of the three was last in a grocery store?
Back when Texas was run by real men, they just ran ads in Mexican newspapers for jobs. Come to Texas and work. We have neighborhoods where you can live called Little Mexico. Bring the family. Bring your friends. Hell bring everybody. And they did.
Most highly educated chicks and pigs are anti Trump.
You are completely forgetting that God has chosen Trump. God changed the pathway of the liberal leftwing assassin’s bullet to spare Trump’s life for a reason.
… and the fireman that took the bullet had it coming.
LOL! Awesome.
Satan directed that one.
Actually, it was Satan who changed the path. God chose the assassin for a reason.
Two red meat issues, here. ICE affecting the meat packaging business and the dripping of the Epstein files. There’s a possibility with poc hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, that this Nov crash will be named the Epstein crash … But, then again the elite 8 senators self-entitled to a cool million, do seem to have already been forgotten …
Like targeting the middle man meat packer corporations, it seems that the president and his administration are really doing their best to place controls on the other red meat drip issue.
Maggie and Cargill destroyed Argentina: moo, moo, moo.
Chinese pigs were infected by an African virus. Chicks by contamination. China is buying more beef after the ban was removed. China imported more Chicks/pigs/meat from the US. They ordered less soybean so we can export more. Demand for slaughterhouses workers is high. Rare earth minerals for chicks and pigs.
The African virus – ASFV – is very similar to Classic Swine Fever, which killed pigs like crazy here in the United States. We used to vaccinate 10s of thousands of pigs a year for it. Catching pigs all weekend long was not a fun childhood. The vaccine was not very effective. For me that meant I dragged dead pigs out of barns for hours and stacked them in big piles to be hauled off. And then it all just stopped. The veterinarians of the world and their professors had decided to liberate me. If a pig farmer, entire planet agreed to this, had a single case of Hog Cholera, that’s what we called it, the government killed every single hog on the farm and banned hogs on the farm for several years. It’s amazing what big government can do. For instance, so far they’ve kept ASFV out of U.S.. Good job so far, but now we a total Moe Ron in the Oval Office. Classic Swine Fever disappeared in the USA around 1983. Their goal was to eradicate it. Failed. Still exists in Africa. They did not order less soybean so we could export more. Lol.
Voted dem for the first time. Not a far reach to take those voting records requested. Run them through musks ai computer then target people.
I mean you got trumps housing guy pulling up political enemies mortgage papers.
Arm yourselves.
Not necessary, AGI then shortly thereafter ASI will solve all problems and humans will become extinct overnight. Read about it extinction odds about 80/20 maybe 95/5.
Lots to unpack here Mish but when I speak of the demographic death spiral, the story above is only part of the problem. In addition to not having labor for menial tasks listed above, it also means that there aren’t going to be entrepreneurs to open new meat packing plants to take on the “monopolies” either.
For all the boomers that own businesses right now whether it’s a restaurant, t-shirt shop, car wash, etc, WHO are they going to sell these businesses to?
The only logical outcome is either the shop closes down or it gets sold to a conglomerate which then has monopoly pricing power. We’ve all see what Walmart did to small communities so now imagine PlumbCO buying up all the plumbers, ElectricCO buying up all the electricians and on and on, you get more concentrated giant corp that controls more and more of the labor and supply chain then causes more and more inflation as less and less competition takes hold.
That’s how we ended up with 3 or 4 meat packing companies controlling 80% of the market or 4 airlines controlling 80% of the market. The same thing is coming to a business entity near you and you’ll have no choice but to pay up.
I know how this opera ends and it’s with a fat lady screaming at her lower quality of life. I guess old Rohwer is voting for democrats at the midterms too.
Not sure how this gets fixed and I only know it won’t be fixed in my lifetime so exit strategy is the only way.
The big construction companies here in Dallas are interviewing prospective employees at college campuses. Nerds will soon be getting all the chicks at the redneck bars.
What’s the point of getting a college degree to work in the trades? A few might be entrepreneurs and use that knowledge to start businesses but that will be a small number.
Desperation.
I know a recent college grad, good grades, stable young man living in a major city, after hundreds of applications, now working as a plumber’s apprentice. This young man is not stupid or lazy, I see his future as becoming a journeyman plumber and eventually owning his own plumbing company if he stays with it. The only thing college actually created for him was debt and lost time.
Walmart didn’t do anything to small communities; shoppers did the damage then complained about the downtown deterioration. You’re confusing apples with oranges.
In the good old days, corporations got big, fat, and lazy which left a big opening for more nimble operators with new ideas. But that was long ago.
The statements are all true. Trump saying it dramatizies his utter hypocrisy and pathological lying.
Thank you. The Window Cleaner always tries to “cleanse the doors of perception” in order to expose delusion and enable new paradigms.
If the meat packers are doing anything illegal, the DOJ should look into it. No tweets necessary.
What about looking into Trump requesting record number of foreign workers?
https://thehill.com/business/5603478-trump-organization-foreign-workers-2025/
The Trump Organization requested 184 foreign workers to work across various company properties, a record number that has increased over the years.
The company sought to hire workers through H-2A and H-2B visas for temporary positions at Mar-a-Lago, two golf clubs and at Trump Vineyard Estates in Charlottesville, Va., according to data from the Department of Labor.
Over the course of Trump’s first term and the first nine months of his second term, the Trump Organization’s visa requests increased from 121 in 2021 to 184 in 2025, according to Forbes. Overall, the company has filed to hire 566 foreign laborers, primarily to work as servers, farm workers, kitchen staff, clerks and housekeepers.
Yes he’s hiring foreigners to do jobs that Americans could do, but the difference is they will legal aliens. So MAGA will love it!
Glad I don’t have any cotton to be picked.
To our GOPer friends here, are morals and values secondary to might makes right, as the optics suggest? I have yet to hear anyone outside of Zerohedge complain about how Trump isn’t doing conservatism justice.
Questions to trumphumpers must be sentences containing only words of two syllables or less.