Transcript

The Drought Sale · I Believe

0:06
SPEAKER_05: A man selling good cows is not happy about it.
0:10
SPEAKER_05: Wednesday morning in May, he pulls into the gravel lot at half past seven.
0:15
SPEAKER_05: The sun is up, but the cold has not gone.
0:18
SPEAKER_05: Winter is fighting summer.
0:20
SPEAKER_05: Some days in May might reach the eighties, some days snow.
0:24
SPEAKER_05: His breath hangs in the air and catches on the bill of his hat.
0:29
SPEAKER_05: Jesse stands on the seat and watches the door.
0:32
SPEAKER_05: The lot is full.
0:33
SPEAKER_05: It should not be full.
0:35
SPEAKER_05: Wednesday is not a normal sale day in May.
0:39
SPEAKER_05: Today is a drought sale, and the trailers are lined up in rows he has not seen in this lot in years.
0:46
SPEAKER_05: Goose necks and bumper pulls, plates from three states.
0:50
SPEAKER_05: Some of the trailers have cows in them with calves still wet at their sides.
0:55
SPEAKER_05: The market is so busy there aren't enough pens to hold all the groups.
0:59
SPEAKER_05: The ranchers unload and the cattle move straight through the alleys into the sail ring, then on to a different truck.
1:06
SPEAKER_05: A rancher does not haul a wet calf to a sale barn unless something is wrong.
1:11
SPEAKER_05: He kills the engine, sits a moment.
1:14
SPEAKER_05: The check he is about to get is already in his head.
1:17
SPEAKER_05: The math is bad and the math is the math.
1:20
SPEAKER_05: twenty five head in the trailer.
1:23
SPEAKER_05: Cows he had not planned to sell for years.
1:26
SPEAKER_05: Good cows, bred back.
1:29
SPEAKER_05: The snow and the grass didn't come this winter, and the hay he would need to carry them through summer is gone, or priced past what the check from October will cover.
1:38
SPEAKER_05: Some years he might have been able to buy hay from Missouri and ship it, but fuel prices are way high because some strait on the other side of the world is closed, so that doesn't pencil out.
1:50
SPEAKER_05: He has run the numbers a hundred times since April.
1:53
SPEAKER_05: There's no version where he gets to keep them and still make money.
1:57
SPEAKER_05: He steps down.
1:59
SPEAKER_05: The gravel crunches.
2:01
SPEAKER_05: Jessie, Bentley mark on her forehead, stays in the cab.
2:06
SPEAKER_05: The brand inspector is at his post off to the left of the building, same man.
2:11
SPEAKER_05: Carhart in a brown ball cap.
2:13
SPEAKER_05: He looks up and nods.
2:15
SPEAKER_05: He has been doing this a long time and he has never seen a Wednesday like this one.
2:20
SPEAKER_05: He does not say so.
2:22
SPEAKER_05: He does not need to.
2:24
SPEAKER_05: Inside the pay window.
2:26
SPEAKER_05: Three ladies behind it.
2:28
SPEAKER_05: One of them smiles at him the way she has smiled at him for twenty years.
2:33
SPEAKER_05: He touches the brim of his hat.
2:35
SPEAKER_05: Through the door to the arena, the stairs are tall and the bleachers are full.
2:40
SPEAKER_05: Men he knows, men he does not, coffee and styrofoam.
2:45
SPEAKER_05: The smell of diesel and pine shavings and manure that his father knew, and his grandfather before him.
2:52
SPEAKER_05: The auctioneer is already going.
2:54
SPEAKER_05: He climbs up, finds a seat, watches.
2:57
SPEAKER_05: The buyers are in the front row.
2:59
SPEAKER_05: He counts them.
3:00
SPEAKER_05: Three.
3:01
SPEAKER_05: There should be more.
3:03
SPEAKER_05: He drove four hours past Buffalo to get to a barn that has eight on a good day.
3:09
SPEAKER_05: Today there are three, and none of them are looking up.
3:13
SPEAKER_05: A healer trots up the aisle.
3:15
SPEAKER_05: Red with a bad left ear.
3:18
SPEAKER_05: She sniffs his boot, moves on.
3:21
SPEAKER_05: The cows come through, cow calf pears, mammas still wet from cabin with their calves in the pen behind them.
3:28
SPEAKER_05: A man two rows down has his hand over his mouth.
3:32
SPEAKER_05: The auctioneer's chant rises, and the gavel falls and rises and falls again.
3:37
SPEAKER_05: His turn comes.
3:39
SPEAKER_05: twenty five head out of the trailer, black, good condition, papers clean.
3:45
SPEAKER_05: The gate opens and they come through in a knot, hooves and dust, and the man with the flag moves them into the ring.
3:53
SPEAKER_05: The chant starts.
3:54
SPEAKER_05: A nod from the buyer for the Nebraska feedlot.
3:58
SPEAKER_05: A nod from Oklahoma.
4:01
SPEAKER_05: The Colorado man does not look up.
4:04
SPEAKER_05: The pause, the gavel.
4:06
SPEAKER_05: The price is the price.
4:08
SPEAKER_05: He walks down, goes to the pay window.
4:12
SPEAKER_05: The lady he knows slides a check across the counter.
4:15
SPEAKER_05: She doesn't smile.
4:17
SPEAKER_05: He folds the check and puts it in his shirt pocket and thanks her and touches his hat and walks out.
4:23
SPEAKER_05: The trailer is empty when he gets to it.
4:26
SPEAKER_05: Jesse stands up on the seat and waits for him to open the door.
4:30
SPEAKER_05: He sits a moment before he turns the key.
4:32
SPEAKER_05: The lot is still full.
4:34
SPEAKER_05: Other men are still in the bleachers.
4:37
SPEAKER_05: Cows in the holding pens behind the building are bawling for the calves they came in with.
4:42
SPEAKER_05: The calves now in different pens behind different trailers belonging to men they have never met.
4:48
SPEAKER_05: He has played the game for 30 years.
4:51
SPEAKER_05: His father played it for 40.
4:53
SPEAKER_05: His grandfather homesteaded the ground.
4:56
SPEAKER_05: It was never designed for him to win.
4:58
SPEAKER_05: He starts the truck, pulls out of the lot, four hours home.
5:03
SPEAKER_05: He has all afternoon to think about it.
5:06
SPEAKER_05: On the drive home, he passes a sign for a high school football field.
5:10
SPEAKER_05: He doesn't think about it.
5:12
SPEAKER_05: He should.
5:43
SPEAKER_01: Sunday in January, a sports bar in Detroit, a man in a Lions jersey watched his quarterback take a knee.
5:49
SPEAKER_01: Jared Goff at quarterback.
5:51
SPEAKER_01: Three years before, the Lions and Rams had swapped quarterbacks.
5:54
SPEAKER_01: The Lions sent Matthew Stafford to Los Angeles.
5:57
SPEAKER_01: The Rams sent Goff to Detroit, along with two of their best draft picks for the next two years to make the deal go through.
6:02
SPEAKER_01: The NFL holds one draft a year.
6:04
SPEAKER_01: Every team picks new college players in turn.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: Worst team first, best team last.
6:09
SPEAKER_01: The rule that has built competitive balance in the league for 90 years.
6:12
SPEAKER_01: Los Angeles gave up its top picks in two of those drafts to get Stafford.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: Two years of the league's best mechanism for building a future.
6:20
SPEAKER_01: Handed over for one quarterback.
6:22
SPEAKER_01: The Lions took the deal because they hadn't won a playoff game in 32 years and had nothing left to lose.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: And because the picks the Rams handed over were what they needed to build a team around the quarterback nobody else wanted.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: 2022.
6:36
SPEAKER_01: HBO put new head coach Dan Campbell's fiery speeches on hard knocks, and the city took to him right away.
6:43
SPEAKER_01: The team started one and six that year, and then won eight of their final ten games.
6:49
SPEAKER_01: A year later, on this Sunday in the wildcard round of the 2023 playoffs, the Lions were ahead of the Rams by three with two minutes on the clock.
6:59
SPEAKER_01: Gop dropped back.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: He threw a first down to Amon Ross St.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: Brown, a fourth round receiver every other team had a chance to take.
7:06
SPEAKER_01: A receiver Detroit had taken because the rules of the draft put him in their pile when nobody else wanted him.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: The first down moved the chains.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: The clock kept running, and the victory formation got under center, the snap, the me.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: Clock running, the crowd on its feet, the man at the bar with his hands on his beard and his eyes on the television and his throat closed.
7:26
SPEAKER_01: The Rams, somewhere far away, already gone.
7:30
SPEAKER_01: The man at the bar had grown up watching the Lions lose.
7:32
SPEAKER_01: His father had grown up watching the Lions lose.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: 32 years, the Lions had been the worst-run franchise in American sports.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: The rock bottom of those years came in 2008 when they became the first team in NFL history to lose every game of a season.
7:47
SPEAKER_01: Detroit was the punchline of every joke about American decline, and the people who lived there had been told by everyone who had never lived there that the city was finished, the man at the bar had not moved on.
7:57
SPEAKER_01: And on this Sunday in January, his team was taking a victory knee in a playoff game.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: The league was built for this.
8:04
SPEAKER_01: The teams had the same salary cap, the same revenue from the same national television deal, the same weighted draft order that gave worse teams better picks the next year.
8:13
SPEAKER_01: Rules written so that 32 years of losing could be ended by good drafts and good decisions and a fair chance.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: The Lions did not win the Super Bowl that year.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: They lost the divisional round the next week by three points on a kick as time expired.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: The season didn't need a trophy.
8:27
SPEAKER_01: The season had done the work.
8:29
SPEAKER_01: Detroit had been crushed by shuttered auto plants and fights between capital and labor.
8:33
SPEAKER_01: The Lions gave them reason to keep going.
8:35
SPEAKER_01: The man at the bar would carry that reason into his Monday morning, into the rest of the winter, into the next season, and the season after that.
8:43
SPEAKER_01: Whatever else the Lions did or did not do, the man at the bar had been given back the thing that had been taken from his city for 32 years.
8:51
SPEAKER_01: A country, like a city, has to be allowed to keep what it has earned.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: Our founding documents are our rules.
8:58
SPEAKER_01: The rules say we the people, for the people.
9:01
SPEAKER_01: They claim a kid, born in a leaky trailer, can raise her children in a warm house, with food on the table, in a good school district.
9:08
SPEAKER_01: They are either true or they are the most spectacular lie ever committed to paper.
9:14
SPEAKER_05: Competition does not happen naturally.
9:17
SPEAKER_05: The principle is older than football, and the league did not invent it.
9:22
SPEAKER_05: It has to be designed, enforced, maintained year after year, against the gravitational pull of consolidation, because consolidation is what every winning team and every winning company would prefer if the rules allowed it.
9:38
SPEAKER_05: The rules aren't focused on the teams, they're focused on the people.
9:42
SPEAKER_05: At the start of every season, any fan can believe their team can win a playoff game.
9:48
SPEAKER_05: The salary cap does not celebrate competition.
9:51
SPEAKER_05: It is an admission that without it, the Steelers and the Patriots and the Chiefs would eat everyone, and the product would die.
10:00
SPEAKER_05: The NFL's design isn't perfect.
10:03
SPEAKER_05: The Patriots ran the AFC East for two decades.
10:06
SPEAKER_05: The Chiefs have run the AFC West for most of the last ten years.
10:11
SPEAKER_05: The Packers under Lombardi won five championships in seven seasons.
10:16
SPEAKER_05: Talent clusters.
10:17
SPEAKER_05: Coaches and quarterbacks and general managers cluster with talent.
10:22
SPEAKER_05: The design can't stop Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes from being great quarterbacks.
10:28
SPEAKER_05: The design constrains the time over which a team can dominate everyone else.
10:33
SPEAKER_05: Imperfect is not the same as failed, and it took many years to build consensus.
10:38
SPEAKER_05: In February of nineteen thirty six, Bert Bell, owner of the worst team in football, proposed that the league's college player draft be run in reverse order.
10:49
SPEAKER_05: Worst team picks first, best team picks last.
10:53
SPEAKER_05: The richest owners in the room would lose the freedom to outbid Bell for college talent.
10:58
SPEAKER_05: They would lose the path to permanent dominance.
11:01
SPEAKER_05: Bell argued that without the rule, the strongest teams would consolidate talent year over year, the weaker teams would fold one by one, and a league without competitive balance would lose its audience.
11:13
SPEAKER_05: The vote was unanimous.
11:15
SPEAKER_05: The first NFL draft was held two days later.
11:18
SPEAKER_05: The reverse order draft has been the rule ever since.
11:22
SPEAKER_05: Twenty five years later in nineteen sixty one, Commissioner Pete Rosell proposed a single national television contract that would split the revenue equally among all fourteen teams.
11:34
SPEAKER_05: The richest teams would leave millions of dollars on the table, they agreed.
11:39
SPEAKER_05: Rosell then took the deal to a federal court in Philadelphia, where a judge ruled it an illegal restraint of trade under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
11:48
SPEAKER_05: Rosell had weeks to save it.
11:50
SPEAKER_05: He went to Congress, testified that professional sports could not function as ordinary businesses, because no team in a league wants its competitors to fold, and asked for a law that would legalize what the court had just struck down.
12:03
SPEAKER_05: Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act in September.
12:06
SPEAKER_05: President Kennedy signed it.
12:08
SPEAKER_05: Every dollar of national television revenue the NFL has earned since has been split evenly among the franchises because a commissioner persuaded the owners of the richest teams to share with the poorest, and then persuaded Congress to bless the sharing.
12:25
SPEAKER_05: We built the design for a game, we didn't build it for beef or airlines or for the search bar in everyone's pocket, or the cloud the search bar runs on, or the eyeglasses on the reader's face, or the seeds the farmer puts in the ground.
12:39
SPEAKER_05: In every one of those markets we did the opposite.
12:41
SPEAKER_05: We let corporations consolidate and shareholders cut cost.
12:46
SPEAKER_05: The products got worse and prices got higher, and the people on the receiving end of those markets, like the rancher, the traveler, the searcher, the patient, and the farmer, got told it was the cost of efficiency.
12:59
SPEAKER_05: It is not the cost of efficiency, it is the cost of cowardice.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: Now, let's not be naive.
13:08
SPEAKER_01: The NFL is a cartel.
13:10
SPEAKER_01: The salary cap is wage suppression.
13:12
SPEAKER_01: The draft is a restraint on the freedom of a young man to sell his work to the highest bidder.
13:18
SPEAKER_01: The revenue sharing is collusion among 32 owners who agreed to bind themselves to a common rule.
13:25
SPEAKER_01: The cartel produces something the free market does not.
13:28
SPEAKER_01: A Sunday in January in Detroit.
13:30
SPEAKER_01: A man at a bar with his throat closed.
13:32
SPEAKER_01: Hope in a city that everyone told to give up.
13:35
SPEAKER_01: The cartel produces the thing a country actually needs its institutions to produce.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: We built the rules for a game.
13:41
SPEAKER_01: We didn't build them for the country.
13:43
SPEAKER_01: We still can.
13:44
SPEAKER_01: It's been done before.
13:51
SPEAKER_02: Act two.
13:55
SPEAKER_02: A century and a half before Burt Bell asked his peers to constrain themselves, a different man stood in a different chamber and asked the same thing of a different cartel.
14:03
SPEAKER_02: He had no commissioner, no Congress willing to bless what he was about to do.
14:08
SPEAKER_02: He had only the office, the argument, and courage.
14:11
SPEAKER_02: His name was Robert Peel.
14:13
SPEAKER_02: He was a Tory.
14:14
SPEAKER_02: He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the most powerful office in the most powerful empire the world had ever seen.
14:21
SPEAKER_02: He had been born to a wealthy cotton manufacturer and raised to defend the interests of the rich men who had paid for his education.
14:28
SPEAKER_02: He did, for thirty years.
14:30
SPEAKER_02: He defended them in the House of Commons.
14:32
SPEAKER_02: He defended them as Home Secretary.
14:34
SPEAKER_02: He defended them as Prime Minister.
14:36
SPEAKER_02: The interests he defended included the corn laws.
14:39
SPEAKER_02: The corn laws were tariffs on imported grain.
14:41
SPEAKER_02: Tariffs are taxes on the poor.
14:43
SPEAKER_02: They had been passed in 1815 to protect the price of domestic British wheat against cheaper grain from mainland Europe and the United States.
14:51
SPEAKER_02: The men they protected were the landed gentry.
14:54
SPEAKER_02: The men they hurt were everyone who bought bread.
14:56
SPEAKER_02: In a country where the working class spent half its income on food, the new taxes stood between a man's wage and his children's supper.
15:03
SPEAKER_02: Peel defended them.
15:05
SPEAKER_02: He believed, as his father and his class had, that protecting domestic agriculture was the foundation of national security and social order.
15:12
SPEAKER_02: He was not wrong about either argument.
15:15
SPEAKER_02: A country that cannot feed itself is a country at the mercy of its enemies.
15:19
SPEAKER_02: A country with impoverished agricultural producers is a country with unstable political order.
15:25
SPEAKER_02: The arguments were serious.
15:27
SPEAKER_02: Peel made them seriously.
15:28
SPEAKER_02: Then the potato crop failed in Ireland.
15:34
SPEAKER_03: In the autumn of 1845, a fungus arrived in Europe and turned the Irish potato harvest into a black slurry in the ground.
15:42
SPEAKER_03: The crop failed again in 1846, and again in 1847.
15:48
SPEAKER_03: Ireland, a country of eight million people, lost a million of them to starvation and disease in five years.
15:56
SPEAKER_03: Another million left.
15:58
SPEAKER_03: The population of Ireland in 1851 was smaller than in 1841.
16:03
SPEAKER_03: The corn laws did not cause the famine.
16:06
SPEAKER_03: The blight caused the famine.
16:09
SPEAKER_03: But the corn laws were the laws under which a starving country could not buy cheap grain from abroad, because the laws made cheap grain illegal.
16:19
SPEAKER_03: The landed class was protected.
16:21
SPEAKER_03: The Irish peasant was not.
16:23
SPEAKER_03: Peel saw it.
16:25
SPEAKER_03: He had defended the laws his entire career, and he saw what the laws were doing in the autumn of 1845.
16:33
SPEAKER_03: He decided he had been wrong.
16:35
SPEAKER_03: Not wrong about the principle of national agricultural security.
16:40
SPEAKER_03: Wrong about tariffs levied on the people who were starving in real time.
16:44
SPEAKER_03: The arguments he had made for thirty years were no longer the arguments the moment required.
16:50
SPEAKER_03: The discipline of his career was to follow the evidence to the decisive point.
16:55
SPEAKER_03: He did.
16:57
SPEAKER_03: He decided to repeal the corn laws.
17:00
SPEAKER_03: His party would not follow him.
17:02
SPEAKER_03: His party was the Conservative Party.
17:05
SPEAKER_03: He had built it and supported the wealthy elites.
17:08
SPEAKER_03: He had defended their principles for three decades.
17:12
SPEAKER_03: Repealing the Corn Laws meant taking food off the table of the men who had funded his career and put him in his office.
17:19
SPEAKER_03: Two-thirds of his own party voted against him.
17:22
SPEAKER_03: He did it anyway.
17:31
SPEAKER_02: The House of Lords passed it on June 25th.
17:34
SPEAKER_02: Royal assent came the next day.
17:36
SPEAKER_02: The cartel of grain prices that had stood for 31 years was no more.
17:41
SPEAKER_02: The same night the Lords passed the repeal, a coalition of Whigs, Radicals, and Protectionist Tories, who had not forgiven Peel for his betrayal, defeated his government on an unrelated Irish coercion bill.
17:53
SPEAKER_02: The vote was 292 to 219.
17:57
SPEAKER_02: Peel resigned the office of Prime Minister four days later, on June 29, 1846.
18:02
SPEAKER_02: He had spent his career as a Tory and ended it without a party.
18:06
SPEAKER_02: The Conservatives he had built would not speak his name without a curse for a generation.
18:11
SPEAKER_02: He gave three speeches before he resigned.
18:13
SPEAKER_02: The last was the one that mattered.
18:15
SPEAKER_02: On June 29th, he stood in the chamber and defended what he had done.
18:19
SPEAKER_02: He didn't apologize or hedge.
18:21
SPEAKER_02: He explained that he had repealed the laws because the laws had become unjust, that a country whose food was priced beyond the reach of its workers, was a country whose government had failed in its first responsibility.
18:33
SPEAKER_02: That protecting the few at the cost of the many was not conservatism.
18:37
SPEAKER_02: It was privilege wearing the costume of conservatism, and that the conservative who refused to know the difference was conserving nothing worth conserving.
18:46
SPEAKER_02: And then he turned, in the last paragraph, to the country he was leaving.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: In modern words he said One day, families will sit in a warm house and share a meal.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: They will have earned that meal by the sweat of their brow, in work that paid them what their work was worth.
19:03
SPEAKER_00: The food on their table will not be priced past their reach by men they will never meet.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: They will not give thanks for the absence of injustice, because they will not have to know it was ever there.
19:13
SPEAKER_00: In those houses, perhaps, they will remember one who had the courage to lose his career so the cartel could be broken.
19:20
SPEAKER_00: One who had the discipline to follow the evidence past every argument he had spent his life making.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: One who had the justice to say out loud that a law written to protect the few at the cost of the many is not a law worth keeping.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: One who had the wisdom to know that a party which protects privilege is not conserving anything that deserves to be conserved.
19:39
SPEAKER_00: In those houses they will remember him with good will, the way a family at a full table remembers anyone who made the table possible.
19:49
SPEAKER_03: Sir Robert Peel died four years later, in July of 1850, thrown from a horse on Constitution Hill in London.
19:56
SPEAKER_03: It shied, threw him, and fell on top of him.
20:00
SPEAKER_03: He lived for three days in pain and died at his home in Whitehall Gardens.
20:05
SPEAKER_03: He was sixty-two.
20:06
SPEAKER_03: His party did not attend his funeral.
20:09
SPEAKER_03: The working men of Britain did.
20:11
SPEAKER_03: They lined the streets in numbers no one expected.
20:15
SPEAKER_03: They had not known him personally.
20:18
SPEAKER_03: They had never been in a room with him.
20:20
SPEAKER_03: They knew only that they were eating cheaper bread because of what he had done.
20:25
SPEAKER_03: The law that had taxed their suppers had been broken by a man who had been the most powerful man in the country.
20:32
SPEAKER_03: He had spent his career defending the system and then gave up his power to break it.
20:38
SPEAKER_03: We have his problem.
20:39
SPEAKER_03: Courage is not rare.
20:41
SPEAKER_03: It is common.
20:42
SPEAKER_03: What is rare is the willingness to pay its price.
20:51
SPEAKER_05: Act three, the empty pen.
20:55
SPEAKER_05: North out of Torrington on 26, then west to Casper, then north again toward home.
21:02
SPEAKER_05: Jesse on the seat, the check folded in his shirt pocket, empty trailer behind him, afternoon sun on his left shoulder.
21:10
SPEAKER_05: He has driven this road a thousand times.
21:13
SPEAKER_05: He has never driven it after a sail like this one.
21:16
SPEAKER_05: The rain had come last week too late to matter.
21:19
SPEAKER_05: The grass here was winter grass.
21:22
SPEAKER_05: The rain would make it green, but it grew in the winter, not the summer.
21:27
SPEAKER_05: It would not grow now.
21:29
SPEAKER_05: By July the pastures would be the color of straw, twenty five head, good cows, cows he had not planned to sell for years.
21:39
SPEAKER_05: Cows that would have raised calves in twenty twenty seven and twenty twenty eight and twenty twenty nine.
21:46
SPEAKER_05: Three years of calves gone in one Wednesday morning.
21:49
SPEAKER_05: The calves those calves would have raised gone with them.
21:53
SPEAKER_05: He had not just sold cows.
21:55
SPEAKER_05: He had sold the next decade of the ranch.
21:58
SPEAKER_05: If he could have kept heifers, In 2026, the bull could breed them in 2027, calves in 2028.
22:06
SPEAKER_05: By the time those calves were on the ground and weaned and through the feedlot, that's pretty close to the end of the decade.
22:13
SPEAKER_05: There isn't anything anybody can change.
22:15
SPEAKER_05: We can't build them out of spare parts.
22:18
SPEAKER_05: Biology is biology.
22:20
SPEAKER_05: A cow has one calf a year.
22:22
SPEAKER_05: A heifer takes two years to be ready.
22:26
SPEAKER_05: The herd can't be rebuilt by want or policy or prayer.
22:30
SPEAKER_05: The herd can only be rebuilt by years of high prices that let ranchers afford to keep the females and breed them instead of selling them.
22:38
SPEAKER_05: The herd needs five years.
22:40
SPEAKER_05: The drought reset the clock to zero.
22:42
SPEAKER_05: His kids in three cities will be in middle age before the national herd is back to where it was the day before he was born.
22:50
SPEAKER_05: And prices will stay high until that day comes.
22:55
SPEAKER_01: North of Casey, the bighhorns come up on the left in a long pale wall.
23:00
SPEAKER_01: Snow on the high peaks at the sage between him and the mountains.
23:04
SPEAKER_01: Grey and patient.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: He knows what the country could do if the country had the courage.
23:09
SPEAKER_01: The answers are not hidden, they are not even particularly hard.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: Break up the four packers.
23:14
SPEAKER_01: Enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act the way it was written to be enforced.
23:18
SPEAKER_01: Give him eight buyers in the front row at Torrington instead of three.
23:22
SPEAKER_01: Let the price the auctioneer calls be a price discovered in a real market, not a price set the day before, on a board in Chicago, by four companies that act like one.
23:31
SPEAKER_01: Label the beef, country of origin, ranch of origin, a USDA grade, fed back to the cow calf operator the way the data has been technically possible for 10 years, and politically possible for none.
23:43
SPEAKER_01: Let his good cows command the premium good cows are worth.
23:46
SPEAKER_01: Let consumers know what they are buying.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: Let the price he gets reflect the work he did.
23:51
SPEAKER_01: Tax the businesses that pay their workers below the wage that keeps them off social programs.
23:57
SPEAKER_01: Reward the ranches and the diners and the small operations whose employees do not need the taxpayers' help to heat the house.
24:03
SPEAKER_01: Stop subsidizing corporations that pay their employees so little the government has to make up the difference.
24:09
SPEAKER_01: Stop treating corporations like disadvantaged small businesses.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: Build starter homes, reform zoning, let his son and billings come home to a house his work can afford.
24:19
SPEAKER_01: None of it is theoretical.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: All of it has been written, debated, modeled, scored, and shelved.
24:25
SPEAKER_01: The reforms are sitting in committee files in Washington.
24:28
SPEAKER_01: They are sitting in policy papers from Heritage and Brookings.
24:31
SPEAKER_01: They are sitting in the books on his own nightstand.
24:34
SPEAKER_01: What is missing is the senator who will lose her caucus to vote for them.
24:38
SPEAKER_01: The congressman who will lose his district.
24:40
SPEAKER_01: The president who will lose his coalition the morning after the bill is signed.
24:45
SPEAKER_01: The courage is not rare, but the willingness to pay its price is He does not know if that person exists.
24:53
SPEAKER_05: He has not seen one in his lifetime.
24:55
SPEAKER_05: But he hopes because the alternative means agreeing to the world as it is.
25:01
SPEAKER_05: The wicked prosper.
25:02
SPEAKER_05: Injustice goes unanswered.
25:04
SPEAKER_05: The violent rule the meek.
25:06
SPEAKER_05: He does not agree.
25:08
SPEAKER_05: He will walk on the high hill.
25:12
SPEAKER_05: He turns off the highway onto the county road, past the mailbox his father put up, the gate his grandfather hung.
25:20
SPEAKER_05: Jesse stands up on the seat.
25:22
SPEAKER_05: The kitchen window light is on.
25:24
SPEAKER_05: The wife is at her desk, riding.
25:26
SPEAKER_05: He walks out behind the barn to the pens.
25:30
SPEAKER_05: They will be empty this summer and next summer.
25:33
SPEAKER_05: Maybe the summer after that.
25:36
SPEAKER_05: Empty when his son in Billings decides whether to come home, or empty when his son decides not to.
25:42
SPEAKER_05: The wind moves through the aspens.
25:44
SPEAKER_05: A meadowlark sings from the pasture.
25:47
SPEAKER_05: The big horns catch the last of the light.
25:50
SPEAKER_05: A man selling good cows is not happy about it.
26:17
SPEAKER_06: Look at it in the eyes of a tiger.
26:20
SPEAKER_06: You should win a rival.
26:52
SPEAKER_06: Let's go.
27:14
SPEAKER_06: Can you hear them bells ringin'?
27:17
SPEAKER_06: Down on there's an angel singin'.
27:20
SPEAKER_06: It ain't over till it's over.
27:23
SPEAKER_06: It's a cold day about to get colder.
27:26
SPEAKER_06: I was raised by the eyes, didn't just get in my reach.
27:36
SPEAKER_06: And that's gonna stop me.