The Iowa Capitol Dispatch has been covering a wrongful death lawsuit against an Iowa pork processing plant related to Covid-19. Picked up in today’s HuffPost, the suit details how 5 workers in a pork plant were exposed to Covid due to inadequate worker protections leading to their deaths by the virus. Over a 1000 workers at this plant eventually caught the virus. The articles detail how plant managers insisted symptomatic employess come to work. In a perfect encapsulation of modern late stage Capitolism, supervisors were betting on how many employees would get sick.
During the arc of this case, Mitch McConnell has been refusing to take up any proposal for addition Covid19 relief. He has held up what I’m sure he knows is must pass legislation, the perfect lever for an unpopular addition to a bill. Mr. McConnell’s must have concession? Liability protections for employers whose employess get sick at or because of work.
People are loosing their jobs, small businesses are closing apace, the nation needs a stimulus bill, but Mr. McConnell has an infinite capacity for other peoples suffereing. He can wait, it seems forever, knowing that the empathy of his opponents will eventally cause them to fold. His political power base is to attend to the needs of the cheaters and the killers who believe with all their hearts that any law that prevents them from getting rich is an abomination.
The polluters and tax cheats who keep him in power really need this favor from Mitch, and their behaviour shows just how confident they are that they will get it. Think about it, if you ran a business that might get people killed, you might normally worry about that. A normal person would fear the fallout from a failure to follow the law that resulted in someone’s wrongful death. A prudent person would act to prevent negative outcomes in order to protect the business and its assets. The fact that plant managers were betting on the infection rate instead of investing in the recommended safety measures tells me they weren’t worried about blowback.
They knew who controlled the regulators. They knew they could buy the legislation they needed to make this go away. The knew Mitch McConnell could not be shamed into action against them. There is a name for this sort of behaviour, depraved indifference.