If you want your children working with bone saws in a pile of animal guts, then Wisconsin might be the state for you. Recently, more than 100 children were found to be working in a Wisconsin meat-packing plant in clear violation of state labor laws. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: It’s up to the Supreme Court right now. And the, and I’m hoping that these folks have good clerks because the babble that this Schnapper presented, when, when my lawyers are saying, what the hell, what is he talking about? He missed the whole point. And it was so bad the Supreme Court justices said, sir, we don’t know what’s, we don’t know what’s coming out of your mouth right now. We don’t even know what you’re saying. Where he came from, I have no idea. One of the most important cases in the country right now and this cat’s up there arguing it.
If you want your children working with bone saws and a pile of animal guts, then Wisconsin might be the state for you. Recently more than a hundred children were found to be working in a Wisconsin meat packing plant in clear violation of every kind of state labor law. No surprise. We’re, we did a story on this last week. The US Chamber of Commerce is giddy, the association, the associated industry is giddy, because we’re bringing all these children across the border. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: What are we gonna do with them? We’re gonna pay ’em below average wages because they’re gonna be working part-time. We’re gonna put ’em in situations where they can be maimed or killed, lose an arm, lose an eye, and we ship ’em back home. US Chamber of Commerce, buddy, they love that because they don’t have to spend the money going across the border. They bring ’em in from Nicaragua and Honduras, wherever. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And this is truly disturbing because when we had talked about this, we were talking about legislation that had been proposed to allow this.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: And then we turn around, find out a week later, uhoh, this is already in practice, illegally in practice, but that shouldn’t surprise anybody. And this company, this Packers Sanitation Services, which is a meat packing plant and they own plants across several states, all of them with children as young as 13, working around these animal carcasses, in unsafe conditions with tools they don’t know how to use. They don’t understand, you know, what happens if you lose an arm at age 13 because they can’t process that kind of future, you know, injury yet.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: And, and it’s terrifying that this is happening in the United States. But it is, and I guarantee you this Packers Sanitation is not the only place doing it.
Mike Papantonio: But Farron, look. Look, US Chamber of Commerce, I can’t tell you what an ugly, ugly bunch of people these are. First of all, it ain’t your mom and pop business down the road. We’re talking about 19 of the biggest multi-global corporations in the, I mean on the planet. Okay. So these are the people who run the US Chamber of Commerce. So what they, when they, when we, when the media started reporting, oh my god, these poor children, we have to let ’em in the country. They missed the story. They, the story is US Chamber of Commerce is now saying go Biden, go Biden. You know, they’re all behind Biden on this. They were doing it because now they don’t have to go out of this, they don’t have to leave the country and pay bribes. They don’t have to engage in corruption to be able to, to manage workers like child workers. Now they just bring ’em into the United States, put ’em in a meat packing place, put ’em in the coal mines. Story we did, they were in coal mines. They were in every kind of mining business. They’re in every kind of meat packing business. This is the way that US Chamber of Commerce is they’re delighted by, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, it is. And, you know, you and I actually did a story during the Bush, W Bush administration, we haven’t been doing this since HW but we’ve been doing it a long time. So all the way back in the Bush administration, I remember you and I talking about Tyson Foods and Tyson Foods through the US Chamber of Commerce was directly influencing the, the W Bush administration to do nothing about immigration, to continue letting everybody across. Talk about it publicly, oh, we’ve got a crisis just like we hear every day now. But these businesses, these industries, the US Chamber of Commerce, they control both parties. So that’s why we hear politicians talk a big game about we’re gonna stop all this immigration. They never will.
Mike Papantonio: No.
Farron Cousins: Because their donors need this source of labor.
Mike Papantonio: Republicans won’t stop it and it’s like Democrats don’t have enough sense to know that they’re getting hustled. That this is not about being humane. This is about feeding the US Chamber of Commerce labor market. That’s all this is about.