Tyson Foods recently announced that they want to hire 40,000 migrants to work at their factories in America, instead of hiring American workers. This is what corporate America has been wanting for decades because these workers are cheap and replaceable. 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: Tyson Foods recently announced that they want to hire 40,000 migrants to work at their factories in America instead of hiring American workers. This is what corporate America has been waiting for for decades. These workers are cheap, they’re replaceable. If you cause ’em harm, cut off an arm, send them back to Guatemala. That’s their attitude. I’ve got Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins with me to talk about it. I hate to say this so many times, we have been doing this story about what Tyson has been up to and what corporate America has been up to with the migration issue. Every time we do it, they say, ah, that’s, you know, everybody wants to believe, yeah, we’re letting everybody cross the border, what, 3 million, I don’t even know what the number is anymore, across the border, because we’re trying to be kind. We’re trying to be compassionate. It’s all about the Chamber of Commerce and associated industry getting cheap labor into America so we don’t have to go overseas anymore. We can bring ’em over here. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. We don’t have to go make a new sweatshop in Saipan when we can make sweatshops right here in the United States. That’s the whole thing. And Tyson, when they got popped for this, because they did have a spokesperson to come out and said, oh yeah, we’re gonna hire 40,000 migrants that are coming in because we care. We want to help these people. And then Tyson, after facing calls for backlash or for boycott, said, no, we, no. That, we never did that. That’s not true. Oh, by the way, we’re also gonna be closing, what is it, a factory in Iowa, Arkansas, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri. They’re just saying, we’re just gonna shut everything down instead.
Mike Papantonio: Because they were caught.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. So in other words, it got out that what we’ve been saying all along is this migration issue is not about compassion. It’s not about these bring us your huddled masses. It doesn’t have anything to do with that. It has to do with the fact that corporate America saw a way to make a lot of money. Cheap, cheap labor. You don’t have to pay ’em but a fraction of what you pay American workers. If they’re harmed on the work, if they lose arm, great. Ship ’em back to Guatemala. You don’t have to pay all that extra money for taking care of them. It’s really an ugly story. Tyson simply got caught, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely.
Mike Papantonio: And when they denied it, no, you can deny it, but tell us this, if that’s not what’s going on here, why did you just shut down five plants? Because you can’t keep ’em operating. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And they specifically said, one of the groups of migrants they’re targeting are the asylum seekers, which those people are far more vulnerable. Obviously, they don’t want to be sent back to their countries. So if they can come in here and show like, hey, look, I’ve got a job. I’m working this job, I’m contributing, I should be given asylum. Tyson can abuse those people even worse and say, listen, you’re facing two things. Either you’re gonna do what we say, you’re not gonna raise any alarms about what we’re paying you, which is pennies on the dollar. You’re not going to say anything about the safety issues that may be happening because if you do, you’re going right back to that country where you’re likely to die. So you open your mouth, you’re outta here.
Mike Papantonio: Stories, they literally show up at their houses at night, put ’em in a car, drive ’em away, and they’re gone. They’re disappeared back to their own country. And the chances of them coming back are almost non-existent. Look, we’ve done so many stories on the corruption of Tyson Foods all the way back to the water contamination where the aquifers were being contaminated so badly in North Carolina, South Carolina, that people were getting sick from drinking the water. It had contaminants, it had biological contaminants in it. We did the story on the fact that, you remember during the COVID issue where they were making workers continue to work with Covid? You did that story.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. And Tyson was doing that. Smithfield, Pork was doing that. Because, oh, we gotta keep this out. And then when they.
Mike Papantonio: For the American public. They need more chickens. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. And then of course, they got in trouble for that. And so I think that’s one of the reasons they’re going to the migrants and saying, okay, well, the American workers told on us. We got in trouble for that. They’re still facing some litigation about that. So we’ll go to the people who know if they open their mouths.
Mike Papantonio: They’re going back home.
Farron Cousins: You’re gone.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. That’s exactly what. Tell me, you have such a great memory, and you and I did this story years ago, who was the senator who went to Saipan, and he says, this is a great model for America?
Farron Cousins: Was it DeLay, Tom DeLay?
Mike Papantonio: It was Tom DeLay. Okay. Tell that story. Give us, because this is come to fruition right here. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. Wasn’t it when he went with, did he go with Abramoff on that or was that?
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, he went with Abramoff.
Farron Cousins: So Tom DeLay goes to Saipan and sees literal sweatshops. The people were working for $1 and 13 cents a day. I do remember that number.
Mike Papantonio: Children.
Farron Cousins: Children. And he says, this is such a great model. We should be implementing this in the United States.
Mike Papantonio:: Okay. So this come full circle. This is it. He liked the kids because they had small fingers and they could do things with their small fingers that grownups couldn’t do.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And he marveled at how quickly they can manufacture these shoes that they were making.
Mike Papantonio: And he was bragging about the fact that they were paid less than a dollar a day.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Whatever, did this guy die?
Farron Cousins: Thinking about it. I have not heard from Tom DeLay. I mean, never heard from him, but.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: That is a name that disappeared and I’m glad he’s disappeared wherever the hell he ended up.
Mike Papantonio: Well, he was a powerhouse at one time, a Republican powerhouse in the Senate. And I’ll never forget him coming back and just gloating about the fact of how great the sweatshops were in Saipan and how we can duplicate that in the United States. Here it is. Tyson Foods.
Suspicious Activity: That it had helped dirty money flow through its branches around the world, including at least 800. Plaintiffs allege that the defendants provided money and medical goods to terrorist groups, Hezbollah and Jaysh al-Adl. This is a well organized business for these individuals that carry out these attacks. Terrorism is a business and they run it like a business. They knew about what was going on for a decade. They absolutely, absolutely no question about it knew that HSBC was washing money. They had every reason to understand it was for terrorism and it was for drug cartels. Took no action whatsoever.
These banks are involved, their accounts are connected, and they’re using them to mask the transactions. The more complicated they can make the transactions, the more distance they could put between the bad guys and a seemingly legitimate purpose of these funds. They pay $1.9 billion, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what they’ve made. And nobody goes to prison. These CEOs, these bankers that made this decision, they’re safe at home. They know what they’ve done. They know it’s resulted in the death of Americans, contractors and soldiers, not just hundreds but thousands. And we look the other way because they don’t look like criminals. The die cast, the people that are responsible for it, are on Wall Street. And they don’t look like criminals. It’s almost a suspension of disbelief. Sometimes I’ll have people call me and say, is this, is this real? Do they really get away with this? Yeah, they do.
