The World and Everything in It: October 17, 2022

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

High stakes in a Supreme Court case that pits animal welfare against pork production.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Legal Docket.

Also today the Monday Moneybeat, David Bahnsen answers your questions.

Plus the WORLD History Book. Ten years ago this week, an American athlete loses his cycling titles due to a doping scandal.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, October 17th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Time for news with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Ukraine » AUDIO: [Siren] 

The familiar sound of air raid sirens in central Kyiv over the weekend after days of Russian attacks on civilian targets.

That as Ukraine awaits delivery of more air-defense systems from Washington and NATO allies. Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova told Face the Nation …

MARKAROVA: Unfortunately, this system is difficult to produce, and they’re not already on the shelves waiting, but we’re doing everything possible and asking our partners to do everything possible to speed up delivery.

The White House just announced another $725 million in weapons and military aid for Ukraine.

ZELENSKYY: [Ukrainian]

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday that by his government’s estimate, Russia has lost nearly 65,000 soldiers in the war.

Vladimir Putin said on Friday that he plans to halt his military draft in two weeks, claiming that Russia has added more than 200,000 troops to its ranks.

Musk SpaceX Ukraine » Oksana Markarova also expressed optimism Sunday about keeping the Starlink internet service from Elon Musk’s SpaceX company up and running in Ukraine.

The satellite internet service has provided critical battlefield communications and humanitarian contacts amid the war.

Musk tweeted on Friday that it was costing SpaceX $20 million a month to support Ukraine’s communications needs and asked the Pentagon to pick up the tab. Markarova said Sunday …

MARKAROVA: It’s the only connection that we have and very important that to continue having it, and I’m positive that we will find a solution there.

Markarova did not indicate whether Musk had agreed to continue funding the service.

Xi Jinping Communist Congress » In China, thousands of delegates gathered in Tiananmen Square’s Great Hall on Sunday for the start of the Communist party conference.

Leader Xi Jinping was expected to receive a third five-year term, breaking with recent precedent and making him perhaps the most powerful Chinese ruler since Mao Zedong.

Drew Thompson is research fellow at the National University of Singapore. He says the Chinese people can expect more of the same …

THOMPSON: Including censorship, policing to further control and enhance the party’s control over the everyday lives of Chinese citizens.

Xi Jinping’s formula will remain the same: strict one-party rule, intolerance of criticism and a hard-line approach toward COVID-19 including quarantines and travel bans even as other countries have opened up.

Migrants » President Biden has repeatedly slammed President Trump’s immigration policies, calling them “cruel,” including toward those fleeing the “brutal” government of Venezuela.

But with growing numbers of Venezuelans arriving at the Southern border, Biden is cracking down on Venezuelan migrants who attempt to cross without authorization.

He has now followed Trump’s lead in invoking Title 42 to deport Venezuelans who are not already authorized to enter the country. That even as Biden’s own Justice Department is fighting Title 42 in court.

GOP Senator Bill Cassidy charged that the Biden administration effectively wants open borders, but …

CASSIDY: Now it’s so totally out of control, even they have to do something. So they’re going back to policies that the last administration did, which were the last policies that worked.

Under the policy, Venezuelans who walk or swim across America’s southern border will be expelled and any Venezuelan who illegally enters Mexico or Panama will be ineligible to come to the United States.

However, the Biden administration said it would offer legal entry to up to 24,000 Venezuelan immigrants if they applied remotely and came to the U.S. by plane.

Raleigh shooting aftermath » Families continue to grieve in Raleigh, North Carolina after a 15-year-old boy killed five people and injured two more in a shooting rampage on Friday.

Jennifer Metallo is with the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team, which is working to support the families.

METALLO: This community is reeling. There’s a senselessness to things like this, so we just pray for that hope, that spark of hope to just come back into this community.

The gunman appeared to shoot people at random. The victims ranged in age from 16 to their late 50s.

Police have not disclosed the suspect’s name. He is behind bars awaiting charges. 

Gas prices » Gas prices have dipped once again after rising last week. AAA’s current national average stands at $3.89 per gallon. That 2 cents lower than a week ago, but 20 cents higher than this time last month.

Georgia has the cheapest gas in the country, $3.26 per gallon on average. California has the highest average price: $6.08.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: High stakes in a Supreme Court case that pits animal welfare against pork production.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Monday morning, October 17th, 2022 and we’re so glad you’ve joined us for The World and Everything in It! Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket. Just one oral argument for today, but it’s a really important one.

REICHARD: Yes, it is. And I may want to take this one up for season four of Legal Docket next summer.

Yea, because it has an interesting constitutional issue—namely, the commerce clause—and the core of the case has to do with the welfare of animals and the efficient production of meat for human consumption.

EICHER: Here’s the background. Back in 2018, California passed a law called Proposition 12. It places restrictions on the sale of pork, saying if you want to sell pork in California, your birthing sows must have an additional 10 square feet of space than what’s typical for them.

Animal-rights activists drove the ballot initiative, and it won nearly two-thirds of votes cast in that election.

REICHARD: But pig farmers and meat packers sued to stop it. Their lawyers say the regulation reaches into other states and disrupts what they do. If the law actually takes effect, the costs California imposes will cause the price of pork to rise across the country. They’d need to build new buildings. New cages. They’d have to reduce the size of herds. All that on top of already-sky high costs of labor, equipment, and feed for the livestock.

Lawyer for the pork producers, Timothy Bishop, at the Supreme Court:

BISHOP: And what I ask the Court to focus on is what our nation's interstate market looks like if California can condition sales on its moral or policy views and every other state can do the same. And that destroys the twin purposes of the Commerce Clause, which this Court said are to maintain the national economic union and preserve the territorial sovereignty of the states. We will not have a national economic union if California can impose its moral views this way.

The Commerce Clause. Article I, Section 8, Clause 3.

In relevant part, it gives Congress the power to regulate commerce among the several states.

So the pork industry argues California is essentially arrogating to itself the power the Constitution gave to Congress.

But California says this is not about interstate commerce. It’s about California and its marketplace. State Solicitor General Michael Mongan.

MONGAN: In this case, Prop 12's sow housing restrictions are tied to the production process for California-bound pork. And the market already treats that aspect of the production process as a basis for differentiating between products. That's why stores sell crate-free pork.

But then there’s another aspect of the Commerce Clause: The so-called Dormant Commerce Clause. Think of it as the flip side of the Commerce Clause rule that delegates to Congress the power to “regulate commerce among the states.” Congress can; conversely, states cannot.

Now, you’re not going to find the Dormant Commerce Clause anywhere in the Constitution. Supreme Court decisions have inferred that, and taken it to mean that state action cannot excessively burden interstate commerce.

Lawyer Bishop for the pork industry says that because California imports 99% of its pork, the effect of the law very much places burdens on interstate commerce.

At least one justice saw this as more than just a moral crusade for animal welfare. After all, states do have police powers to regulate public health and safety of their own people.

EICHER: Take the example of California’s particular problem with air pollution—which is produced by emissions from the millions of automobiles operated in southern California.

So think about the gasoline those cars burn. Refiners produce gasoline from light crude oil and create a number of different blends. To meet California environmental standards, refiners must create specific reformulations that are more expensive to produce. But they can produce it. And they can do it in-state without much effect on markets in the rest of the country.

Pork production is not like that, and California is not merely demanding a special pork blend. Its policy targets the way out-of-state farmers raise the animals.

REICHARD: In other words: California is basically trying to regulate Iowa and a handful of other small states.

Nevertheless, here’s Justice Sotomayor steering the analysis toward public health. Her exchange is with pork-industry lawyer Bishop.

SOTOMAYOR: It is also reasonable to think that reducing close confinement of pigs may reduce the use of antibiotics in pigs, thus reducing the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And some think that the use of gestation crates increases the presence of diseases in piglets that carry—can carry through to time of slaughter. Now I know you're going to tell me there's no scientific proof, but there is certainly a reasonable basis for these people to think this.

BISHOP: We don't think there's a reasonable basis. Our veterinarians say exactly the opposite.

Justice Samuel Alito jumped in to clarify that the statement about disease came from a friend-of-the-court brief. In other words: it is not evidence in the record. That’s extremely important. No trial court below established this as a fact, so the Supreme Court is not supposed to presume it as true.

This case brings out a thread of commerce-clause analysis that’s not been explored much. That is, how the morality of a regulation is defined. The Humane Society of the United States was behind Prop 12’s ballot initiative. Animal welfare is its primary concern, arguably more than the health and safety of people.

Justice Clarence Thomas wondered the limits of that in this question to lawyer Mongan for California:

THOMAS: How far would you carry that? Could you -- other than beyond the health and safety concerns that you might have here, you'd say moral concerns. Could it extend to a state that has, for example, different political views on certain issues that are important to your voters?

MONGAN: I don't think so, Your Honor…

Mongan going on to say California is not passing moral judgment on the policy choices of other states. He acknowledges that to bar imports of goods for such reasons would conflict with the so-called Dormant Commerce Clause that court-made doctrine barring state protectionism.

Discerning ears could hear another hot topic dangling in the air: abortion. Nobody even mentioned it, but with nationwide abortion rights thrown out in June, implications of a decision in this case are clear. Such as banning abortion pills mailed in from another state.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett used other hot topics to make the point to Mongan, lawyer for California:

BARRETT: So, could you have California pass a law that said we’re not going to buy any pork from companies that don’t require all their employees to be vaccinated, or from corporations that don’t fund gender-affirming surgery? Or that sort of thing?

Mongan answered no, you can’t condition sales in-state on some company policy.

Barrett pressed on:

BARRETT: But couldn’t Californians have a moral interest in saying they don't want to be complicit and open their supermarket shelves to the wares of a company that mistreats its employees, for example, by not providing certain forms of healthcare?

MONGAN: So I -- I -- I certainly could imagine a state articulating that type of moral interest, but I don't think that stating the moral interest is the end of the constitutional analysis.

The justices spun hypotheticals to find the constitutional principle.

Justice Alito wondered whether pork producers and eaters might retaliate against California by saying “we’re worried about water shortages, so no almonds from irrigated fields in California can pass through our state.” He asked Mongan, lawyer for California:

ALITO: Are you unconcerned about all this? Is California unconcerned about all this because it is such a giant, you can wield this power, Wyoming couldn't do it, most other states couldn't do it, but you can do it? You can bully the other states, and so you're not really that concerned about retaliation? Is that part of your position?

MONGAN: No, Your Honor, that's certainly not how I would put it.

Bishop for the pork farmers suggested California could use less drastic means to accomplish what it wants. For example, put a label on pork that says in big letters: “This is immorally produced.”

Some justices seemed to like that idea.

Justice Elena Kagan looked down the road to the logical conclusion if California’s policy goals win here:

KAGAN: ... a lot of policy disputes can be incorporated into laws like yours. You know, one, California can do laws that you have to be pro-labor union. And Texas can do laws that say you have to be anti-labor union, you know, close shop, open shop. You could have states making immigration policy, essentially, through these laws. You could have states doing a wide variety of things through the mechanism of saying, well, unless you comply, you can't sell goods in our market. And, you know, we live in a divided country, and the -- the -- the balkanization that the framers were concerned about is surely present today. You know, do we want to live in a world where we're constantly at each others' throats and, you know, Texas is at war with California and California at war with Texas?

MONGAN: Right, I -- I certainly…

Supreme Court precedent holds that the the power of states to pass laws interfering with interstate commerce is limited when that law imposes an undue burden on businesses. And some states have laws that explicitly permit what California forbids as far as pig confinement goes.

Chief Justice John Roberts saw the overall problem in this comment to Jeffrey Lamken, lawyer for the Humane Society:

ROBERTS: I think people in some states, maybe the ones that produce a lot of pork, in Iowa or North Carolina or Indiana, may think there's a moral value in providing a low-cost source of protein to people, maybe particularly at times of rising food prices. But, under your analysis, it's California's view of morality that prevails over the views of people in other states because of the market power that they have.

Trends in consumer demand do appear to be growing in the direction of meat derived from more animal-friendly procurement. Meanwhile, pressure from California regulations caused one of the biggest pork producing companies in the country to announce it will close early next spring.

My best guess is that the pork producers will win this case, based on established precedent and concerns the justices have with economic balkanization.

But does our constitutional structure prevent states from requiring that producers consider the welfare of animals? One friend-of-the-court brief cited C.S. Lewis, who called animal suffering at human hands a “question of justice.” Lewis asked, “What shall be done for these innocents?” And in that quote, hAnd in that quote he was talking about animals treated cruelly.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: the Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Time now for our weekly conversation on business, markets, and the economy with financial analyst and adviser David Bahnsen, head of the wealth management firm The Bahnsen Group. Good morning!

DAVID BAHNSEN, GUEST: Good morning, Nick. Good to be with you.

EICHER: Well, today we start making good on listener questions, David. We have a lot of them. As it turns out, we had a glitch in our system where not all of our email was getting through, but our team was able to fix it and we believe recover them all. I’ve read through everything—I hope—several weeks worth of backlogged email and let me say, you may not hear yours right away. I’ve had to place them into categories and one of those categories I’ll call “evergreen”—appropriate for any time—and so David let’s get right into it. First question relates to your comments of last week.

This is from Jacques Pye and he writes this:

While I understand and agree with your comments that the notion that the good jobs report [in September] would cause the Fed to raise the prime rate in order to cool the economy (producing so many jobs) … [that it] was NOT the cause for the large decrease in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the preceding Friday, I would like to know your thoughts on what did cause the Dow to drop 600+ points that [day].

So David, maybe recontextualize your comments and then address our listener, what did cause the Dow drop a week or so ago.

BAHNSEN: He’s referring to the day when the employment number comes out and looks pretty good, which means the Feds will not be likely to slow down tightening. And they’re not likely to slow down raising rates, and so it causes the Dow to drop. That’s the basic thinking in the media’s narrative.

He did mention the Fed is therefore more likely to control the prime rate, but the Fed doesn’t control the prime rate, they control the Federal funds rate. And those technical details make a difference. Even though ultimately, the prime rate is largely going to feed off the Fed funds rate, I want to make that clarification.

But first of all, the question of what drives the market on any given day is a really dangerous thing to try to answer because you’re not going to know. And by seeking out an awareness of what could be potentially moving markets, you can embed an arrogance or a confidence that becomes actionable. That would be in opposition to the approach of humility that says the market can go up or down any day for any reason, without telling you why it’s doing it. For example, last Friday you could say the market absolutely knew that the Fed was still going to be hiking rates in the next meeting. And then the employment report comes out pretty good. But the market dropped anyways. So maybe the market didn’t know.

But what I would say is maybe there were a lot of people positioned in trades, short term traders, hedge funds, high frequency algorithmic players, who were positioned for the other way. It didn’t happen. So they had to cover their trades real quick. This kind of thing doesn’t need to be fully knowable or transparent, and it isn’t. I don’t declare it with an incredible certitude. But what I’m pointing out is that those things do drive a lot of short term market activity. And those things are incredibly irrelevant to investors.

EICHER: Next question from Matthew J.S. Jackson. He listens to us, he says, almost every day in Northern Ireland:

JACKSON: Hi David. My name is Matthew. I'm from Northern Ireland. I've got a question about the United Kingdom market. The UK market has seen a big change in the last week. And I guess I just wanted to understand your thinking behind it. Whether you think it is due to the mini budget or the Bank of England, and whether you think that the mini budget will actually help with the rise of inflation in the UK or whether it will just exasperate it as it’s penting up more demand rather than stymieing the demand and getting supply back to a normal level. So your thoughts would be very much appreciated. Thank you.

BAHNSEN: All right. In a way, the question is a broader economic philosophy question: Does greater production or incentive to greater production create more or less inflation? He happens to contextualize it in the context of UK right now. Their new Prime Minister Liz Truss is not having a lot of political success driving this agenda. I have—by the way—been in touch with their economic department in a number of conference calls now trying to push the agenda of supply incentives being the solution to inflation and not the problem of inflation.

Returning to the question: Does it stimulate more demand which exacerbates the problem? And this is, again, the philosophy of demand side versus supply side economics. The issue we have with inflation in the UK and the United States is an inadequate level of production of goods and services relative to demand and the money supply behind the demand. And there is no possible way that incentives to produce more goods and services is counterproductive to inflation.

The greatest argument we have in history for this was the massive and structural disinflation that the supply side activities in the United States created [during the 1980’s], where output exploded after Reagan’s tax cuts and his cabinet’s process of deregulation and you had significant lowering and moderating of inflation. I very much believe that the UK would be well served to stimulate or incentivize greater production. However, I am quite skeptical that they’ll be able to politically do it based on the uphill battle that they’re fighting.

EICHER: Let’s stay on the subject of Europe, David. A question from Matt Himsey asking this:

We’ve been hearing about swings in the value of currency lately and how the Euro was historically low. How is the value of currency determined? Why is it that the Euro is losing value and not that the [United States] dollar is gaining value?

BAHNSEN: By definition, both things are happening at once; I happen to believe one is driving the other. You have one that is trading relative to another. That’s how currencies always are, because a currency’s value is the amount of the other currency you can get for it. And so if one is going lower, it means the other is going higher. This is textbook zero sum. And the dollar has risen this year against the euro, but also substantially against the yen and against the Sterling Pound as well. And the question is to why these other currencies are declining, and the answer is very simply that demand for dollars is driving dollar prices higher. And the reason there is demand for dollars relative to these other developed currencies is the Fed is ahead of the other central banks in tightening monetary policy.

If you go into the treasury bonds, sovereign debt of our currency and the fact that we dollar denominated so much of global trade, and particularly if you go into our control via our currency over world oil markets, the dollar has that leverage. In times of economic distress, both domestic and global, people fled into dollars, not out of dollars. And so it’s a great argument for understanding the economic concept in the sense of having the cleanest shirt in the dirty laundry or the best house in a bad neighborhood. We can have all kinds of criticisms of the dollar and US monetary policy that weakens the stability of its own currency. But as long as other countries are more guilty than we are in the relative and zero sum game that is foreign exchange of currency, then the other currencies are going to take it worse. And there’s no question that the instability of the euro has been more severe than the state of the U.S. dollar.

RICE: Hi, David, Jeb Rice here. I love your spot on The World and Everything in It podcast. I appreciate what you do. My question is about inflation. So the causes of inflation are multifactorial. If those causes were successfully addressed, would you anticipate that prices would stay about where they’re at? Have we reached a new set point for what we pay for things like food, energy, things of that nature, or do you anticipate a period of deflation with prices start dropping again, going back to close to where they were prior to this inflationary period? Thanks for your time, David. Really appreciate it. Take care.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, it’s a great question. And there’s also a third option where the rate of growth of prices drops significantly—what we call disinflation—but where prices themselves don’t deflate and go lower than where they are.

I would answer your question by saying I expect something different amongst different goods and services. I believe housing is going to deflate, and I believe rents are going to deflate as a result of the lack of equilibrium between supply and demand. I think that food prices will disinflate, and perhaps get back to near pre COVID levels. But there’s a lot of work to do with food inflation, and energy is also a tougher story that has to be determined because of where supply policies will be in the United States. Going forward, there’s a lot of electoral and political significance there. But if you look to this sort of fictitious idea of the price level—an aggregate summary of all prices—as a general price level, then I believe that we face debt and severe disinflation in the near future. And at some point, we would face deflation, that I would not want to go on record with a timeframe for.

We have been very fortunate in the United States as—besides the great financial crisis, and of course the depression before that— we’ve had very little deflation over the years. The kind of purgatory we are looking at isn’t really great, where the economy is slow with no growth, but it’s better than deflation. And even apart from negative contraction of the price level deflation, “slow with no growth” feels a lot like deflation. It exacerbates social divides. It takes away job and productive growth opportunities, and the excessive indebtedness that is responsible for this lingers, and that would be my forecast going forward.

EICHER: Well, as I say, we have a lot more questions than we have time. But don't let that discourage you, or stop you from sending a question in because David is willing to stay after class as it were. And we're looking into recording a special podcast where we go much longer and get through all of them. So we are considering a special one- off or two-off, whatever we need to take care of all of the questions because I know David loves to do that. So if you have a question, do email us at feedback@worldandeverything.com. Whatever is on your mind around business, economics and finance: feedback@worldandeverything.com. Do send me a recording if you can, have you asking the question and we'll be able to hear your voice.

David Bahnson is founder managing partner and chief investment officer of the Bahnson group. His personal website is Bahnsen.com. David, we will talk to you next time. Thanks again!

BAHNSEN: Appreciate it. Thanks so much, Nick.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, October 17th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next: the WORLD History Book. Today, a brief history of a well-loved dish—eaten all around the world. Plus, 10 years ago this week, the U.S. anti-doping agency banned Lance Armstrong from cycling. But first, the 100th birthday of a British institution. Here’s Paul Butler.

PAUL BUTLER: We begin today on October 18th, 1922. A consortium of six companies establish a nationwide network of English radio transmitters—known as the British Broadcasting Company.

BBC HISTORY: Broadcasting is a development with which the develop must reckon—and reckon seriously.

Prior to 1922, the British government’s General Post Office had the exclusive rights to regulate all means of mass communication—including wireless telegraphy.

BBC HISTORY: As chairman of the British Broadcasting Company and on the occasion of the opening of our new London studio, I’m glad to have the opportunity of saying a few words for our many thousands of listeners throughout the country.

The BBC is the world’s oldest nationalized broadcaster. It is primarily funded by an annual license fee charged to all British households.

BBC HISTORY: On the Air song

The network changes its name to the British Broadcasting Corporation and spreads quickly—offering hundreds of hours of diverse programming across the British Isles. But it during World War II, it unites the empire:

BBC WAR REPORT: The evacuation of British children is going on smoothly and efficiently. The ministry of health says that great progress has been made with the government's arrangements.

The BBC began its broadcast television service shortly after the war and has played a prominent role in British life ever since.

BBC TV SIGN-ON: This is the BBC Television service…

It is sometimes known as the “Beeb.” Others refer to it as “Auntie” or “Auntie Beeb” due to its censorship over the years—the nickname was started by the comic broadcaster Kenny Everett, who likened the BBC's attitude to that of a repressed maiden aunt.

Next, a sports scandal ten years ago this week:

ABC NEWS: Breaking news tonight champion cyclist Lance Armstrong had until midnight to contest the career shattering doping charges brought against him by the country's highest force authority.

For years, Armstrong denied any wrongdoing.

LANCE ARMSTRONG: How many times do I have to say it?
INTERVIEWER: I'm just trying to make sure your testimony is clear.
ARMSTRONG: It can't be any clearer that I've never taken drugs, then incidents like that could never happen.

Yet just three months after the US anti doping agency officially stripped Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles—plus his records, and prize monies—he changed his story. He agreed to talk with Oprah Winfrey:

OPRAH: Let's start with the questions that people around the world have been waiting for you to answer and for now, I just like a yes or no. Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance?
ARMSTRONG: Yes.
OPRAH: Yes or No? Was one of those banned substances? EPO?
ARMSTRONG: Yes.
OPRAH: Did you ever blood dope or use blood transfusions to enhance your cycling performance?
ARMSTRONG: Yes.
OPRAH: Did you ever use any other banned substances like testosterone, cortisone or human growth hormone?
ARMSTRONG: Yes.
ORPAH: Yes or no. In all seven of your Tour de France victories? Did you ever take banned substances or blood dope?
ARMSTRONG: Yes.
OPRAH: In your opinion, was it humanly possible to win the Tour de France without doping? Seven times in a row?
ARMSTRONG: In my opinion. No.

In the end, Armstrong lost his major sponsors—including Nike, Oakley, and Trek bicycles. The IOC took away his Olympic medal, and he was banned for life from the sport of cycling.

ARMSTRONG: It's too late for probably most people. And that's my fault. You know, I view this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times. I made my decisions there. My mistake. And I'm sitting here today to acknowledge that and to say I'm sorry for that.

And finally today, October is National Pizza Month:

MUSIC: THAT’S AMORE by Dean Martin

MUSIC: THAT’S AMORE by 101 Strings

Flatbreads with toppings have been around since the times of the ancient Egyptians. But the birthplace of modern pizza is in Naples, Italy. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Naples had a large working class population. They often lived in very small dwellings with little more than one room. Much of their living and cooking was done outdoors. Residents frequently relied on cheap food vendors for their dinners. Pizza was an ideal meal: flatbread with simple toppings that could easily be eaten without utensils…or even dishes.

While middle to upper class Italians looked down on the eating habit, legend has it that in 1889, the queen of Italy visited Naples. Tired of the rich, opulent French dinners, she requested an assortment of pizzas from a local restaurant. Queen Margherita most enjoyed the pie topped with soft white cheese, red tomatoes and green basil—reminiscent of the Italian flag…and from then on it became known as pizza Margherita. The local dish’s popularity spread. As immigrants from Naples came to America, pizza came with them and it began to adapt to its new surroundings.

After World War II, pizza’s popularity grew as a fast food. And while boutique pizzas are highly adaptable to fine dining these days, it remains a staple for those on limited food budgets. Just ask any college student.

MUSIC: PIZZA ANGEL by Veggie Tales

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Paul Butler.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: the latest on a key race in Georgia and what it means for partisan control of the Senate. And the status of a new group of migrants at the southern border, those coming from Venezuela.

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Apostle Paul wrote: I, therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. (Eph 4:1-3 ESV)

Go now in grace and peace.

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