Daily Take: A Brazilian Meat Billionaire Walked Into Trump’s Oval Office. What Happened Next Should Terrify Us All…

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1:00A meat billionaire walked into Trump's double office and what happened next should terrify us all. And Monday's New York Times, Eric Schlosser, the guy who freaked out a nation with this book Fast Food Nation at quarter century ago. Published an article that kicks off of the simple observation. If you buy a t-shirt at the Gap, Federal Law requires a label that tells you where it was made and what it's made of. While the same is true for your car, your refrigerator, your television and every apple and bag of frozen peas in the supermarket. As a result of lobbyists being able to buy politicians in America, beef and pork are the exceptions. Which is why Schlosser argues that Donald Trump could sign a one-man presidential proclamation, allowing roughly 660 million pounds of foreign beef to enter America with either inspection nor the usual 26.4% out of quoted tariff. If Americans knew where this mystery meat was coming from, they did not want to eat it, Schlosser notes. But Trump is apparently making sure we'll never know.

2:00Ironically, the same morning Schlosser was warning us about the incoming meat. Axios reported that the FDA just hit a record 19 simultaneous foodborne illness outbreak investigations, covering everything from infant formula to jalapenos. A Cornell economist told him the American food safety system has, quote, gotten hit so hard over the last year and a half. This is quite simply what happens when you turn a nation's food supply over to its oligarchs and shut down the regulations that protect average consumers. Schlosser says much of the beef that will be coming into the US could be small chunks that have been frozen for years overseas, blended here with fattier American meat and massive industrial grinders. Trump refuses to tell us where the meat is coming from and his agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, a former right-wing propagandist and fundamentalist Christian evangelist with no food safety background whatsoever, says she's not privy to that information. Meanwhile, Schlosser pointed out that Uruguayan beef was recently found tainted with an al-Wod anti-paracidic drug.

3:04Argentine beef has repeatedly tested positive for a band-ion antibiotic that can cause nerve damage. And in 2017, Brazilian federal police raided nearly 200 meat-packing plants over allegations that inspectors and politicians had been bribed to allow rotten meat, chemically treated to mask the smell, to be sold to schools, and hospitals, and exported abroad. Will your next burger come from one of these countries? We have some clues. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that on August 20, Josli Batista, the Brazilian billionaire who controls JBS, the largest meat-packer on Earth, met privately with Trump in the Oval Office, and made the case for dropping the tariff on Brazilian beef. Haberman and Swan reported in their book the Batista's long-time friendship with Melania Trump helped make Trump's meeting with Batista happen. The next day Trump announced his Bring in the Meat Plan on his Nazi-infested social media site his proclamation dropped the entire 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef into the other countries

4:08category, which Brazil dominates. This is the same guy who, along with his brother in 2017, confessed to bribing roughly 1800 Brazilian officials to not examine their meat products. Trump's own first-term SEC and justice department find them in their companies $280 million dollars under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, in part for using bribes to finance their takeover of the American Chicken Giant Pilgrims Pride. The SEC called their conduct a profound failure of corporate governance and had blocked JBS from listing the New York Stock Exchange for nearly a decade. Then Pilgrims Pride wrote a $5 million check to Trump Trump's 2025 inauguration, the single largest corporate donation five times what Amazon or Meta gave, and Trump suspended enforcement against JBS of the Corrupt Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Two days after the donation became public, Trump's SEC also approved the stock market listing, and JBS began trading on the NYC last June. Now the company's co-owner walks into the

5:09Oval Office and walks out with a terrif holiday on a prodigous company's sells. Senator Elizabeth Warren has been asking pointed questions about the entire sort of deal for over a year. I spent a couple of decades doing international relief work, living and working in some of the roughest and poorest parts of the world. I was rarely worried about crime. Very poor communities tend to police themselves, and they're especially protective of the relief workers who show up to help. What I worried about constantly though is that I'd eat something that would rip apart my guts or leave me with a brainwarm. That worry was foreign to me most of my life because I'd grown up in an America that had been so horrified by Uptancing Clare's novel The Jungle in 1906, that we built an entire system to keep our food clean. And every president from Teddy Roosevelt to FDR to Eisenhower, Kennedy Johnson, Nixon Ford, Carter Reagan, Bush Clinton, Bush Obama, and Biden took care to keep running smoothly and efficiently. I'd spent my whole life simply assuming that the food on my plate wouldn't hurt me. Now, much the way I used to look at a plate of food in South Sudan

6:13or in the body of his Bogota, I can no longer make that assumption. And neither can you. When Uptancing Clare's novel exposed the Chicago Packing Houses in 1906, Teddy Roosevelt sent in his own investigators with much fanfare from the newspapers. They found that Sinclair's descriptions were, if anything, conservative, and TRU's Inspector's report is a moral bludgeon to force the Packers to accept federal meat inspectors on the Killing Floor. The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, both signed by him the same day, gave us the USDA inspection system and eventually the FDA. Exactly a century and two years later, in 2008, Congress added mandatory country of origin labels for meat. Then in 2010, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized bribery of our national politicians and judges. The Meat Packers lobby swarmed DC, and in December 2015, Congress quietly repealed the labels for beef and pork by tucking that repeal into a 2000-page omnibus spending bill. Chikkin and Lam still carry the label,

7:18but your hamburger doesn't. The mystery and mystery made was purchased by the industry a decade ago, setting up Trump's desperate effort to lower beef costs and screw our ranchers before the election. And then there's Bob Kennedy, the man who promised to make America healthy again. In April of last year, he announced 10,000 layoffs across federal health agencies, including 3,500 at the FDA. The Associated Press reported that the fired staff included both the lab scientists who test food samples for contamination and the communication specialists whose job is to alert us the public to food safety recalls. Now Bob's FDA budget wants to shift routine food inspections away from the feds and onto the states, all while cutting the agency's field laboratory operations by more than half. And he's trying to pull this off at the same time that, under Republican Congress, the federal grants the pay for state inspections today are facing cuts approaching 60%. The result of all this Reagan-S deregulation are already measurable.

8:19While in 2004, the FDA identified the source of 77% of the outbreaks it investigated in 2005 that fell to a shocking 36%. This was an agency that had only had 443 food inspectors for 366. 6,600 facilities before the cuts began. And then there's the rule that would have made it possible for the remaining federal regulators to trace contaminated lettuce or eggs back to their source in hours and set of weeks. Congress wrote it in a law in 2011. The FDA finished it as a rule to be implemented in 2022, and it was set to automatically take effect this past January. But after the grocery lobby complained and presumably made some well-placed donations to Republican politicians, Kennedy's FDA pushed that rule back 30 months to July of 2028. And Republicans in Congress then threw in a rider the barred the agency from spending even a single dollar to enforce it before them. You can see the consequences in the official numbers, which are certainly an undercount,

9:21as they represent only reported cases. As of last week, the cycle of spora outbreak I wrote about in July has grown to more than 18,000 confirmed cases in 49 states with 990 hospitalizations and two deaths. And it's not just pathogens living organisms that the FDA and EPA are supposed to be monitoring to keep our food supply safe. Last week, the AP reported that Trump has stalled for nearly two years in EPA investigation into which industries are dumping toxic PFAS forever chemicals into our rivers and streams, and how much of the treated sluaged sludge containing PFAS is ends up spread as fertilizer on our farms and thus gets into our food supply. Welcome to the result of 45 years of Republican deregulation based on claims that government is the problem and the market knows best. When your TV fails, you buy another television, but under Trump and Kennedy, when the system keeps your food clean fails, your kid simply ends up in the hospital. People living in the richest country and the history of the world should be

10:23confident their food is safe, and for most of the last century we were. Every president of both parties starting with Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 understood that and worked to make it real. But now it appears that Trump and Kennedy have decided that the patista brothers' profits and Republican's ability to claim lower grocery prices in time for the election matter more than our kids' health. So it's time to call our senators and representatives at 202-224-31-21 and tell them to restore a mandatory country of origin labeling for beef and pork, reverse the FDA's food safety cuts and fund the traceability rule now rather than in 2028. And please share this piece at support the independent work we do every day at HartmanReport.com.

11:25And here we forgot that the milk would not betray us, that the meat would not make us sick. That someone stood between our children and the poison and the greed. A promise written after people learned what happens when money gets to feed. Now the inspectors disappear, the labels disappear too, and the men who write the rules answer to someone else. Not you. Should you be afraid of what's on your dinner plate, when the people meant to guard you are driven from the gate, when a billionaire buys access who pays the final price, your child should never be the wager.

12:27When somebody rolls the dice. We learned there's ones from the jungle, we saw what greed could do, so generations built a fortress between the killing floor and you. Now they call that a wall of burden, they call protection waste, but you can't deregulate a pathogen, you can't bargain with what's elased. This isn't left, this isn't right, this the food your family eats tonight and freedom doesn't mean a damn thing if you have no right to know who grew it, who killed it, who inspected it, and who got paid to look the other way. Should you be afraid of what's on your dinner plate, when profit gets protected and protection comes to late,

13:31they can hide the name, they can hide the source, they can sell the law to the highest bidder of course, but there are some things a country must never sell, the water, the food, the truth, our children's lives, not for money, not for power, not for anyone.