This is Slavery. How Trump is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic by Jane Mayer

This is outrageous and upsetting.  Give this a close read to learn about American slavery, as an African American woman interviewed for this story exclaimed. It's shocking and disgusting to read about how during a pandemic, Trump is loosening every regulation imaginable right now—from poultry and meat packing plants, to trucking companies and oil and gas pipelines. The New Yorker's focus here is on poultry companies who are hyper-exploiting their workers right now. 

This is happening as their greedy corporate bosses are delivering between 2 and 3 million dollars to the Trump campaign. Get this. They are his biggest campaign contributors,

This is Coronoavirus, disaster capitalism, my friends, that is literally sacrificing, Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans to highly dangerous, toxic, prison-like, freezing working conditions in plants where production rates of Birds Per Minute—while standing next to COVID-infected employees in COVID-infected plants—reach ever-higher, plateaus. 

It's terrifying to read that these companies have stopped generating official data for the public which, of course means, that the general public is also sacrificed and at risk.

Untold numbers are dying. This is inhumane. We need an abolitionist movement for what is happening in these industries hidden away from public view, reminiscent of Upton Sinclair's famous 1906 novel, The Jungle [free download available].

"The book so shocked Americans that President Theodore Roosevelt ordered an immediate investigation of slaughterhouses. The result was landmark consumer-protection legislation that formed the foundation of today’s Food and Drug Administration."

We need an FDR. We need consumer and worker protections all over again in this country. Here is one small, meaningful action we can all take today.  Please sign this petition—Poultry Companies: Give workers essential benefits and safe conditions during COVID19 where you can also make a contribution. National LULAC is also taking this on under the brilliant leadership of Domingo Garcia and Sindy Benavides.

This whole system needs to be upended. We need a national campaign to boycott any plant that treats its workers so horrifically. 

Just the thought of chicken produced under these conditions makes my stomach churn anyway.

Aside from the general principle of the matter, it's for the good of everybody's health and welfare. You may want to go straight to the NY website, as I just did, to listen to the audio version of this story.  The narrator, presumably the author, Jane Mayer, does an excellent job. Hearing her tell the story made it even more impactful for me.  So impactful that I had to blog about this right away.

-Angela Valenzuela

#BlackLivesMatter
#BrownLivesMatter
#AsianLivesMatter
#CoronavirusCapitalism
#AbolishSlavery
#AbolishSlaveryInAmerica

A Reporter at Large

July 20, 2020 Issue

How Trump Is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic

The secretive titan behind one of America’s largest poultry companies, who is also one of the President’s top donors, is ruthlessly leveraging the coronavirus crisis—and his vast fortune—to strip workers of protections.

By Jane Mayer

July 13, 2020

 Ronald Cameron, the head of Mountaire, which critics call a “brutal” employer, is one of Trump’s top donors.Illustration by Cleon Peterson

On June 22nd, in the baking heat of a parking lot a few miles inland from Delaware’s beaches, several dozen poultry workers, many of them Black or Latino, gathered to decry the conditions at a local poultry plant owned by one of President Donald Trump’s biggest campaign contributors. “We’re here for a reason that is atrocious,” Nelson Hill, an official with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, told the small but boisterous crowd, which included top Democratic officials from the state, among them Senator Chris Coons. The union, part of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., represents some 1.3 million laborers in poultry-processing and meatpacking plants, as well as workers in grocery stores and retail establishments. Its members, many defined as “essential” workers—without the option of staying home—have been hit extraordinarily hard by the coronavirus. The union estimates that nearly thirty thousand of its workers in the food and health-care sectors have contracted covid-19, and that two hundred and thirty-eight of those have died.

For the previous forty-two years, a thousand or so laborers at the local processing plant, in Selbyville, had been represented by Local 27. Just two years earlier, the workers there had ratified a new five-year contract. But, Hill told the crowd, in the middle of the pandemic, as the number of infected workers soared, the plant’s owner, Mountaire Corporation—one of the country’s largest purveyors of chicken—conspired, along with Donald Trump, to “kick us out.”

Hill, who is Black and from a working-class family on the Delmarva Peninsula—a scrubby stretch of farmland that includes parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia—was used to the area’s heat and humidity. But, as he spoke to the crowd, behind dark glasses, his face glistened with anger. “It’s greed, that’s what it is,” he said. “It’s a damn shame.”

The jobs at Mountaire rank as among the most dangerous and worst paid in America. Government statistics indicate that poultry and meat-processing companies report more severe injuries than other industries commonly assumed to be more hazardous, including coal mining and sawmilling. Between 2015 and 2018, on average, a slaughterhouse worker lost a body part, or went to the hospital for in-patient treatment, about every other day. Unlike meatpackers, two-thirds of whom belong to unions, only about a third of poultry workers are represented by organized labor—and those who are unionized face mounting pressure. The industry, which is dominated by large multinational corporations such as Mountaire, has grown increasingly concentrated, expanding its political influence while replacing unionized employees with contract hires, often immigrants or refugees. These vulnerable workers are technically hired by temp agencies, relieving poultry plants of accountability if documentation is lacking. Trump has weakened federal oversight of the industry while accepting millions of dollars in political donations from some of its most powerful figures, including Ronald Cameron, Mountaire’s reclusive owner. In 2016, Cameron gave nearly three million dollars to organizations supporting Trump’s candidacy.

Founded in Little Rock, Arkansas, but incorporated in Delaware, Mountaire has operations in five states. It reportedly generated more than $2.3 billion in revenue last year. Because it is owned almost entirely by Cameron—and because it supplies poultry to other companies that put their own labels on the meat—the company’s public profile is virtually nonexistent. Cameron himself has received almost no media attention. “I’ve tried mightily over the years to bump into him, but he lays low,” Max Brantley, a longtime editor at the Arkansas Times, told me. According to trade journals, however, Mountaire has been spectacularly successful. Arkansas Business reported that the company’s sales in 2019 were a billion dollars higher than they were in 2010, nearly doubling the size of the business. Information on profits isn’t available, but as Mountaire’s revenues have risen wages for poultry workers have fallen even further behind. In 2002, workers were paid twenty-four per cent less than the national average for manufacturing jobs; today, they are paid forty-four per cent less. On average, poultry workers now earn less than fourteen dollars an hour.

By long-standing custom, labor contracts are binding for at least three years, giving a union time to prove its value to members. But in April a laborer at the Selbyville plant, Oscar Cruz Sosa, raised a legal objection to the contract, arguing that he’d been forced to join the union and pay dues against his will. He wanted a vote on whether to decertify the union. Mountaire maintains that it played no role in Cruz Sosa’s actions, and that the move to decertify the union was “entirely employee-driven.” But Cruz Sosa has had some outside help. His case was supported by lawyers from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the foremost anti-union advocacy group, which is funded by undisclosed tax-deductible donations. Meanwhile, a mysterious group calling itself the Oscar Cruz Committee for Employee Rights sent out mailings, in English, supporting Cruz Sosa’s complaint. (Cruz Sosa speaks only Spanish.) The return address was the Rehoboth Beach branch of MailBiz, which rents post-office boxes.

Jonathan Williams, a spokesperson for the union, suspects that Cruz Sosa was a stalking horse. “It’s not hard to find one individual, who may get special privileges from management, and who maybe is offered a future position,” he told me. “It’s very, very rare, though, when an employee does the research, contacts the Department of Labor, and goes through all this effort. Usually, someone is being coached.” (Cruz Sosa didn’t respond to interview requests.)

When the union reached out to Cruz Sosa, his lawyers filed a grievance with the National Labor Relations Board, claiming harassment. The specific legal dispute is abstruse. Mark Mix, the president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, has called the contract’s language “illegal,” claiming that it didn’t make sufficiently clear that—as stipulated by law—new employees had thirty days to decide whether to join the union. The union argues that applications presented to new employees are unambiguous about the time frame, and says that the current contract has virtually the same boilerplate used in every contract with Mountaire since 1982.

After Cruz Sosa got thirty per cent of his co-workers to sign a petition, the National Labor Relations Board ordered an election at the Selbyville plant. When the union protested that this would violate the customary bar on overturning contracts before three years, the N.L.R.B. decided to broaden the case, reëxamining the entire concept of barring challenges to settled union contracts. The move has shocked labor-law experts. By statute, the N.L.R.B. has five members and is bipartisan, but the Trump Administration has filled only three seats, all with Republicans.

Given the pandemic, the union argued that there was no way an in-person election could be safely and fairly held in Sussex County, where Selbyville is situated. Delaware’s governor had declared a state of emergency on March 23rd, because of the surge in covid-19 cases, almost half of them in Sussex County, which has many poultry plants. The union asked for a stay, but on June 24th the N.L.R.B. moved to proceed with the election, by mail. The ballots that were sent out must be received by July 14th. Meanwhile, the board will weigh the larger question of whether such elections are legal, potentially overturning a precedent that dates back to the New Deal.

“We’re really being let down by the federal agencies,” Williams, the union spokesperson, said. He also lamented a shift at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the division of the Labor Department that enforces workplace safety. Since osha’s inception, in 1970, the agency has enforced federal law that makes it illegal to subject employees to “recognized hazards.” But during the pandemic the Times editorial board has been prompted to ask, “Why is osha awol?” Democrats pushed for the agency to issue an emergency rule forcing businesses to comply with the Centers for Disease Control’s health guidelines for covid-19, but the Labor Department refused.

Instead, on April 28th, forty-eight hours after Tyson Foods, the world’s second-largest meat company, ran a full-page ad in several newspapers warning that “the food supply chain is breaking,” Trump issued an executive order defining slaughterhouse workers as essential. The White House had appointed Cameron to an advisory board on the pandemic’s economic impact. The executive order commanded meat-processing facilities to “continue operations uninterrupted to the extent possible.” The Labor Department released an accompanying statement that all but indemnified companies for exposing workers to covid-19. It assured employers in essential industries that the agency wouldn’t hold them responsible if they failed to follow the C.D.C.’s health guidelines, as long as they made a “good faith” effort.

Meat and poultry workers had to keep working and risk infection—or lose their jobs. By July 7th, osha had received more than six thousand coronavirus-related workplace complaints but had issued only one citation, to a nursing home in Georgia. David Michaels, a professor of public health at George Washington University, who headed osha during the Obama Administration, told me that the agency was “saying that the Labor Department would side with the employers if workers sued,” and added, “That would be unthinkable in any other Administration. osha’s job isn’t to protect corporations—it’s to protect workers!”

The prospect of food shortages understandably caused concern in the White House. Yet reports show that in April, as Tyson and other producers were warning that “millions of pounds of meat will disappear” from American stores if they had to shut down, exports of pork to China broke records—and Mountaire’s chicken exports were 3.4 per cent higher than they were a year earlier. The next month, the company’s exports were 10.9 per cent lower than in 2019, but its exports to China and Hong Kong grew by 23.1 per cent in April and by fourteen per cent in May, according to statistics provided by Christopher Rogers, an analyst with Panjiva, which tracks the food-supply chain. Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for Food and Water Watch, a progressive nonprofit advocacy group, said, “They were crying about shortages, and yet we’re still exporting meat. The shortage was phony.”

Meanwhile, coronavirus cases exploded in the meat-and-poultry industry. Initially, Mountaire released statistics about employee infections. At the end of March, the company told the union that there had been forty-one cases in Selbyville. However, Hill’s shop steward, Manuel Rosales, told him not to trust this number. “Half the plant isn’t there,” he explained, either because the workers were sick or because they feared becoming so. A month later, a television station in North Carolina reported that a Mountaire plant, in Siler City, which employs some sixteen hundred workers, had at least seventy-four positive cases among workers and their families. After that, the company stopped sharing its covid-19 numbers. Mountaire became so secretive, Hill said, that workers “were seeing people disappear, and they didn’t know what the hell was going on.” In many cases, a “co-worker had tested positive, but the company wouldn’t tell anyone.” Rosales, who works in the deboning department at the Selbyville plant, told me, “People are coughing and they don’t look well, but they just want to keep the chicken coming. It’s all hush-hush.”

Cathy Bassett, the communications director for Mountaire Farms of Delaware, confirmed, “We’re not releasing any numbers,” adding, “I don’t even know those numbers. We’ve told our workers that if you’ve been exposed we’ll notify you.” According to Hill, the company argued to the union that it was protecting employee privacy. “They were hiding behind it,” Hill told me. “We weren’t asking for private health information—we were just trying to report the numbers.”

The (True) Origin of Wealth: Why Some Societies Prosper — and Others Collapse (Like America)

Umair Haque is a critical writer and thinker.  He looks for answers to his questions about wealth and poverty in economics and economic theory and they fall short.  I encourage him to read postcolonial scholars like Walter Mignolo, Maria Lugones, Anibal Quijano and others to get a perspective, coupled with deep histories, on colonization and decolonization.  Read in tandem with this piece by Tim Wise titled, "Western 'Superiority' is Killing us" where I specifically reference several of these postcolonial scholars’ writings.

-Angela Valenzuela

#GetWoke

The (True) Origin of Wealth

Why Some Societies Prosper — and Others Collapse (Like America)

by Umair Haque

There’s a question as old as economics itself: where does “wealth” really come from? Now, this question isn’t asked in the late-night infomercial sense. But in the genuine one: why are some countries rich, and others poor?

Nobody, really, has an answer to this question. There have been many answers proposed. Some — like Daron Acemoglu — say that wealth comes from institutions. Others, like the Chicago School, from freedom, or from its various branches, from property rights. Still others, like Schumpeter’s disciples, from “innovation” (whatever that even means anymore.

I was trained — maybe indoctrinated — in the arts of American economics. And for a long time, this question gnawed away at me. I couldn’t really accept any of the answers above. And worse, I couldn’t quite say why. They seemed lacking to me, in some basic human way, along some obvious and fatal dimension. Like the most straightforward thing in the world seemed to be missing from them.

Now, nobody in economics wants to engage with this question anymore much. Everybody’s picked a side — and if you ask it, you’ll basically get all the same old answers, just only more furiously, because that’s what happens when people bunker down in ideological foxholes. No thinking allowed — that’s modern economics’s credo. So the question — where does wealth really come from? — is still unanswered.

I began thinking about it, like I said, long ago. And after many years — go ahead and call me dumb, you’ll do it many times this essay, I almost guarantee you — it occurred to me that maybe the question itself was backwards.

Maybe the correct question isn’t: “where does wealth come from?”, but “where does poverty come from?”

Why did I think that? Well, because it was suspicious to me that economics started asking this question at the dawn of the colonial age. You see, for most of human history, nobody had ever asked the question “where does wealth come from?”, even though there were vast and glaring inequities in society, the Roman master reclining in his villa, fed by slaves.

I thought it was altogether too convenient that economics had suddenly started asking the question: “where does wealth come from?” at a precise and certain point in history. Not just any point — but the point when, well, the nations asking that question were busy enslaving and exploiting the world.

Yes, really. That’s not an overstatement. The Greeks and Romans had slaves, sure — but it was America (and Britain) who built an intercontinental slave trade, and chewed their way across the world like locusts. Roman and Greek slaves were debtors and prisoners of war, who could buy their way, often, into freedom — but American slaves, and European colonial subjects — they were different: they were subhuman. They were objects to be used and abused and discarded.

We did something truly horrific, my friends, the scale of which we have yet to grapple with. We constructed a world of predators and prey. We made ourselves the predators — and then invented science after science to justify it. There was a biology which said human beings are made of different nobilities, and evolve to different standards. There was a sociology that ascribed every kind of vice to that newfound biology’s defects.

And today I think that I rank economics in just that place: as a pseudoscience riddled through with the corrosion of supremacy. In just the same way we laugh today at a biology that said yesterday whites are genetically superior — so today we should begin laughing at an economics that asks the question: where does wealth come from?

After all, the answer is obvious. If by “wealth” we mean “the things and privileges and freedoms that American white people enjoyed”, then the origin of wealth couldn’t be more obvious. Slavery. Exploitation. Violence. Centuries of it.

Remember when I said the wrong question is “where does wealth come from?” and the right question is “why are some people poor?”

Is it just history’s biggest coincidence that the nations who were enslaved, exploited, and plundered for centuries are the ones who are still “poor” today? Is it just an even bigger coincidence that the pattern of their poverty follows the extent of their depredation and degradation — Africa mostly still savagely poor, which was brutally enslaved, Asia rising just a touch, which was allowed to live a little freer, and so on?

My friends, if you ask me to believe that is a coincidence, then you are also asking me to be a fool. It isn’t a coincidence that the rich world is the world that centuries of brutality made upon the poor world. Those two worlds are still vastly separate and vastly unequal because there is a relationship there.

They are poor because we are rich, and we are rich because they are poor.

You’d be correct to accuse me of “zero-sum thinking” right about now. But it isn’t really me you’re accusing. It’s the slavemasters, who were our forefathers in the rich West. They are the ones who thought that they could only really prosper if other limbs did all the work, and other bodies sweated. Not all of them thought that — but enough did. The zero-sum thinking isn’t mine. It’s history’s. And so like I said — to not see a rich world that was also a predatory one, and a poor world that was also a brutalized one by that very rich world is not to see the world at all, I think.

You’d also be correct to say something like: “but what about innovation! Science! Technology! These things have made us rich!!” Correct. But only in an incorrect way. Darwin discovered evolution precisely because Britain had a class of aristocrats who could think at leisure — but that was only really possible because there was an empire slaving away to make them tea and crumpets. Edison invented the lightbulb — but only because there was a whole economy of slaves behind him, picking that cotton, giving him the freedom to do a thing only a white man could, which was dedicate his life to something better than slavery.

Do you see what I mean? In economic jargon, slavery and exploitation were the “primary public good” that created “positive externalities”…for the true humans, for whites, for masters, to enjoy. The slaves and colonial subjects were the ones investing their labour and sweat, their broken bodies and minds, to ultimately create all those grand things the masters took for granted — whether tea and crumpets or debating halls to propound fine theories in.

Now, you might think: well, that only means we should enslave the world all over again. Science! Tech! Progress! But you are wrong.

I’ve told you a dismal story so far. It goes like this. Economics keeps asking what the origin of wealth is. And curiously, suspiciously, it began asking that question at just the time the societies asking it were getting rich by enslaving much of the world. Call it a psychological defense mechanism, call it a case of protesting too much…call it a case of not being able to see the obvious.

The rich world didn’t get rich through some kind of noble virtue — it grew wealthy by taking what was the poor world’s. Minerals and oil and dust and trees and gems. But not just that, and not really that. Labour. Lives. Possibilities.

You see, we will never know — never — how many Einsteins or Edisons or Salks there might have been among all those lives that were shattered and destroyed. Ever. We have no idea of the possibilities that were lost. They are uncountable and infinite. Who can say what that beautiful mind might have discovered — the one picking the tea? Who can say what that person might have created — the one bent over the mine? What about the one serving the tea, and hammering together the shackle for another slave?

We will never know. I feel a terrible grief when I write that sentence. Do you feel it, just a touch of it? A kind of sorrow as deep as an ocean and as wide as winter hits me, all at once. I feel like I’m drowning. Like I’m numb.

How could we have built a world like that? A world so ugly? So morally wrong? So stupid and foolish? Were our forefathers really such violent and disgusting people?

I’m sorry. Do you feel insulted? Forgive me, maybe. I still feel that grief of all those lost lives, all that possibility…gone.

But let me come back to the point. One way to think about the above is: the West got wealthy by enslaving the world, but at least we now have science and medicine and technology and whatnot.

But that is absolutely wrong. The correct question, if you understand all the above, is this.

The West got wealthy by enslaving the world, but if it hadn’t enslaved the world, what might have happened?

Well, for an example, for some insight, we can look at. modern Europe versus America. America didn’t invest in itself. It chose violence instead. It thought that if everyone just exploited everyone else enough, that somehow — don’t ask me how — it would prosper. Cruelty and greed would breed virtue and discipline and toughness.

But it was wrong. Everyone exploiting everyone else only led, in the end, to what America is now: a failed state and a collapsed society.

All that wealth created by centuries of slavery…where is it now? The average American dies in debt, literally. He never owns or saves or earns anything, in real net terms. So that wealth can’t be with him. That wealth is not anywhere, really — not even in the hands of the billionaires, who just own a tiny portion of the majority of what’s left of it. All that wealth created by centuries of exploitation…America squandered it. On toys and trinkets and wars. Hence, it ended up a failed state.

I want to put that in a way you really understand.

It went in a circle. Americans arrived on the shores of a Promised Land, poor and desperate. They enslaved whom they couldn’t exterminate. They grew rich on the labour of others they considered subhumans. But where did it all end up? Nowhere — because today, the average American…dies broke.

Do you see the terrible irony? Ah, but do you see the terrible lesson? The horrific truth? All that savagery, brutality, the hatred and suffering of slavery…was for nothing. Americans didn’t end up rich. They only ended up poor. Precisely because the ghosts of the enslaved haunt them to this very day, ripping old wounds open, whispering — “which subhumans will you hurt today?”

The lesson — which economics doesn’t seem able to see, much less learn — couldn’t be clearer.

Wealth earned through violence and exploitation doesn’t endure and last. But see the paradox: the origin of wealth is exploitation and violence — but only of a certain kind of wealth. A thin kind, let us say. One as costly as it is heavy to carry.

And now let’s look at Europe. There are those who’ll say: Europe had colonies too! They are right. But after the war, whatever wealth Europe had was literally ashes and dust. Europe began with nothing. Literally nothing. A little investment from America, to be sure — but all those centuries of slavery and exploitation were wiped out by the war. It’s nations weren’t wealthy anymore — they were now poor, devastated, and ruined.

And yet in one human lifetime, Europe rose from ashes to enjoy the world’s highest living standards. Without, crucially, this time, violence and exploitation and slavery. For the first time in history. Do you see how momentous and beautiful that is?

The true secret of wealth revealed itself, at last. At least to those with eyes to see.

Europe’s secret wasn’t America’s initial pool of investment. It could easily have squandered that, too.

Europe’s secret was simply…people investing in each other. Modern European societies were the first ones in human history, ever, anywhere, anytime, to guarantee people healthcare, retirement, transport, media, income, savings, shelter, food, safety, even dignity…as basic human rights.

Nobody in history had ever attempted that. American economists, by the way, laughed and that it was all going to be a a miserable failure.

Now, European leaders did all that for a strange reason. Not to get rich — but to have peace. The idea was simply that desperate people won’t turn on one another — because a hungry person will do anything to fill their childs’ belly. Americans laughed at that idea — they championed exploiting and abusing each other, the ghost of the slavemaster haunting them.

Which idea won? Exploitation, or investment?

The answer should be obvious — though it’s probably not. Europe has had something like one of history’s great miracles. Rising from the ashes to achieve history’s highest living standards ever, period…in one human lifetime. Without slavery and violence and exploitation at some kind of horrific, mass scale.

Nobody in human history ever did that. Because nobody in human history ever believed such a thing was possible. Certainly not Americans — who still don’t, even if they don’t know they don’t.

The miracle was that the most improbable thing of all turned out to be the origin of wealth. For millennia, violent men had said exploitation and enslavement were the origin of wealth. The world believed them. Bitterly, ironically, even the very societies who followed that principle then turned right around and asked, as if dumbfounded — “what’s the origin of wealth?” — while they were busy building history’s greatest slave-empires. But the true secret of wealth was revealed in the aftermath of a great war, by a desperate and broken and impoverished people, who’d spent so long killing each other, there was nothing left to destroy. There was no one left to kill. There was nothing left to kill each other for.

The only thing left was to invest in each other, to nourish each other, to grant one another inalienable and intrinsic worth, that none could ever take away. And just a few decades of that made Europe rich — while America plunged into poverty.

The lesson, to me, couldn’t shine any clearer. The origin of wealth was slavery, exploitation, hate, violence. But the origin of poverty, disgrace, and collapse was, too. The origin of truer wealth — that lasted, endured, mattered, which was made of happiness, meaning, trust, truth, peace, courage, gentleness — was people, standing beside one another, on the long, twisting, difficult road through the desert, back home. I wonder, some days, when the grief of all those lives lost pours through me, how long it will take the world to see it.

Umair Haque
February 2020