“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
The death toll from the Wuhan virus hasn’t come close to the forecasts promoted by “experts,” but the economic damage caused by government lockdowns has more than made up the difference.
U.S. farmers—the people who make sure the rest of the country has enough to eat—have been some of the hardest hit. America’s store shelves are running on empty.
So President Donald Trump has come up with a clever plan to help both farmers and hard-pressed Americans at the same time.
The problem is obvious to anyone who’s been to the store—the one place we’re still allowed to go inside, that is. Just when more Americans are unemployed than at any time in decades, food prices are skyrocketing.
Coronavirus has shut down about 20 slaughterhouses, and the processed meat supply has fallen by a reported 35%.
Farmers can’t sell the animals they’ve been raising…or make room for the new herds they’ve already purchased and scheduled for delivery, so they’re killing them.
To make room for new arrivals, farmers have slaughered at least 2 million animals and left their carcasses to rot.
Prices are spiking. Meat costs have already risen 8% and CoBank, a farmers’ bank, warns the price of hamburger, chicken, or pork could jump an unprecedented 20%.
But it’s not just meat. 40% of all vegetables raised in America go to restaurants—but they’ve been shut down tight since the coronavirus outbreak.
“We’ve been devastated,” said Paul Allen, co-owner of RC Hatton Farms, who had to bury about 8 million acres of cabbage, because KFC doesn’t need it for its cole slaw.
“The food supply chain is breaking,” warned John Tyson of Tyson Foods in a dire blog post.
“We have a responsibility to feed our country,” he said. “It is as essential as healthcare.”
At the same time, the shutdown orders created massive unemployment, and even food banks are scrambling to get enough food.
U.S. food banks are spending an extra $1 million a week and still have to turn people away because they run out.
“The only thing we can do is ration and give families less,” said Eric Cooper, who runs a food bank in San Antonio.
But in stepped President Trump.
He saw farmers who need to sell their food, and food banks that need food, and put them together.
President Trump authorized the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to buy $470 million of crops that are turning brown in the fields—and give them to food banks to feed people shut out of their jobs by state lockdown orders.
Trump saw the problem and told the USDA “to purchase these foods and deliver them to the hungry Americans who need it most,” said Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.
The government will send boxes of chicken, fish, oranges, sweet potatoes, and other food to feed Americans who Blue State Democrats want to keep locked out of their jobs.
“There is no reason these high-quality, nutritious, farmer-grown products should be left in facilities to rot when there are so many American families who are suddenly faced with food insecurity,” Perdue said.
It couldn’t come at a more critical time.
COVID-19 has put tens of millions of Americans out of work and sent mom-and-pop business and start-ups into bankruptcy.
More than 20 million Americans lost their jobs in April, the worst month since the Great Depression. More than 30 million are unemployed nationally.
But that hasn’t affected elite politicos and celebrities, who are sheltering with their freezers full of gourmet ice cream and singing “Imagine.”
Democrats want the lockdowns to continue, so they can get Americans hooked on government handouts and blame the high unemployment rate on Donald Trump.
Part of the problem could also be that the Wall Street/D.C./Hollywood elites couldn’t care less about people in flyover country.
You could hear the disdain when former Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg said, “I could teach anybody…to be a farmer.”
“You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn!”
Bloomberg said farming doesn’t take real intelligence like, say, playing the stock market.
“Mini Mike hates the farmer,” said Donald Trump.
Instead of spending his billions to help farmers, in March—at the outset of the coronavirus outbreak—Bloomberg donated $18 million to Democrats to defeat Donald Trump.
You can see who has the farmers’ backs—and who’s just out to score political points.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”