#meat packing

Researchers calculated 18,000 people died in mid-2020 because of meat packing plant Covid exposures. They died because industry executives didn’t give a fuck about workers, just profits.

As hundreds of meatpacking workers fell sick from the coronavirus that was spreading through their plants and into their communities in April 2020, the CEO of Tyson Foods reached out to the head of another major meatpacker, Smithfield Foods, with a proposal.

Smithfield’s pork plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, had been hit particularly hard, and state and local officials were pressuring the company to shut it down.

“Anything we can do to help?” Tyson CEO Noel White asked in an email.

Smithfield’s CEO Ken Sullivan replied that he wished there was.

But White had an idea. Would Sullivan like to discuss the possibility of getting President Donald Trump to sign an executive order to keep meatpacking plants open?

So began a high-pressure lobbying campaign by the meat industry, according to a report released Thursday by congressional investigators, leading to one of the most consequential moments in the nation’s COVID-19 response: a presidential order that effectively thwarted efforts by local health officials to shut plants down and slow the spread of COVID-19.

In 2020, ProPublica obtained thousands of emails and other documents showing that the meatpacking industry had ignored years of pandemic warnings, tried to overrule public health officials and exposed vulnerable workers and their communities to COVID-19.

But the new report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, along with revelations in a wrongful death lawsuit, make clear that the callousness of meatpacking executives and the level of industry influence over the Trump administration were far greater than previously known.

For example, ProPublica had reported that the meat industry’s trade group shared a draft executive order with the Trump administration that bore striking similarities to the one the president signed days later.

Emails released by the subcommittee now show that the proposed order was drafted by Tyson’s legal department. The goal, according to Tyson’s vice president of government relations, was to shield the company from legal liability.

ProPublica also reported that the meat industry dismissed government warnings to prepare for a pandemic by stockpiling masks and developing plans to space out workers on processing lines.

But documents uncovered in a wrongful death lawsuit filed this week in Iowa show that while Tyson was slow to adopt safety measures to protect U.S. workers, it moved swiftly to do so at its plants in China, with extensive protocols, including a mask requirement and reduced production, in place by mid-February 2020 — more than a month before cases showed up in U.S. plants.

Please stop calling our frontline workers “essential employees.”

Call them

SACRIFICIAL WORKERS

because (per Dr. Fauci) the level of suffering many Americans are willing to accept is enormous when it involves getting our:

Groceries

or

mail

or

haircuts

or

tattoos

or

meat from slaughterhouses with employees and USDA inspectors working shoulder-to-shoulder covered in gore.

It’s they who will die.

Why?

Because we have a “president” who demands that meatpacking plants stay open. He used the emergency act to Federalize them but won’t use it to enforce PPE manufacture. Regardless that meatpacking plants are neck-and-neck with nursing homes as “hot spots” of viral explosion.

Our “president” just fired the Postmaster General, a career executive, a woman, and a former mail carrier.

I don’t need to tell you Trump replaced her with a big contributor with no government or delivery experience, and with a mandate to privatize/destroy the USPS, mistreat postal workers and bust unions.

His main motivation in life is for other people to fail so he looks better by comparison, I have no doubt in my mind he only wants a vaccine so he can hold it over everyone’s head like a carrot on a stick, “I’m only gonna give vaccines to the governors who appreciate me.”  As we speak, he is actively trying to kill people, withholding aid from states that voted against him and competing with them for supplies.  He doesn’t want a vaccine so he can save lives, he wants a vaccine so people will owe him a debt, because he has the mentality of a child and wants a smiley face sticker for doing his fucking job, “I did this! Me! Nobody else! Now thank me for it.”

If the US develops a vaccine first, they will patent it and make sure nobody else can get it without paying a huge markup.  They already tried to buy out a German company earlier this year, there’s no limit to how low trump will stoop.  Republicans are being willfully ignorant at this point; they know he’s only there to serve himself, but they keep bending over backwards to suck his dick because they don’t want to admit they’ve been backing the wrong horse for five years.  They’ve already admitted that they like it when he hurts people, that’s a feature, not a bug, but they thought that meant he would hurt OTHER people, not them.  Now he’s hurting them but they’re too proud to care.  They’re more than willing to die for what their leader says is the greater good.  It’s the sunk cost fallacy, they’ve already come this far, they don’t want to cut their losses and acknowledge their monumental fuck up.  If they go down, they just want to take everyone else down with them.

Fuck them.

They can all go drink some bleach, or eat some contaminated meat (Upton Sinclair wrote an entire book about why the industry needs regulation, but no, I’m sure it’ll be fine running itself.  Nobody will find any human fingers or rat parts in their bacon.  E. coli?  Never heard of it!)