HAVE YOU EVER BOUGHT INTO BERNIE SANDERS BULLSHIT? HE'S ABOUT AS MUCH FOR THE AMERICAN WORKER AS OPEN BORDERS ADVOCATES JOE BIDEN, NANCY PELOSI, CHUCK SCHUMER, MARK ZUCKERBERG AND MODERN SLAVER JEFF 'BEZSOHEAD' BEZOS

DEMOCRAT PARTY  -  NEVER ENDING ASSAULT ON MIDDLE AMERICA AND THE AMERICAN WORKER!

Bernie Sanders Silent as Corporations Look to Explicitly Grow Profit Margins via Limitless Immigration

10

MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

1 Dec 20210

3:15

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a self-described Socialist, has remained silent as corporate special interests seek to dramatically shift the nation’s legal immigration system for their benefit.

Last month, House Democrats passed President Joe Biden’s filibuster-proof “Build Back Better Act” reconciliation package, which would blow the lid off legal immigration levels — explicitly to provide an unlimited pipeline of foreign workers to multinational corporations.

Specifically, the reconciliation package would allow corporations to utilize an expanded foreign worker pipeline through the employment-based green card system even as hundreds of thousands of American professionals and graduates seek jobs in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) jobs.

In late October, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) urged Sanders, who is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, to oppose the reconciliation package for its “corporate carve-out for unlimited foreign labor” that includes “several breathtaking immigration provisions that have long been the crown jewel of corporate lobbying.”

Sanders has been silent, Hagerty told Breitbart News in an exclusive statement.

“It’s been over five weeks since I wrote to Senator Sanders about the corporate carve-out in the so-called ‘Build Back Better’ legislation that benefits Big Tech and harms American workers, and we still haven’t heard a single word of defense from him,” Hagerty said.

“If Senator Sanders is serious about supporting American workers like he proclaims, he should soundly reject this dangerous, hidden provision that would create an unending pipeline of foreign labor for Silicon Valley giants to lower wages and displace aspiring Americans,” he continued.

Sanders did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

Breitbart News has reviewed lobbying records that detail the lobbying campaign from corporate giants like Amazon, Facebook, Intuit Inc, AT&T, Verizon, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Alphabet, Deloitte, the Microsoft Corporation, IBM, Accenture, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and the Intel Corporation — all of whom would benefit significantly from the expanded foreign worker pipeline.

The corporations, as listed, file thousands of petitions to the federal government every year to secure employment-based green cards for their foreign visa workers who, more often than not, arrive in the U.S. through the H-1B visa program that has been used to replace American workers with cheaper foreign workers.

Amazon, this year alone, petitioned for nearly 3,000 employment-based green cards for their foreign visa workers and foreign nationals seeking to take high-paying white collar jobs. Microsoft and Google, likewise, petitioned for more than 3,300 employment-based green cards.

More than one million white-collar American jobs today are held by foreign visa workers.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here. 

Democrats, Big Tech Billionaires Unite to Keep DACA Illegal Aliens in U.S. Jobs

780

Frazer Harrison/JIM WATSON/JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

1 Dec 20210

4:07

Democrats and billionaire executives for giant tech corporations are urging the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to keep illegal aliens, enrolled in former President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, in American jobs.

In July, Judge Andrew Hanen ordered President Joe Biden’s administration to shut down the DACA program by blocking the federal government from allowing new applicants, illegal aliens who have not previously been enrolled, onto the program’s rolls.

Months later, in September, Biden’s DHS issued a draft regulation that would effectively preserve the DACA program that has allowed more than 800,000 illegal aliens to remain in the United States and hold American jobs since 2012.

In a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Senate Democrats including Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Alex Padilla (D-CA), and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), along with a number of House Democrats, urged the Biden administration to move forward with the regulation and expand the program to include more illegal aliens.

The Democrats write:

To preserve family unity, we urge you to update the DACA threshold criteria to include individuals who had lawful status on June 15, 2012. One of the threshold criteria in the proposed rule is that DACA applicants must have “had no lawful immigration status on June 15, 2012, as well as at the time of filing of the request for DACA.” We ask that DHS to update these criteria to allow individuals who had lawful status in the United States on June 15, 2012, but subsequently lost such status by the time of their request, to qualify for DACA. This update could be accomplished by changing the above criterium to read: “had no lawful status at the time of filing of the request for DACA.” [Emphasis added]

…

We also encourage you to consider adopting additional changes to DACA eligibility requirements that would enable more Documented Dreamers to utilize the protection this program offers if the unlawful status requirement were revoked. Specifically, we urge you to consider removing the threshold criteria that require requestors to have continuously resided in the United States from June 15, 2007 to the time of filing of the request. We also support adjusting the dates in the threshold criteria to provide relief for individuals who arrived in the United States after 2007. These adjustments would help a greater number of Documented Dreamers access relief and avoid accruing unlawful status. [Emphasis added]

Likewise, executives at Amazon, Google, Cisco, the Intel Corporation, IBM, and Meta Platforms have sent a letter to DHS asking that DACA work permits be preserved and that Congress grant amnesty to DACA illegal aliens.

“DACA recipients help us innovate on behalf of customers and are a critical part of our diverse workforce,” the executives wrote. “… DACA recipients enrich our companies and the economy in different ways.”

Already, current immigration levels put downward pressure on U.S. wages while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth away from America’s working and middle class and towards employers and new arrivals, research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has repeatedly found that amnesty for illegal aliens would be a net fiscal drain for American taxpayers while driving down U.S. wages.

Every year, 1.2 million legal immigrants receive green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. In addition, 1.4 million foreign nationals are given visas to take American jobs, while hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens enter the U.S. annually.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here. 

In the United States, migration curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens regional wealth gaps. It radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture, and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

Democrats Prod Parliamentarian to OK Amnesty in Budget Bill

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

NEIL MUNRO

1 Dec 20210

4:16

Top Democratic staffers met Wednesday with the Senate’s debate referee to demand that she include their parole amnesty for illegal migrants in President Joe Biden’s spending bill.

Bloomberg reported that the parliamentarian did not reveal her views:

House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), who helped craft the immigration language in the House, said he’s optimistic.

“This is the third try,” he said earlier Wednesday. “There is no reason that they shouldn’t just accept it.”

In a prior meeting, the parliamentarian “kept it very close to the vest and didn’t react when we made our initial presentation,” Sen. Dick Durbin told reporters on November 30.

The parliamentarian is Elizabeth MacDonough. She has a lot of clout in the legislative process because Senate rules require the exclusion of policy disputes from the fast-track reconciliation bill process. Democrats are using that process because it allows them to push their government-expanding $1.7 trillion bill through the Senate with just 51 votes.

Democrats are also not trying to bypass the parliamentarian because she is backed by several Democrats who represent small states. The Senate’s current debating rules boost the clout of small-state Senators.

Few Republicans are denouncing the Democrats’ donor-backed, wealth-shifting immigration measures, Instead, most are hoping the parliamentarian will exclude the migration measures from the spending bill, so saving them from the pain of arguing against their donors or of ignoring the pro-American demands of their voters.

Still, GOP leaders have appointed an immigration expert to help persuade the parliamentarian to exclude at least some of the migration measures from the bill.

The parole amnesty would provide work permits to 6.5 million illegals for at least 10 years. It is the attention-hogging showpiece immigration measure in the reconciliation bill.

But the bill would also dramatically accelerate chain migration — so spiking housing costs and diverting Americans’ K-12 schools from the basic task of educating Americans’ children.

The legislation would also give Fortune 500 companies a massive new inflow of cheap visa workers to help them exclude U.S. college graduates from rising careers. The green-card giveaway is being criticized this way by some GOP Senators, including Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN).

Bloomberg reported:

Separate immigration provisions that aim to speed up the legal immigration process and address backlogs haven’t yet been presented to the parliamentarian. [Migration advocate Kerri] Talbot said she expects that to happen soon.

Talbot is the deputy director of Immigration Hub, a group created by billionaire widow Laurene Powell Jobs to promote amnesty and migration.

Meanwhile, swing-vote Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is still playing hard to get.

On November 29, for example, he told reporters that he had not studied the House bill’s language on immigration, such as the parole amnesty, the chain-migration acceleration, and the green-card giveaways. Bloomberg.com reported November 29:

Manchin again raised concerns about the impact of more federal spending on inflation, telling reporters that he heard deep concerns about rising prices from his constituents during a week-long Thanksgiving break. The discovery of a new variant of the Covid-19 virus adds to economic uncertainty, he said.

“The unknown is great right now and it gets greater,” Manchin said. “Inflation is now more than transitory. We found out it’s not transitory. And on top of that, you have this new strain of Covid they’re very much concerned about. No one knows what effect it’s going to have. And you have inflation on top. So all these things give you cause to pause.”

In the United States, migration curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens regional wealth gaps. It radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture, and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

Biden didn’t withdraw from Afghanistan. He brought Afghanistan to America.

Currently, there is an estimated record high of 44.5 million foreign-born residents living in the U.S. This is nearly quadruple the immigrant population in 2000. The vast majority of those arriving in the country every year — more than 1.5 million annually — are low-skilled foreign nationals who go on to compete for jobs against working class Americans.

Bombshell report shows Biden admin secretly transporting migrants around US

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uIaYGTFZK4

JOE BIDEN: EASY WELARE KEEPS OUR ILLEGALS COMING AND VOTING DEMOCRAT FOR MORE!

Likewise, while 31 percent of foreign-born residents are on food stamps, only 19 percent of native-born Americans use the program.

Federal data shows that current legal immigration levels will drive the nation’s foreign-born population to an unprecedented 69 million by 2060. The data indicates that about 1-in-6 U.S. residents in less than four decades will have been born outside the U.S. if legal immigration levels are not reduced. JOHN BINDER

American graduates’ odds of landing STEM jobs are dismal, mostly due to corporate offshoring and the nation’s allowing companies to import foreign visa workers to do the same work for less. Recent Census Bureau data, for example, found that although 37 percent of the college-educated U.S. workforce held STEM degrees, just 14 percent worked in STEM jobs.

Federal data shows that current legal immigration levels will drive the nation’s foreign-born population to an unprecedented 69 million by 2060. The data indicates that about 1-in-6 U.S. residents in less than four decades will have been born outside the U.S. if legal immigration levels are not reduced.

The nation’s foreign-born population stands at 44.5 million — a 108-year record high.

Study: Over Half of Migrants Are on American Taxpayer-Funded Welfare

JOHN BINDER

More than half of the nation’s non-citizen population — including legal immigrants, foreign visa workers, and illegal aliens — use American taxpayer-funded welfare after arriving in the United States, a new analysis reveals.

Research by Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steven Camarota finds that about 55 percent of non-citizen households in the U.S. use at least one form of welfare compared to just 32 percent of households headed by native-born Americans.

Camarota’s research analyzes the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation data from 2018, showing that 49 percent of households headed by foreign-born residents, including naturalized American citizens, use at least one welfare program.

In 2017, economist George Borjas called the U.S. immigration system “the largest anti-poverty program in the world” at the expense of America’s working and middle class.

Specifically, foreign-born residents used vastly more Medicaid compared to native-born Americans and food stamps. For example, while 33 percent of foreign-born residents use Medicaid, just 20 percent of native-born Americans do so.

Likewise, while 31 percent of foreign-born residents are on food stamps, only 19 percent of native-born Americans use the program.

Camarota’s research reveals that even after years and years of residing in the U.S., foreign-born resident households continue to use high levels of welfare.

About 44 percent of foreign-born residents who resided in the U.S. for 10 years or less use at least one form of welfare. Roughly 50 percent of those who resided in the U.S. for more than 10 years are on welfare.

When naturalized Americans are excluded from that count, the level of welfare use rises significantly for those who have resided in the U.S. for a while. For example, among non-citizen households who resided in the U.S. for 10 years or less, 40 percent use welfare. For those in the U.S. for more than 10 years, about 62 percent are on welfare.

The latest data comes after similar numbers were released in March 2019 that showed that, in 2014, non-citizen households used nearly twice as much welfare as native-born Americans.

Currently, there is an estimated record high of 44.5 million foreign-born residents living in the U.S. This is nearly quadruple the immigrant population in 2000. The vast majority of those arriving in the country every year — more than 1.5 million annually — are low-skilled foreign nationals who go on to compete for jobs against working class Americans.

At current legal immigration levels, the Census Bureau projects that about 1-in-6 U.S. residents will be foreign-born by 2060 with the foreign-born population hitting a record 69 million.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.

D.C. Lobbies: Cut Inflation by Importing Cheaper Workers

MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty

NEIL MUNRO

1 Dec 20210

5:47

Congress can and should import more wage-cutting migrants to reduce President Joe Biden’s rising inflation, say progressives and business advocates.

“One of the driving forces behind inflation is the shortage of workers … And yet immigration has fallen sharply in recent years amid the pandemic and tougher immigration policies during the Trump administration,” said a CNN report. “Comprehensive immigration reform, which Biden could forcefully advocate for, would help ease the shortage of workers and thus the inflationary pressures, economists say.”

Inflation is being fueled by labor shortages, wrote Katherine Rampell, a Washington Post columnist. “There’s one underappreciated factor contributing to labor shortfalls that the Biden administration could alleviate almost immediately: the “missing” immigrant workers.”

The economic logic is correct; More immigration will flood the labor market, so shrinking wages, so reducing the cost of many items, including food and services.

But the vast majority of the benefits would go to wealthy investors and employers — not to the ordinary Americans who might be able to get slightly cheaper groceries as they watch their wages shrink in value.

“The larger crisis in the U.S. labor market is [not a lack of immigrants, but]… the dramatic decline in work among working-age people for the last 50 years,” said Steve Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “If you look at prime-age men, from the time I was born in 1964 to the present, you have basically an uninterrupted 60-year decline” in the share of men who are working, he said.

That share began rising amid President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies — but then crashed when the coronavirus hit the economy, he said.

Yet many D. C. lobbies and advocates want to shield wealthy investors from inflation by sacrificing the wages of ordinary Americans.

“In the past week, we learned that these [employee shortages] shortages led to the largest year-on-year increase in inflation in over 30 years,” claimed two advocates at the Brookings Institution. “Some of these front-line jobs could be filled from the vast pool of [migrants] … This would help relieve the supply chain pressures currently hampering growth, calm inflation.”

“Welcoming more low-wage foreign workers could address acute labor shortages in certain industries, helping hard-hit areas of the country recover while staving off higher inflation,” Vox.com claimed October 26.

More immigration will flood the labor market, so shrinking wages, so reducing the cost of many items, including food and services. (Image via AFP)

“As for how he would curb inflation, [economist and former Obama advisor, Austan] Goolsbee proposed … boosting immigration to alleviate labor market pressures,” NBC reported Nov. 28.

Some advocates are calling for more migration while also claiming the extra labor supply will not cut wages. “Allowing more working-age immigrants to enter the U.S. can reduce prices without depressing economy-wide wages,” said Eric Levitz, a pro-migration writer at New York Magazine.

But business — including Wall Street — believes that migrants cut wages, and even Biden’s White House officials admit the trade-off.

So Democratic legislators are more careful as they pitch the same migration-cures-inflation pitch.

“If my Republican colleagues think that there is a labor shortage … then they should welcome the ability for migrants, immigrants who have been living in our communities for decades, they should welcome them having access to work permits,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Tx) told PBS NewsHour on November 2017.

“If they’re concerned about inflation, as we all are, then we want to get productivity back up.”

On November 14, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen seemingly rejected the cut-wages-to-reduce inflation that was proposed to her by CBS’ interviewer on “Face The Nation”:

There are a lot of issues involved in immigration, but that — I believe that is one reason that we do face supply shortages — shortages of certain kinds of workers … I mean, we’ve long had a problem of more jobs available for skilled workers and declining opportunities for less skilled workers. So focusing on education and training [for Americans] was important and continues to be.

“Labor supply has been impacted by the pandemic — [American] labor force participation is down; it hasn’t recovered,” she noted.

Nonetheless, Biden and his deputies are arguing that his $1.7 trillion Build Back Better bill will reduce inflation by eventually increasing the productivity of U.S. workers.

But that bill would allow government and business executives to also import millions of new workers and consumers who will reduce productivity and drive down wages while also spiking inflation in housing prices.

A columnist at Bloomberg.com noted November 21 that the big-spending bill is not intended to curb inflation:

The truth is that the Democrats aren’t pursuing this spending bill in the spirit of meeting a pressing national objective. They’re just trying to cram as much of the progressive agenda as they can get through Congress before Republicans can end their control of it in the next election. That’s not the kind of advertising pitch likely to work on the public, though. And so we have ended up with the president pretending that this bill is his big idea to whip inflation.

In the United States, migration curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens regional wealth gaps. It radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture, and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

 

US corporate profits hit new record

Shannon Jones

2 hours ago

As the death toll from the pandemic continued to mount, US corporations enjoyed the widest profit margins in more than 70 years during the second and third quarters of 2021.

US corporate profits before adjustments rose to a record high of $3.14 trillion at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in the third quarter of 2021. After tax and adjustments for inventory, profits rose to a record high $2.74 trillion, according to the most recent figures reported by the US Commerce Department.

A sign for a Wall Street building, Wednesday, May 19, 2021, in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

These numbers, released as the official pandemic death toll in the US nears 800,000, are the direct product of the government’s prioritization of profits over human lives. This was underscored again Monday when President Biden declared there would be no public health measures taken besides vaccines in the face of the spread of the Omicron variant, despite warnings by scientists it may be resistant to vaccines.

Fueled in large part by the government’s mass injections of cash into the economy, profits of domestic nonfinancial corporations increased $67.5 billion in the third quarter and a massive $221.3 billion in the second quarter of 2021. Compared to the final quarter of 2019, the last reporting period prior to the onset of the global pandemic, profits are up an astonishing 39.6 percent. In dollar terms, the annual increase in profits since before the start of the pandemic has been over $500 billion, based on US Commerce Department figures.

Profit margins, that is the share going to profits out of each sales dollar, are at their highest level since 1950, during the early part of the post-World War II economic boom. Nearly two thirds of publicly traded US corporations have reported higher profit margins this year compared to 2020. One hundred of the largest have booked profit margins at least 50 percent above last year’s levels.

The spread of COVID-19 has been used by the ruling class to effect a further vast transfer of wealth from the working class into the coffers of the corporations and very wealthy. Pandemic financial assistance went disproportionately to the rich while the US Federal Reserve has been pouring trillions into the financial markets while keeping interest rates at near zero.

Amid soaring profits, according to figures released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics earlier this month, real average hourly earnings for all employees decreased 0.5 percent from September to October 2021. With inflation rising at the fastest pace since 1990, year-over-year real wages fell 1.2 percent, seasonally adjusted, from October 2020 to October 2021. When combined with a 0.3 percent decrease in the average workweek, there was a 1.6 percent fall in real weekly earnings.

While inflation has had the impact of lowering real wages for workers, corporations, for the most part, have been able to pass higher prices onto consumers. Major retailers such as Walmart, Home Depot and Target saw higher third quarter profits, despite supply chain issues and labor shortages. Walmart’s stock is up 25 percent for the year and Target’s is up 47 percent.

Procter and Gamble, a supplier of home and personal care products, reported a massive 24.7 percent profit margin for the third quarter, with $14.3 billion in net earnings for fiscal 2021. In April, the company announced major price increases for its line of products. Rather than give a price break to consumers, P&G decided to reward investors instead by buying back some $3 billion of its own stock.

Among the big winners were oil companies, whose profits rebounded from last year’s slump amidst rising petroleum prices. ExxonMobil had net income of $6.8 billion in the third quarter of 2021 while Chevron, the second largest US oil company, reported an adjusted profit of $5.7 billion, its best result in eight years and 17 times greater than its earnings one year ago.

The glaring contradiction between soaring profits and the precarious circumstances in which millions are living, facing the danger of infection while soaring inflation erodes incomes, is fueling a wave of working class militancy. On the side of the ruling class, the increase in strikes is raising fears that workers are breaking free from the grip of the corporatist trade unions after decades in which the class struggle has been suppressed. There is the concern that workers will seek significant wage increases, undermining the financial house of cards that has been created by the continual pumping of cheap money into financial markets.

This has already been the case at many companies, including US farm and heavy equipment company John Deere, hit by a bitter five-week strike by members of the United Auto Workers. However, rather than demanding Deere divert money from profits to restore previous concessions forced on workers, the UAW imposed a rotten contract falling far short of workers’ demands and shutting down the strike by 10,000 Deere workers. The UAW used threats and lies to get the contract ratified, falsely claiming the company did not have money to provide adequate wages increases, including the restoration of decades of concessions.

This was despite the fact that the company reported net income of $6 billion for the fiscal year ending October 31, more than double the previous year’s total of $2.8 billion. The company’s previous record was $3.5 billion in 2013. Deere is predicting net income of $6.5 to $7 billion for the current fiscal year.

Cereal maker Kellogg is threatening to hire permanent scab replacements for 1,400 striking workers at five plants across the US. The company reported operating profits of $447 million in the third quarter of 2021, up 9.1 percent from the same period last year. However, management has refused to meet workers’ demands for the elimination of the hated multi-tier wage structure that leaves 30 percent of the workforce at a “transitional level” with lower pay and benefits, as well as grueling 7-day and up to 16-hour work schedules.

The bumper profits for US corporations amid the worst health catastrophe in 100 years is due to the policies of a criminal ruling class that at every point has prioritized profits over human lives. There is no level of death that will make the government change course, because policy is entirely subordinated to the profit interests of the wealthy.

This has been the case since the start of the pandemic, when the ruling class decided to conceal the dangers posed to the population by the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in order to shore up financial markets and forestall a stock market collapse.

The working class must intervene to demand that the vast resources now flowing to the coffers of big business be used instead to fight the global pandemic. The powerful scientific resources of society must be used to eliminate and eradicate the virus, saving the lives of millions.

Make Amazon Pay was formed in 2020 and has since helped to organize a number of strikes and protests against company policies. The campaign states on its website: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon became a trillion dollar corporation, with Bezos becoming the first person in history to amass $200 billion in personal wealth. Meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers risked their lives as essential workers, and only briefly received an increase in pay.”

A video on the Make Amazon Pay website further states: “Amazon’s wealth has increased so much during the pandemic that its owners could pay all 1.3 million of its employees a $690,000 COVID bonus and still be as rich as they were in 2020.”

Read more at Business Insider here.

NLRB Rules Amazon Workers in Alabama Will Revote on Unionization

The Associated Press

LUCAS NOLAN

30 Nov 20210

3:08

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has approved a new union election at one of Amazon’s Alabama warehouses this week. The warehouse workers voted against unionization in April, but following complaints to the federal agency, a revote has been ordered.

CNBC reports that the NLRB has authorized a new union election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, known as BHM1. In April, workers at the warehouse voted against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (Isaac Brekken/AP)

Jeff Bezos holds goggles to his face (Joe Raedle /Getty)

The union has since argued that Amazon illegally interfered in the election, resulting in a legal battle in which the NLRB ruled in the union’s favor. NLRB spokesperson Kayla Blado confirmed to CNBC that the agency has ordered a new election.

At the initial unionization vote of BHM1 in April, employees rejected forming a union with less than 30 percent of votes favoring joining the RWDSU. The RWDSU challenged the results, claiming that Amazon illegally interfered in the election and began a protracted legal battle with months of hearings examining the company’s actions in the time leading up to the vote.

People hold placards during a protest in support of Amazon workers in Union Square, New York on February 20, 2021. (Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)

A major issue that RWDSU had was that Amazon installed a mailbox on-site at the facility which the union argued created a false appearance that Amazon was conducting the election and intimidated workers into voting against the union.

In August, an NLRB hearing officer suggested that the results be set aside and another vote should take place, Amazon said it would appeal the decision at the time. Region 10 Director Lisa Henderson issue the decision and directions for a second election at BHM1 this week.

Henderson wrote in her decision: “I agree with the hearing officer’s recommendations. Accordingly, I affirm the hearing officer’s rulings, I adopt her recommendation to sustain certain objections, and I order a second election.”

An Amazon spokesperson told CNCB that the company disagrees with the NLRB’s decision and that Amazon doesn’t think unions are the answer for its employees.

“Our employees have always had the choice of whether or not to join a union, and they overwhelmingly chose not to join the RWDSU earlier this year,” the Amazon spokesperson said. “It’s disappointing that the NLRB has now decided that those votes shouldn’t count.”

Union President Stuart Appelbaum said in a statement: “Today’s decision confirms what we were saying all along – that Amazon’s intimidation and interference prevented workers from having a fair say in whether they wanted a union in their workplace – and as the Regional Director has indicated, that is both unacceptable and illegal. Amazon workers deserve to have a voice at work, which can only come from a union.”

Read more at CNBC here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

DO A SEARCH FOR OBAMA AND HIS SAUDIS PARTNERS. BARACK LOVES THE SMELL OF DIRTY MONEY. HE WAS WITNESS TO THE SAUDIS BUILDING THE BUSH-SAUDIS PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AFTER BUSH PROTECTED THE SAUDIS AFTER THEY INVADED US 9/11. THEN THE SAUDIS PUMPED BIG MONEY INTO THE CLINTON LIBRARY AND THE CLINTON FOUNDATION FAMILY SLUSH FUND.... WITH THESE PIG LAWYERS, JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY!

CODA

OBOMB'S SO CALLED PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY WILL NOT HOUSE HIS PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS. WE HAVE WATCHED FROM THE BEGINNING OBAMA COVER HIS TRAIL AND CONCEAL HIS TRUE IDENTITY: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE DICTATOR.

Bezos ‘Greases’ Way Into Dem Establishment With $100 Million Obama Donation

Obama-Biden alum Jay Carney arranged the massive gift

Jeff Bezos and Jill Biden, in 2016 (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Santi Ruiz • November 22, 2021 5:40 pm

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Faced with scorn from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos appears ready to "grease" his way into the Democratic establishment with a $100 million donation to the Obama Foundation, according to Puck News.

The donation was arranged by Amazon executive and former Obama press secretary Jay Carney. The no-strings-attached gift comes as Bezos faces growing opposition from the left. The gift is the largest ever made to the foundation, which has chosen to forgo the traditional presidential library in favor of building a privately managed presidential center.

Bezos's donation comes at a difficult political moment for Amazon. Lawmakers from both parties fault the company for its poor treatment of workers and abuse of its market power. The company has also come under fire for banning conservative voices. This year, Amazon banned a book that criticizes transgender ideology and blocked an ad for a book that criticizes the Black Lives Matter movement.

Bezos has tasked Carney, who served as then-vice president Joe Biden's communications director, to ingratiate Amazon with Democratic lawmakers. Under Carney's leadership, Amazon's lobbying team has grown from about two dozen to 250 members. Reuters reported Friday that Carney has successfully lobbied to kill privacy protections for consumers in 25 states.

Amazon is not the only Bezos project to pique the ire of leading Democrats. NASA administrator and former Democratic senator Bill Nelson blamed Bezos's Blue Origin for causing a delay in a U.S. return to the moon. The space exploration company sued NASA after it lost a major contract to Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Obama's presidential center is the first presidential library or museum to be run by a partisan nonprofit, rather than by the National Archives and Records Administration. Bezos's ex-wife Mackenzie Scott and Bill and Melinda Gates have already made substantial donations to the center, which presidential scholars worry will become a partisan slush fund.

Activists on Chicago's South Side said the center will force out longtime neighborhood residents. The center received a tax-free, 99-year lease on almost 20 acres of public parkland from the city of Chicago, for $10 in total. The center will be allowed to charge fees and keep the profits.

Bezos has ramped up his philanthropy over the past four years, pledging millions of dollars to liberal causes and figures. Earlier this year, he pledged $1 billion to conservation efforts and gave $100 million to CNN contributor Van Jones.

A video on the Make Amazon Pay website further states: “Amazon’s wealth has increased so much during the pandemic that its owners could pay all 1.3 million of its employees a $690,000 COVID bonus and still be as rich as they were in 2020.”

BIDEN CRONY BEZOS IS THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD AND YET PAID NO, OR LITTLE INCOME TAX. THE SYSTEM IS RIGGED TO PROTECT THE DEMOCRAT PARTY'S BASE OF TECH BILLIONAIRES FOR OPEN BORDERS!

JOE BIDEN HAS HANDED OVER TO AMAZON BEZOS BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF GOV CONTRACTS. 

Inside Jeff Bezos' $78 MillIon Dollar Hawaii Estate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kELjWUwqllc

Inside Jeff Bezos Mansions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVURsBK1-zY

Jeff Bezos' $400 Million Flying Fox Yacht

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRYEcushHjc

Inside Jeff Bezos' $21,000,000 Car Collection

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu-Vy9Q6U4A

Inside Jeff Bezos' $300 Million Mansions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UsHq_99lJE

CON MAN JOE FROM SCRANTON

During the 2020 Democratic primaries, every candidate pledged

to repeal the Trump tax cut for the rich. Biden has repeatedly

called his domestic agenda a “blue collar” program. While

declaring ad nauseam that “I am a capitalist,” who has nothing

against people becoming billionaires, he has called on Wall

Street to “pay their fair share.”

How Wealth Inequality Spiraled Out of Control | Robert Reich

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOI8RuhW7q0

Eco-Warriors Blockade Amazon Warehouses in Britain on Black Friday

31

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

PETER CADDLE

27 Nov 20210

2:44

Climate crazies Extinction Rebellion blockaded a number of Amazon warehouses in the UK on Black Friday, the company’s busiest day of the year.

Thirteen Amazon warehouses in the UK were targetted by Extinction Rebellion, in an attempt to disrupt the retail giant’s busiest day of the year and protest against the supposedly environmentally damaging practices of Amazon.

The group began its blockade of Amazon’s largest warehouse in the UK in Dunfermline, Scotland, at 4 am on Friday, according to a report from The Telegraph.

Protesters prevented lorries from leaving the site, as well as some from entering through the use of placards, and by using so-called “lock-ons” — devices that are designed to prevent protesters from being removed.

Extinction Rebellion claimed that every Amazon distribution centre in the UK would be targeted by the organisation, with similar protests also occurring in the US, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Over 31 XR activists were arrested at Amazon warehouses across the country on Black Friday, the BBC reported.

A spokeswoman for the far-left climate alarmist group at the Dunfermline blockade stated that they were being watched by police, who reportedly had a single van on-site. She also stated that the group had brought “good vibes and music”.

“The action is intended to draw attention to Amazon’s exploitative and environmentally destructive business practices, disregard for workers’ rights in the name of company profits, as well as the wastefulness of Black Friday,” another spokesman for the group stated.

The tactics employed by left-wing climate protesters have come under increased scrutiny after an XR splinter group, Insulate Britain, used similar methods to cause chaos in September and October.

Activists frequently glued themselves to the tarmac in order to maximize disruption during attempts to shut down major roads and motorways, such as the M25.

The protests reportedly resulted in serious injuries by delaying people who required urgent medical attention from reaching medical centres.

Nine of the group’s eco-warriors were subsequently jailed for violating a court injunction that prohibited the blockading of roads.

On social media, Extinction Rebellion claimed that they are “trying to wake people up to reality” with the blockades and that in order for governments to act on climate change, “mass disruption” and “civil resistance” are required.

“There’s no guarantee it will bring the change we need, but after COP26, it should be obvious that nothing else will,” one post stated.

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AT WORK:

Make Amazon Pay was formed in 2020 and has since helped to organize a number of strikes and protests against company policies. The campaign states on its website: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon became a trillion dollar corporation, with Bezos becoming the first person in history to amass $200 billion in personal wealth. Meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers risked their lives as essential workers, and only briefly received an increase in pay.”

During the 2020 Democratic primaries, every candidate pledged to repeal the Trump tax cut for the rich. Biden has repeatedly called his domestic agenda a “blue collar” program. While declaring ad nauseam that “I am a capitalist,” who has nothing against people becoming billionaires, he has called on Wall Street to “pay their fair share.”

Inside Jeff Bezos Mansions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVURsBK1-zY

Jeff Bezos' $400 Million Flying Fox Yacht

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRYEcushHjc

Inside Jeff Bezos' $21,000,000 Car Collection

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu-Vy9Q6U4A

IRS data shows: US billionaires' true tax

rate far lower than that of workers

 

Jacob Crosse

On June 8, ProPublica published the first in a projected series of articles documenting the massive scale of legally sanctioned tax evasion carried out by America’s ever-expanding class of billionaires. The article, based on an exhaustive study of leaked Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents, focuses on the period from 2014 through 2018. It demonstrates that in the course of those five years, the 25 richest Americans paid federal taxes on their increased wealth at a far lower rate than the typical US household.

The report also cites tax data on billionaire oligarchs such as Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg going back to the first decade of the current century, showing that they paid little or no taxes regardless of which big business party—Democrats or Republicans—occupied the White House. It explains as well that even were the Biden administration to carry out its promised increases in income tax rates for the rich, the impact on the vast fortunes of today’s robber barons would be minimal.

The authors state that in determining the increased wealth of America’s “top 0.001 percent,” they included not simply their salaries, which in many cases comprise only a small share of their actual income, but also “investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.”

 

Billionaires Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk (All originals from Wikimedia Commons)

The result, they note, demolishes “the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most.” They continue: “The IRS records show that the wealthiest can—perfectly legally—pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.”

ProPublica’s revelations provide insight into how the capitalist system and its various state institutions and rigged legal system promote a parasitic financial aristocracy that lives in a world apart from the rest of humanity. Unlike workers, who depend on their wages to survive and pay the full income tax rate, the ultra-wealthy avoid taxes by obtaining massive loans from banks, borrowing against the value of their ever growing and artificially inflated assets, such as stocks and real estate, which are not taxable until they are sold.

In order to calculate what ProPublica terms the “true tax rate” of the 25 richest Americans, the report compares how much in taxes these individuals paid over a given period to how much their wealth grew, using wealth estimates published by Forbes magazine.

Between 2014 and 2018, Forbes estimated that these 25 people saw their wealth increase collectively by $401 billion. The documents obtained by ProPublica show that these same individuals collectively paid $13.6 billion in federal income taxes over the same time period, for a true tax rate of only 3.4 percent. By contrast, ProPublica found that between 2014 and 2018, a typical US worker in his or her 40s experienced a net wealth expansion of about $65,000. That same worker’s tax bills “were almost as much, nearly $62,000, over that five-year period.”

Over that same period, according to ProPublica, Warren Buffett’s wealth increased by $24.3 billion, but the Berkshire Hathaway mogul paid only $23.7 million in taxes, resulting in a true tax rate of 0.10 percent.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ wealth soared by a staggering $99 billion, but he paid just $973 million in taxes, yielding a true tax rate of less than 1 percent.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is another “pandemic profiteer.” He saw his wealth skyrocket this past year, in part by violating a state-ordered shutdown and illegally restarting production at the Fremont, California, Tesla factory, leading to hundreds of coronavirus infections. Between 2014 and 2018 his wealth grew by $13.9 billion, while he paid $455 million in taxes, resulting in a true tax rate of 3.27 percent.

The reporting confirms the Marxist analysis of the capitalist state, described in the Communist Manifesto as “… a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” The various loopholes and tax avoidance schemes employed by the ruling class are legal, have been for decades, and will continue to be so under Biden or any other Democratic administration.

As then-candidate Joe Biden assured wealthy donors at a Manhattan campaign fundraising event in January 2019, should he become president, “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.” Nearly six months into his presidency, Biden has kept his promises to his wealthy benefactors, as evinced by his recent retreat from his proposal to raise corporate taxes by a few percentage points.

Among other facts included in the ProPublica report:

· Bezos, the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes in 2007 and 2011. In 2011, despite his overall wealth holding steady at $18 billion, Bezos filed a tax return in which he claimed to have lost money. The IRS not only approved the billionaire’s tax return, it granted him a $4,000 tax credit for his children!

· Musk, now the second richest person in the world, did not pay any federal income taxes in 2018.

· Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as billionaire investors Carl Icahn and George Soros, have also had years when they paid nothing in federal income taxes. Soros, worth an estimated $8.6 billion as of March 2021, paid no federal income taxes for three years in a row.

According to the ProPublica report, when the super-rich do pay something in income taxes, their true tax rate is far lower than that of the typical working class household, with a median income of $70,000. For instance, between 2006 and 2018, while Bezos’ wealth surged by over $120 billion, he paid, on average, $1.09 in taxes for every $100 in wealth growth. But over the same period, the median American household paid $160 in taxes for every $100 in wealth growth—paying more in taxes than it gained in wealth.

Overall, ProPublica found that the richest 25 Americans pay a far lower income tax rate, an average of 15.8 percent of adjusted gross income, than do many workers, once taxes for Social Security and Medicare are included. To highlight the point, ProPublica found that by the end of 2018, the 25 richest Americans were worth $1.1 trillion and collectively paid a federal tax bill of $1.9 billion.

The $1.1 trillion in collective wealth hoarded by 25 people equals the combined annual wages of roughly 14.3 million American workers, who in 2018 paid $143 billion in federal taxes, or over 75 times more than the billionaires.

On Tuesday, in response to a reporter’s question about the ProPublica report, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had nothing to say about its damning content. Instead, she threatened criminal prosecution of those who leaked the IRS documents to ProPublica.

“Any unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information by a person of access is illegal and we take this very seriously,” said Psaki. She added that the IRS commissioner has referred the matter to investigators and that the FBI and Justice Department would also be investigating.

 

THERE'S NO ONE UP HIGH TECH'S ASS MORE THAN BIDEN! THERE WILL BE NO HIGH-TECH ANTI-TRUST UNDER THE BIDEN REGIME!

The donation comes after the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust introduced five bills last summer aimed to curb anti-competitive practices in the tech industry. The bills have been presented as a bipartisan effort to rein in the power of dominant Silicon Valley companies. 

IT PAYS TO OWN A FEW DEMOCRAT POLS

A video on the Make Amazon Pay website further states: “Amazon’s wealth has increased so much during the pandemic that its owners could pay all 1.3 million of its employees a $690,000 COVID bonus and still be as rich as they were in 2020.”

Read more at Business Insider here.

Jeff Bezos Donates $100 Million to Obama Foundation

The Associated Press

ALANA MASTRANGELO

22 Nov 20210

3:02

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is donating $100 million to the Obama Foundation in the wake of Amazon clashing with the Biden administration over antitrust issues.

Bezos’ $100 million donation to the Obama Foundation, made in honor of late Rep. John Lewis, is the foundation’s largest individual contribution received to date, the Obama Foundation announced in a Monday press release.

Jeff Bezos lectures normal people about climate change Pool/Getty)

GLASGOW, SCOTLAND – NOVEMBER 08: Former US President Barack Obama delivers a speech while attending day nine of the COP26 at SECC on November 8, 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

The donation comes after the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust introduced five bills last summer aimed to curb anti-competitive practices in the tech industry. The bills have been presented as a bipartisan effort to rein in the power of dominant Silicon Valley companies.

One bill aimed to prevent technology companies from favoring their own products and services on their platform, a practice that Google and Amazon have been accused of. Another targeted the use of data obtained from competitors to gain an advantage over them, a practice that has made Amazon the subject of an EU antitrust investigation.

Moreover, Lina Khan, the Chairperson of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), is reportedly probing Amazon’s $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM Studios. In June, Amazon demanded that Khan recuse herself from any FTC probes of the company, reported New York Post.

Bezos’ nine-figure gift to the Obama Foundation was arranged by former Obama press secretary and current Amazon senior vice president of global corporate affairs Jay Carney, according to a report by Puck News.

The Obama Foundation says Bezos’ donation will “help expand the scope of programming that reaches emerging leaders in the United States and around the world,” adding that Bezos “has asked for the Plaza at the Obama Presidential Center to be named the John Lewis Plaza.”

While the foundation was vague regarding what Bezos’ donation will be spent on, it said that the money will give “the next generation of emerging leaders” the “necessary tools, resources, and training needed to be the change they want to see in the world, just as Congressman Lewis did.”

“I’m thrilled to support President and Mrs. Obama and their Foundation in its mission to train and inspire tomorrow’s leaders,” Bezos said.

Earlier this month, former President Barack Obama jetted into Glasgow, Scotland, for the COP26 climate conference to tell “old folks” to “get out of the way.”

“From the perspective of the Obama Foundation, one of the things I’m most excited about is to see the young activists from around the world who are taking up the baton and not just working in their own countries, but now forming a collective movement across borders to tell the older generation that has gotten us into this mess that we all have an obligation to dig our way out of it,” Obama said in a recorded a video message.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.

DEMOCRAT = THE MODERN SLAVE LABOR PARTY OF OPEN BORDERS, GLOBALIST AND NAFTA PIGS!

BEZOSHEAD IS RIGHT AT NAFTA BIDEN'S SIDE WITH MARK ZUCKERBERG ON THE OTHER SIDE PUSHING FOR AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!

‘Make Amazon Pay:’ Workers in 20 Countries Plan to Strike on Black Friday

KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images

LUCAS NOLAN

22 Nov 20215

3:29

Amazon employees in 20 countries are reportedly preparing to strike on Black Friday as part of a campaign titled “Make Amazon Pay.”

Business Insider reports that Amazon employees in 20 different countries are planning a mass strike on Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year, as part of the “Make Amazon Pay” campaign. The campaign includes a coalition of 70 organizations including Greenpeace, Oxfam, and Amazon Workers International.

Mural of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. (Thierry Ehrmann/Flickr)

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (Isaac Brekken/AP)

The workers are demanding accountability from top executives who they believe are placing profits ahead of worker wellbeing. Individual workers “from oil refineries, to factories, to warehouses, to data centers, to corporate offices” are expected to take part in the walkout on November 26.

Make Amazon Pay wrote in a list of demands on its website: “The pandemic has exposed how Amazon places profits ahead of workers, society, and our planet. Amazon takes too much and gives back too little. It is time to Make Amazon Pay.”

The protests come as Amazon employees continue to complain of long hours, low pay, and strict performance review systems. Make Amazon Pay is demanding increased salaries, improved job security, and the suspension of the “harsh productivity and surveillance regime Amazon has used to squeeze workers.”

The group is also calling for a “pay back to society” which will include enhanced environmental sustainability efforts, increased transparency over the use of user data and privacy measures, and the immediate end of partnerships between Amazon and police forces and immigration authorities which are “institutionally racist.”

“Amazon is not alone in these bad practices but it sits at the heart of a failed system that drives the inequality, climate breakdown, and democratic decay that scar our age,” Make Amazon Pay wrote in its demands.

A company spokesperson told Business Insider that the company is “inventing and investing significantly” in several of the categories that the campaign is calling for action in, including climate efforts. The spokesperson said:

These groups represent a variety of interests, and while we are not perfect in any area, if you objectively look at what Amazon is doing in each one of these areas you’ll see that we do take our role and our impact very seriously.

Make Amazon Pay was formed in 2020 and has since helped to organize a number of strikes and protests against company policies. The campaign states on its website: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon became a trillion dollar corporation, with Bezos becoming the first person in history to amass $200 billion in personal wealth. Meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers risked their lives as essential workers, and only briefly received an increase in pay.”

A video on the Make Amazon Pay website further states: “Amazon’s wealth has increased so much during the pandemic that its owners could pay all 1.3 million of its employees a $690,000 COVID bonus and still be as rich as they were in 2020.”

Read more at Business Insider here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com

House Democrats pass stripped-down social welfare bill with massive tax cut for the rich

Barry Grey

19 November 2021

House speaker Nancy Pelosi

On Friday morning, the House of Representatives passed its version of President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” social welfare and climate bill. As expected, the measure was approved on a party-line vote, with 220 Democrats voting “Yes” and all 212 Republicans voting “No.” One Democrat, Jared Golden of Maine, a conservative former Marine who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, broke ranks and voted in opposition to the bill.

Golden had announced that he would oppose the bill because it included a massive tax break for the wealthy. The outcome of months of internal Democratic Party wrangling was the decision of the Biden White House and the party leadership to strip the bill of all major tax increases opposed by big business and slash the top line figure for social programs and climate protection in half, from $3.25 trillion to $1.75 trillion over 10 years.

That, however, did not satisfy the Wall Street and corporate interests that dictate government policy and control both major parties. Earlier this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi incorporated into the bill a measure demanded by wealthy donors in high-tax states such as New York, New Jersey and California. It was the lifting of a $10,000 cap on deductions on federal income taxes to compensate for state and local taxes. The cap was imposed as part of the Trump tax bill passed in December of 2017, which slashed taxes for corporations and the wealthy.

Until then, there was no limit on the amount of federal tax deductions for state and local taxes that wealthy people in generally pro-Democratic high-tax states could claim by itemizing their federal tax returns. In imposing the limit, Trump and the Republicans were targeting states that historically vote “blue” in federal elections.

This infuriated the Democrats’ wealthy backers, who demanded that the Biden budget bill raise the limit on so-called SALT (state and local tax) deductions. The Democrats acceded by adding to the bill a provision raising the limit to $80,000 for each of the next nine years.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this tax windfall for the wealthy will cost the federal government $285 billion over the 10-year span covered by the bill, making it the second most costly item in the legislation. It is topped only by a combined $390 billion for universal pre-school for three- and four-year-old children and limited subsidies for child care.

It is considerably higher than the allocation for clean energy and climate resilience ($220 billion), four weeks of paid family and medical leave ($195 billion), clean energy and electricity tax credits ($190 billion), affordable housing ($170 billion), Medicaid home- and community-based services ($150 billion), a one-year extension of the expanded child tax credit ($130 billion), and tax credits for health insurance premiums under Obamacare ($125 billion).

It would help pay for programs that were severely cut or dropped outright from the bill under pressure from big business and its most open mouthpieces in the Democratic Party, such as senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. These include free community college (eliminated); the ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry, thereby lowering their costs (reduced to a shell program affecting only a handful of drugs and not even starting until 2024); and Medicare coverage for dental, hearing and vision (reduced to limited subsidies for hearing aids).

According to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the SALT tax provision will overwhelmingly benefit the top 10 percent of income earners, with virtually nothing going to the remaining 90 percent, i.e., the working class and lower-middle class. The measure will particularly benefit the top one percent, those who make over $867,000 a year. They will see a tax cut in the tens of thousands of dollars.

“Anything you do to eliminate the SALT cap is going to be regressive, because that tax is overwhelmingly paid by very high-income people,” said Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center. “Anything you do to lower that tax doesn’t matter for most people.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) reported that a family of four in Washington D.C. making $1 million per year would receive 10 times as much tax relief next year from expanding the state and local tax deductions as a middle-class family would receive from an expansion of the child tax credit. The CRFB said that two-thirds of households making more than $1 million a year would get a tax cut under the legislation because of the increase in the state and local property tax deduction.

Pointing to the brazen hypocrisy of Biden and the Democratic Party, Marx Goldwein, senior policy director at the CRFB, said, “We’re debating about whether to give lower- and middle-class families a thousand dollars more a year through the child tax credit, while giving upper-class families $10,000 or more through SALT. That’s counter to everything the Democrats have been saying Build Back Better is about and everything they said about the Trump tax cuts.”

According to a report from the Tax Foundation, raising the SALT cap would more than offset other tax increases for the wealthy in 2022 included in the House bill. These include a 15 percent minimum corporate tax, a 1 percent tax on stock buybacks, increased taxes on US companies’ foreign profits, and a surtax of 5 percent on those with adjusted gross income over $10 million and 8 percent on those making more than $25 million.

In a column in the Financial Times on Thursday, Edward Luce alluded to the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics and linked it to the Build Back Better bill:

The result is a bill that caters best to the most powerful slice of Americans—the very wealthy. They can sleep easy now that the carried interest loophole, which allows private equity partners to be taxed at lower than ordinary income rates—as Warren Buffett pointed out, they pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries—is probably safe. As it stands, the bill will also give wealthy Americans a bigger tax cut than they got from Trump’s big 2017 tax bill.

Even this miserable travesty of social reform will be further gutted if not blocked outright in the Senate, where passage will require the support of all 50 Democrats. Neither Manchin nor Sinema has signed on to the bill, the former having declared his opposition to even a completely inadequate a four-week paid leave provision, while calling for means testing and work requirements for other social benefits.

The so-called “progressives”—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, the more than 100-strong House Progressive Caucus—capitulated to the demand of Biden and the most right-wing factions in the Democratic caucuses to pass the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. This bill was backed by virtually every corporate lobby group, without having secured the agreement of Manchin and Sinema to support Senate passage of the broader “Build Back Better” social spending bill, against which the corporations have waged a massive lobbying campaign.

Sanders, for his part, has denounced the inclusion of the SALT provision in the House bill but is supporting a modified version in the Senate bill, according to which eligibility for expanded tax deductions would be limited to people making less than $400,000 a year. On the other hand, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, widely known as the “senator from Wall Street,” is supporting an even bigger deduction than that provided by the House.

He has announced that he will bring up the National Defense Authorization Act, which allocates $778 billion for the military in a single year (nearly half the 10-year Build Back Better budget) and the anti-China United States Innovation and Competition Act before taking up the social/climate measure passed by the House. This could delay consideration of Build Back Better until next year, something Manchin has hinted at, likely killing the legislation.

All of the so-called “progressives” promoted by the pseudo-left, including Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush, voted for the House bill on Friday, demonstrating the DSA’s role as an arm of one of the two main parties of US imperialism.

During the 2020 Democratic primaries, every candidate pledged to repeal the Trump tax cut for the rich. Biden has repeatedly called his domestic agenda a “blue collar” program. While declaring ad nauseam that “I am a capitalist,” who has nothing against people becoming billionaires, he has called on Wall Street to “pay their fair share.”

Now it is perfectly clear what this actually means. Under conditions where the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, they have dropped any attempt to raise corporate or personal income tax rates for the wealthy The only significant change Biden and the Democrats are seeking to make to Trump’s multitrillion-dollar tax giveaway to the oligarchy is to increase its scale.

This is a devastating exposure of the fraudulent claims of the DSA and similar organizations of the upper-middle class that progressive change is possible within the framework of the capitalist two-party system and that the Democratic Party can serve as an instrument of social change.