The US is currently experiencing a shortage of a number of different products
for varying reasons.
And one of the most critical ones is baby formula,
now we've already broken down on the show earlier this week.
Some of the reasons that that's happening,
much of it has to do with negligence of the corporations.
And concerned that contaminated baby formula could take the lives of more
babies.
But in any event,
we're at the position right now where in some areas of the country,
you can't find formula or you might have to drive for hours to get to it.
If you try to find it online it might be marked up several times and
that is very much an issue.
But there's a new issue that the writers pounced on.
And that is that they have found some formula that might in theory have been
being given to migrants and they are incensed over that.
As Marjorie Greene will make clear in this press conference.
>> Here's what we know, this government is failing the American people,
the taxpayers and its citizens.
Pictures are emerging today from the border where the Biden administration
has been sending pallets of baby formula for illegal mothers and their babies.
While American mothers and babies cannot find baby formula,
this is completely unacceptable and this needs to end now.
>> Now just to start off the idea that a mother can be illegal is disgusting in
every possible way.
The idea that these babies having the formula are illegal is disgusting, but
it's on brand for
Marjorie Greene, everything about this argument is disgusting.
She is, they're referencing the fact that there are photos of baby formula
at a border facility.
There's a Washington examiner article that has gone into this,
immigrants being detained at the border received baby formula.
And yes, that was at the same time that there is a nationwide shortage.
So there's of course some facts about this that you need to understand.
The thing about being a migrant detained in a border facility is that
you can't leave.
And so if there's a baby in a cell there, they can't get formula, they can't go to
the store, they can't drive hours, they can't go online and order it.
Either it's there or it's not, and
the baby can't go like you go into hibernation.
Now she's not actually saying what she wants to be done there,
she's not explicitly saying that she wants to see more of these migrant babies
literally starve to death.
When the US government has the capacity to stop that from happening.
But what she does want to do is get white conservatives to feel like something
is being taken from them.
Brown people are taking something that they want or need and
that is a major problem.
You can see this photo by the way, this is one of the things that's sparking it.
As with so many things in American politics, a conservative took a photo of
a shelf and that's pretty much the whole story, nor critical thought necessary.
So anyway, as ridiculous as all this is,
as heartless as the core of this is, stated or unstated.
It is likely in America to be a problem for the bad administration.
>> Okay, so this is a great story for you to understand how framing works and
how lies in the media works, and certainly lies in politics.
So you know how much of the formula goes down to those detention centers
when you take the whole country into account, about 0.001%.
So if we said, okay, you illegal mothers are taking that baby formula from you and
gave it to other people.
First of all, where would we give it?
Would we just bring it to the closest grocery stores and
give it away to random people?
What do you mean?
Take that and give it, right, and so
the mechanics behind it are near impossible anyway.
But it wouldn't make any difference, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage, right?
And if as John pointed out, the moms can't leave the detention center.
Now if you're having a shortage issues in America, I hate that that's happening,
I'm gonna tell you why it's happening.
The actual reason in a second, okay, but you have some set of options,
you can go online, you can go to different drive further.
There's a bunch of things you can do, but if you're in a detention center and
you cannot nurse and you do not get the baby formula.
There is no other option, your baby will starve and die,
and this is the pro life party, you understand?
Total and utter lie, they don't care about babies at all, like, it's,
they're illegals, kill their babies, kill them, who cares?
Don't give it to them, well then you gotta let them leave, right?
You gotta let him leave the detention center,
otherwise the kid is literally going to starve.
And they say, I don't care, it's not just Marjorie Taylor Greene,
there's tons of other republicans, they're tweeting about it today.
Kill the babies, kill the babies, kill the babies, the republicans say.
But that is literal in this case, it's literal because they're saying,
do not give them the one thing that will allow them to survive.
They never cared about life, they never ever cared about it,
all they care about is controlling women's bodies.
I get to tell you what to do with your body, said the Freedom Party,
you see how everything republicans say is a lie.
I'm not kidding, and you would all know this if the mainstream media didn't
constantly call everything even.
It's not even, those babies would actually die, that's an actual issue,
now why did the baby formula shortage happen in the first place?
We did a long segment on it earlier in the week, summarized super quick,
there was a plan in Michigan.
One of the major distributors, Abbott, turns out, they didn't like regulation,
it cost them a nickel, it cost them a dime, that's hyperbole, right?
But it cost them a tiny amount of money to fix their machines,
they hid it from the FDA.
They didn't fix the machines and guess what?
Babies died, cuz they had toxic material in their bacteria in their baby food, so
what do you want us to do?
You want us to have them sell the toxic baby food that's actually killing babies?
As republicans chant, kill the babies, kill the babies, who cares?
Money, profit, right, okay, so we had to shut the goddamn factory down.
Lack of regulation, whose fault is that?
Unquestionably the republicans, Donald Trump said, don't do any regulation.
If you do one piece of regulation, you have to take two away,
make sure that the babies are not protected, right?
And by the way, why is there only three major baby food companies?
That's why when one of them can't produce baby formula,
we have this massive shortage.
Because of corporate consolidation, which both corporate republicans and
corporate democrats allowed to happen and celebrated.
Because they were bribed by those same corporations
in the form of campaign contributions, so that's the reality.
Now by the way, if you go to right wing media, they'll pretend that all the baby
formula [LAUGH] went down to the detention centers.
And that it's all the illegals fault when it's reality,
when they're actually protecting their corporate buddies who are the ones that
created the problem in the first place.
You turn on the mainstream media, you'll hear like, are the democrats going to
apologize for sending the formula to the babies who would starve otherwise?
And they'll have a legitimate debate over that.
>> Yeah, as of earlier today,
no one had even confirmed that that photo of the supposed stocked pallets
of baby formula was actually at an immigrant detention center.
And if you look closely at that image, the top shelf and the bottom shelf,
our applesauce.
Only the middle shelf is baby formula, and I'm pretty sure, you cannot give
a baby apple sauce as a substitute for breast milk and it's go go squeeze.
That's a great apple sauce, I eat it, if I could produce applesauce,
that would be amazing.
But like I said, you cannot give this to a baby and
Marjorie Taylor Greene is suggesting to women across the country.
That they need to start breastfeeding again,
which is something that's really difficult to do once you stop.
Also at the immigrant detention centers, there's still family separation,
so babies aren't even with their mothers.
The mothers, they're probably couldn't breastfeed if they want to.
The earliest baby that was found separated at an immigrant detention center was four
months old and we've got confirmation, this is still happening under Biden.
And so Marjorie Taylor Greene's brilliant solution also ties into
what republicans are doing right now.
By suggesting that women should just breastfeed,
you're making the assumption they have the time to do it.
They have the energy to do it,
they have the calories to do it instead of giving them the baby formula.
And this is suggesting that women's bodies should be used for childbearing.
Again, this narrative is coming up from the right, taking away women's freedoms.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is talking about this, like women are at disposal, just
ready to breastfeed their kids whenever they need to and they really can't.
That's not a good solution to offer as a public official.
>> Well, look, I will say Jessica, as a person who shares certain characteristics
with republican men who are tweeting a lot about this.
I think it's kind of disgusting that you think we should understand women's bodies
there to be controlled, not too understood.
To the extent that I understand them, they're generally gross,
I don't like what I already know and I wish I could forget it.
But anyway, yeah, they're making all these claims about, no instantly.
It's like a McDonald's Pepsi dispenser, you just turn it on and you make the milk.
No, the the entire thing is ridiculous, they don't care, fundamentally,
Marjorie Greene doesn't care about any bit of this.
She doesn't want to release them so they can go track down the formula themselves,
she doesn't want them to get the formula, obviously.
Even though she would say, I think, that if we're gonna be locking up people in all
of these different prisons throughout the country.
That in theory, we shouldn't let them die in there, none of that or
the trying to let these babies die seems particularly like anything Jesus would do.
But she's the Christian, what would I know?
I'm a godless atheist, what I do know is that they are running with this.
And I think we have a bit of a montage of just yesterday's commentary on
Fox News about this very specific photo.
Why can illegals get baby formula from border agents, but
we can't get it at Walgreens?
Does any of this make sense?
>> Of our border children, the illegal immigrant children are getting formula.
>> American families there's a shortage, but if you're a migrant,
don't worry because Uncle Sam has a stash of that.
We reached out to customs and
border protection to find out how much baby formula the agency has purchased.
They would not tell us, it's not their duty to respond to the public apparently,
but they didn't deny that they had bought it.
Spokesman told us that, quote,
ensuring migrants have formula is in line with this administration's commitments.
So how much more these people gonna take, you wonder, it's too humiliating.
>> Pallets and pallets of baby formula for illegal immigrants and their families.
Even as hard working American families, were now suffering a massive,
a nationwide formula shortage.
>> Illegals pouring across and being flown all across America,
crowding our schools, spreading illness and disease, working for under market pay.
Democrats just don't care, no one is convinced by today's
staged white house baby formula event, either that Biden did.
>> Okay, so they want to know what the administration is going to do about
the formula shortage.
So they did a whole press conference specifically about that,
no one's going to be convinced about that.
And the earlier clip by the way,
was part of her monologue about the formula wasn't directly about it.
I just want you to know that if you tune into Fox news,
it will literally just be this white woman shouting at you that immigrants are dirty.
They're taking pleasure cruise around the country to spread disease,
and then work for under market wages, which is their fault.
They're the bad guy, that corporations will hire them for less money.
And she certainly doesn't want regulations that would either punish those
employers or
make sure that there is a higher minimum wage, that they would have to abide by.
The entire thing is political opportunism and that's it,
and the final thing I will say is, I mentioned this on the damage report.
If Fox News is apparently just discovered that there are some people that are having
difficulty feeding their children.
I'm gonna blow their minds right now, that was true yesterday, and the week before,
and the month before, and the year before.
That food insecurity is a very common thing in the United States,
because we don't care about our people.
But she'll know that if some like white family in West Virginia has kids that
are going to sleep hungry every night.
Do you think Marjorie Greene wants to help them pay for that food?
Do you think she wants like recurring payments to make sure that they can
afford that?
The Republican Party has been fighting against food stamps and
all those programs for literally years.
So it's very convenient for them to come at the end and
suddenly declare that they care if babies are on the brink of starvation.
>> Yeah, so here's my last couple of votes,
the right wing loves any story where there's a shortage of resources.
Cuz it makes people more tribal and their side is tribal, so
they go, my God, we gotta grab to stop before somebody else does, Goddammit.
The others, the others are coming, they're grabbing our food, right?
And that makes them panic, it triggers them more than anything.
And Fox News knows that and that Marjorie Taylor Greene, and
that's why they're pressing on that wound, right?
Now the second reason, as I said earlier is a distraction, because
the literally 99.999% of the problem was created by a corporation, Abbott.
Fox News, you're gonna talk about the majority of the problem?
No, they're going to distract the whole country into thinking the real
problem is the 0.0001 percent, that's exactly how distractions work.
And why do they do that distraction?
It's a two for, one is get you to hate the others, by the way, calling them disease
and saying that they're spreading disease across the country.
It is classic nazi propaganda, that's exactly what they said about Jews and
outsiders.
They're spreading disease and
we gotta make sure we stop them cuz they're all diseased.
So Laura Ingram very literally using nazi propaganda there, okay, why?
One is to blame the others and rally your tribe ballistic Neanderthals to your side,
and the other is to say, do whatever you do.
Do not look at the real problem, which is corporations like us at Fox News,
remember Fox News are multi billion dollar corporation.
And who are all their advertisers, multi billion dollar corporations.
That is literally how they make their money, marketing for corporations.
So they don't want you to know what's actually causing the baby
formula shortage, you can look it up.
These are verifiable facts, they are definitely lying to.
But I'll end on a fun note, no phoenix, one of our members wrote in,
so life begins at naturalization ceremony?
[LAUGH] Apparently, that's the new right wing ideology,
life only matters if it's an American life and maybe, and especially if it's a male.
But if you're a mom that isn't American and
you made the mistake of coming here with your baby.
There's a good chance we're gonna kill your baby if the republicans get their way
because they're pro life.
>> It's absolutely so backwards, the republicans always tell us that we have to
get the government out of the market.
The government shouldn't intervene, but yet you blame the Biden administration for
something that was sourced in a corporation.
They're not even holding the FDA accountable,
if you want to point to somewhere in the government to look at in this.
And they're never going to make that argument about antitrust laws in regard to
baby formula.
Baby formula is already so expensive because the market is so
consolidated, the price went up 18% over the past year.
And baby formula just dehydrated milk, sugar, and
vitamins, and it costs a family $428 a month.
We see people stealing baby formula on a regular basis, but
they want to sensationalize this,
because the Republican Party operates on mobilizing fear.