A 60-year-old grandmother died without ever meeting her only grandchild after contracting COVID-19 in a slaughterhouse former President Donald Trump ordered to remain open at the behest of scandal-laden Brazilian billionaire backers who misled his administration, according to a new report.
Tin Aye's death was one of hundreds the Trump administration "sacrificed" to protect meat monopolies pursuing billions in profits amid a global pandemic that claimed 7 million lives, author Peter S. Goodman argues in his new book "How the World Ran Out of Everything."
"That so many ordinary workers found themselves in harm’s way in the midst of a pandemic was no mere misfortune," Goodman writes in an excerpt published Monday by Vanity Fair. "It was a direct outgrowth of the business plans pursued by their corporate bosses.
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"Worse, they manufactured fears of a meat shortage to gain the complicity of the American government."
The corporate bosses in question were brothers Wesley and Joesley Batista of the Braxial conglomerate JBS Foods, the world's largest meat processing company, who served time in prison and are accused of bribing three presidential administrations presidential administrations, Goodman writes.
By 2020, the Batistas had expanded into the U.S. and their business worth about $5 billion, Goodman writes.
The same year, Coloradan San Twin's mother Aye was being paid $12 an hour to work in their Greeley slaughterhouse where COVID-19 ran rampant, Goodman writes. Aye was among the first of five workers who died from the disease.
A total 59,000 U.S. meatpacking workers would contract COVID-19 in 2020 and 269 people would die, according to Goodman.
Goodman reports that JBS Foods responded to mounting concerns by lobbying the Trump administration for support in keeping their facilities open and raising the specter of a meat shortage.
Ten days after a doctor alerted JBS their workers in a Texas facility could get sick and die if they remained open, Trump signed an executive order to ensure it wouldn't close, Goodman writes.
"This was not a coincidence," Goodman writes. "Top agribusiness executives had been meeting and corresponding regularly with senior Trump administration officials to plot strategy engineered to keep slaughterhouses open."
Goodman then notes the food shortage specter raised by the meatpackers did not include a crucial fact: "The largest meatpackers in the United States had enough inventory to stock the shelves of every grocery store in the land."
A year later, San Twin would tell Goodman about the last conversation she had with her dying mother, who had fled Myanmar to escape ethnic persecution and chosen to settle in the U.S. in hopes of finding work.
The day after her son Felix was born, San Twin received a call from another hospital, Goodman writes.
“She was calling to say goodbye,” Twin said. “She said, ‘I really want to see you, but I can’t see you anymore.’ She told me to work hard for Felix. Just believe in the positive view and help yourself and others. And then she dropped the phone, and I never talked to her again.”
JBS brought in $22 billion on U.S. beef sales that year, Goodman notes, and sent Twin $6,000 to help pay for Aye's funeral.