Meatpacking CEO's Pushed Legislation That Killed Hundreds During COVID

The meat packing industry helped push for an executive order that allowed them to stay open, but resulted in the deaths of hundreds of workers. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The meatpacking industry helped push for an executive order that allowed them to stay open, but it resulted in hundreds of deaths of the workers. Remember we covered this.

Yep.

When the, as soon as this all started happening, we started covering this story because we were getting people calling and, and they're saying, look, I think I have COVID and they're making it sound like I simply have a flu. And they would go to work and they would then infect everybody around them. And people died in these meatpacking, in this meatpacking the numbers were staggering compared if you just took their numbers to the normal population, the numbers were staggering.

Well, there was a time in this country when more than 10% of the COVID cases were coming from meatpacking plants. I mean, that's how bad these conditions were for these workers. And so what happened here and this is a truly disgusting stories. All of these CEOs get together. You have Smithfield, you have Tyson, you have the national chicken group, whatever they're called. They're all having these phone calls with each other saying, what can we do?

Mm-hmm.

We need to stress the importance of, of meat and getting it out there.

Oh, we remember that. Don't you?

Yeah.

What happened there? Don't you remember the meat shortage crisis?

Yep.

Just like the baby formula shortage crisis. They hustled that. We caught 'em hustling it. We knew they had enough supplies, but they were saying to the American public and saying to politicians, if you don't let us break the law, if you don't let us kill a few people, we can't deliver this product to you. And what they were doing is bringing people from over the border, right?

Yep.

Immigrant workers, putting them in this meatpacking business. If they died, they simply shipped them home. Chamber of Commerce loved that.

Yeah. And you just replace them with the next man up in line there. And you got this endless supply of expendable labor as they like to look at it.

Yeah.

And, and then of course it goes deeper. They're having these phone calls, they're saying, oh whoa is me. What do we do? And then I think it was the Tyson CEO came up with the brilliant idea. Let's write the executive order ourselves.

Yeah.

And send it through Mark Meadows because they had this, you know, direct line to Trump's chief of staff. He puts it in front of Trump. And of course it gets signed because, hey, we're in a meat shortage. Everybody needs to eat. And that's how they framed it because the meatpacking industry made them frame it that way. They were allowed to craft the talking points. They drove the narrative and they put hundreds, if not thousands of people into early graves, just so we could have bacon back on store shelves.

Okay. Has that directive changed?

No.

No. This administration has not changed the directive. The Chamber of Commerce again, we always, I don't know why people miss this story. The border is not about compassion. Trust me. It is not about compassion. It's about bringing in workers in the United States. If they're on the job site and they lose an arm, no problem ship 'em back. If they're working in a meat factory and they die of COVID that could have been prevented. No problem. Ship the body back. They don't have to pay workers compensation for that. There is no lawsuit that they're gonna collect on there. They, it's, it's expendable labor as you put it. And that's part of the program that's happening right at the border right now. And everybody's looking at ,and the media is totally missing the fact that's being driven by the Chamber of Commerce and Biden bought into that.

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