The Trump Pandemic

[JimC]

Well, after all, they've had a rough decade or so, financially ...

'After lobbying, Catholic Church won $1.4B in virus aid'

The U.S. Roman Catholic Church used a special and unprecedented exemption from federal rules to amass at least $1.4 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus aid, with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.

The church’s haul may have reached -- or even exceeded -- $3.5 billion, making a global religious institution with more than a billion followers among the biggest winners in the U.S. government’s pandemic relief efforts, an Associated Press analysis of federal data released this week found.

Houses of worship and faith-based organizations that promote religious beliefs aren’t usually eligible for money from the U.S. Small Business Administration. But as the economy plummeted and jobless rates soared, Congress let faith groups and other nonprofits tap into the Paycheck Protection Program, a $659 billion fund created to keep Main Street open and Americans employed.

By aggressively promoting the payroll program and marshaling resources to help affiliates navigate its shifting rules, Catholic dioceses, parishes, schools and other ministries have so far received approval for at least 3,500 forgivable loans, AP found.

Will that annoy the evangelicals, for whom the Catholic Church is the Whore of Rome?

[Scot Dutchy]

I noticed you did but would you include the USA with the first world countries with the present political corruption going on there. Looking at Nine's post with figures like that being bantered around. You cant ignore the political angle on the figures with governments and local authorities openly admitting their mistakes. Brazil is claiming almost 2 million cases when has not got a clue how many people live in the country. A country Kyrgyzstan (where that is?) clams to have more cases than Australia. Sorry but they look about as realistic as the number of Lotto winners.

You seem to be implying that the real numbers are less than those stated. Every report I've read suggests the opposite; actual numbers are higher. Do you think Bolsonaro in Brazil is going to artificially inflate the numbers of something he dismisses as of minor importance? Are you aware of a variety of studies comparing death rates from all sources now from similar periods last year in many jurisdictions, with the result in most cases being many more deaths than reported Covid deaths, implying under-reporting?

Basically it is true that the reliability of Covid data is variable, but that, in the main, it under-reports the impact...

Even Bolsonaro likes aid money. I am not saying inflating figures but just writing off deaths as Covid. Covers up other short comings such as poverty.

[Svartalf]

Well, after all, they've had a rough decade or so, financially ...

'After lobbying, Catholic Church won $1.4B in virus aid'

The U.S. Roman Catholic Church used a special and unprecedented exemption from federal rules to amass at least $1.4 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus aid, with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.

The church’s haul may have reached -- or even exceeded -- $3.5 billion, making a global religious institution with more than a billion followers among the biggest winners in the U.S. government’s pandemic relief efforts, an Associated Press analysis of federal data released this week found.

Houses of worship and faith-based organizations that promote religious beliefs aren’t usually eligible for money from the U.S. Small Business Administration. But as the economy plummeted and jobless rates soared, Congress let faith groups and other nonprofits tap into the Paycheck Protection Program, a $659 billion fund created to keep Main Street open and Americans employed.

By aggressively promoting the payroll program and marshaling resources to help affiliates navigate its shifting rules, Catholic dioceses, parishes, schools and other ministries have so far received approval for at least 3,500 forgivable loans, AP found.

Will that annoy the evangelicals, for whom the Catholic Church is the Whore of Rome?

Given how evangelicals are attached to money, they are more the whores even than the church of rome.

[JimC]

You don't have to convince me, Svarty. I just find strange bedfellows politically interesting...

[Scot Dutchy]

The churches got bugger all here. They are not recognised as business so they could not claim. The one across the road is almost bankrupt.

[L'Emmerdeur]

'After lobbying, Catholic Church won $1.4B in virus aid'

Will that annoy the evangelicals, for whom the Catholic Church is the Whore of Rome?

It probably annoys them, but they got their own government largesse.

Payments received by churches and other organizations linked to Trump’s evangelical allies represent a small fraction of the total aid the program gave to religious entities, which were allowed to access pandemic assistance loans even if they performed only faith-based functions.

[Senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas] Robert Jeffress noted that in establishing the relief program, the Trump administration as well as Congress not only allowed houses of worship to take part but “encouraged” applications for aid out of an understanding “that houses of worship are not only ministries, but they’re employers.”

Not that making hypocritical noise about the Whore of Babylon would be anything unusual for them.

[JimC]

Anyway, they can always hold their noses, and join with catholics and muslims to excoriate the real enemy, those evil atheists!

[Seabass]

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Glenn Grothman Coughs Uncontrollably at Mask-Optional Event

[Sean Hayden]

...just clearing a clot

[Seabass]

Jane Mayer has written a long article about conditions in the US meat packing industry:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020 ... e-pandemic

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.

[...]

Michaels, the former osha head, told me, “We’re very much back in Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’ ”—the 1906 novel that exposed abuses in the meat industry. 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. But, for the past four decades, wealthy donors to the Republican Party have pushed hard for the dismantling of Progressive Era reforms and later curbs on corporate power. The 1980 platform of the Libertarian Party, which was underwritten by the billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch, laid out a road map, calling for the abolition of almost every federal agency, including the F.D.A. Although Trump claims to be a defender of the working class, he has delighted wealthy donors—and their pressure groups, such as the Club for Growth—by reliably serving their agenda. Michaels told me, “Mountaire and others are taking advantage of the covid-19 crisis to say, ‘We need more chickens.’ The Trump Administration is aiding and abetting this. They’re saying, ‘Produce more food,’ regardless of the cost to workers. If companies cared as much about their workers as they do about their chickens, we’d be a better country.”

[...]

As the temperature in the parking lot climbed into the nineties, the rally dispersed. The participants drove in a convoy to the Selbyville plant, in a show of support for the upcoming vote. The facility is a hulking mass of industrial tanks and largely windowless buildings crisscrossed by a maze of metal pipes and ventilation shafts. Surrounded by concrete barriers and chain-link fences, the complex has the feel of a prison.

A few miles away, at the Oasis truck stop, I met with an employee from the Selbyville plant. A feisty mother with three kids still at home, she explained, with a laugh, that she had put on her “Tina Turner wig” for the occasion.

She had worked in Mountaire’s chicken plant, off and on, for years, after attending a local high school. Although she and her co-workers had felt frightened as more and more colleagues disappeared after contracting covid-19, she was grateful to the pandemic for one thing. “I’ve wanted to speak out for so long—I thank God that this pandemic happened, so that my voice can be heard,” she told me. “It’s terrible in there. I want these people exposed.”

She asked to speak anonymously, because she feared retribution both from Mountaire and from local racists, who, she said, seemed more aggressive recently toward African-Americans like her; when out shopping, she had noticed more Confederate-flag paraphernalia on public display. But she was eager to describe working conditions so exploitative that, as she put it, “it’s slavery, baby.”

Typically, her shift begins at 8:18 a.m. and lasts until 4:54 p.m. Since her youngest child is still a toddler, she works less than full time. As a result, she has lost her seniority, and gets only one week of vacation a year; workers don’t get two weeks until they’ve been employed for four full years. “You know what they give us for Christmas?” she said. “You think I ever got a bonus since working there? They give us two whole chickens and a bag of potatoes. Every year, that’s all we get.” She was paid about thirteen dollars an hour until the pandemic hit. Mountaire then instituted a hazard-pay raise of a dollar an hour, but in June the raise was cancelled. Even local convenience stores, she noted, gave workers a three-dollar-an-hour raise. “And then Mountaire took it back!” she said, shaking her head. “Why are they giving us a one-dollar raise and giving two million dollars to Donald Trump? What are we, animals?”

She works in the refrigerated side of the plant, handling eviscerated carcasses. The temperature, she said, is so cold that “it’s unbearable.” Although she is under fifty, she said that she already has arthritis. “Listen, girl,” she said. “My body hurts from that place. My hands. The cold air. Imagine you got to put your hands on that cold meat. I mean, sometimes it’s so cold I have to go home.”

She and other workers complained that, even before the coronavirus struck, their respiratory systems had suffered from inhaling harsh antimicrobial chemicals, such as peracetic acid, that are used to protect chicken from contamination. When she walks through some parts of the plant, “I hold my breath,” she told me.

When the pandemic hit, she said, “a lot of people died.” She wasn’t sure how many fatalities there had been, because her bosses were “not talking about it.” One co-worker she considered a friend—an elderly man named Hyung Lee, who was known as Pop Pop—disappeared. “Everything was hush-hush,” she said. “It was just ‘Go in there and do your work.’ ” Eventually, Lee’s son called to say that Lee had died from pneumonia brought on by covid-19, and that Lee’s wife was now “fighting for her life.”

The employee said of Lee, “God, it took him out. I’m hurt. I cried my ass off.” But management was silent. “You think the owner cares about people dying in that hell?” she said. “No! You think they posted one picture of a person who died, in memory of somebody? Nothing. Not one picture.” A co-worker confirmed this account and added, “They didn’t even take up a collection for the family.”

Soon afterward, the employee said, she warned her supervisor that another friend at the plant, an émigré from Guatemala, seemed sick. The supervisor sent the woman to see the company nurse. The employee told me, “The nurse sent her right back on the God-damned line to work. The nurses aren’t worth shit in there.”

The Guatemalan woman eventually stopped showing up for work. One day, one of her four sons called and said that his mother was sick with covid-19 and was on a ventilator. “That woman worked right by me!” the employee told me. “I prayed for her.” The Guatemalan woman recovered, but vowed not to return to Mountaire. The employee told me, “It’s an evil company.”

According to the Washington Post, in April and May at least twenty-two hundred poultry workers on the Delmarva Peninsula contracted covid-19, and at least seventeen died. Delaware health officials began testing workers outside poultry plants, and at one plant thirty per cent of the results were positive. The paper reported that one infected Mountaire worker, in an effort to protect her family, tried to quarantine herself for two weeks in a windowless bathroom, sleeping on a foam mat. After the company provided two weeks of partial sick pay, it paid her nothing during the additional month it took her to recover. At the Oasis truck stop, the employee said of Mountaire, “They have all these signs that say stuff like ‘In God We Trust.’ But how, in a pandemic, can you treat people like this?”

[Tero]

Covid data to be sent to HHS department, bypassing the CDC. Will we see data again?
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5 ... -reporting

[Tero]

Local idiots spread virus golfing
https://www.klkntv.com/officials-covid- ... urnaments/
In these tournaments there are probably meals at the country club.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Covid data to be sent to HHS department, bypassing the CDC. Will we see data again?
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5 ... -reporting

Many people are saying that the Centers for Disease Control have done very poorly, just a bad job, really, and have treated Donald Trump very unfairly.

[JimC]

In our first lockdown, golfing was banned, much to the disgust of many old white males. The golfing mafia have ensured that it's not banned in our second lockdown...

[rainbow]

Covid data to be sent to HHS department, bypassing the CDC. Will we see data again?
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5 ... -reporting

Many people are saying that the Centers for Disease Control have done very poorly, just a bad job, really, and have treated Donald Trump very unfairly.

The CDC is controlled by a Trump appointee, Robert Redfield.
...a snake-oil salesman.