Official Trump Swamp Thread: Still Corrupt as Fuck

Pilchard said:

Now, that's exactly how you drain the swamp!

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Pilchard said:

Now, that's exactly how you drain the swamp!

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WakeandBake said:

Sailor, angus, catamount preparing whatabout and/or shrug posts....

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Coach O said:

Speaking of idiots, where are we with #Obamagate? Has it happened? Did I miss it?

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In April, for instance, the United States Department of Agriculture granted fifteen waivers to poultry plants, including a Mountaire facility in North Carolina, authorizing them to increase the number of birds per minute—or B.P.M.—that workers must process. The waivers enabled companies to accelerate the pace from a hundred and forty B.P.M. to a hundred and seventy-five. Angela Stuesse, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has studied the poultry industry, told me that, in the chicken business, “you make pennies on a pound.” Among the few ways to increase profits are squeezing labor costs and accelerating line speeds, which are set by the U.S.D.A. to accommodate federal inspectors, who are supposed to assess every bird. The regulations have long been a point of contention between poultry-plant owners and unions, because as the line speed increases so do injuries and other stresses on workers’ bodies. “They move the birds so fast, you have to be really close together to get every bird,” Williams, the union spokesperson, told me. “It’s like the ‘I Love Lucy’ episode at the chocolate factory.” Even though the C.D.C. has emphasized that social distancing is necessary to maintain safety, faster production lines require more workers, who must then squeeze closer together. In many areas of a plant, poultry workers already stand two feet apart at most, often facing one another. Nonetheless, the U.S.D.A. has now indicated that it plans to permit faster line speeds throughout the poultry industry. The National Chicken Council, the industry’s trade group, had lobbied for precisely this change. Williams fears that “these policies will result in the deaths of many more workers.”

Debbie Berkowitz, a program director at the National Employment Law Project, a pro-labor group, who previously headed the health-and-safety division of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, told me that, thanks to the pandemic, “the Chamber of Commerce is getting everything they always wanted.” An analysis of public records by her group found that, of the fifteen poultry plants granted waivers to increase line speeds in April, eight had covid-19 outbreaks at the time. “If you’re a worker in a plant bursting with covid-19, it’s a shitshow for you,” Berkowitz said. “The industry is getting away with murdering people.”

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Bassett, the Mountaire spokesperson, said, “This has really been a challenge for everyone. We tried to follow the C.D.C. guidelines, but they changed.” At first, the C.D.C. had advised that anybody exposed to the virus should quarantine for two weeks. But, Bassett said, “at some point the C.D.C. realized essential workers were being sent home for fourteen days.” Williams alleges that the C.D.C. rolled back its recommendation “after interventions from lobbyists and Trump.” As Bassett acknowledges, employees were henceforth permitted to quarantine only “if they were symptomatic.”

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Louis Gossett Jr said:

I also don't think Goya will benefit from this. Like within a week the rube army will forget about buying beans but now more and more people that had goya products as a staple in their life will no longer buy their products for possibly an indefinite period of time.

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WakeForestRanger said:

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Chris Christie dreamed of becoming president. Now, he’s settling for a different role in Washington: lobbyist.

The former New Jersey governor is making big money from businesses trying to tap the gusher of coronavirus relief funds coming from the federal government. Newly filed disclosures show Christie’s firm pulled in $240,000 in less than three months for lobbying the Trump administration on coronavirus aid on behalf of three New Jersey hospital systems and a Tennessee-based chain of addiction treatment centers.

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Christie is hardly the first former governor to land on K Street. But it’s unusual for a former presidential candidate who hasn't ruled out running again to become a lobbyist, especially without joining a major Washington firm. And he’s off to a fast start pulling in business: Christie registered to lobby for the first time only last month, in the middle of a lobbying boom fueled by the federal government’s multitrillion-dollar response to the pandemic.

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avalon said:

Chris Christie cashes in on coronavirus lobbying

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