Prime time for the PRIME Act
2020-04-30 · Guest: Thomas Massie (US Representative from Kentucky) · 51:40
Food supply chain fragility and the PRIME Act
Rep. Thomas Massie joins Bob Zadek to discuss the fragility of the American food supply chain and his legislative solution, the PRIME Act. Massie details his transition from a high-tech career at MIT to off-grid farming in Kentucky, the corrupt “pay-to-play” committee structure in Congress, and why current federal regulations are causing mass livestock euthanization while grocery shelves go empty.
Topics: PRIME Act, food shortages, meat processing, USDA regulations, Congressional corruption, national debt, CARES Act, Defense Production Act, livestock farming
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Rep. Thomas Massie
Introduction [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live—yes, I said live—libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. We’re here every Sunday, the show of ideas, 100% of the time, never once the show of attitude. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning, and let me make a prediction: you’re probably listening to this while at home, as I am broadcasting this at home. I just took a wild guess at that.
It is not often—in fact, it is painfully rare—that I get to spend an hour on the air with a guest whom I have followed, respected, encouraged, supported, and rooted for so much of my life. And this morning, I have exactly that opportunity. I’m delighted to welcome to the show this morning for the whole hour Representative Thomas Massie. Thomas represents the 4th Congressional District in Kentucky. He was elected to Congress in 2012 and he is still there.
Congressman Massie—you may remember Congressman Massie—he did the outrageous act a few weeks ago of insisting that Congress—are you sitting down?—actually adhere to the rules of conduct set forth in the Constitution. How outrageous is that? For that, he earned the scorn and snide tweets of many in Congress and indeed in the President. Notwithstanding that, he did insist that Congress follow its constitutional duty and actually vote in person, not anonymously and not from afar, on the first $2 trillion bailout measure. $2 trillion—it’s astonishing, it’s getting to sound like a small number, but it was a sure big number at the time.
Congressman Massie has represented Kentucky, as I said, since 2012 and has a unique perspective on government in general, on how we are behaving during the virus, and he has given us a warning several weeks ago—indeed several months ago, and probably a few years ago—that we are about to suffer a USSR-style food shortage. Get ready for empty supermarket shelves, especially in the meat counter. This is in fact upon us, the early returns are. To share his views with us for the entire hour, I am delighted—if you can accept an understatement—to welcome to the show Representative Thomas Massie. Thomas, welcome to the show this morning.
Thomas Massie: Hey, Bob. The honor is mine to be on your show. I rarely get this much time to explain my positions and my thoughts and my observations in Congress. Usually, they try to limit you to 15-second soundbites on TV, and if they don’t like what you’re saying, they cut your microphone off. So thank you, Bob.
From MIT to the Farm [01:59]
Bob Zadek: Well, Thomas, if you sit there in your seat in Congress and you are concerned people aren’t giving you enough time to talk, you’re on the show this Sunday and you will have the whole hour to say to our audience what you don’t get to say to your colleagues in Congress and to those who sit and watch C-SPAN.
Now, Thomas, you’re of course from Kentucky, and in your early life, you went to MIT, so you were, I guess, a techie or a nerdy or whatever silly label people imposed upon you at that time. And you were quite successful. You started a business, you earned perhaps 29 or so patents. Your business was successful. So there you were living the life, successful at what you chose to do with your life. And then you made a wrong turn, a right turn—the audience will decide, indeed you will decide—when you decided to have a career change and leave business and leave the success and run for Congress.
And I guess the starting question is, as somebody who observes Congress, when you decided to give up that life and the financial security and the comfort and the gratification and run for Congress, I guess the appropriate question is: Thomas, what were you thinking?
Thomas Massie: Well, the short answer is it was a momentary lapse of judgment that encouraged me to get into politics. But the longer answer, which I think your listeners deserve, is that it was out of concern that I got involved in politics. I wasn’t really a political junkie. I was too busy with my business, which was in virtual reality and artificial intelligence, by the way. I tell people now I’m back into artificial intelligence and virtual reality now that I’m in Congress.
But I started there technologically. My wife and I—by the way, she grew up in the same county as me in Kentucky, we were high school sweethearts—we both went to MIT, we started our company together. We did that for 10 years in New England, but we desperately wanted to come back to Kentucky where we both grew up. So after 10 years, we left the tech lifestyle to go low-tech. We bought the farm that she grew up on from her parents. They still live on the farm with us. We raise cattle there.
I decided that I wanted to live a sustainable lifestyle, and my wife was all in for that too. We built our own house all off the grid. We logged our own timbers, cut them with our own sawmill. The house that we live in has been off the grid for 13 years since we built it; it’s never been on the grid. It runs on solar power. I bought a battery out of a wrecked Model S Tesla, I rewired it, and it runs our house. In fact, there’s a rainstorm coming in a bit, and the house will be running off of a Tesla car battery here when the clouds come out.
But we were, you know, living a happy lifestyle, not bothering anybody, minding our own business. And I got drawn into local politics. I actually wrote a letter to the editor. If somebody could go back in history and stop me from submitting that letter to the editor, I can assure you I wouldn’t be in Congress right now. It was the banana peel that I stepped on.
I had written many letters to the editor before that letter, but I’d thrown them all in the trash because I didn’t want to upset my neighbors. And that one I was compelled to submit. It was basically the local government was going to pass a new tax. They were going to tax everybody, but most of our folks are farmers, so the tax was going to go on the farmers and ostensibly it was to fund a conservation office that was giving out grants to their own board members. And I thought, why would we tax farmers, who are the best conservationists in the world, like small farmers, and then give the money to people who are self-interested?
So I fought that, wrote a letter to the editor, inspired people to show up at a town hall type meeting. We stopped the tax. I wrote another letter to the editor when they tried to zone our farm property and say you can only ever farm this property, you can’t build a business on it. And we stopped the zoning in the county. And before you know it, people encouraged me to run for the county executive office, which I did. I got in there, I found waste, fraud, and abuse. I also ticked off a lot of people. I aired all the dirty laundry that I found; I hung it up to dry for everybody to see.
And then our congressman decided not to run for reelection and the people in this county and surrounding counties that knew what I was doing in the county, they encouraged me to run for Congress and I did. And I won. It was a seven-way Republican primary, a very brutal kind of election—baptism by fire, if you will. And then I find myself in Congress. That was in 2012.
The Reality of Congress [09:01]
Bob Zadek: Now, when you decided to run for Congress, what was your—here you are turning your back on what sounds like a pretty idyllic low-tech, wonderful, self-contained lifestyle, surrounded by people who respect you and who listen to you and you’re accomplishing some good. So now you go to Congress. What was your—when you were going to Congress, what was your goal? What were you chafing at the bit to accomplish? What were you hoping to accomplish in Congress?
Thomas Massie: Well, it was a combination of things. I’m in an economically depressed area of Kentucky and I was hoping to bring some prosperity and some hope to our region. Also, you know, when my wife and I moved back to Kentucky from New England, we were sort of trying to avoid big government. And what I found in coming back to our hometowns is that you can’t escape the growth of government. The federal government was growing, the local government was growing, and it was literally diminishing people’s quality of life. And so I realized you can’t hide from government; it just keeps growing. So somebody’s going to have to go and battle it.
And finally—and I know that might sound weird for somebody that’s running for political office to say you’re battling the government—but what I’m battling is the growth of government. There are legitimate roles for government; it’s just gotten way outside of its constitutional boundary. And finally, as soon as I got to Congress, even before I put my wife and kids’ pictures on the wall, I put a debt clock on the wall that’s updated every second. It shows the national debt because I didn’t want to ever forget why I went there. My goal is to basically try and stop the debt from growing.
And my little daughter, when my youngest, when she came to my office the first time, she looked at the debt clock and she said, “So Daddy, when you fix things here, will that go backwards?” And I hadn’t even thought of whether the clock had the ability to go backwards, but here’s a little kid who understood that that’s actually what you need to do—it needs to go backwards, you don’t need to just stop it, you need to get us out of debt. But anyways, so those were my motivations: to bring a better quality of life to the part of Kentucky that I’m from, to reduce the size and scope and the growth of government that is basically diminishing the quality of life for people, and to try and stop this ridiculous growth of debt that’s going to enslave our children.
Bob Zadek: I have just an aside about the debt clock. So every day when you walk into your office, the first thing you see is this visual going up and up and up and up at increasing speed. And that’s how you start your day? That’s like self-flagellation. How could you be in a good mood before you even have your coffee?
Thomas Massie: Well, listen, I suffer that every morning, and so does my staff. It kind of depresses them. So in December, we replaced the debt clock with the Christmas clock, and it goes down—it’s the number of days until Christmas. So there’s a reprieve in December; we go from the debt clock to the Christmas clock.
But the other thing is, you know, you’re besieged by lobbyists and special interest groups a dozen plus times a day who are coming in, and most of them are asking you to spend more money. And if they have to wait in the vestibule or the lobby right outside of my internal office, while they’re waiting, they get to watch that debt clock. And maybe they’ll be a little more reserved in their demands for more money. That’s my hope.
Bob Zadek: Thomas, I’m going to go off-message just for a second because when you describe your debt clock, I’m reminded of—there was a company called Sharper Image that sold, like 10-20 years ago, high-tech sort of toys, devices, stuff like that. And the worst product they ever sold—they had this clock, it was a digital clock, and what you did was when you bought it, you entered about 10 questions: your age, your weight, whether you smoked, whether you drank, about 10 questions. And then you pushed a button and it told you the hour, the day, and the minute you were going to die. And you sat there and you watched it go down every day. And that’s—you have built with that debt clock the functional equivalent of that product, where every day you come to work, sit at your desk, and the first thing you see is when you’re going to die. So that’s what you reminded me of. I’m sorry to go off-message, I couldn’t resist.
Now, Thomas, how long did it take for you to say to yourself, “What have I gotten myself into?” or perhaps, “This is going to be a tad harder than I imagined?”
Thomas Massie: It took 48 hours for my wakeup call. And then—and then don’t let me forget to tell you the story that happened about eight weeks after I got elected. So 48 hours after they hand me the voting card—and by the way, the voting card that I am given belongs to 750,000 people in Kentucky. It doesn’t belong to a caucus, it doesn’t belong to a party, it doesn’t belong to a member of leadership. And I’ve always held that opinion: it belongs to 750,000 people in Kentucky.
But they thought that was kind of a quaint idea when I got there because the second day that I was in Congress and I was voting, I put my card in the machine and I voted no. And I was like, I don’t know, maybe one of five or six noes that day. And a staffer comes over to me and informed me of my mistake. And I said, “Well, ma’am, I meant to vote that way.” And she said, “Well, if you want to know what’s in this bill, come over here to the leadership table and we’ve got a team over here that can explain the bill to you.” And I said, “I read the bill, that’s why I’m voting no.”
And she said—and mind you, this isn’t even another member of Congress, this is a staffer—she told me, she said, “Well, we’re not whipping this vote tonight, so you can vote how you want on this one.” And then she walked away and I was just dumbfounded. I’m like, wow, here’s a 20-something-year-old staffer that just gave me permission to vote how I want on a bill. And that has stuck with me ever since then.
And by the way, another quick anecdote: they say when you get to Congress, you pinch yourself. The ceilings are twice as high in Congress as they are in any other building, and it’s all marble, it’s all mahogany, you know, the doors are immense, they make you feel small. And you pinch yourself and you say, “How did I get here?” And then after about eight weeks, you meet some of your colleagues and you say, “How the hell did they get here?” And that’s where I got to after about eight weeks.
I mean, and so I’d raised a little cane, I had voted against Speaker John Boehner. By the way, he did a fundraiser for me in like September before I was elected in the general, and I joined part of a revolt against John Boehner within a couple weeks of getting to Congress and realizing what a scam it was. And I voted against him.
But there were some lobbyists that felt that I was salvageable. So they asked to have lunch with me in the basement of the Capitol Hill Club. Now, it’s dark and dingy down there, nobody can look in the windows because there are no windows in the basement. There’s a bar, and then you sit at some tables, and it’s usually where you hang out with the lobbyists because we’re not allowed to talk about money in our offices with the lobbyists or political campaigns. So we have to literally walk 20 yards across the street and go into this other building to have those conversations.
So I was down in that basement, I’d been there eight weeks, and my chief of staff was with me and the woman who I had hired to help me raise money in Washington, D.C., she facilitated this meeting. And there were three lobbyists at the table, and it was the medical device industry. And the lobbyist told me, he said, “You know, you’re not like these other congressmen. You’re smart, you’re going places, you could really make a difference here. Your chief of staff, we like him too.” So they puff him up. By the way, he went to MIT, Stanford, and Caltech, my chief of staff. Anyways, and he had invented—he had patents of his own.
And they said, “You know, you’re just wasting your time on this transportation committee and this oversight committee and this science committee. You really need to be on the Ways and Means Committee because that’s the most powerful committee here. And you’ve got what it takes to really make a difference.” And they told me that Paul Ryan was going to be the next chairman of the Ways and Means Committee—by the way, I’d never heard that anywhere, I wondered how they knew that was going to happen. They told me, “You know, there’s always one or two guys here that screw up and they don’t get reelected, so we know there’s going to be a seat on the Ways and Means Committee.” And then he said, “And we’re prepared to raise the money that’s going to be required to get you on that committee.”
And that was an eye-opener to me, Bob. Wow. And I left there— my chief of staff and I walked out of there, I said, “I need to get a shower. That is one of the slimiest meetings I’ve ever been in.” Imagine, you’ve just—if you’re me and you’ve just got to Congress, part of you thinks, “Wow, these guys really recognize talent when they see it,” right? They’re puffing you up, they’re making you feel like Britney Spears, you know, and you’re being recruited by a record label. It’s like, “Wow, they know I can sing.” Anyways, they’d heard me sing before.
Bob Zadek: So it seems to me when you describe those wonderful anecdotes—and the audience, my friends out there, I know are loving these stories—but when you describe them, the picture I get in my brain from your anecdotes is that you are not Thomas Massie. You are just a chess piece who other people move around and you are like a twig in a stream, and you don’t—you’re just a vote. That’s all you are, but you don’t have any brain, or at least that’s how you’re perceived. Am I exaggerating?
Thomas Massie: No, they’re not looking for a few good men—you know, the military said that until it became not politically correct, I guess. They’re looking for a few compliant individuals who are just smart enough to carry their bucket of water. And what—you know, that meeting, after I left that meeting, it caused me to be curious. I found out that you have to give about a million dollars to the Republican Party—and by the way, if you’re on the Democratic side of the aisle, you have to do the same thing—you have to give about a million dollars to get on the Ways and Means Committee.
Now, are you going to go back home to Kentucky and ask somebody to hold a fundraiser for you in their living room and pass the hat and ask for, you know, $50 or $500 checks from your friends and neighbors and then tell them this is to buy my seat on the Ways and Means Committee? I don’t think so. So what you do is you pass the hat with the lobbyists, and then you become, like you said, their twig. And that’s the way it works. You pay to get on these committees. I don’t want to leave your listeners with the impression that you can buy a seat on a committee. You have to rent it. They will not sell it to you. You have no equity in that seat. Every two years, you have to pay that money.
Bob Zadek: You are the last vestige of an at-will employee. They don’t exist anywhere in society except in Congress.
Thomas Massie: That’s right. At-will. And you bet you gotta pay for that honor to be on that committee, gotta stay on the ball and raise the money. And by the way, this is also how the leadership gets control over you because they can put up the bat signal. Let’s say if I were to vote against John Boehner a second time, which I actually did—I didn’t just vote against him, I led the coup with another individual—and what the leadership can do is they call up the lobbyists, they’ve got a bat signal, and they say, “If you want your legislation to be in the next omnibus bill, don’t you dare support Congressman Massie.” And so your fundraising in D.C. goes from 60 to zero in about four seconds. And they can do that to you, and that’s one of the things they do that doesn’t show up in the news.
Bob Zadek: So it’s just a big ritual, it’s a big kabuki play broadcast only on C-SPAN 2 before the eyes of the voting public. Oh my god, that almost sounds creepy. This is Bob Zadek. I’m spending a wonderful hour talking with Congressman Thomas Massie from the 4th Congressional District in Kentucky. When we come back from our 30-second—only 30-second—break, we’re going to discuss Congressman Massie’s accurate prediction about an impending food shortage. But Thomas Massie does not just present us with a problem, he also has a solution. Thomas Massie’s solution is the perfect cure and will open our eyes to the underbelly of the food supply chain in America. When we come back, we’ll also discuss the PPP program and Congressman Massie’s contribution to that. Please stay tuned, there’s lots of inside-the-beltway stuff to follow. We’ll be back in 30 short seconds.
The PRIME Act and the Meat Monopoly [24:35]
Bob Zadek: I’m Bob Zadek broadcasting here every Sunday morning at 8:00. Remember the free speech movement started in Berkeley in the 60s? At Berkeley today, students protest against free speech and picket when a controversial, usually conservative, speaker is scheduled. At other top universities, professors are terrified of their students. The free exchange of all ideas has disappeared. My new book, The Bubble, explores how higher education became America’s most overrated product. Students spend four critical years of their lives in an expensive bubble of indoctrination, and they’re creating a second bubble in the process. Luckily, a small dedicated minority is fighting back against repressive campus speech codes and disinvitation campaigns. Learn how universities have created a bubble within a bubble, a trillion-dollar financial bubble in student loan debt propped up by a bubble that protects from offensive speech. Now some are even suggesting student loan forgiveness. It’s time to burst the bubble. Book now available at BobZadek.com.
Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. This morning, we are spending the entire hour with Congressman Thomas Massie, who represents the 4th Congressional District in Kentucky. Thomas has been in Congress since 2012, and yes, he remains in Congress, and we hope he remains as long as he is generous enough with his time to help us all by staying in Congress.
Now, of course, we are living in these hopefully unusual times created by the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. And one of the many, many, many profound changes of life in America has been—and maybe for the first time since FDR—an impending food shortage. Yes, food shortage. We are not talking about East Germany, we’re not talking about Venezuela, we’re not talking about the USSR, we’re talking about the USA. A food shortage in general and particular with respect to the supply of meat in America. Is America ready for a food shortage? How did the food shortage come about? And what is Congressman Massie’s plan—because he’s got us covered—for correcting the impending food shortage in a permanent way and may relieve us of a huge swath of government regulation?
So Congressman Massie, you have been warning about the impending food shortage from long before the virus. What did you see as happening, and what is about to happen now, vindicating your prediction? And most importantly, what is your cure?
Thomas Massie: Well, by way of introduction, I’m going to tell you a quick story about John Boehner and me on the floor of the House. One day he caught me in the aisle and looked at my shoes and he saw I was wearing cowboy boots on the floor of the House. And he said, “Massie, what’s with the boots?” And I was immediately terrified because that’s what he will do—he used to get in the seat and lecture everybody on dress code if he saw somebody wearing something he didn’t like on the floor of the House. And I thought, “Oh no, everybody’s going to get a lecture because I wore boots.” And then I remembered there’s at least 10 people that wear cowboy boots. I said, “Mr. Speaker, with all due respect, I know at least 10 other members that wear cowboy boots.” He said, “Pfft, they’re from out West. They’re from Arizona, Texas, and Nevada. Massie, you’re from Kentucky.” And I looked at him, I said, “Mr. Speaker, I think I’m the only cowboy here that owns a cow.” And he goes, “Pfft, all right, all right, Massie.”
So you mentioned, you know, I’ve been in Congress for about eight years, but for 16 years, I’ve been raising cattle. And I have identified a problem long ago, and in fact, five years ago, I proposed a solution. I’ve got Democrats, Republicans, and independents in the House and the Senate on this bill because I’ve been predicting this problem. Our food supply is brittle. Now, the farmers are robust and they’re numerous, and the consumers are numerous and the supermarkets are robust and numerous. But we’ve allowed four meatpackers—and one of them’s owned by China and one of them’s owned by Brazil, and the other’s a multinational—we’ve allowed four meatpackers to control 80% of the meat market. Because the farmers take their animals to these slaughterhouses, these giant factory-scale slaughterhouses.
Meanwhile, you’ve got these small local processors that can process beef, but they can only process it if you own the animal. The USDA has regulated them either out of existence in most cases, but in some cases just regulated them out of the supermarket with overregulation. And the big factories love this regulation because it keeps the little guys out. So five years ago, and for every Congress since then, I’ve introduced a bill called the PRIME Act, which stands for Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption. It says that if the farmer lives in the same state as the grocery store and the consumer and the meat processor, then the USDA doesn’t have to be at that meat processor’s facility 24/7.
You see, today you’ve got these small meat processors—of course, they’re inspected by the local health department and they’re subject to surprise inspections by the USDA—but they don’t employ a full-time USDA meat inspector, so they’re not allowed to sell their food in the supermarkets. So my bill says, you know what, as long as it’s local, as long as the consumer can know who the butcher and the farmer were, then they can buy it in the grocery store. And that’s the bill that the country needs right now. Right now.
Bob Zadek: Now, let me just remind our audience or point out to our audience that ever since I think it was 1967, the Wholesome Meat Act, something like that, it has been the law that a beef processor cannot sell the beef that it processes—the product—it cannot sell it unless they have on-site full-time a federal government employee, an inspector. And that has created a huge mouth of the funnel, which means all beef, as you pointed out, from all ranchers and growers of beef and other meat, they have to sell their product to a processor, and only a few processors are large enough to be able to afford all of the regulatory infrastructure. Which means they have through legislation, they have in effect once again created a—not a monopoly, an oligopoly—of only a few.
And small processors cannot simply exist because they can’t afford it. And your solution is to remove that bottleneck and to widen the mouth of the funnel. And to do so through intrastate commerce so as to avoid the reach of the federal government through the regulation of interstate commerce. Now, what is happening—because you pointed this out, Congressman—but tell our urban and suburban listeners, because the rest know, tell us what is happening on the farms with the pigs and the cattle which are ready for market and cannot get to the processor. So we have a demand, a growing demand on the one side, growing supply on the other. What is happening on the ground at the ranchers such as you? What is happening to their meat that’s ready to be slaughtered?
COVID-19 and the Food Supply [33:44]
Thomas Massie: And so this—like a lot of people who don’t farm don’t understand—why can’t you just keep the animal alive and keep feeding it and keep it on your farm? Well, everybody knows like one human year is worth seven dog years, right? Well, with chickens, you measure their lifespan in weeks, okay? So you can’t keep the breeds of chickens that are being raised commercially for meat, you can’t keep them another four weeks. Like, they get broken legs and heart attacks. Like, they are not geared to stay around very long. They’re geared to go end up as chicken wings, okay, or boneless breast. So what you’re seeing is the euthanization of chickens first. That happened first. And then they also—they’re destroying the hatchlings and the eggs because they know if they can’t sell the adult chicken, why should they have young chickens be born? So the farmers have already reacted rationally to the problem.
Now, pigs have a lifespan that’s measured in months, okay, not years, but months. And what’s happened is there’s slaughter-ready hogs—I mean, these hogs are ready to go to the butcher, but there’s not enough processors to butcher them. And so the farmers are shooting the animals and burying them or rendering them, trying to turn them into fuel, but in most cases, in almost all cases, the animals are being wasted. And this is a tragedy.
Now, you haven’t seen this yet in beef cattle because we’re in the summer, okay? Grass grows in the summer, and cattle are marketable, at least the ones that are considered prime, up until about 30 months of age. After that, the USDA has another set of regulations that kick in because mad cow disease has never been discovered in a beef animal less than 30 months old. Once you get over 30 months old, there’s a whole another set of rules that kicks in for these animals if they’re beef cattle. So you’ve got like a wall there too.
And so we’ve seen more—we’ve seen the milk poured out, we’ve seen the chickens killed and wasted, we’re seeing the hogs slaughtered by the thousands and just destroyed this week. And if we don’t do something, you’re going to see the same sort of thing in the cattle market. Because the cattlemen are getting a double whammy: they’re seeing their prices go down at the auction ring because the milk—because the milk demand has changed, the dairymen are selling their dairy cattle into the beef industry at prices far lower than any cattleman could raise a beef steer.
In fact, I went to the processor on Thursday with two of my steers. Okay, I raise cattle, like I said, I’ve only got 60 cattle, but I took two of my steers to the processor. By the way, this was an appointment I made in January to get them butchered in April. That’s how backed up they are. This is a USDA facility, I had to drive three hours to get there. I saw farmers unloading dairy cattle into the beef plant. Now, this is not unusual—this happens—it usually doesn’t happen at this plant, though. This is like a smaller plant. And these weren’t old dairy cattle; these were like productive dairy cattle that still had big milk sacs. Like, they were selling them there.
So in case—this is what’s happening. The only way to relieve this pressure—you used one analogy, here’s another analogy I use: we used to have thousands of bridges to cross to get from the farm to the table. Now we’ve reduced it to four bridges. One of them’s owned by the Chinese, one of them’s owned by Brazil, one’s multinational, and one’s an American company. But they—it’s the oligopoly control these four bridges. Those bridges are crumbling because of COVID.
And I want to talk about the President’s response too, and how that’s not a silver bullet. And there’s still all these smaller bridges. A lot of them have been abandoned or destroyed, but there’s still a lot left. We need to divert traffic—which is these animals—we need to divert that traffic across these smaller bridges. The PRIME Act would do that.
Now, very quickly, the President’s solution has been to use the Defense Production Act. Now, he’s not seizing the means of production. The reason he invoked this is he’s trying to absolve these big companies of liability from their workers. The “Big Four” meatpackers are concerned that if they tell their workers to come to work and because they have a higher incidence of COVID-19 at these factories, the worker might later come back and sue them for telling them to come to work when they knew that they had a high chance of catching COVID at work. So the President is absolving—this is the irony: it says “America First,” but he’s telling American workers they can’t sue the Chinese factory they work in here in the United States. To me, that’s not America First.
Now, we may need some kind of legislation—it shouldn’t be by executive order—we may need some kind of legislation to deal with all the lawsuits that may come after COVID and the courts open up and people that would sue for a hot cup of coffee at McDonald’s, you know, sue over the temperature of the coffee. They’re going to be having all sorts of lawsuits. We might need to change the laws in anticipation of that, but it should cover everybody, not just the multinational corporations. It should cover the hairdresser, it should cover the small meat processor, it should cover the grocery store. And it should be legislative, not executive fiat.
Bob Zadek: I have two comments and two thoughts on what you just explained to us. Number one, you mentioned that your bill, which has been in the hopper for some time, has the support—and your phrase was “Democrats, Republicans, and independent.” Who exactly did you have in mind when you said “independent” other than Bernie Sanders in the Senate? I didn’t know there was such a thing. That’s just a throwaway comment, not looking for a response.
Thomas Massie: No, I would love to respond. The lead sponsor of this bill is Senator Angus King in the Senate. I mean, he’s even got the right name for this bill—Angus King is the lead sponsor. He is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. Now, in the House, Justin Amash is a sponsor. He was an independent; he recently switched to the Libertarian Party. So I guess I’ve got four categories: independents, Libertarians, Republicans, and Democrats.
Overcoming the Lobbyists [40:39]
Bob Zadek: And the second question is more practical. Your bill seems so obvious, I can’t imagine any organized group of people opposing it. I can’t even—I tried to imagine who would be—who would lobby against it. Perhaps the big meatpackers? I guess that’s the answer. But tell us about the opposition, because it seems such an obvious, painless cure to, of all things, a food shortage in America. Who would have thunk it?
Thomas Massie: Okay, so who’s the opposition? Well, there’s a revolving door in Washington, D.C., that everybody knows about between lobbyists and members of Congress, or staff members and lobbyists, right? They go lobby, they come back and they’re staffers, then they go lobby again. And the congressmen do the same thing. But there’s another revolving door with the executive branch. There are congressional staffers who go work at the USDA, then they become lobbyists, and then they come back and work in Congress.
And so the USDA—their power derives from their authority, and they are opposed to the bill. Let’s call it the—if you want to call the USDA the “US-Duh,” this would be the “Deep Duh” is opposed to the bill. And so the money’s against it, the Deep State is against it. And here’s the other surprising thing, Bob: the farm groups that these farmers belong to, right? They pay a membership fee and they go have dinner once a month and they have their meetings with these farm groups that represent them as lobbyists in D.C. When they get to D.C., they lobby against the farmer. They are against the PRIME Act even though all the farmers that belong to that group are for the PRIME Act.
And that’s because so much of their money comes from the meatpackers, or from other lobbying organizations like the corn growers, who have a vested interest in seeing the cattlemen get only cheap prices for their calves. By the way, these are the same people that lobbied to—they say they’re for food safety, but they lobbied to get rid of Country of Origin Labeling on beef and pork in 2015 and were successful. So now, when you go to the supermarket, when you buy your fish, it tells you what country it came from. When you buy your vegetables, you know what country it came from. In fact, if you buy an iPhone or a set of shoes or a suit or some tools or a car, they’re all labeled with Country of Origin Labeling. But guess what isn’t? Beef and pork. No longer labeled because the lobbyists got that passed.
Taking Action [43:25]
Bob Zadek: Now, it seems to me that since your bill is designed to benefit consumers by supplying—by maintaining—a source of supply of food, kind of goes in the list of necessaries in life, isn’t this a classic case of where voters—us—can influence the success of your bill by insisting that our representatives or senators support the legislation? Isn’t this a classic case—it’s like there are more tenants than landlords—there are more food buyers than those people who benefit? And maybe it’s a case of dispersed benefits in a small amount and concentrated—dispersed costs over the whole voting population and concentrated benefits in those people who are lobbying against you. But this is a classic case where our listeners and their friends can influence this by insisting their elected officials support the legislation because it’s good for all Americans. Isn’t this the classic case when that ought to work?
Thomas Massie: This is the case. And I know people at home are saying, “My congressman never listens to me,” or they’re saying, “I’m a conservative and she’s a liberal and she wouldn’t ever respond to me.” I’ll tell you what: these congressmen, more than anything, they desperately want to get reelected. And when they’re staring down hungry constituents, when they have to watch on the news animals being slaughtered, when they’ve got farmers going broke, now you have leverage here, and the general public has leverage here.
And I would encourage you not to send an email, not to write a letter—I don’t even care if you’ve got the best penmanship in the world, don’t write a letter. Certainly don’t send a fax. What you need to do, and this is easier than even any of those things that I mentioned, pick up the phone and make three phone calls. Don’t make four phone calls, don’t make two phone calls, make three phone calls. Everybody listening to your show has three people to contact in Washington, D.C. They all have two U.S. senators. Both of those U.S. senators work for you. And you all have one U.S. representative. That U.S. representative works for you.
Do not bother calling anybody else. If they take your call, they’re not even going to write it down, the staffer that takes it, because those other ones don’t work for you. And I know you say, “Yeah, but what they do affects me, so they should listen to me.” Well, good luck with that. They’re not going to listen to you. But the three that will are your two U.S. senators and your one U.S. representative. Call them. Don’t @ them on Twitter—that does not count as constituent feedback, okay? Don’t make a Facebook comment. Pick up the phone and call them.
That’s my advice. I’ve been on the floor of the House of Representatives when people turn to me and say, “How are you voting on this?” and I say, “Well, I see the pluses, I see the minuses,” and they say, “Well, I got 100 phone calls against this bill, I’m not voting for it,” or “I got, you know, 50 phone calls for this bill, I’m going to vote for it.” It’s literally tens of phone calls make a difference. It doesn’t take thousands.
Bob Zadek: I would suggest also, if you want something a bit more graphic, just take those three elected officials of yours and mail to them—even Federal Express—a hamburger bun with no hamburger in it and say, “You’re my elected official, put a hamburger between these two pieces of the bun.” They’ll get the message. So I think that might be more effective, Thomas, and quite graphic and visual.
Thomas Massie: “Where’s the beef? Pass the PRIME Act.” Yeah, write it right on a little sheet of paper and stick it between the buns. “Where’s the beef? Pass the PRIME Act.” I love your idea.
Bob Zadek: See that? I have a future in politics, Thomas. And to all of our friends out there, you have homework when you put down your device and finish listening to my conversation with Thomas: either send a hamburger bun to your elected official or call them and tell them to help get the PRIME Act passed.
The CARES Act and the Quorum [47:41]
Bob Zadek: Now, Thomas, we are running out of time. I want you to offer a few thoughts if you may—because you were so involved and such headline-grabbing in the first $2 trillion—as I said, it’s starting to seem like a low number—the first $2 trillion installment on the bailout and the so-called Paycheck Protection Act. And your opinion of the Act—and remember we only have a couple of minutes left—and how Congress has missed the boat or not.
Thomas Massie: First and foremost, a lot of people said I was trying to delay the vote or stop the vote or stop the bill. One person can’t do that. That wasn’t my goal. One person could delay it, but what I did is told everybody a day in advance what I was going to do, which was to note the absence of a quorum if they didn’t have a quorum there. Because, you know, Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution says Congress has to have a quorum to do business. So all I demanded on March 27th was that we follow the Constitution.
And once everybody showed up, the second thing I asked for was a recorded vote. They refused to take a recorded vote. I don’t care if you’re for this bill or against this bill, you should go on the record. That’s your one duty. And so—you haven’t given me enough time to talk about what’s wrong with the bill—but we’re sending checks to dead people. Like, electronic transfers to any dead person that still has a shared account with a survivor.
But it’s not the $1,200 checks to the dead people that concern me, it’s the $10 million checks to “small businesses” that are publicly traded companies that pay their executives a million dollars a year. Like, there’s been such a rush to get this money out of the Treasury—even though there’s not money in the Treasury—to get virtual money out of the Treasury and into the hands of the people that all the normal checks and balances have been suspended.
And we’re going to look back at this and the waste, fraud, and abuse of this program is just going to dwarf all waste, fraud, and abuse that preceded it. It’s just crazy. And it’s a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the super-wealthy. I mean, you’re going to get—your average family might get $3,000, but if you do the math, the average family’s on the hook for $60,000 in this bill. Take the $6 trillion and divide it by 100 million families. That’s $60,000 apiece. You all are getting 5% of your money back. I’m not talking about 105% like a 401(k), 5%. They’re taking 95% of your money and distributing it to corporations and bankers. That’s my problem with the bill.
Closing Remarks [50:33]
Bob Zadek: Thomas, I hate to interrupt, but we’re going to run out of time. I would like to close by saying: you have about the world’s worst job, but please don’t ever quit and don’t ever resign. Please sacrifice yourself and your happiness because we all are profound beneficiaries. Thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time. Your insights are very special and unique, and I urge our friends out there to do all they can to help you to get your legislation passed and keep you in Congress. You are essential to the freedom and the liberty of all of us and our listeners. So thank you so much, Thomas, for giving us an hour of your time and for what you have done in Congress.
Thomas Massie: It’s been an honor to be on your show, Bob. I’m going to go back to raising some beef cattle here.
Bob Zadek: Oh, thank you so much, and good luck in the primary, Thomas.
Thomas Massie: Thank you.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much for listening. I’ll be back again next Sunday, sure as anything, with another hour of ideas, not attitude.