One of the week’s big must-reads was How Trump is helping tycoons exploit the pandemic, by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. Specifically, Ronald Cameron, the owner of the massive poultry processing company Mountaire. Cameron is a major Trump donor, and he’s on a White House advisory board about the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Meanwhile, there’s a campaign to bust the union of the workers at a Mountaire plant and the Trump administration is gutting regulations that protect these workers, whose job was already both dangerous and low-paid before COVID-19. Now, workers are getting sick and the company is keeping its numbers secret—and continuing to get favorable treatment from the Trump administration.

A worker at the plant told Mayer that a fellow worker ended up on a ventilator with COVID-19 after she told the company nurse she felt unwell and “The nurse sent her right back on the God-damned line to work. The nurses aren’t worth shit in there.” Mountaire workers got hazard pay of just a dollar an hour, which was canceled in June, while a Trump executive order forced them to remain on the job. “Why are they giving us a one-dollar raise and giving two million dollars to Donald Trump? What are we, animals?” the worker told Mayer. Read the whole thing.

This blog originally appeared at Daily Kos on July 18, 2020. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson has been a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006. Full-time staff since 2011, currently assistant managing editor.