This is because
despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers.
It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the
military-industrial complex.
Amazon
is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and
intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA
in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last
year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s
facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and
local police.
Biden names national security team of right-wing militarists
President-elect Joe Biden sent a clear message to the world and to the American people with the first announcement of the top appointees to his cabinet and White House staff: the number one priority of the incoming Democratic administration is to build a US-led front of imperialist powers in preparation for stepped up military pressure and outright war on Russia and China.
All six of the appointments announced Monday in press releases—the nominees themselves will be introduced to the public later today—are in the sphere of foreign policy and national security. All are veterans of the Obama-Biden administration, and many were confirmed in those earlier positions by a Republican-controlled Senate led by Mitch McConnell, demonstrating that Biden intends to form a government entirely acceptable to the Republican right.
The six officials named Monday include:
Antony Blinken, secretary of state: Blinken is a long-time Biden national security aide in both the US Senate and during Biden’s vice presidency, and he was deputy secretary of state in 2015-2016.
Jake Sullivan, national security adviser: Sullivan succeeded Blinken as national security adviser to Vice President Biden, as well as serving as chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Avril Haines, director of national intelligence: Haines was on Biden’s staff at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then on the Obama-Biden National Security Council before serving two years as deputy director of the CIA in 2015-2016.
Alexander Mayorkas, secretary of homeland security: a Cuban-born son of immigrants, Mayorkas is a career domestic security official who was deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the Obama administration, which deported more immigrants than any previous government.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, ambassador to the United Nations: the highest ranking African American in the career foreign service, Thomas-Greenfield was named ambassador to Liberia by George W. Bush, then State Department personnel chief under Obama and later assistant secretary for African Affairs. She was forced out by Trump in 2017 and became a counselor with the Albright-Stonebridge Group, a foreign policy think tank for Democrats headed by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
John Kerry, special presidential envoy for climate: the former senator, presidential candidate and secretary of state, now 76, co-chaired Biden’s climate change task force along with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He will head a US effort to rejoin the Paris climate accord.
The first and most obvious fact about all six nominees is that they are dedicated defenders of American imperialism and the interests of Wall Street. Several are multi-millionaires, while all are comfortably within the top tier financially. Blinken, for example, is the son of a founder of Warburg Pincus investment bank, Donald Blinken, who was for 12 years chairman of the board of the State University of New York.
For all the hosannas in the media over the “diversity” of these initial appointees—one African American, one Hispanic, two women—these facets of their identities are entirely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter to the victim of torture in a CIA secret prison that the torturer (or her boss in Washington) is female. It doesn’t matter to refugee children separated from their parents by immigration agents that the DHS secretary is Hispanic. It doesn’t matter to the victims of US military aggression that the diplomat who defends this violence before the world is black.
The emphasis on diversity is used to distract from the reactionary character of the foreign policy orientation of the incoming Biden administration, which his apologists seek to disguise using the skin color, gender and national origin of the personnel who will carry it out.
There has been little discussion in the media of the significance of Biden choosing, in the midst of a nationwide and worldwide public health catastrophe that has already taken the lives of a quarter million Americans, to announce his foreign policy team first. If victory over coronavirus was the number one priority, as Biden claimed during the fall campaign, why not announce those who will head up the Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies with the main responsibility for the fight against the pandemic?
This is a signal that the real point of difference between the Democrats and Trump is not his catastrophic performance in relation to COVID-19. While Trump now openly embraces “herd immunity” and dismisses the death toll as inconsequential, the Democrats will pursue essentially the same policy, and Biden has flatly rejected any new lockdown of the US economy.
Ever since Trump took office, the focus of Democratic Party opposition has been on foreign policy, particularly Trump’s allegedly “soft” line on Russia and his pullout, albeit largely rhetorical, from US commitments to Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that Biden expects to be in control of US foreign policy in less than 60 days, he is demonstrating that this will be the initial focus of policy changes.
BLOG EDITOR: THE WASHINGTON POST IS OWNED BY BIDEN CRONY JEFF BEZOS.
Both major pro-Democratic Party newspapers emphasized this in their coverage of the Biden team’s rollout. The Washington Post wrote, “Biden is planning to prioritize foreign policy as a major pillar in his administration, with vows to reassemble global alliances and insert the United States into a more prominent position on the world stage.”
The New York Times was even blunter, identifying China as the main target of the new administration. In a front-page profile, the Times described Blinken as “a defender of global alliances” and said that he “will try to coalesce skeptical international partners into a new competition with China…” It identified trade in the Indo-Pacific region, technology investments, and Africa as areas in which the US would be “competing with China.”
Other profiles have noted that Blinken and Biden were generally aligned on foreign policy issues during the Obama administration, except on two occasions—the US attack on Libya, and US policy towards Syria—where Blinken favored more aggressive US intervention and Biden was more cautious.
The two were completely in step in relation to Ukraine, where Blinken played a key public role in turning the Crimean secession and reunification with Russia into a major international crisis. Blinken was the main US spokesman advocating heavy sanctions on Russia, to punish not only the Putin government, but also the population of the country as a whole. In a speech at the time, he said sanctions were needed to “demonstrate to the Russian people that there is a very hefty fine for supporting international criminals like” Putin.
Of the other appointees, Avril Haines is also a close personal associate of Biden, serving on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he was chairman, then moving to the National Security Council in the Obama-Biden White House before her two years at the CIA. After leaving the government when Trump came in, Haines joined Blinken at the newly formed WestExec Partners, a national security think tank peddling advice to US corporations. Another partner was Michele Fluornoy, the former Pentagon official under Obama who is widely expected to be Biden’s choice as secretary of defense.
Late Monday, after the rollout of the group that Biden called the “crux” of his national security team, the Biden transition revealed that his next major cabinet pick would be former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to serve as Treasury secretary. This underscores the absolute subservience of the incoming administration to Wall Street, since Yellen was identified with the Fed policy of unrestrained opening of the financial spigots to support the financial markets during the 2008-2009 Wall Street crash.
Yellen was a top Fed official from 2004 on, working with then-chairman Ben Bernanke, moving up to vice chair in 2009 and appointed by Obama to succeed Bernanke in 2013. Trump declined to reappoint her to a second term in 2017.
This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
Amazon is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and local police.
“Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble.”
DANIEL GREENFIELD
Traditional book publishers were decimated by the arrival of Amazon, which aggressively pursued them, in the words of Bezos, “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”
Amazon, the multinational online retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
Amazon is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and local police.
THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WAGES WAR ON AMERICA!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/09/bill-gates-zuckerberg-jeff-bezos.html
"GOP estb. is using the $5 billion border-wall fight to hide up to four blue/white-collar cheap-labor programs in lame-duck DHS budget. Donors are worried that salaries are too damn high, & estb. media does not want to know."
TOP EVIL CORPORATIONS LOOTING AMERICA
Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIES – CLINTON CRONIES
JPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil
Halliburton BUSH CRIME FAMILY CRONIES
British American Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google CLINTON CRONIES
Facebook OBAMA CRONIES, BIDEN CRONIES
Amazon WORKS FOR BIDEN, OR DOES HE WORK FOR JEFF BEZOS?
Walmart
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Graph from the Economic Policy Institute
Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell to only 61 percent.
Millionaires projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019...watch those numbers go up with Bidenomics!
While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.
At the end of 2014, millionaire households owned about 41 percent of global private wealth, according to BCG. This means that collectively these 17 million households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in liquid assets, or about $4 million per household.
By Gabriel Black
The massive increase in the value of the stock market, which only a small segment of the population participates in, means that the top 10 percent of the population controls 73 percent of all wealth in the United States. Just three men—Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates—had more wealth than the bottom half of America combined last year.
The father of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin just completed the most expensive purchase of a living artist’s work in US history, spending over $91 million on a three-foot-tall metallic sculpture. Ken Griffin, the founder of hedge fund Citadel, recently dropped $238 million on a penthouse in New York City, the most expensive US home ever purchased. And Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has invested $42 million in a 10,000-year clock (BEZOS OWNS ABOUT $300 IN RESIDENTIAL PROPERTIES HE CONSIDERS HIS HOMES THESE INCLUDE $135 MILLION MANSION IN BEVERLY HILLS, A $40 MILLION DOLLAR TOWNHOUSE IN D.C. AND $100 MILLION IN CONDOS IN NYC).
Amazon’s 25th anniversary: A conglomerate based on parasitism and exploitation
Last week, Amazon commemorated its 25th anniversary. From its beginnings in a garage in Seattle, Washington, Amazon has grown into a multinational technology conglomerate with a market capitalization of nearly one trillion dollars.
In 1994, future Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos left his job at hedge fund D.E. Shaw to get out in front of the possibilities opened up by the accelerating development of the internet, beginning with the modest idea of an online bookstore. Bezos went on to become the wealthiest man on the planet, his hoard by one estimate peaking at a record $157 billion before his assets were divided in a divorce earlier this year.
Traditional book publishers were decimated by the arrival of Amazon, which aggressively pursued them, in the words of Bezos, “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” Using its vast flows of cash, Amazon ruthlessly undercut its rivals, from neighborhood stores to diaper manufacturers, accepting losses in order to drive competitors out of its way. Meanwhile, Amazon demanded and obtained free money from state and local governments in the form of tax breaks and other concessions.
Amazon’s annual revenues reached $233 billion in 2018, on which the conglomerate is expected to pay zero federal income tax. To put this figure in perspective, these revenues are nearly at the level of the annual tax revenue of Russia, which amounted to $253.9 billion in US dollars in 2017. Amazon’s revenues are higher than the government revenues of Turkey ($173.9 billion), Austria ($197.8 billion), Poland ($90.8 billion) and Iran ($77.2 billion).
Nearly half of American households now have subscriptions to Amazon Prime. The click of a mouse on a personal computer, or the tap of a finger on a mobile device, now sets into motion the speedy delivery of commodities from around the world, or the instantaneous electronic transmission of a film, song or book. Behind these deceptively simple transactions lies Amazon’s vast and complex commercial, logistics, distribution and computing empire.
Promising advances have indeed been made in automation and artificial intelligence. These technological advances carry with them tremendous liberating potential for human civilization as a whole. Heavy and repetitive toil by humans can increasingly be mitigated by robots, and possibilities appear on the horizon for advanced levels of coordination and integration around the world, assisted by artificial intelligence.
But under capitalism, new advances in technology have made possible new techniques of exploitation. Amazon has become a watchword for a new kind of despotism in the workplace.
In Amazon “fulfillment centers,” workers are forbidden to carry cellphones or to talk to each other. They are searched coming in and out, and minute details of their activity throughout the workday are tracked. Amazon specializes in putting constant pressure on workers to move as fast as possible, with electronic devices constantly prompting and prodding them to complete the next task.
Workers are instructed to compete with each other to surpass each other’s rates, which they are admonished constitutes “fun.” Arbitrarily high rates are demanded, and then raised, and then raised again. A worker who takes a moment to rest, to drink water, or to go to the bathroom can be criticized for a diminished rate. The workers who are deemed too slow, or who simply tire out, are replaced.
Amazon is now the second-largest employer in the United States, and there are around 647,000 Amazon workers worldwide. Journalist John Cassidy, writing about Amazon in The New Yorker in 2015, commented: “Behind all the technological advances and product innovation, there is a good deal of old-fashioned labor discipline, wage repression, and exertion of management power.”
Over the past week, we published an article exposing the injury of 567 workers over a two-year period at Amazon’s DFW-7 fulfillment center near Fort Worth, Texas. In December of last year, the WSWS reported how Amazon had hired a private detective to spy on 27-year-old worker Michelle Quinones in an effort to block compensation for her injury.
Amazon has appeared in the “Dirty Dozen” list maintained by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) for two years in a row. The 2019 report highlights six worker deaths in seven months, 13 deaths since 2013, “a high incidence of suicide attempts, workers urinating in bottles and workers left without resources or income after on-the-job injuries.”
Amazon’s techniques are merely a refined expression of conditions being imposed on workers around the world. In March of this year, Ford Motor Company announced the hiring of its new chief financial officer, Tim Stone, who previously served as Amazon’s vice president of finance and the leader of the Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods. Stone was hired as Ford carries out brutal cost-cutting in the US, Europe and around the world.
There is no shortage of opposition among Amazon workers. On social media, current and former Amazon workers are contacting each other, looking for ways to fight back. In Poland, where Amazon workers make around $5 per hour, Amazon walked out of negotiations on July 2 with two unions over working conditions, setting the stage for a strike.
To fight for their interests, Amazon workers cannot allow their struggles to be corralled and smothered by the pro-capitalist trade unions, which are doing everything they can to block a fight against inequality and exploitation.
In 25 years, Amazon produced the biggest individual fortune in history, and it did so on the backs of hundreds of thousands of workers. Amazon’s trajectory represents an “accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital.”
Not just Bezos, but many others have enriched themselves or stand to enrich themselves from Amazon’s rise. Wall Street has its fingers in the pie. The Vanguard Group currently owns $55 billion of Amazon stock, BlackRock owns $45 billion and FMR owns $30 billion.
The parasitic activities of Amazon, through which it has sought to appropriate for itself the surplus value accumulated by other companies, have been integrated with the financial parasitism of the American economy. Amazon’s own stock has been buoyed ever higher as part of the speculative mania on Wall Street.
Amazon is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the US military and intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million contract with the CIA in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense last year to move government data onto the cloud. Meanwhile, Amazon’s facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being marketed to federal and local police.
In 2013, Bezos personally purchased, and now operates, the Washington Post, which has been a main media voice for the Democratic Party’s anti-Russia campaign and the overall interests of American imperialism.
The increasing integration of Amazon with the repressive apparatus of the state, while its tentacles stretch into every corner of society.
Amazon must be placed under public ownership and democratic control. It must be taken out of the hands of the financial oligarchy and transformed into a public utility. The technology and infrastructure behind Amazon’s meteoric trajectory and the biggest individual fortune in modern history must be turned towards the needs and aspirations of the world’s population as a whole.
This program can only be achieved through the mobilization of the working class on an international scale on the basis of a fight to overthrow the capitalist system and establish a democratically-controlled socialist economy, run on the basis of social need, not private profit.
ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER…. Amazon’s JEFF BEZOS PLAN FOR A NEW AMERICAN SLAVERY
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/11/amazon-billionaire-jeff-bezos-says-fuck.html
"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
Traditional book publishers were decimated by the arrival of Amazon, which aggressively pursued them, in the words of Bezos, “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”
AMAZON’S ASSAULT ON AMERICA CONTINUES
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/05/modern-slaver-jeff-bezos-of-amazon.html
Amazon, the multinational online retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
"Today, each of the top 5 billionaires owns as much as 750 million people, more than the total population of Latin America and double the population of the US."
“A comprehensive new report released Sunday by the New York-based labor rights watchdog China Labor Watch (CLW) has shed new light on the barbaric and illegal practices that Amazon employs to boost its profits by driving down production costs on the backs of factory workers at the company’s electronics assembly plants in China.”
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/06/hundreds-of-miserably-paid-employees-at.html
“A comprehensive new report released Sunday by the New York-based labor rights watchdog China Labor Watch (CLW) has shed new light on the barbaric and illegal practices that Amazon employs to boost its profits by driving down production costs on the backs of factory workers at the company’s electronics assembly plants in China.”
Amazon, the multinational online retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
AMAZON’S JEFF BEZOS IS THE FACE OF MODERN SLAVERY!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-face-of-evil-jeff-bezos-assault-on.html
The gains for employees are a novel pain for the investors and employers who have been able to hold down wages for decades because the federal government is trying to grow the economy via cheap-labor legal immigration.
“INVESTORS” HAVE AND WILL DESTROY THIS NATION IF IT WOULD IMPACT THE NEXT QUARTER’S EARNINGS!
Amazon, the multinational online retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
Hunger and evictions surge in the US
The worst social catastrophe to befall the US working class since the Great Depression of the 1930s continues to leave millions of people hungry, jobless and facing eviction.
Feeding America, the second-largest food charity in the US, estimates that upwards of 54 million people, including one in four children in the US are facing food insecurity.
People line up and check-in for a food giveaway at Harlem's Food Bank For New York City, a community kitchen and food pantry, Monday, Nov. 16, 2020, in New York. Over five hundred turkeys and produce food boxes were given away by lottery to needy families for Thanksgiving. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
The growing need for food among millions of workers and their families is coinciding with record levels of COVID-19 infections reported in states across the country. In Texas, over 1 million have contracted the coronavirus, with over 20,000 perishing, the second highest tolls in the country behind New York. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation forecasts roughly another 190,000 deaths by March 1, 2021 if current trends continue.
On top of food insecurity, between 11 and 13 million renter households across the country are at risk of eviction, according to research by Stout, an investment bank and global advisory firm.
The Eviction Lab at Princeton University reports that eviction filings increased in several major metro areas following the expiration of CARES Act provisions at the end of July and before the CDC eviction moratorium was implemented on September 4. However, even with the moratorium, Princeton researchers note that evictions have continued across the country, and Stout estimates that with its expiration at the end of the year, this could lead to up to 6.4 million eviction filings.
The Eviction Lab data shows that two weeks after the CDC moratorium was implemented, evictions still continued to be processed, with 508 in Fort Worth and 1,053 in Houston, Texas. Filings also increased on a month-to-month basis in several cities, including Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and in the Florida cities of Tampa, Jacksonville and Gainesville.
In North Carolina, almost 25,000 eviction cases were filed between July and September, according to data from the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts, with almost 15,000 completed. Overall, Stout estimates that between 300,000 and 410,000 North Carolina households are unable to pay rent, with 240,000 expected eviction filings by January 2021.
In an interview with CNN, attorney Michael Trujillo commented on the bind that renters will find themselves in come January 1, 2021. “The pandemic is not going away before the end of the year,” he said, adding that without additional protections, “a huge wave of evictions” is on the horizon.
In a Hill-HarrisX poll taken between November 10 and November 13, 77 percent of US voters were in favor of passing a coronavirus relief package “as soon as possible.” Yet despite massive popular support for more stimulus, no relief is coming.
After the House and Senate passed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act at the end of March, which provided billions to Wall Street, large corporations and the well-connected, ensuring their financial stability for a lifetime, workers were left with limited protections and only temporary unemployment relief. Congress has yet to pass another bill long after the $1,200 stimulus checks have been sent out and enhanced unemployment benefits have expired. Months of inaction have left millions of workers and their families without additional stimulus, eviction protection, health care, food or medicine, exacerbating mental health issues and stress.
Included in the CARES Act was an eviction moratorium that expired, along with the federal $600-a-week unemployment supplement, at the end of July. After Congress failed to come to terms on another bill at the end of July, the Centers for Disease Control, on September 4, implemented a federal eviction moratorium, which required tenants to sign a declaration and provide a copy to their landlord. This, along with additional federal unemployment assistance distributed under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) programs, are set to expire the final week of December, leaving millions of people who have yet to find jobs or come up with the monies needed to pay back rent facing eviction in less than 50 days.
As of October, some 13 million people were receiving benefits through the PUA or PEUC program, more than from state unemployment insurance, which has also expired for millions of workers.
While the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates that over 11.1 million people are unemployed, thousands of workers, primarily low-wage workers, continue to be laid off. Last week, the BLS recorded over 700,000 first-time unemployment filings for the 34th week in a row, with first-time unemployment claims exceeding any week throughout the 2008-09 Great Recession.
A Washington Post analysis found that among higher education workers, low-wage and administrative staff have seen ongoing monthly job losses or have not been called back to campus, while higher paid instructors have been hired back. The Post found that while colleges hired 180,000 workers during the fall semester last year, only 20,000 jobs were added this year.
Mass unemployment has led workers to apply for state unemployment benefits, but hundreds of thousands have yet to receive anything nearly eight months into the pandemic. In Wisconsin, reporters working with Wisconsin Watch found that nationally only 56 percent of unemployment claims were paid from March through August, while in Wisconsin the level was only 42.5 percent. As of November 10, more than 94,000 people in the state were still waiting for either state or federal unemployment benefits.
For those who were fortunate enough to receive benefits, their expiration and the inability to find safe well-paying work have left them unable to afford basic necessities.
The out-of-control spread of the virus coupled with overcrowded hospitals prompted a flurry of public health declarations over the past 72 hours from Republican and Democratic governors, such as Iowa Republican Kim Reynolds and Michigan Democrat Gretchen Whitmer. These included curfews, mask mandates and calls to limit social gatherings to 10 people or less. However, not one politician in either party is advancing the necessary demand to resume lockdowns of all non-essential businesses, with guaranteed pay for jobless workers and small business owners.
As Democratic President-elect Joe Biden made clear in his speech yesterday after meeting with corporate executives, the number one concern of the ruling class is “to get the economy back on track,” not to stop the spread of the virus, feed the hungry, provide relief or house the homeless. All policy is focused on ensuing the flow of profits to the corporations and Wall Street.
Not once in Biden’s speech did he call for resuming the unemployment benefits in the CARES Act or extending eviction moratoriums.
This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
In the latest round of political theater on Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appealing, “for the sake of the country,” to “come to the table and work with us to produce an agreement that meets America’s needs in this critical time.”
The letter noted that the negotiations should begin from the previous failed starting offer of $2.2 trillion, which McConnell and the Republicans have dismissed, a position from which they have not budged for the last six months. Despite the intransigence on the part of the Republicans, the fact is that the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have found time to advance several of President Trump’s federal judges past committee hearings, including Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, allowing them to be approved.
Ultimately, both parties see the provision of even the most meager benefits as a “disincentive” for their real aim: getting workers back on the job in factories and other workplaces amid a raging pandemic.
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