CLAY: Jen Psaki, Buck. Every day there’s something it feels like that’s more absurd that comes out of her White House press briefing. But yesterday… We know inflation is running at levels we haven’t seen since 1982. It’s 6.8% right now, and that’s not 6.8% on everything, right? The impact of everything is different on gas versus used cars on what you may be paying for meat at your grocery store.
And Jen Psaki blamed “corporate greed.” I’m not even making this up! Corporate greed. Now, I know a little bit of something about the meat packing industry, and I’ll explain it in a minute. But first here’s Jen Psaki yesterday. The reason why your meat is expensive right now is because corporations are greedy. Listen.
PSAKI: The president thinks the way people across the country, American families digest inflation is by price increases. So, for example, the president, secretary of agriculture, have both spoken to what we’ve seen as the greed of meat conglomerates. That is an area, one where people go to the grocery store and they’re trying to buy a pound of meat, two pounds of meat, 10 pounds of meat, the prices are higher. That is, in his view, uh, and the view of our secretary of agriculture because of… (sputters) You could call it corporate greed, sure. You could call it, uh, jacking up prices during a pandemic. So I would say there’s some areas where we have seen corporations, uh, benefit, profit from the pandemic.
BUCK: You know how we always say, Clay, that there’s not even a 101-level econ understanding in much of this White House. This is a perfect example of that. But beyond it, it’s like El Generalisima Psaki here. This is straight out of Maduro’s Venezuela playbook. This is what you hear in socialist regimes when there’s inflation, and then they usually institute price controls which makes everything even worse because that results in shortages.
This is the downward spiral of Venezuela. They had inflation, then they instituted price controls, then they had seizures of assets — private assets — by the government, ’cause they’re gonna run it better. They’ll take better care of it. This is what happened in a country that eventually not only collapsed into crime, chaos, and anarchy but you also had the so-called Maduro Diet with people being malnourished and underfed and losing 15 to 20 pounds a year.
So Jen Psaki here is straight-up taking a page out of the Marxist dictator playbook with meat prices are high because of corporate greed. Unless there’s meat price collusion that we need to know about — the proper usage of term collusion, unlike what we had with Russia — she’s just spewing nonsense, and it’s really Marxist claptrap, and we all should know that.
CLAY: Couple of things. One, I don’t know if you read it, ’cause we hadn’t talked about. Fabulous… I believe it was a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday about the collapse of Venezuela and how Venezuela happened. If you are interested in any way to see, because Venezuela used to be — of the Latin-American countries — the gold standard for democracy, success; for capitalism thriving relative to Latin-American ideals.
To see that country collapse, the thesis that was written about I thought quite well in the Wall Street Journal article was that effectively Venezuela allowed itself to be taken over by Cuba. Maduro and the Castros and everybody else in Cuba, they became such incredible partners. And I’m using the word “incredible” in the unbelievable context; not in the “oh, this is awesome” context, that Venezuela economic policies and procedures ended up mirroring Cuban economic policies.
And as Cuba collapsed, Venezuela did as well and they opened with the story of tanker fuel which Venezuela produces or used to produce a ton of oil, and they were sending it to Cuba, and they didn’t have enough oil to be able to get it to all their people because the government collapsed. But on the meat packing specifically, Buck — and I’d encourage people to read that article on Venezuela.
That’s why so many Venezuelans in South Florida in particular supported Trump and Republicans, because they’re terrified of what you just talked about, Buck, which is stupid arguments like Jen Psaki’s making. My father-in-law — step-father-in-law, to be accurate — owns a meat-packing plant in Michigan. I tweeted a little bit about this on Thanksgiving. He and my mother-in-law were with us for Thanksgiving, and he said, “Clay,” ’cause he knows.
It’s amazing to walk through these meat-packing plants to see all the materials, all the amazing things you have to do in order to comply with government regulations in a meat-packing plant. So walking around, I’m kind of intrigued by the business and the cost structure and everything else. He said, “I just want you to see this email. This is how much I’m having to pay before I even process the meat and everything else when it arrives at my facility.”
The overall cost structure — because of inflation and because of supply chain shortages and because of the covid insanity in America — has sent all these meat prices higher, and his overall cost is up substantially. So what does he do? He passes it on to the customer and the grocery stores that take his product because if he didn’t, he would go bankrupt. (laughs) That’s the essence of capitalism!
BUCK: This is exactly… So a couple things here. One is, the Biden regime — and increasingly I think everyone understands that that is a good word to use for them. The Biden regime is having to defy in their public statements, in their talking points the basic laws of economics now on a regular basis. We’re gonna spend more money, they say, with Build Back Better, and that will make inflation better. We’re going to spend trillions to the $29 trillion in debt and inflation will go down?
My friends, on the economy, the Democrats are the arsonists that are telling you, “We’re gonna put the fire out on your house by throwing gasoline on it,” and when you look at them like they’re crazy, they think you’re nuts. You mentioned what’s going on in Venezuela. That’s such an interesting case study because, yes, it was bad policies, bad decision-making by the people in charge. Venezuela has more crude oil reserve than Saudi Arabia. People often don’t know that.
CLAY: It’s crazy, right? I didn’t realize that.
BUCK: Yeah. The highest proven reserves in the world — and it’s often at a higher quality, too, Venezuelan crude, than you get in a lot of major oil producers. It was a pretty well-off country before Marxism came. Marxism is like a plague of locusts that has just moved all around Latin America and just destroyed everything. And anyplace that hasn’t been hit by it, some demagogues will come into power…
This might start to give you a little tingle about what’s going on in America. “We’re just gonna redistribute the wealth! We’re just gonna have the rich people pay their fair share,” and then the plague of locusts devours everything, and they blame the Yankee imperialists or whatever. This is the playbook out of Venezuela, out of Cuba, out of Central America, name a place.
A lot of Latin-American countries now in South America are actually trending in this direction, too. Look at a country like Argentina. Economic basket case, right? Why? Marxism. The basics of economics — this is all bringing it back to Biden — apply even in the face of “social justice,” even in the face of “pay your fair share.” They hope that they can just use the propaganda to get around the reality, Clay, and that’s gonna be the whole game plan for next year. I start to worry — and some people are pointing this out. You know how we see the terrible poll numbers that Biden has and all these things?
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: They won’t accept repudiation. They’re not gonna change but they’re also not gonna go quietly into the night in terms of giving up power. So what are they gonna do, my friends? Think about that long and hard right now. What are Democrats willing to do next year to prevent Republicans from pushing them out of elected office and power all across the country? And you start to see, it’s gonna get ugly, right? Right now, it feels like our side is winning, Clay. Reality is winning. But they’re gonna try to defy reality.
CLAY: There’s no doubt. And, by the way, on the Venezuela front, Rush used to spend a lot of timing talking about it as a perfect representation of what happens when socialism takes over. And that’s why those Venezuelans who are in America, they actually know what happens when you gave when you give up your country to the left wing and allow them to destroy capitalism.
BUCK: And I would tell anybody, “Look at the receipts,” so to speak. You can read in the New York Times pretty pro-Chavez editorials stretching back a decade. So we’re not even talking about, “Oh, go back 30 years and read what people were saying.” In 2011, 2012, they were writing about Chavez in Venezuela, “He’s got the social justice and…” Nope. Total disaster. So the commies at the New York Times were supporting that then.