May 5, 2026 • 31 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's that time, time, time, time, Luck and Lude. Michael
Very Show is on the air right now.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
There's a lot of fallacies about Latinos and we want.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
To clear that up. Oh yeah, like like what, officer, Well,
first of all, not every single Latino is Mexican. I'm
glad you noticed different kind of Mexicans. Puerto Rican Mexicans,
Rob Mexican, the Minican Mexican.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I knew nothing of Mexican culture. I'm originally from the Midwest.
I moved to Los Angeles like Sinko DeMaio.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
I didn't even know what it was. My neighbor's Mexican.
I asked him.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I mean in Midwest, we call it Tuesday, you know.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I asked him. I go, what is it?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
He goes, it's our Independence Day. I go, who'd you beat?
He goes the French. I'm like, well, who didn't you know?
I don't know if it's something to get quite this
wound up about Hose, but.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
If Martin readers or half Pride, I'm all the actors,
let go to.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Bankok Sank book, Sank Book, Thank Cook.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
The French forces in the Battle of Puebla back in
eighteen sixty two. It's also an excuse to drink tequila
on a Monday morning.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
At work for Lewis.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
President Obama will mark the holiday with a reception at
the White House. You have to drink the whole thing
and eat the worm. I wanted to take a moment
right here because on Monday, think of the mile Way
too early made sarcastic references to the way some Americans
celebrate the holiday, and it was not our intention to
be disrespectful, and we sincerely apologize for those references. You know,
after twenty years in this business, anyone who knows me
(01:52):
knows where I stand on diversity and inclusion.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
So to those I let down.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Or feel betrayed, I hear you, and I'm sorry. We
want to go over to Lewis now, but look at
the stories in the cour of this morning, and I
know you are contrite.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
As well, Thomas.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
I want to express my sincere apologies as well.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
I truly was never my intention to offend anyone, and
if I did it, and I know I did, I'm
very sorry. You know, when you spend all your time
worrying about offending someone else, nothing great ever gets done.
(02:29):
When all you care about is offending other people, there
comes a point in your life where you grow up
and you understand it's not my choice whether you're offended
or not. It's your choice. We choose whether we're offended
or not. You know that cool black guy at work
(02:50):
who never gets bothered and he laughs along at your jokes,
and then he gives one back. He's got white people
joke too. He's got Mexican jokes, or the Hispanic that's
got Mexican jokes and white people jokes and black people jokes.
And y'all are friends, so you joke with each other
because that's what adults do. They kid each other right
(03:15):
the way we kid our wives, and they kid us
back the way we joke with our kids about being kids,
and they joke with us about being adults. You know,
like when my boys who are black, tell me, Dad,
you're not white, you're peach, and I no, i'm not.
I'm white, and they pull out a sheet of paper
and go, that's white and put up next to my skin.
All right, you're right on peach. But do I have
(03:37):
to call myself a peach? If I say you're black,
I'm peach. Yeah, you have to say you're peach. And
we all laugh because funny, because laughter's good. You choose
to laugh, you choose to be offended. Oh, and there
will be people offended today. They will be careers lost
over what should have been fun Today is the fifth
(03:58):
of May, known as Sinco to Mayo, and I went
through the whole history this morning. I want. It's not
Mexican Independence Day, not that it matters. It's a day
that in the little town of Puebla from which we
get a poblano, a person or pepper from Puebla, that
they defeated the French who had loaned them a bunch
(04:19):
of money and they weren't paying it back, so they
said we'll fight it out, and they managed to win.
They won the battle, they lost to war. But me
that as it may, it was a cause for celebration,
wasn't really a big deal till years later in Texas
they began celebrating that battle, which wasn't really such a
(04:39):
big deal, but it became a bigger deal. And when Corona,
especially in the eighties, wanted to promote a Mexican beer Corona,
they led the charge for this big national celebration of
Cinco to Mayo. So it's really a half assed made
(04:59):
of up holiday to push Mexican beer and Mexican food
and having fun and drinking. And guess what, there's nothing
wrong with that. You know, we need occasions. We need
occasions to give us the excuse, to give us a license,
to give us an okay, and not to sound like
(05:21):
a therapist, but to allow ourselves to have fun. A
lot of people move from big event to big event,
occasion to occasion because they don't know how to just
have fun on a Tuesday night unless it's a big occasion,
then they will allow themselves to have fun. I got
(05:42):
a friend named Matt Brice. He owned six restaurants in
Houston called Federal American Grill. I called him on Saturday
morning ten o'clock. I said, how are you looking for today?
How'd you do last night? Last night was good, but
today we're going to kill it. Why every restaurant fully
booked for Kentucky Derby. Ah, it's Derby Day. I forgot.
(06:05):
People love to dress up and go out and you
may not, but there are other people who do. It's
a upper middle class, professional class thing to do to
dress up in your Derby clothes. And men and women,
especially women know they buy their hats and it's an
excuse to do that. It's a fun thing. And because
(06:27):
it is a holiday, or because it is a big
day and everyone else is in on it, they will
do that. You know, you create these event type things
and they drive people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't.
So in Texas, especially, Sinko Demo is a big day.
The tex Mex restaurants in Texas today will have a
(06:51):
Christmas in May. This will be as big as the
Super Bowl in liquor sales, in beer cells, It'll be marger,
some beers, and it will be a big, big deal.
I have been frustrated with the Trump administration that it
feels like they're not paying attention to the things that
matter to voters. We've got a midterm coming up in November.
(07:14):
The war in Iran is not going to win us
any voters. Whether you think it's the right thing to
do or not as up to you. But it's not
winning US voters. It's costing us voters. And this is
a president who's been focused not on war but on
domestic affairs. And we've got inflation, we've got high gas prices,
we've got people frustrated, and it feels like it feels
(07:37):
like the president's not as focused as he has been,
and I think he's mindful of that, and that's why
you see the measure coming out today with the Department
of Agriculture, Brooke Rowlins, the secretary, talking about the fact
that we have eighty five percent of the nation's cattle
processing in the hands of four companies and charging them
(08:00):
that they are price fixing. Whatever comes of this, you
are now telling the American consumer, especially housewives who buy
the meat for the family, Okay, we're mindful that you're
paying too much for beef. That's the thought. We're going
to make sure the law is being followed. There are
only two nationally syndicated talkcoasts out of Houston, my good
(08:24):
friend Jesse Kelly and our show. And so now that's
not true. Walton and Johnson is based out of Houston,
but they are Gulf Coast syndicated and they've got a
lot of affiliates. That wasn't a flex That was a
way of saying that most of the national shows historically
(08:44):
have been based in New York. And then when Rush
left New York for Palm Beach, it kind of gave
license to saying all right, they don't all have to
be based in New York. Let me just drop that
whole subject. What I was trying to say was, I
I figure a lot of people listen to our show
(09:06):
across the country who have never been to Texas or
haven't spent much time in Texas. And I like to
share things about Texas, regional delicacies, prejudices, biases, loves, hates, myths,
history because I think it's fun. I want to I
(09:28):
want to hear about Florida and California and Mississippi and Louisiana,
in New York and Virginia. And I figure maybe you
feel the same. That band you just listened to is
you've heard of the Traveling Willlberry's, which was this great
you know this, these these legends of music who joined
(09:49):
a supergroup. And then of course it's Asia, this the supergroup.
And then you got the the Highwaymen of country music
that is the Great Tehano Supergroup. Now this is a
little bit deeper dived than most people are going to know,
but Texans of my age and above know the four
stars of that band. And that was Flaco Jimenez, Augie Meyer's,
(10:14):
Doug Some and Freddy Fender and I will tell you
if if that conjunto style like that and that being different,
or you just want to learn more about music, just
spend a little time when our show is over and
go look up to Texas tornadoes. They've got some Uh
they got a song called Hey Baby Kpasso. That's a
fun song. But it was four legends of Tejano music
(10:39):
in Texas who came together toward the end of their
careers and lives and had some albums and toured and
it's just it's legendary. It's awesome. We love it all right.
So the Trump administration is now making waves, which is
a good thing, with a focus on making life better
for America. In my opinion, one of the great assets
(11:06):
of the Trump candidacy in twenty sixteen was here was
a guy who was saying, for the first time, really
in my lifetime, let's focus on the American first Republican anyway.
Let's focus on the lives of Americans, not Ukrainians, not Israelis,
not Middle Easterners, not Mexicans, not Haitians or anyone else.
(11:33):
Let's focus on making life better for the American citizen.
And it has felt like the administration has been dragged
into Iran. Whether that's true or not, However, we've ended
up there. That has occupied a lot of the President's time,
and I think that has left a lot of Americans feeling, hey, okay, fine,
(11:58):
but I'm paying a lot for gas at the pump. Now.
I know you're gonna email me, Whachael if we can
solve the Iran problem. They went, Okay, I got all that,
but I'm just going to tell you this. You can
argue all you want. Voters are going to go to
the polls in November, and if the Republican brand is
(12:20):
in disrepair, it will be because of the sense that
Republicans are not concerned about what matters to American citizens.
And I don't believe American citizens give a damn about
Iran right now. How can you say that nineteen seventy nine,
then the Iraq War, and then all the things they've done.
(12:42):
They're horrible, They're okay, you're not arguing with me, You're
arguing with your neighbors. And I believe, and I could
be wrong, I believe that Americans right now are concerned
about something. I think Americans are frightened of whether AI
is going to make their job redundant. It's a scary thing.
(13:02):
It's a scary thing, the likes of which, to this
extreme most Americans have not experienced. Is my job at
the plant going to go away, never to return? What
am I going to do? If you're sixty five, you go, well,
just I'll go ahead and call it a day and
start drawing Social Security? But what if you're forty five?
(13:24):
What if you don't have enough saved up? That is
very scary to people. I know lawyers who are asking me,
do you think AI is going to replace me? Teachers,
positions that we once believed a human would have to occupy.
Now people are seeing, Sure we had offshoring, Sure you
(13:48):
had h one bvs as knocking Disney employees out. Sure
you had people being imported from the Philippines to be
to replace the nurses, or imported from several countries to
replace the doctors, or imported from India to replace the
computer engineers. But now you're sitting it across the board,
and there was a great uneasiness over that. That is
(14:12):
a president Trump understood when he ran for president. He
understood that there was a great deal of anxiety, bitterness,
resentment over illegal immigration, which was getting worse by the day.
The one thing you can remember of twenty sixteen build
the Wall. That was a winner because rich people, poor people,
(14:37):
and everything in between recognize that our country was on
the verge of collapse. But for that, the president understood
that and voters responded. Voters right now, I believe, are
terribly concerned over AI. They're terribly concerned over inflation, which
(14:58):
includes high gas prices. I think these are issues, so
we will get to that.
Speaker 5 (15:05):
I didn't get to it yet, Brook Rawlins of the
ag secretary coming out and talking about food security and
potential price fixing by these big companies that have sort
of what looks like an.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Oligopoly in the field. I don't care if somebody dec
restricts you. You can't shoot at Michael pass It's benfolk.
Whatever one may say of Donald Trump, I do believe
he has a symboled, a star studded cast of quality
people for his cabinet. Brook Rollins doesn't get a lot
of pub because you got a lot of big egos
(15:37):
and the president and number one and number two secretaries
of agriculture don't normally get a lot of attention anyway,
But here she is talking about the seeming oligopoly in
the food in cattle processing and how it's affecting the
(15:59):
price of the meat you're cooking for your family.
Speaker 6 (16:02):
The consolidation in US meatpacking has led to just four
meat packers JBS, a Brazilian owned company, Cargill, Tyson Foods,
and National Beef, another Brazilian company. Those four companies monopolize
about eighty five percent of the US processing market today,
but it hasn't always been that way. The rate of
(16:23):
this four firm control has accelerated since the nineteen seventies.
According to USDA data, concentration for cattle slaughter of these
four was only twenty five percent in nineteen seventy seven
and jumped to seventy one percent by nineteen ninety two.
As mentioned, today, it is an astounding eighty five percent. Notably,
(16:44):
these four firms now own together more than seventy subsidiary
subsidiary companies. Today, they don't own them together, but in
total there are seventy subsidiary companies that are owned by
these four. This has led to a frightening landscape for
cattle ranchers. Industry consolidation reduces options for our ranchers looking
to sell their cattle, it weakens their negotiating power and
(17:07):
it risks reliance upon a single buyer. Today, the concentration
of larger plants opens the door to tighter coordination by
the Big four with producers and perhaps the exertion, perhaps
the exertion of control over them as well. Giving they
have limited options to sell their cattle.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
She said, there's only four meatbackers. I think there's a
lot more than them. Investigators have already reviewed more than
three million documents and interviewed people across the industry. As noted,
only four companies a group a cabal of only four
country companies control more than eighty five percent of the
(17:50):
beef processing market, and officials say about half of that
is owned by a Brazilian firm. Speaking at a Monday
news conference, Acting Attorney General Todd Lanche called on insiders
to come forward. He says that if whistleblowers help land
a criminal case worth more than a million dollars, they
could get between fifteen and thirty percent of whatever the
(18:11):
government recovers. He is encouraging ranchers, buyers, and processors to
report anything from price fixing to bid rigging. I have
heard for years that this is going on. The American
marketplace is the target of every company outside of the
(18:35):
United States. Let's leave aside American companies from moment. The
Chinese economy would practically collapse if we shut down our
marketplace to them. It was with a full understanding of
this fact that President Trump initiated his Tariff Process policy,
(19:00):
the idea being I can close off the American marketplace
to you foreign country slash company and bring you to
your knees. Competition and ensuring competition. It's such a difficult
thing to do. It is at the heart of our model,
(19:24):
and it is such a give and take. It's such
a delicate mix and balance, because the big struggle is
how do you ensure competition. What we saw over the weekend,
Spirit Airlines went under during the Biden administration. Spirit Airlines
(19:46):
and Jet Blue came forward with the proposal to merge
those two airlines. It was really an acquisition of Spirit
by Jet Blue. But the idea was we can we can,
we can roll Spirit airlin Lines into the operations of
Jet Blue. And yes, Jet Blue is going to have
to increase the prices on the routes that Spirit had
(20:11):
Why would Jet Blue even need Spirit Airlines? The FAA, Well,
the aviation industry generally in this country is very regulated,
and there is value to having existing routes already, to
(20:35):
get approval on certain routes, to get leases in certain airports,
to build out space, to build out terminals, to build
out kiosks, to staff up in certain positions. If I
gave you a billion dollars tomorrow and said start an airline,
and I want you to hit the all these cities,
(20:58):
if you didn't have operations in Burma, Alabama already, you
wouldn't know where to start. If you didn't have operations
in Prescott, Arizona, you wouldn't know where to start. So
there is value to things already being established. When you
see that a company, a multilocation company, is sold to
(21:21):
another company, one of the points of value is, yeah,
we're going to pay a premium over what it would
cost to open these ourselves, because there's time and energy
and money involved in opening all these locations. So that
was a delicate balance of IIDA administration sided against allowing
(21:41):
the merger, and now they look like idiots. In the
beef industry, I don't well, the cattle processing and it's beef, pork,
and chicken. I don't think most people think that the
consolidations are just expansive behaviors and arguably predatory behaviors of
(22:02):
these big boys. There's a movie called The Informant. Matt
Damon is really good in this movie, and it's a
story about Archer Daniels Midland, and a guy tells the
story about how they they cornered the market on a
particular product, and this was he's an informant for the
federal government. And he basically alleges that Cargill and adm
(22:25):
and their allegations against quite a few of them, that
what they do is outside the realm of legality in
order to dominate particular industries. Do companies do this, Yes,
So they put us in an odd situation for those
of us who are believers in capitalism, believers in the
(22:48):
free market, because you learn that most companies don't actually
believe in the free market. That's a general concept that
they will push. But what they really want is market dominance,
a market monopoly. Free market means they don't want the
(23:08):
government to set their wages or have restrictions or workplace
safety or things like that. We want free market, leave
us alone, but they want to use the government and
questionable practices to drive their competition out of the industry.
So preserving that without government becoming fascistic, socialistic overregulating. It's
(23:30):
a delicate balance and it's never going to not be
a delicate balance. This is DJ Higgs of your fighting
Texas aggies. You're listening to my uncle Kazar Michael Berry.
The Supreme Court yesterday allowed that its recent landmark decisions
(23:52):
striking down Louisiana's congressional map will take effect immediately. Justice
Katanji Brown Jackson called to move unwanted and unwise, saying
the court should quote stay on the sidelines and let
(24:13):
the old maps be used for the upcoming primary, which
prompted Samuel Alito to respond, writing, I'm getting tired of this.
It's so tedious. Did you not get catch up with
your French fries? No, he said, He's not going to
stand by and watch folks quote run out the clock.
(24:34):
So Louisiana is forced to use congressional maps that we've
just found to be unconstitutional, that would be he didn't
say this, I am that would be like Jim Comey
in October of twenty sixteen, when he said, yeah, I mean,
(24:55):
obviously Hillary's committed all these crimes. We really don't want
to get involved right before the election. How many times
this is too big to fail? Wow, we don't want
to bail them out. But you know, yeah, they did
some really bad things. Yeah, we're not going to have
(25:17):
a callback provision, so nobody's ever going to pay back
what we've paid them over the years. Yeah, it's true
that they wasted money and made torrible business decisions, and
we can't bail everybody out. But yeah, you know, let's
just quite and bail them out. We don't do it
again in the future. You can't say that by creating
a race based congressional district, you have disenfranchised other voters
(25:41):
who might not be black, But go ahead with the
election because we don't want to fix it. That's the mindset.
And I see this a lot. It's interesting to watch
parenting philosophies. How often parents when a kid misbehaves, but
(26:03):
the kid misbehaves in front of everybody at a birthday party,
at the after the game pizza party, and the kid
is being an absolute brat, and the parent will say,
I'm gonna deal with this when I get home. But
(26:23):
if you deal with it when you get home, you're
basically condoning it in the moment. If you make it
unpleasant at that moment, it's not only unpleasant for the kid,
it's unpleasant for the parent. Nobody wants to be the
parent who has to discipline their child in front of
(26:45):
other people, But good parents with good kids do it
because the next time that kid is thinking of doing
something stupid in a crowd of his friends, he won't think, well,
(27:06):
my parents aren't going to doing anything until we get home,
if at all, so I'll go ahead and get away
with it. But if that child learns, and this is
the reason for discipline, If that child learns, oh, if
I do this now, my parents will discipline me now,
(27:28):
and I don't want that. That would embarrass me, just
as I will have just embarrassed them, which was the
reason they had to do it, and embarrass myself. So
let me not do what I was going to do,
because I will be disciplined for that. And that's the
(27:49):
reason for discipline, to break a bad behavior. But you're
not breaking the bad behavior if you delay the discipline.
So in this case, it'd be a whole lot easier
to say, well, this is a race based district and
(28:09):
that's wrong. We strike it down, But go ahead and
elect somebody on that basis and continue disenfranchising the voters
who happened to be white living in a district where
the whole purpose was to elect someone black. And by
the way, I got an email to this effect, I
(28:34):
wish I'd printed the guy's name, because he deserves credit.
Let's take a step back. We had the Voting Rights Act,
We had a lot of measures in the sixties that
were designed to at a minimum, improve our governmental process,
(28:58):
whereby blacks were better represented. That was the theory. But
at the heart of all that, if you listen carefully,
most Democrats and some Republicans believe that the only people
who can really represent blacks are blacks. I reject that notion.
(29:21):
But if that's true, why is it true. You don't
believe that whites can represent blacks. You don't think that
Americans put being an American first. You're suggesting that there
is a tribal nature to representation. Well, if in fact
(29:48):
a black person is so much better at representing blacks,
then whites could be wouldn't that also be true of whites,
and don't whites also deserve to be represented? But wait,
let's step back from that, and let's ask a very
(30:09):
simple question. We have had since the late sixties, an
explosion in the number of black elected officials. I think
every major city in America now has had a black mayor.
If we were to study those administrations, Kwame Kilpatrick and Detroit,
(30:34):
Ray Nagan in New Orleans, Harold Washington in Chicago, what
was the woman's name in Baltimore, I think she went
to prison. Sylvester Turner in Houston, complete criminal, horrible, Lee
Brown too, Marion Barry in DC. Would we say that
(30:59):
those black elected officials turned out to be on average
better or worse than their predecessors. Did the lives of
the black residents of those cities get better or worse
as a result of their service
It's that time, time, time, time, Luck and Lude. Michael
Very Show is on the air right now.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
There's a lot of fallacies about Latinos and we want.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
To clear that up. Oh yeah, like like what, officer, Well,
first of all, not every single Latino is Mexican. I'm
glad you noticed different kind of Mexicans. Puerto Rican Mexicans,
Rob Mexican, the Minican Mexican.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I knew nothing of Mexican culture. I'm originally from the Midwest.
I moved to Los Angeles like Sinko DeMaio.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
I didn't even know what it was. My neighbor's Mexican.
I asked him.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I mean in Midwest, we call it Tuesday, you know.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I asked him. I go, what is it?
Speaker 2 (00:50):
He goes, it's our Independence Day. I go, who'd you beat?
He goes the French. I'm like, well, who didn't you know?
I don't know if it's something to get quite this
wound up about Hose, but.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
If Martin readers or half Pride, I'm all the actors,
let go to.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Bankok Sank book, Sank Book, Thank Cook.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
The French forces in the Battle of Puebla back in
eighteen sixty two. It's also an excuse to drink tequila
on a Monday morning.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
At work for Lewis.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
President Obama will mark the holiday with a reception at
the White House. You have to drink the whole thing
and eat the worm. I wanted to take a moment
right here because on Monday, think of the mile Way
too early made sarcastic references to the way some Americans
celebrate the holiday, and it was not our intention to
be disrespectful, and we sincerely apologize for those references. You know,
after twenty years in this business, anyone who knows me
(01:52):
knows where I stand on diversity and inclusion.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
So to those I let down.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Or feel betrayed, I hear you, and I'm sorry. We
want to go over to Lewis now, but look at
the stories in the cour of this morning, and I
know you are contrite.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
As well, Thomas.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
I want to express my sincere apologies as well.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
I truly was never my intention to offend anyone, and
if I did it, and I know I did, I'm
very sorry. You know, when you spend all your time
worrying about offending someone else, nothing great ever gets done.
(02:29):
When all you care about is offending other people, there
comes a point in your life where you grow up
and you understand it's not my choice whether you're offended
or not. It's your choice. We choose whether we're offended
or not. You know that cool black guy at work
(02:50):
who never gets bothered and he laughs along at your jokes,
and then he gives one back. He's got white people
joke too. He's got Mexican jokes, or the Hispanic that's
got Mexican jokes and white people jokes and black people jokes.
And y'all are friends, so you joke with each other
because that's what adults do. They kid each other right
(03:15):
the way we kid our wives, and they kid us
back the way we joke with our kids about being kids,
and they joke with us about being adults. You know,
like when my boys who are black, tell me, Dad,
you're not white, you're peach, and I no, i'm not.
I'm white, and they pull out a sheet of paper
and go, that's white and put up next to my skin.
All right, you're right on peach. But do I have
(03:37):
to call myself a peach? If I say you're black,
I'm peach. Yeah, you have to say you're peach. And
we all laugh because funny, because laughter's good. You choose
to laugh, you choose to be offended. Oh, and there
will be people offended today. They will be careers lost
over what should have been fun Today is the fifth
(03:58):
of May, known as Sinco to Mayo, and I went
through the whole history this morning. I want. It's not
Mexican Independence Day, not that it matters. It's a day
that in the little town of Puebla from which we
get a poblano, a person or pepper from Puebla, that
they defeated the French who had loaned them a bunch
(04:19):
of money and they weren't paying it back, so they
said we'll fight it out, and they managed to win.
They won the battle, they lost to war. But me
that as it may, it was a cause for celebration,
wasn't really a big deal till years later in Texas
they began celebrating that battle, which wasn't really such a
(04:39):
big deal, but it became a bigger deal. And when Corona,
especially in the eighties, wanted to promote a Mexican beer Corona,
they led the charge for this big national celebration of
Cinco to Mayo. So it's really a half assed made
(04:59):
of up holiday to push Mexican beer and Mexican food
and having fun and drinking. And guess what, there's nothing
wrong with that. You know, we need occasions. We need
occasions to give us the excuse, to give us a license,
to give us an okay, and not to sound like
(05:21):
a therapist, but to allow ourselves to have fun. A
lot of people move from big event to big event,
occasion to occasion because they don't know how to just
have fun on a Tuesday night unless it's a big occasion,
then they will allow themselves to have fun. I got
(05:42):
a friend named Matt Brice. He owned six restaurants in
Houston called Federal American Grill. I called him on Saturday
morning ten o'clock. I said, how are you looking for today?
How'd you do last night? Last night was good, but
today we're going to kill it. Why every restaurant fully
booked for Kentucky Derby. Ah, it's Derby Day. I forgot.
(06:05):
People love to dress up and go out and you
may not, but there are other people who do. It's
a upper middle class, professional class thing to do to
dress up in your Derby clothes. And men and women,
especially women know they buy their hats and it's an
excuse to do that. It's a fun thing. And because
(06:27):
it is a holiday, or because it is a big
day and everyone else is in on it, they will
do that. You know, you create these event type things
and they drive people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't.
So in Texas, especially, Sinko Demo is a big day.
The tex Mex restaurants in Texas today will have a
(06:51):
Christmas in May. This will be as big as the
Super Bowl in liquor sales, in beer cells, It'll be marger,
some beers, and it will be a big, big deal.
I have been frustrated with the Trump administration that it
feels like they're not paying attention to the things that
matter to voters. We've got a midterm coming up in November.
(07:14):
The war in Iran is not going to win us
any voters. Whether you think it's the right thing to
do or not as up to you. But it's not
winning US voters. It's costing us voters. And this is
a president who's been focused not on war but on
domestic affairs. And we've got inflation, we've got high gas prices,
we've got people frustrated, and it feels like it feels
(07:37):
like the president's not as focused as he has been,
and I think he's mindful of that, and that's why
you see the measure coming out today with the Department
of Agriculture, Brooke Rowlins, the secretary, talking about the fact
that we have eighty five percent of the nation's cattle
processing in the hands of four companies and charging them
(08:00):
that they are price fixing. Whatever comes of this, you
are now telling the American consumer, especially housewives who buy
the meat for the family, Okay, we're mindful that you're
paying too much for beef. That's the thought. We're going
to make sure the law is being followed. There are
only two nationally syndicated talkcoasts out of Houston, my good
(08:24):
friend Jesse Kelly and our show. And so now that's
not true. Walton and Johnson is based out of Houston,
but they are Gulf Coast syndicated and they've got a
lot of affiliates. That wasn't a flex That was a
way of saying that most of the national shows historically
(08:44):
have been based in New York. And then when Rush
left New York for Palm Beach, it kind of gave
license to saying all right, they don't all have to
be based in New York. Let me just drop that
whole subject. What I was trying to say was, I
I figure a lot of people listen to our show
(09:06):
across the country who have never been to Texas or
haven't spent much time in Texas. And I like to
share things about Texas, regional delicacies, prejudices, biases, loves, hates, myths,
history because I think it's fun. I want to I
(09:28):
want to hear about Florida and California and Mississippi and Louisiana,
in New York and Virginia. And I figure maybe you
feel the same. That band you just listened to is
you've heard of the Traveling Willlberry's, which was this great
you know this, these these legends of music who joined
(09:49):
a supergroup. And then of course it's Asia, this the supergroup.
And then you got the the Highwaymen of country music
that is the Great Tehano Supergroup. Now this is a
little bit deeper dived than most people are going to know,
but Texans of my age and above know the four
stars of that band. And that was Flaco Jimenez, Augie Meyer's,
(10:14):
Doug Some and Freddy Fender and I will tell you
if if that conjunto style like that and that being different,
or you just want to learn more about music, just
spend a little time when our show is over and
go look up to Texas tornadoes. They've got some Uh
they got a song called Hey Baby Kpasso. That's a
fun song. But it was four legends of Tejano music
(10:39):
in Texas who came together toward the end of their
careers and lives and had some albums and toured and
it's just it's legendary. It's awesome. We love it all right.
So the Trump administration is now making waves, which is
a good thing, with a focus on making life better
for America. In my opinion, one of the great assets
(11:06):
of the Trump candidacy in twenty sixteen was here was
a guy who was saying, for the first time, really
in my lifetime, let's focus on the American first Republican anyway.
Let's focus on the lives of Americans, not Ukrainians, not Israelis,
not Middle Easterners, not Mexicans, not Haitians or anyone else.
(11:33):
Let's focus on making life better for the American citizen.
And it has felt like the administration has been dragged
into Iran. Whether that's true or not, However, we've ended
up there. That has occupied a lot of the President's time,
and I think that has left a lot of Americans feeling, hey, okay, fine,
(11:58):
but I'm paying a lot for gas at the pump. Now.
I know you're gonna email me, Whachael if we can
solve the Iran problem. They went, Okay, I got all that,
but I'm just going to tell you this. You can
argue all you want. Voters are going to go to
the polls in November, and if the Republican brand is
(12:20):
in disrepair, it will be because of the sense that
Republicans are not concerned about what matters to American citizens.
And I don't believe American citizens give a damn about
Iran right now. How can you say that nineteen seventy nine,
then the Iraq War, and then all the things they've done.
(12:42):
They're horrible, They're okay, you're not arguing with me, You're
arguing with your neighbors. And I believe, and I could
be wrong, I believe that Americans right now are concerned
about something. I think Americans are frightened of whether AI
is going to make their job redundant. It's a scary thing.
(13:02):
It's a scary thing, the likes of which, to this
extreme most Americans have not experienced. Is my job at
the plant going to go away, never to return? What
am I going to do? If you're sixty five, you go, well,
just I'll go ahead and call it a day and
start drawing Social Security? But what if you're forty five?
(13:24):
What if you don't have enough saved up? That is
very scary to people. I know lawyers who are asking me,
do you think AI is going to replace me? Teachers,
positions that we once believed a human would have to occupy.
Now people are seeing, Sure we had offshoring, Sure you
(13:48):
had h one bvs as knocking Disney employees out. Sure
you had people being imported from the Philippines to be
to replace the nurses, or imported from several countries to
replace the doctors, or imported from India to replace the
computer engineers. But now you're sitting it across the board,
and there was a great uneasiness over that. That is
(14:12):
a president Trump understood when he ran for president. He
understood that there was a great deal of anxiety, bitterness,
resentment over illegal immigration, which was getting worse by the day.
The one thing you can remember of twenty sixteen build
the Wall. That was a winner because rich people, poor people,
(14:37):
and everything in between recognize that our country was on
the verge of collapse. But for that, the president understood
that and voters responded. Voters right now, I believe, are
terribly concerned over AI. They're terribly concerned over inflation, which
(14:58):
includes high gas prices. I think these are issues, so
we will get to that.
Speaker 5 (15:05):
I didn't get to it yet, Brook Rawlins of the
ag secretary coming out and talking about food security and
potential price fixing by these big companies that have sort
of what looks like an.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Oligopoly in the field. I don't care if somebody dec
restricts you. You can't shoot at Michael pass It's benfolk.
Whatever one may say of Donald Trump, I do believe
he has a symboled, a star studded cast of quality
people for his cabinet. Brook Rollins doesn't get a lot
of pub because you got a lot of big egos
(15:37):
and the president and number one and number two secretaries
of agriculture don't normally get a lot of attention anyway,
But here she is talking about the seeming oligopoly in
the food in cattle processing and how it's affecting the
(15:59):
price of the meat you're cooking for your family.
Speaker 6 (16:02):
The consolidation in US meatpacking has led to just four
meat packers JBS, a Brazilian owned company, Cargill, Tyson Foods,
and National Beef, another Brazilian company. Those four companies monopolize
about eighty five percent of the US processing market today,
but it hasn't always been that way. The rate of
(16:23):
this four firm control has accelerated since the nineteen seventies.
According to USDA data, concentration for cattle slaughter of these
four was only twenty five percent in nineteen seventy seven
and jumped to seventy one percent by nineteen ninety two.
As mentioned, today, it is an astounding eighty five percent. Notably,
(16:44):
these four firms now own together more than seventy subsidiary
subsidiary companies. Today, they don't own them together, but in
total there are seventy subsidiary companies that are owned by
these four. This has led to a frightening landscape for
cattle ranchers. Industry consolidation reduces options for our ranchers looking
to sell their cattle, it weakens their negotiating power and
(17:07):
it risks reliance upon a single buyer. Today, the concentration
of larger plants opens the door to tighter coordination by
the Big four with producers and perhaps the exertion, perhaps
the exertion of control over them as well. Giving they
have limited options to sell their cattle.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
She said, there's only four meatbackers. I think there's a
lot more than them. Investigators have already reviewed more than
three million documents and interviewed people across the industry. As noted,
only four companies a group a cabal of only four
country companies control more than eighty five percent of the
(17:50):
beef processing market, and officials say about half of that
is owned by a Brazilian firm. Speaking at a Monday
news conference, Acting Attorney General Todd Lanche called on insiders
to come forward. He says that if whistleblowers help land
a criminal case worth more than a million dollars, they
could get between fifteen and thirty percent of whatever the
(18:11):
government recovers. He is encouraging ranchers, buyers, and processors to
report anything from price fixing to bid rigging. I have
heard for years that this is going on. The American
marketplace is the target of every company outside of the
(18:35):
United States. Let's leave aside American companies from moment. The
Chinese economy would practically collapse if we shut down our
marketplace to them. It was with a full understanding of
this fact that President Trump initiated his Tariff Process policy,
(19:00):
the idea being I can close off the American marketplace
to you foreign country slash company and bring you to
your knees. Competition and ensuring competition. It's such a difficult
thing to do. It is at the heart of our model,
(19:24):
and it is such a give and take. It's such
a delicate mix and balance, because the big struggle is
how do you ensure competition. What we saw over the weekend,
Spirit Airlines went under during the Biden administration. Spirit Airlines
(19:46):
and Jet Blue came forward with the proposal to merge
those two airlines. It was really an acquisition of Spirit
by Jet Blue. But the idea was we can we can,
we can roll Spirit airlin Lines into the operations of
Jet Blue. And yes, Jet Blue is going to have
to increase the prices on the routes that Spirit had
(20:11):
Why would Jet Blue even need Spirit Airlines? The FAA, Well,
the aviation industry generally in this country is very regulated,
and there is value to having existing routes already, to
(20:35):
get approval on certain routes, to get leases in certain airports,
to build out space, to build out terminals, to build
out kiosks, to staff up in certain positions. If I
gave you a billion dollars tomorrow and said start an airline,
and I want you to hit the all these cities,
(20:58):
if you didn't have operations in Burma, Alabama already, you
wouldn't know where to start. If you didn't have operations
in Prescott, Arizona, you wouldn't know where to start. So
there is value to things already being established. When you
see that a company, a multilocation company, is sold to
(21:21):
another company, one of the points of value is, yeah,
we're going to pay a premium over what it would
cost to open these ourselves, because there's time and energy
and money involved in opening all these locations. So that
was a delicate balance of IIDA administration sided against allowing
(21:41):
the merger, and now they look like idiots. In the
beef industry, I don't well, the cattle processing and it's beef, pork,
and chicken. I don't think most people think that the
consolidations are just expansive behaviors and arguably predatory behaviors of
(22:02):
these big boys. There's a movie called The Informant. Matt
Damon is really good in this movie, and it's a
story about Archer Daniels Midland, and a guy tells the
story about how they they cornered the market on a
particular product, and this was he's an informant for the
federal government. And he basically alleges that Cargill and adm
(22:25):
and their allegations against quite a few of them, that
what they do is outside the realm of legality in
order to dominate particular industries. Do companies do this, Yes,
So they put us in an odd situation for those
of us who are believers in capitalism, believers in the
(22:48):
free market, because you learn that most companies don't actually
believe in the free market. That's a general concept that
they will push. But what they really want is market dominance,
a market monopoly. Free market means they don't want the
(23:08):
government to set their wages or have restrictions or workplace
safety or things like that. We want free market, leave
us alone, but they want to use the government and
questionable practices to drive their competition out of the industry.
So preserving that without government becoming fascistic, socialistic overregulating. It's
(23:30):
a delicate balance and it's never going to not be
a delicate balance. This is DJ Higgs of your fighting
Texas aggies. You're listening to my uncle Kazar Michael Berry.
The Supreme Court yesterday allowed that its recent landmark decisions
(23:52):
striking down Louisiana's congressional map will take effect immediately. Justice
Katanji Brown Jackson called to move unwanted and unwise, saying
the court should quote stay on the sidelines and let
(24:13):
the old maps be used for the upcoming primary, which
prompted Samuel Alito to respond, writing, I'm getting tired of this.
It's so tedious. Did you not get catch up with
your French fries? No, he said, He's not going to
stand by and watch folks quote run out the clock.
(24:34):
So Louisiana is forced to use congressional maps that we've
just found to be unconstitutional, that would be he didn't
say this, I am that would be like Jim Comey
in October of twenty sixteen, when he said, yeah, I mean,
(24:55):
obviously Hillary's committed all these crimes. We really don't want
to get involved right before the election. How many times
this is too big to fail? Wow, we don't want
to bail them out. But you know, yeah, they did
some really bad things. Yeah, we're not going to have
(25:17):
a callback provision, so nobody's ever going to pay back
what we've paid them over the years. Yeah, it's true
that they wasted money and made torrible business decisions, and
we can't bail everybody out. But yeah, you know, let's
just quite and bail them out. We don't do it
again in the future. You can't say that by creating
a race based congressional district, you have disenfranchised other voters
(25:41):
who might not be black, But go ahead with the
election because we don't want to fix it. That's the mindset.
And I see this a lot. It's interesting to watch
parenting philosophies. How often parents when a kid misbehaves, but
(26:03):
the kid misbehaves in front of everybody at a birthday party,
at the after the game pizza party, and the kid
is being an absolute brat, and the parent will say,
I'm gonna deal with this when I get home. But
(26:23):
if you deal with it when you get home, you're
basically condoning it in the moment. If you make it
unpleasant at that moment, it's not only unpleasant for the kid,
it's unpleasant for the parent. Nobody wants to be the
parent who has to discipline their child in front of
(26:45):
other people, But good parents with good kids do it
because the next time that kid is thinking of doing
something stupid in a crowd of his friends, he won't think, well,
(27:06):
my parents aren't going to doing anything until we get home,
if at all, so I'll go ahead and get away
with it. But if that child learns, and this is
the reason for discipline, If that child learns, oh, if
I do this now, my parents will discipline me now,
(27:28):
and I don't want that. That would embarrass me, just
as I will have just embarrassed them, which was the
reason they had to do it, and embarrass myself. So
let me not do what I was going to do,
because I will be disciplined for that. And that's the
(27:49):
reason for discipline, to break a bad behavior. But you're
not breaking the bad behavior if you delay the discipline.
So in this case, it'd be a whole lot easier
to say, well, this is a race based district and
(28:09):
that's wrong. We strike it down, But go ahead and
elect somebody on that basis and continue disenfranchising the voters
who happened to be white living in a district where
the whole purpose was to elect someone black. And by
the way, I got an email to this effect, I
(28:34):
wish I'd printed the guy's name, because he deserves credit.
Let's take a step back. We had the Voting Rights Act,
We had a lot of measures in the sixties that
were designed to at a minimum, improve our governmental process,
(28:58):
whereby blacks were better represented. That was the theory. But
at the heart of all that, if you listen carefully,
most Democrats and some Republicans believe that the only people
who can really represent blacks are blacks. I reject that notion.
(29:21):
But if that's true, why is it true. You don't
believe that whites can represent blacks. You don't think that
Americans put being an American first. You're suggesting that there
is a tribal nature to representation. Well, if in fact
(29:48):
a black person is so much better at representing blacks,
then whites could be wouldn't that also be true of whites,
and don't whites also deserve to be represented? But wait,
let's step back from that, and let's ask a very
(30:09):
simple question. We have had since the late sixties, an
explosion in the number of black elected officials. I think
every major city in America now has had a black mayor.
If we were to study those administrations, Kwame Kilpatrick and Detroit,
(30:34):
Ray Nagan in New Orleans, Harold Washington in Chicago, what
was the woman's name in Baltimore, I think she went
to prison. Sylvester Turner in Houston, complete criminal, horrible, Lee
Brown too, Marion Barry in DC. Would we say that
(30:59):
those black elected officials turned out to be on average
better or worse than their predecessors. Did the lives of
the black residents of those cities get better or worse
as a result of their service
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