JOBS FOR BLACKS IN NAFTA JOE BIDEN'S AMERICA WHERE JOBS GO TO ILLEGALS FIRST - It isn’t just black Americans that are suffering. Lower-income Americans of all races have also seen setbacks in the early months of the Biden administration.

 

Carney: Welcome to Biden’s America, Where the Poor Pay More

OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images

JOHN CARNEY

9 Apr 20212,410

3:57

The first two months of the presidency of Joe Biden have not been a particularly auspicious period in which to be black, poor, or working class in America.

The unemployment rate for black Americans fell for eight consecutive months as Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House marched toward its end, falling from 16.7 percent to 9.2 percent in January, one of the swiftest decline in unemployment in recorded economic history. It jumped back up to 9.9 percent in February and only slightly recovered to 9.6 percent in March.

It isn’t just black Americans that are suffering. Lower-income Americans of all races have also seen setbacks in the early months of the Biden administration.

The latest data on prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that prices jumped much higher than expected in March. The annual gain of 4.2 percent is the highest since 2011, although this is somewhat of a statistical illusion created by the depression in demand for goods and services after our political leaders ordered everyone to shelter at home to protect themselves from Covid-19. But even the monthly gains exceeded expectations, rising 1 percent compared with a forecast of half that.

Inflation weighs particularly hard on those at the lower end of the income scale. A much larger share of income goes into current consumption, so higher prices squeeze budgets more. Meager savings are much more likely to be in low-interest paying bank accounts than in equities or inflation hedged investments, so they are vulnerable to to the deterioration of the buying power of the U.S. dollar.

The details of March’s price hike make it even clearer that the early Biden era inflation is weighing particularly on the bottom end of the income scale. Gasoline prices, for example, rose 8.8 percent in March. The lower third of household incomes spend more on transportation than the upper two thirds, according to long-running data from Pew Charitable Trusts.  In 2019, transportation costs—of which the price of gasoline is a major component—accounted for 17 percent of all household expenditures, according to Statista, the second biggest category after housing.

Food is third in line after transportation and housing, accounting for 13 percent of household spending. The March Producer Price Index indicates food prices rose half a percentage point in March and 1.3 percent in February. Over the past 12-months, food prices are up 5 percent.

Contrast the shares of household spending with the top income brackets. The top third of spend around 8 percent of household income on transportation, according to Pew Charitable Trusts. Statista gives higher figures for the top quintiles but still a good deal below the bottom quintiles. The same goes for food—it takes up less of a wealthier family’s income and makes up less of its monthly expenditures.

What’s more, wealthier households are more likely to benefit from the “upside” of inflation because they have more fixed interest rate debt that gets to be paid back in depreciated dollars in an inflationary environment. By contrast, households with floating rate debt—such as credit cards—do not benefit because the rates tend to rise alongside inflation. Similarly, lower-income households are more likely to rent their homes than upper-income households, and rents rise with inflation.

Inflation, particularly food and gasoline price hikes, acts as a regressive tax, hurting low-income households more than higher income households.

Biden, who won office on a promise to combat inequality and only hike taxes on very wealthy Americans, has presided over a stealth inflation-tax hike over lower-income households.

Welcome to Biden’s America, where the poor pay more.

THE ENTIRE REASON FOR OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY, NON-ENFORCEMENT, AND NO E-VERIFY IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. IT WORKS!

ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS FOR AMNESTY AND WIDER OPEN BORDERS!

 

Desperate to ensure profits, capital has gutted the living  standards of the working class while engrossing the coffers of those at the top through financial parasitism.

 

Study finds 90 percent of Americans would 

make 67 percent more without last four 

decades of increasing income inequality

A new study from the RAND Corporation, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018,” written by Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards, provides new documentation of the profound restructuring of class relations in America over the last 40 years.

The study, which looks at changes in pre-tax family income from 1947 to 2018, divided into quintiles of the American population, concludes that the bottom 90 percent of the population would, on average, make 67 percent more in income—every year (!)—had shifts in income inequality not occurred the last four decades.

In other words, any family that made less than $184,292 (the 90th percentile income bracket) in 2018 would be, on average, making 67 percent more. This amounts to a total sum of $2.5 trillion of collective lost income for the bottom 90 percent, just in 2018.

Furthermore, the study concludes, that had more equitable growth continued after 1975 (a date they use as a shifting point), the bottom 90 percent of American households would have earned a total of $47 trillion more in income.

Given that there were about 115 million households in the bottom 90 percent of the US in 2018 population (out of a total of 127.59 million in 2018), that would mean that each of these households would, on average, be $408,696 richer today with this lost income.

To reach these conclusions, the authors break down historical real, pre-tax, income into different quintiles of the population (bottom fifth, second fifth, third fifth, fourth fifth, highest fifth). Looking at the period between 1947 and 2018, they divide the years based on business cycles (booms and busts of the economy).

Growth in Annualized Real Family Pre-tax, Pre-Transfer Income by Quantile from RAND, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018,” by C. Price and K. Edwards.

Their data quantitatively expresses the restructuring of class relations that began at the end of the post-WWII boom. Facing intensified economic crisis, automation, and global competition, the US ruling class undertook an aggressive campaign of deindustrialization, slashing wages and clawing back benefits won in the previous period by explosive struggles of the working class, while simultaneously funneling money to financial markets, expanding the wealth and income of both the upper and upper-middle class.

As the data shows, while the bottom 40 percent of American households made significant percentile increases to their income, relative to the top 5 percent, for the 20 years between 1947 and 1968, in the 40 years from 1980 to the present, this trend was reversed. In 1980-2000, the bottom 40 percent of the population experienced a net income gain significantly below that of the top 5 percent. It must be noted that because these are percentile increases, the absolute differences between the gains of the rich versus the poor is far larger.

Furthermore, not included in this data is wealth. In the last 40 years, and especially the last 10 to 20 years, the stock market has become the principal means through which the top 10 percent of the population has piled up historic levels of wealth.

Significantly, the data from 2001 to 2018 shows a sharp slowdown in income gains for all sections of American society as per capita GDP growth slowed and US capitalism experienced a historic decline. However, while the income of the top 5 percent of the population may have only grown by about 2 percent between 2008 and 2018, the wealth of the top percentiles of the population exploded. For example, according to data from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, the wealth of the top 1 percent of the population increased from almost $20 trillion in the first quarter of 2008, just before the worst of the financial crisis, to almost $33 trillion at the beginning of 2018.

By using the data, the authors come up with a set of counterfactual incomes based on what would be the different income brackets in 2018 without a shift in income distribution. The top 1 percent, instead of making on average $1,384,000 would make $630,000. The 25th percentile, instead of making $33,000 would make $61,000.

Data source: RAND; Graphics by Marry Traverse for Civic Ventures; as published in TIME Magazine

The authors of the study also make several other important observations by breaking down their data on the basis of location, education, and race.

For example, they note, “Racial income disparities below the median have declined over the last four decades. This has primarily occurred because White men in the bottom half of the income distribution are earning the same or less than in 1975.” In other words, for the bottom half of the population, the bulk of the working class, there has been greater parity between sexes and races in terms of pay as white men’s pay stagnated and pay for other sections of the working class slightly increased.

While black men in the bottom 25th percentile of the population only increased their income from $27,000 in 1975 to $30,000 in 2018, black men in the 95th percentile, the upper-middle class, increased their pay from $65,000 in 1975 to $128,000—effectively doubling it.

Regarding education, they note: “Because incomes for those without a college degree have not increased more than inflation over the last forty years, education is frequently touted as a solution to rising income inequality. However, even for college graduates, incomes failed to grow at the rate of the overall growth of the economy. Thus, the economic value of a college degree may largely be in avoiding the negative outcomes felt by those who do not have one. …”

This saliently expresses what a college degree has become for most Americans: a necessity to avoid extreme poverty but in no way a guarantee of a well-paying, stable job.

The authors also note that “Incomes in rural areas have neither kept pace with the growth in broader economy nor with urban and suburban areas,” due to “a decline in the economic health of rural areas.”

The stark class divide expressed in the report is not the outcome of a single politician or for that matter a specific party. Rather, it is the policy, collectively, of the entire ruling class, as American, and indeed global, capitalism entered a period of profound and protracted crisis. Desperate to ensure profits, capital has gutted the living standards of the working class while engrossing the coffers of those at the top through financial parasitism.

 

Tucker Carlson: ‘America’s Core Problems Are Not Racial — America’s Core Problems Are Economic’

JEFF POOR

Thursday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson opened his program with a monologue dissecting the latest round of turmoil in America’s streets spurred by the announcement of a grand jury’s finding on the Breonna Taylor episode in Louisville, KY.

Carlson argues that the country’s problems are not racial but economic, explaining that “a small group of people have a disproportionate amount of money.”

He suggested that for those “on the right end of that equation,” it may behoove them to “fund racial conflict,” so those on the wrong end of the equation would not think about it from that viewpoint.

Transcript as follows:

CARLSON: It’s hard to think clearly when things are on fire. That’s a basic rule of life, that may be why looking back on it, we’ve seen so much arson recently.

If you wanted to keep the public from thinking clearly about what you plan to do to their country, you might riot and no one would notice that you’re lying. They definitely have been lying.

Every story we’ve been told for the past three months has been at its core, a lie, all of them from the first day.

George Floyd was executed by racist cops on the street. That’s what they told us. That’s what everyone believed. Yet when the autopsy became public, it showed that George Floyd had lethal levels of fentanyl in his system among other drugs. Floyd said he couldn’t breathe long before police landed on him as he was in fact sitting untouched in the back of a patrol car.

But the mob wasn’t interested in hearing those details. They torched Minneapolis.

In Kenosha, Democrats told us that bloodthirsty cops just walked up and shot Jacob Blake as he was trying to break up a fight between two women. It was horrifying. But that’s not what happened.

Police arrived there after a woman called 911 to say Blake was at her home in violation of a restraining order. That woman had previously accused Blake of sexual assault. Blake fought with the responding officers, first cops tried non-lethal force to subdue him. They Tased Blake, that didn’t work.

When they saw him reach for a knife, they shot him. What else were they supposed to do exactly?

But Kamala Harris wasn’t interested in knowing what actually happened. She declared that she was proud of Jacob Blake and then her voters burned Kenosha.

Tonight, the mob is in Louisville to protest the death of Breonna Taylor. News organizations told us that Taylor was in bed when police shot her. But she wasn’t, she was in her hallway. They told us that Taylor had nothing to do with her drug-dealing ex-boyfriend whom police were investigating. That’s why they were there.

In fact, intercepted jailhouse communication suggests that Taylor was warehousing that man’s drug money. They told us that police shot first. That’s not true. Taylor’s boyfriend shot a cop first.

Then they told us over and over and over again that police surprised Taylor in the middle of the night. They barged into her apartment in a so-called no-knock raid. Then yesterday the Attorney General of Kentucky exposed that as yet another lie.

The police did in fact knock on Breonna Taylor’s door. They identified themselves as police. There’s a witness to it. But it didn’t matter. They kept lying to us.

Kamala Harris issued a statement attacking no-knock raids. Amazingly, so did Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Republican. Tim Scott should know better.

A grand jury did know better. The jurors considered all of the available evidence in the Breonna Taylor case. And yesterday, they declined to charge the officers with murder. There wasn’t any evidence that a murder took place.

That is how our system is supposed to work. We don’t indict the innocent. That’s wrong. It’s not justice. But the mob doesn’t care about justice no matter what they scream. They want blood.

So with the encouragement of so many of our leaders, they unleashed violence on the City of Louisville. They set fires. They destroyed businesses, then to the surprise of no one, they opened fire on the police. Here are scenes of it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Shots fired. Shots fired.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Good?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I’m good.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You all good?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I’m good.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Right there. Right there. Officer down, right there.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Officer down?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We’ve got an officer down.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Two police officers were shot last night in Louisville. They’re not the only police officers who have been shot recently for political reasons. They’re just the latest. That’s not front-page news. No, it’s not front-page news.

Tonight, thank God, both of those officers are still alive. A man called Lorenzo Johnson is under arrest for shooting them. It seems clear this was not a street crime. It seems clear these were attempted political assassinations.

Lorenzo Johnson’s social media posts don’t look very different from Kamala Harris’s Twitter feed, pro-BLM, outraged by the racist killing of Breonna Taylor.

Whipped into a frenzy by media-generated lies, it is not surprising that people like Johnson will try to murder the police. In fact, they told us last night before they did that they plan to do that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All y’all get ready to [bleep] die.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: “Get ready to die.” Now that’s not the kind of thing liberal suburban moms are thinking when they plant BLM signs on their lawns. But that’s the reality of it. BLM leaders have told us many times they would like to murder cops, it’s not something they whisper, and it’s something they shout on camera.

When two cops were shot last night in Louisville, BLM’s Chapter there did not express a word of sympathy for the officers in the hospital with bullets in them. Instead, BLM Louisville called for the total abolition of law enforcement. Apparently, the plan is to take out one cop at a time. Here’s BLM last night in Louisville.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Burn it down. Burn it down. Burn it down.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Turn that camera off. Turn it off.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: These are violent thugs obviously, many of them, by the way, have college degrees from expensive universities. But in the end, they’re all just foot soldiers. There are legions behind them. People you don’t see on camera. It takes legions. It takes money and it takes organization to stage effective riots for three and a half months.

So it’s worth asking, who is funding all of this? That is a central question too few have tried to answer it. We still don’t know the full answer, but we’re getting a clear picture tonight.

Last night, we showed you footage of a U-Haul truck in Louisville full of rioting supplies and mobile armor. Watch the mob descend on that U-Haul within minutes of the grand jury’s verdict.

[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]

CARLSON: When we showed you that footage last night, we suggested we had leads as to who might have rented that U-Haul. Tonight we know who did.

We’ve determined that a woman called Holly Zoller paid for that U-Haul truck. Zoller works as a so-called bail disruptor. That’s her description from an organization called The Bail Project. The Bail Project helps get suspected criminals and rioters back out onto the street as quickly as they can.

So who funds The Bail Project? It takes money to get people out of jail. Take a look at that organization’s Board of Directors and it tells you the story.

There’s a first-term Democratic congresswoman on there, but other than that, you will not find a more pampered group of revolutionaries. One Board member is a woman called Lisa Gersh. She previously served as the President of Strategic Initiatives at NBC and a Managing Director at NBC Universal. She also was the CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Gersh even founded her own law firm at one point, not a starving artist.

Another Board member is a man called Michael Novogratz. He is the CEO of Galaxy Investment Partners and a former principal at Fortress Investment Group LLC, and the Fortress Macro Fund. He’s a finance guy. He also serves on the Board of the Princeton Varsity Club.

So what’s going on here? Why are the most privileged people in our society, rich executives like Gersh and Novogratz supporting an organization that bails people out of jail who are destroying our cities and attacking our police? People like that, Board members like this live far from the scenes of riot. So why are they paying for riots? Maybe they’re doing it to cover their own tracks. That’s a thought.

America’s core problems are not racial. America’s core problems are economic. A small group of people have a disproportionate amount of money. Everyone else is getting poor. For the majority of the population, the American Dream is dying.

But if you were on the right end of that equation, you wouldn’t want the public to think too much about this. So maybe you’d fund racial conflict, so they wouldn’t think about it. It’s pretty clever. It’s also completely evil.

Last night, we told you about the Hearst Corporation. That’s a media company that generates more than $11 billion a year. One of Hearst properties — maybe its most famous property — is Cosmopolitan magazine. Cosmopolitan magazine spent most of yesterday raising money to bail out rioters in Louisville.

At one point yesterday, Cosmo tweeted an image of Holly Zoller, the woman who rented the U-Haul and others along with this message. “Support protesters who are brave enough to go out and take a stand-in coming days.” Take a stand? Cosmo wants you to take a stand and send money to people who are taking a stand.

So what does taking a stand look like? Well, they took a stand last time in Portland, Oregon. Cosmo readers did. They tried to kill police officers with Molotov cocktails. Keep in mind, this took place thousands of miles from Louisville and Breonna Taylor. Why?

[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]

CARLSON: Just Cosmo readers taking the stand. You’ll notice that no one in the crowd tries to stop the firebombing. Instead, they hoist middle fingers at the police. Meanwhile, in Seattle last night, BLM forgot the gasoline, so they tried to kill a cop with a baseball bat. Watch this.

[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]

CARLSON: Just to be clear, because this is something else they’re lying about pretty relentlessly, the people you just saw are not Trump voters. And that’s not a partisan point designed to help the President’s re-election campaign. It is true.

Every one of these people is a Democrat or Democrat adjacent. Why is that relevant? Many reasons. But here’s one, a word from Kamala Harris might slow these people down. But Harris isn’t interested in slowing them down. There’s an election to win so the mob rages on.

By the way, you should know that in the name of racial justice, a BLM supporter shot a black cop in Louisville last night against racial justice. In Los Angeles, rioters screamed racial epithets at another black cop. Watch this.

[VIDEO CLIP PLAYS]

CARLSON: Well, if nothing else that shows that real life is a little bit more complicated than the straightforward black and white race war the media are always promoting. MSNBC won’t acknowledge that though.

In fact, yesterday, they turned over its airwaves to talking heads who described the African-American Attorney General of Kentucky, Daniel Cameron as a race traitor for disagreeing with them. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: Don’t look at the fact that this guy is black. That does not mean anything. He is a Republican through and through. He spoke at the RNC He told you who he was believing.

CHERYL DORSEY, RETIRED LAPD SERGEANT: He is skin folk, but he is not kinfolk. And so just like he thinks they can’t speak for Kentucky because he is up there with a black face, he does not speak for all of us.

ALICIA GARZA, AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: I think what I saw this morning was a Bull Connor speech in 2020, and you’re right. Unfortunately, it was being given by a black prosecutor.

JASON JOHNSON, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: I’m so disgusted by this. I’m so disgusted by Daniel Cameron’s performance. I am so sick and tired of black people going on the air and performing for violence and white supremacy and state-sponsored violence against black people and claiming their mama’s and claiming they are because they are a black man, they care about it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Here’s the thought. You shouldn’t put crap like that on TV. It’s too dishonest. It’s too divisive. It hurts the country too much. It’s flat-out racist, and it’s wrong.

And the people who run NBC News should be ashamed of that. They should stop putting that stuff on television. It legitimately hurts the country.

But that’s the position of the Democratic Party. Remember when Joe Biden announced that no true black person could vote Republican? Well, Biden’s allies in the media — and that’s everyone — went a step further. At MSNBC, they explained that black people are, quote, “performing for white supremacy,” if they don’t tow the D.N.C.’s line.

At CNN, the anchors want you to know it’s quote “politically charged” to criticize, quote, “mob violence.” Can you imagine saying something like that?

Our leaders in Congress and on television and at Cosmo have decided that law enforcement of any kind is an act of bigotry? Do they really believe that? Well, of course, they don’t really believe that. That’s why so many of them are surrounded by armed bodyguards.

But it doesn’t matter what they really believe. In the short term, in the run-up to this selection, they are getting their way, and the rest of us will have to live with the consequences of that.

 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.

The case for expropriation: Billionaires’ wealth surged 60 percent in first year of pandemic

Niles Niemuth@niles_niemuth

2 hours ago

The collective wealth of the world’s billionaires exploded by more than 60 percent last year, from $8 trillion to $13.1 trillion, according to Forbes magazine’s annual list of global billionaires, released on Tuesday.

“COVID-19 brought terrible suffering, economic pain, geopolitical tension—and the greatest acceleration of wealth in human history,” Forbes writes.

Left: Jeff Bezos (AP Photo/Charles Krupa), Right: Workers wearing PPE bury bodies in a trench on Hart Island, April 9, 2020 (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

The number of billionaires in the world grew by 660 to 2,775, biggest total number and the largest annual increase ever. A new billionaire was minted every 17 hours.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk lead the pack with $177 billion and $151 billion, respectively. They are followed by Bernard Arnault and family ($150 billion), who control the French luxury goods company LVMH, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates ($124 billion) and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ($97 billion).

Press reports discuss how Zuckerberg “earned” $50 billion and Elon Musk “earned” $130 billion last year. But the very term is an absurdity. One cannot “earn” a figure equivalent to the gross domestic product of a mid-size country.

This wealth is socially appropriated. First, through the exploitation of the working class in the process of production.

Second, and no less important, the wealth is appropriated as the result of state policy, designed to ensure the perpetual rise of the stock market through a combination of monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve and the provision of an endless supply of cheap labor for exploitation. As a result, the S&P 500 stock index has nearly doubled since its low in March 2020.

Amid a raging pandemic, every country in Europe and the Americas has refused to shut down nonessential production, claiming the cost would be too high. This policy, which has led to the deaths of over three million people, has the deliberate aim of expanding the wealth of the financial oligarchy.

With each death, an average of $1.7 million was added to the net worth of the billionaires. Hundreds of millions of people around the world got sick on the job or were thrown out of work. Hundreds of millions went hungry. But the stock portfolios of the wealthy soared to ever greater heights.

As Karl Marx noted more than 150 years ago in Capital, it is a basic law of capitalism that “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”

The piling up of immense sums at the top of society is made possible by the immiseration of the working class and poor.

As global markets entered freefall in March of 2020, the US government and Federal Reserve, along with governments and central banks around the world, stepped in with trillions of dollars to buy up the bad debts of the banks and corporations and prop up the markets. No expense was spared to guarantee and expand the wealth of the very richest, while destroying the wages and conditions of the working class.

In other words, the government oversaw the massive creation of public debt, which was transferred, by the mechanism of the markets, into the private fortunes of the financial oligarchy.

As soon as the bailouts were secured, the push came to reopen the economy and overturn the lockdowns and other basic public health measures that had been put in place after wildcat walkouts by workers forced shutdowns in Europe and North America.

As US President Trump declared, echoing the line pioneered by the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, the “cure can’t be worse than the disease.” Workers were forced back into deadly factories and workplaces, and children were packed into schools, so that profit-making could be resumed. The capitalists were determined to ensure that the working class paid the full cost of the pandemic, and more.

Virtually every government around the world refused to carry out measures shown in the few countries that employed them, such as China and New Zealand, to be effective in containing the virus and minimizing the loss of life. It was no secret that what was required was an extended shutdown of nonessential industries and schools, strictly enforced social distancing, testing, quarantining and contact tracing.

All such serious and scientifically based measures were rejected because they impinged on the personal wealth of the financial oligarchs. The interests of the masses—the working class—coincided with the implementation of internationally coordinated measures that prioritized saving lives and protecting the income of the population. The economic interests of the capitalist class required a rapid and full resumption of profit-making in unsafe factories, offices and warehouses—and the herding of youth back into unsafe schools to facilitate their parents’ return to work.

Bezos and Musk have been among the most handsomely rewarded for rejecting any serious public health safeguards in their plants to protect the workforce and slow the spread of the virus. Musk reopened his Tesla auto factory in Fremont, California last May in defiance of public health orders, resulting in over 440 workers contracting COVID-19. Amazon has sought to cover up COVID-19 outbreaks and worker deaths at its plants around the world. The company finally admitted in November that nearly 20,000 of its employees had tested positive since the start of the pandemic. The number of workers who have died as a result of these infections has yet to be disclosed.

Thanks to tax cuts included in the CARES Act bailout and Trump’s tax cuts in 2017, 55 of the largest corporations in America—including FedEx, Nike and Salesforce.com—paid no federal income taxes in 2020, with most receiving rebates. All told, these companies received $3.5 billion in tax rebates from the US government.

Just over one year into the pandemic, as a fourth wave of infections surges around the globe and vaccine distribution remains limited, it is increasingly clear that the ruling class is prepared to send millions more to their deaths to satisfy its drive for profit.

Stopping this deadly accumulation of wealth in the hands of the oligarchy is critical to preserving the safety and well-being of the world’s population. Just as the spread of the pandemic is inseparable from the enrichment of the financial oligarchy, the ending of the pandemic is inseparable from the expropriation of the oligarchs. The vast wealth piled up by the financial elite must be used to finance e mergency measures to stop the spread of the virus and save millions of lives.

As workers all over the world enter into social struggle, they must take up the demand for the expropriation of the wealth of the financial oligarchy as a pillar of the socialist program to reorganize society to meet social need, not private profit.

 The union bureaucracy has shared in the

looting operation carried out by Wall Street

during the pandemic. According to the UAW’s

latest federal financial filings, for example, its

assets increased by $31 million last year, and

the union shelled out tens of thousands of

dollars for trips to resorts and casinos for its

top bureaucrats, hundreds of whom earn more

than $150,000 per year. In recent years, the

UAW has been exposed as an organization

run by corrupt gangsters who steal workers’

dues money and accept bribes from the

companies in exchange for ramming through

concessions contracts

Biden: 'I'm a Union Guy...It's about Time They Start to Get a Piece of the Action'

By Susan Jones | April 1, 2021 | 7:02am EDT

 

President Joe Biden outlines his $2.5 trillion American Jobs Plan in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on March 31, 2021. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

(CNSNews.com) - "I'm a union guy," President Joe Biden told a gathering in Pittsburgh on Wednesday as he prepared to announce phase one of his $2.5-trillion infrastructure plan, part of which would weaken right-to-work laws in 27 states. Those laws bar compulsory membership in labor unions.

"I support unions. Unions built the middle class. It's about time they start to get a piece of the action," Biden said.

Biden said his proposals will create millions of jobs -- "good-paying jobs." 

He said it will "ensure free and fair choice" for workers to organize and bargain collectively," provisions found in the Democrats' "Protecting the Right to Organize Act," or PRO Act, which the House has passed and is now included in Biden's Jobs plan.

Biden's plan to rebuild the middle class goes beyond roads, bridges and ports. It includes expanding home-based care, retrofitting buildings, replacing all lead pipes, and scrapping "exclusionary" state and local zoning laws. Yet Biden compared it to the building of the interstate highway system in the 1950s:

It's not a plan the tinkers around the edges. It's a once in a generation investment in America, unlike anything we've seen or done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race decades ago. In fact, it's the largest American jobs investment since World War II. Create millions of jobs, good-paying jobs that'll grow the economy, make us more competitive around the world, promote our national security interests, and put us in a position to win the global competition with China in the upcoming years.

It's big, yes. It's bold, yes. And we can get it done. It has two parts, the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan. Both are essential to our economic future. In a few weeks, I'll talk about the American's Family Plan [sic], but today I want to talk about the American's Jobs Plan [sic]. I'll begin with the heart of the plan. It modernizes transportation infrastructure, our roads, our bridges, airports.

Biden highlighted the following elements of his plan, as noted in his own words:

-- "The American Jobs Plan will modernize 20,000 miles of highways and roads and main streets that are in difficult, difficult shape right now. It'll fix the nation's 10 most economically significant bridges in America that require replacement...We'll also repair 10,000 bridges, desperately needed upgrades to unclog traffic, keep people safe, and connect our cities, towns, and tribes across the country."

-- "The American Jobs Plan will build new railcars and transit lines, easing congestion, cutting pollution, slashing commute time, and opening up investment in communities that be--can connect it to the cities and cities to the outskirts where a lot of jobs are these days. It will reduce the bottlenecks of commerce at our ports and our airports.

-- "The American Jobs Plan will lead to a transformational progress in our effort to tackle climate change...building a nation-eyed-- wide network of 500,000 charging stations, creating good-paying jobs by leading the world in the manufacturing and export of clean electric cars and trucks. We're going to provide tax incentives and point-of-sale rebates--rebates to help all American families afford clean vehicles of the future."

-- "When we make all of these investments, we're going to make sure ... that we buy American.

-- "The American Jobs Plan will put plumbers and pipefitters to work replacing 100 percent of the nation's lead pipes and service lines so every American, every child can turn on a faucet or a fountain and drink clean water." (Biden said up to 10 million homes in the U.S. and more than 400,000 schools/childcare centers have lead pipes.)

-- "American jobs will make sure every single -- every single -- American has access to high-quality, affordable, high-speed Internet for businesses, for schools. And when I say affordable, I mean it. Americans pay too much for Internet service. We're going to drive down the price for families who have service now and make it easier for families who don't have affordable service to be able to get it now."

-- "My American Jobs Plan will put hundreds of thousands of people to work...line workers, electricians, and laborers laying thousands of miles of transmission line, building a modern, resilient, and fully clean grid, and capping hundreds of thousands of literally orphan oil and gas wells that need to be cleaned up because they're abandoned, paying the same exact rate that a union man or woman would get having done that well in the first place.

-- "We'll build, upgrade, and weatherize affordable energy efficient housing and commercial buildings for millions of Americans.

-- "American Jobs Plan's gonna help in big ways. It's gonna extend access to quality, affordable home and community-based care. ...For too long, caregivers who are disproportionately women and women of color and immigrants have been unseen, underpaid, and undervalued. This plan along with the American Families Plan changes that, with better wages, benefits, and opportunities for millions of people who'll be able to get to work in an economy that works for them."

-- "American Jobs Plan is the biggest increase in our federal non-defense research and development spending on record. It's gonna boost America's innovative edge in markets where global leadership is up for grabs. Markets like battery technology, biotechnology, computer chips, clean energy, the competition with China in particular."

(Biden did not mention this, but a White House fact sheet notes that his plan would "Eliminate exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies." According to the fact sheet: "For decades, exclusionary zoning laws – like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing – have inflated housing and construction costs and locked families out of areas with more opportunities. President Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative, new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate such needless barriers to producing affordable housing.")

Biden urged Americans "think about" what his physical and social infrastructure plan means to "you and your loved ones." "We just have to imagine again," he said. 

"Imagine what we can do, what's within our reach if we modernize those highways. You can your family could travel coast to coast without a single tank of gas onboard a high-speed train. We can connect high-speed, affordable, reliable Internet wherever you live. Imagine knowing that you are handing your children and grandchildren a country that will lead the world in producing clean energy technology..."

Biden put the price of his American Jobs Plan at "roughly two trillion dollars...spread largely over eight years."

"So how do we pay for it?" Biden asked. He wants to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, up from the current 21 percent. "Just doing that one thing will generate one trillion dollars in additional revenue over 15 years," Biden said.

"We're going to also eliminate deductions by corporations for offshoring jobs and shifting assets overseas. You do that, you pay a penalty...And use the savings from that to give companies tax credits to locate manufacturing here and manufacturing and production here in the United States. And we'll significantly ramp up the IRS enforcement against corporations who either failed to report their incomes or under report. It's estimated that could raise hundreds of billions of dollars.

"All this adds up to more than what I proposed to spend in just 15 years."

Biden repeated his promise not to raise taxes on "people making less than $400,000."

He also said he's "open to other ideas, so long as they do not impose any tax increase on people making less than $400,000."

Biden ended with a plea for bipartisanship:

"Let me close with this. Historically, infrastructure had been a bipartisan undertaking, many times led by Republicans. It was Abraham Lincoln who built the Transcontinental Railroad. Dwight Eisenhower, Republican, Interstate Highway System. I could go on. And I don't think you'll find a Republican today in the House or Senate, maybe I'm wrong, gentlemen, who doesn't think we have to improve our infrastructure?

"They know China and other countries have eaten our lunch. So there's no reason why it can't be bipartisan again. The divisions of the moment shouldn't stop us from doing the right thing for the future. I'm going to bring Republicans into the Oval Office, listen to them, what they have to say, and be open to other ideas. We'll have a good faith negotiation with any Republican wants to help get this done. But we have to get it done," Biden insisted.

March jobs growth dominated by low-wage sectors

Shannon Jones

11 hours ago

Despite a better than expected jobs report for the month of March, one year after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the US remains blighted by high levels of unemployment, including a stubbornly high number of long term unemployed.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that employment rose 916,000 in March, a number boosted by large numbers of hotel, restaurant and other service workers returning to work as states moved rapidly and prematurely to remove COVID-19-related restrictions. Employment in education also rose significantly as the Biden administration moved ahead with the forced reopening of public schools.

People wait for a distribution of food in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, April 18, 2020. (Credit: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)

The official unemployment rate fell to 6.0, still well above the pre-pandemic figure. However, a more realistic measure of the unemployment rate, which takes into account so-called discouraged workers and those forced to work part time who want full time work, stands at 10.7 percent. Known as the U6 rate, this figure gives a more accurate picture of the degree of social distress.

Reflecting the reentry of lower-paid workers into the labor force, average hourly earnings fell slightly in March.

In another indication of the depth of the social crisis, more than 4.2 million have been out of work for more than six months, and that number rose slightly in March from the previous month.

The largest job gains in March came from leisure and hospitality with a 280,000 increase. Bars and restaurants added 176,000 jobs, while arts, entertainment and recreation saw 64,000 new hires. These three sectors, typically low-wage and seasonal, accounted for well over half of the March job gains.

Local, state and private education added 190,000 jobs in March as schools reopened in cities across the US under the pressure of the Biden administration and Democratic Party politicians, who see the schools as a child care service for potential workers. This homicidal policy will only serve to add new fuel to the pandemic, which despite vaccinations, is surging in Michigan and a number of other states.

Construction added 110,000 jobs in March, while manufacturing added 53,000. Manufacturing is down 515,000 jobs since February 2020. Altogether, through March the US economy is still down 8.4 million jobs since before the pandemic.

While some economists predict that April will also show strong employment gains and an optimistic report by the Wall Street Journal predicted monthly job gains averaging 500,000 for the rest of the year, that would leave overall employment below pre-pandemic levels. According to the Federal Open Market Committee, a return to the 3.5 percent unemployment rate prior to the pandemic would take until the end of 2023 in the unlikely event there are not intervening economic shocks.

Another measure, the labor force participation rate, which measures the percentage of the population employed or actively seeking work, was little changed in March at 61.5 percent. That compares to the pre-pandemic level of 63 percent. The number of workers forced to work part time who wanted full time employment stood at 5.8 million, 1.4 million higher than February 2020. The number of discouraged workers stood at 523,000, unchanged from the previous month.

The release of the jobs report follows the publication of the Department of Labor report on weekly unemployment claims that showed an increase of 61,000 state claims from the previous week to 719,000. This marks more than one year of historically unprecedented numbers of new unemployment filings. In addition, there were 237,025 new claims filed under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that provides assistance to contract and self-employed workers not covered by regular unemployment benefits.

In the face of the rising employment numbers, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell rushed to reassure markets that the cash spigot would be left open despite signs of an improving economy. The US central bank has been propping up equities markets through the purchase of $120 billion in bonds each month while keeping interest rates near zero. Were this flow of money to be stopped or even slow down, the inflated stock market would likely crash.

The precarious nature of the financial boom was illustrated earlier this week by the stock selloff around the collapse of investment firm Archegos Capital that resulted in massive losses for major banks. The degree to which the failure of even a relatively small firm could threaten to spark a panic in the markets testifies to the highly leveraged and unstable character of the world financial system, inflated by the infusion of ultra-cheap money.

In a sign of continuing social distress, food banks report no let-up in demand. According to a local news report, the Alameda County Food Bank in the San Francisco Bay Area is continuing to see high demand. In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, the food bank distributed 3.2 million pounds of food. In March 2021, that number was 6.0 million. The food bank went from helping one in five residents of the county to rising over the course of the past year to one in four.

At the Mission Food Hub in San Francisco, donations are collected for farm workers. It has gone from distributing food to 300 families a year to over 9,000. "The pandemic has caused them to get COVID and they can't work. And when they can't work they get no money. They don't have savings and 401Ks," organizer Roberto Hernandez told KTVU News. "You have people who lost their jobs a year ago. And they won't be able to go back to those jobs because a lot of those businesses are gone."

According to a report released by the Georgia Food Bank Association, an additional 344,000 residents of the state have been forced into food insecurity since the start of the pandemic. The report said that 1.7 million people in the state face food insecurity, including 562,000 children.

Nationwide food bank network Feeding America projects that 1.4 million New York City residents will struggle to secure adequate food this year. Enrollment in food stamps had increased 12 percent to 1.66 million city residents as of January.

Food Bank for New York City, which distributes food through a network of 1,000 food banks and charities, has seen a 61 percent increase in demand over the prior year. Zac Hall, vice president of programs for the nonprofit, told the Wall Street Journal, “I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think the same level of response that we have today is going to at least be needed for the next couple of years.”

Growth in class struggle in the US pits workers against the pro-capitalist trade unions

Tom Hall

11 hours ago

There are a number of expressions of a significant growth of the class struggle in the United States, which pose fundamental questions of perspective for the working class.

At Columbia University, 3,000 graduate students are fighting against “COVID-19 austerity” and are demanding decent pay, health and child care benefits. In Worcester, Massachusetts, more than 700 nurses have been on strike for more than four weeks against unsafe staffing ratios in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. These ongoing strikes were joined this week by important sections of industrial workers, including 1,300 workers at steelmaker ATI in the northeast US and 1,100 miners at coal company Warrior Met in Alabama.

Left: Workers picket at the Hunts Point Market on January 19, 2021 (WSWS Media). Right: Striking Columbia graduate student workers (WSWS Media).

These struggles are a component part of a growing movement of workers internationally, including a one-day general strike against a pay-rise cap in Belgium, a four-day strike by 2,000 Amazon workers in Germany, a strike by 2,000 coal miners in Bosnia and Herzegovina over unpaid wages, and a planned walkout of primary school teachers against school reopenings as the pandemic surges in France.

This is only an initial expression of an enormous growth of social antagonisms throughout the world as a result of the ruling class response to the pandemic. The subordination of public health to the profit interests of the rich has led to more than 2.8 million deaths globally, including more than 560,000 in the United States alone. At the same time, the pandemic was used to orchestrate a historically unprecedented bailout of the rich, which is being followed by a massive restructuring of class relations to force workers to pay for it.

Every struggle of the working class raises directly the reactionary role of the corporatist trade unions, including the AFL-CIO in the US, which serve to suppress the class struggle and, when they cannot avoid a strike, to isolate and defeat it. The “unions” intervene not on behalf of the workers that they falsely claim to represent, but on behalf of management against workers.

At Columbia University, the United Auto Workers, which covers graduate students, is working to keep the strike isolated from graduate students at NYU only a few miles to the south, who are in the same local. Last month, the president of the UAW local revealed that they had planned to shut down the strike before a strike vote at NYU. The UAW is doing nothing to mobilize auto workers behind the graduate students and everything to prevent them from even knowing about the strike.

Meanwhile, the UAW is starving graduate students out on the picket line with a meager $275 weekly strike pay, in spite of the fact that the UAW controls a strike fund of $790 million.

The Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), the largest state organization of the National Nurses United with 123,000 members, is isolating the 700 Worcester nurses while not providing any strike pay. Instead, the MNA is forcing nurses to beg for charity: it is running a Venmo account to receive donations from the public to pay for nurses’ living expenses.

As for the ATI and Warrior Met workers, the United Steelworkers and the United Mine Workers are using the tactic of an “unfair labor practice” strike to avoid raising any concrete demands, and to allow the union to shut down the strike as soon as possible under the pretext that management is “bargaining in good faith.”

Over the past year, the executives that operate and control the AFL-CIO have played an absolutely essential role in enforcing the homicidal policy of the ruling elites. The teachers unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—have been instrumental in forcing a reopening of schools against overwhelming opposition from both teachers and parents. Local teacher unions have forced through reopening agreements by forcing teachers to vote on a fait accompli, as in Chicago and Los Angeles, or by not allowing them to vote at all, as in Philadelphia and Detroit.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union and its subsidiary, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, have kept meatpacking workers on the job even as more than 50,000 in the United States have become infected and at least 286 have died. In the auto industry, the UAW is not only keeping workers on the job but forcing them to work 50, 60 and even 80 hours per week, while covering up all information on the extent of infections and deaths.

The word “union” conjures up images of an organization that defends workers against the deprivations of the companies, or at least one whose fate is somehow bound up with its ability and willingness to defend workers’ standard of living. This, however, bears no relationship whatever to the present unions. They function as labor syndicates, controlled by wealthy executives whose incomes move in inverse proportion to the fate of workers.

Within every major national organization in the AFL-CIO, there are literally dozens, and in some cases hundreds, of bureaucrats at both the national and local levels who earn more than $100,000 per year, many times more than the workers in the unions. Top executives have incomes that place them in the top 5 or even top 1 percent of income earners in the US.

Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the relatively small RWDSU, which is campaigning for recognition at Amazon, made $344,464 last year, and secretary treasurer Jack Wurm made $324,022. In the RWDSU national office, there are 29 staffers who “earned” more than $100,000 last year, and the union spent more than $6 million on salaries for the national office alone.

Randi Weingarten of the AFT made $564,236 in total compensation for the fiscal year ending June 2019, according to the AFT’s IRS filings. The national office received more than $253 million in receipts and spent more than $238 million, including $43.75 million on salaries and zero dollars on strike benefits last year. Fully 234 people in the AFT national office alone made more than $100,000 during the union’s last reporting period, and 28 made more than $200,000.

The Teamsters union has more than 200 officials on its payroll making more than $100,000 a year, and ten making more than $200,000, including President James Hoffa ($387,000).

As the unions’ dues base has continuously shrunk as a result of their own betrayals, the executives have resorted to control of strike funds, pension funds and even ownership of corporate stock in order to finance and supplement their income. This directly ties the financial status of the organizations and the executives who control them to the profitability of corporate America and the performance of the stock market. They fear a movement of the working class not least because it would threaten their own financial interests.

The union bureaucracy has shared in the looting operation carried out by Wall Street during the pandemic. According to the UAW’s latest federal financial filings, for example, its assets increased by $31 million last year, and the union shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for trips to resorts and casinos for its top bureaucrats, hundreds of whom earn more than $150,000 per year. In recent years, the UAW has been exposed as an organization run by corrupt gangsters who steal workers’ dues money and accept bribes from the companies in exchange for ramming through concessions contracts.

The unions are emerging more and more as a critical instrument of bourgeois statecraft. The unprecedented intervention into the unionization campaign at Amazon by Biden and the Democrats, and even right-wing Republican Marco Rubio, reflects the intense fear within ruling circles of the growth of the class struggle, and their calculations that this can be blunted by putting workers under the guardianship of the AFL-CIO and byzantine US labor law.

Under conditions of growing commercial and military conflict between the US and its rivals China and Russia, the unions are viewed as a means of tying the working class to the capitalist state and its war preparations.

This year is the fortieth anniversary of the betrayal by the AFL-CIO of the PATCO air traffic controllers, who were fired by President Ronald Reagan in a deliberate provocation. The attack on the PATCO workers was preceded by an agreement from the AFL-CIO that it would oppose any broader mobilization of the working class to defend them. This was followed by a series of struggles that were systematically isolated and defeated with the collaboration of the unions. This was a key turning point, not just in the US but around the world, in the complete integration of the unions into the structure of corporate management.

The expansion and unification of the struggles of the working class requires the formation of rank-and-file factory and workplace committees, completely independent of the pro-capitalist trade unions. Such committees are the form through which workers can advance their own demands, including emergency measures to stop the coronavirus pandemic, an end to the unsafe reopening of schools and workplaces, with full compensation for workers and small businesses.

Columnists

HANSON: The 10 radical new rules that are changing America

Author of the article:Victor Davis Hanson

1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much.

Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. Not now. As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110% of annual GDP, our elites either believe permanent zero interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced to address needed income redistribution.

2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore. Joe Biden took an oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But he has willfully rendered federal immigration laws null and void. Some rioters are prosecuted for violating federal laws, others not so much. Arrests, prosecutions and trials are all fluid. Ideology governs when a law is still considered a law.

Crime rates do not necessarily matter. If someone is carjacked, assaulted or shot, it can be understood to be as much the victim’s fault as the perpetrator’s. Either the victim was too lax, uncaring and insensitive, or he provoked his attacker. How useful the crime is to the larger agendas of the left determines whether a victim is really a victim, and the victimizer really a victimizer.

3) Racialism is now acceptable. We are defined first by our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily — if at all — by an American commonality. The explicit exclusion of whites from college dorms, safe spaces and federal aid programs is now noncontroversial. It is unspoken payback for perceived past sins, or a type of “good” racism. Falsely being called a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist.

4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. The newcomer, unlike the host, is not stained by the sins of America’s founding and history. Most citizens currently must follow quarantine rules and social distancing, stay out of school and obey all the laws.

Yet those entering the United States illegally need not follow such apparently superfluous COVID-19 rules. Their children should be immediately schooled without worry of quarantine. Immigrants need not worry about their illegal entry or residence in America. Our elites believe illegal entrants more closely resemble the “founders” than do legal citizens, about half of whom they consider irredeemable.

5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. They cannot be asked to provide an ID to vote. “Noble lies” by our elites about COVID-19 rules are necessary to protect “Neanderthals” from themselves.

Americans deserve relief from the stress of grades, standardized testing and normative rules of school behaviour. They still are clueless about why it is good for them to pay far more for their gasoline, heating and air conditioning.

6) Hypocrisy is passe. Virtue-signaling is alive. Climate change activists fly on private jets. Social justice warriors live in gated communities. Multibillionaire elitists pose as victims of sexism, racism and homophobia. The elite need these exemptions to help the helpless. It is what you say to lesser others about how to live, not how you yourself live, that matters.

7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it. It is more humane to let thousands of homeless people live, eat, defecate and use drugs on public streets and sidewalks than it is to green-light affordable housing, mandate hospitalization for the mentally ill and create sufficient public shelter areas.

8) McCarthyism is good. Destroying lives and careers for incorrect thoughts saves more lives and careers. Cancel culture and the Twitter Reign of Terror provide needed deterrence.

Now that Americans know they are one wrong word, act or look away from losing their livelihoods, they are more careful and will behave in a more enlightened fashion. The social media guillotine is the humane, scientific tool of the woke.

9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. Neither statue-toppling, nor name-changing, nor the 1619 Project require any evidence or historical knowledge. Heroes of the past were simple constructs. Undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees reflect credentials, not knowledge. The brand, not what created it, is all that matters.

10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity. Its priesthood outnumbers the clergy and exercises far more power. Silicon Valley is the new Vatican, and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter are the new gospels.

Americans privately fear these rules while publicly appearing to accept them. They still could be transitory and invite a reaction. Or they are already near-permanent and institutionalized.

The answer determines whether a constitutional republic continues as once envisioned, or warps into something never imagined by those who created it.

Victor DavisHanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

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.

Data: Multinational Corporations Kept Outsourcing American Jobs in Pandemic

Graeme Jennings-Pool/MANDEL NGAN/MICHAEL REYNOLDS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

5 Apr 202122

3:40

A number of multinational corporations and outsourcing firms continued outsourcing American white-collar jobs in Fiscal Year 2020 to H-1B foreign visa workers, data reveals.

Thirty multinational corporations, big banks, and outsourcing firms were awarded approval by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency to outsource more than 33,000 American white-collar jobs to H-1B foreign visa workers, according to data compiled by Economic Policy Institute (EPI) researchers.

“Members of Congress and Presidents from both parties over the past 14 years — who have been well-informed that the H-1B program has morphed into a corporate scam to offshore U.S. tech jobs and underpay migrant workers — have turned a blind eye to fixing it,” the EPI researchers write.

The H-1B visa program allows companies to bring 85,000 foreign workers to take American jobs each year and likely thousands more as universities and nonprofits are exempt from this annual cap.

There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.

The data from October 2019 to September 2020 shows that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Qualcomm, Oracle, Cisco Systems, Walmart, and McKinsey, as well as big banks such as Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs, and outsourcing firms like Infosys, Tata Consulting Services, Tech Mahindra Americas, IBM, Deloitte, Cognizant, and Capgemini were among the firms that were approved to outsource more than 33,000 American jobs.

In total, these 30 corporations, banks, and outsourcing firms were approved to import nearly 4-in-10 of all the H-1B foreign visa workers allowed to take American jobs last year.

Of the 30 top outsourcers, more than half are outsourcing firms whose business model relies on widening profit margins by outsourcing and eventually offshoring American jobs.

“Many of the outsourcing firms on this list have been reported to use the H-1B program to replace U.S. workers in cases that garnered national attention,” the researchers noted.

Even as about 17 million Americans remain jobless, all of whom want full-time work, President Joe Biden has ended former President Trump’s executive order that paused visa programs like the H-1B visa to shore up jobs for unemployed Americans.

Biden’s restarting the visa program came after corporate interests had lobbied the administration to let the Trump order expire. Many of those corporations who lobbied Biden will now more easily be able to outsource American jobs.

Despite the decision, the latest survey from Rasmussen Reports finds that 66 percent of likely U.S. voters say it is better for businesses to raise wages and provide better benefits to recruit Americans rather than importing foreign workers — 73 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of Democrats, and 62 percent of swing voters.

Likewise, 65 percent of voters said the nation’s labor market “already has enough talented people to train and recruit for most of those jobs” and does not need more.

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

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, 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.

BIDEN CRONY JEFF BEZOS OF AMAZON SAYS HE CAN’T AFFORD TO PAY LIVING WAGES!

 HERE’S WHY:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTYfJwTuP4A

Inside Jeff Bezos' $175 Million Mansion 

Is anyone expecting the Dems and union bosses to pile on and pillory Bezos as a ruthless capitalist?  Anyone?  Anyone?

In addition to the pending complaint, Amazon is fighting unionization:

National Labor Relations Board rules that Amazon illegally fired activist workers

By Thomas Lifson

Jeff Bezos may use his online retailing operation to censor conservatives and publish a Democrat/Deep State apologist newspaper, The Washington Post, but when his money is at stake, he looks indistinguishable from a union-busting robber baron of old.  CNBC reports:

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has found Amazon illegally retaliated against two of its most outspoken internal critics when it fired them last year.

Last April, Amazon fired Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, two former user experience designers, for "repeatedly violating internal policies." Cunningham and Costa argued they were fired in retaliation for their continued criticism of Amazon.

The NLRB confirmed to CNBC that it found merit to Cunningham and Costa's unfair labor practice complaint, which was filed last October. If Amazon doesn't agree to settle the case, the agency said it would file a complaint against Amazon in the next few weeks and set a trial date in the coming months. News of the NLRB's decision was first reported by The New York Times.

Is anyone expecting the Dems and union bosses to pile on and pillory Bezos as a ruthless capitalist?  Anyone?  Anyone?

In addition to the pending complaint, Amazon is fighting unionization:

The NLRB decision comes as Amazon is staring down a closely-watched union vote at one of its Alabama warehouses. The NLRB began counting votes last week and it could take a few days or weeks to reach an outcome.

Amazon Fulfillment Center, Shakopee, MN.
Photo credit: Tony Webster CC By-SA 2.0 license.

In my opinion, Bezos is buying protection for his hard-line tactics against his own employees by acting as a propagandist for the left.  This is as cynical as it gets.  Once the left consolidates power, if H.R. 1 passes and Dems never lose another national election, they will come for him.  He is what Lenin called a "useful idiot."

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.

Josh Hawley Calls for Criminal Probe of Amazon

SEAN MORAN

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday, urging him to open a criminal antitrust investigation against Amazon for stifling competition.

According to a Wall Street Journal report released last week, Amazon used data and sales to develop its own, competing products against other businesses competing on its Amazon marketplace. The Journal wrote:

The online retailing giant has long asserted, including to Congress, that when it makes and sells its own products, it doesn’t use information it collects from the site’s individual third-party sellers—data those sellers view as proprietary.

Yet interviews with more than 20 former employees of Amazon’s private-label business and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal reveal that employees did just that. Such information can help Amazon decide how to price an item, which features to copy or whether to enter a product segment based on its earning potential, according to people familiar with the practice, including a current employee and some former employees who participated in it.

In one instance, Amazon employees accessed documents and data about a bestselling car-trunk organizer sold by a third-party vendor. The information included total sales, how much the vendor paid Amazon for marketing and shipping, and how much Amazon made on each sale. Amazon’s private-label arm later introduced its own car-trunk organizers.

Hawley contended that Amazon’s business practices serve as an existential threat to small businesses competing against Amazon on the Internet giant’s marketplace.

“These practices are alarming for America’s small businesses even under ordinary circumstances. But at a time when most small retail businesses must rely on Amazon because of coronavirus-related shutdowns, predatory data practices threaten these businesses’ very existence,” the Missouri senator wrote.

“Abusing one’s position as a marketplace platform to create copycat products always is bad, but it is especially concerning now,” Hawley added. “Thousands of small businesses have been forced to suspend in-store retail and instead rely on Amazon because of shutdowns related to the coronavirus pandemic. Amazon’s reported data practices are an existential threat that may prevent these businesses from ever recovering.”

Hawley noted that the European Union already opened an investigation into Amazon using data in an anticompetitive fashion against third-party businesses.

“In the light of the enormous evidence already gathered, I ask that you look into this issue and open a criminal antitrust investigation of Amazon,” Hawley wrote.

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.

 German Economist Says

‘Great Reset Will Cause a

Crash Worse than 1930s’

JAMES DELINGPOLE

The Great Reset is real, it’s happening now and will lead to devastation worse — “much, much worse” — than the Weimar Republic, a German economist has warned.

Dr Antony Mueller, Professor of Economics at the Federal University of Sergipe in Brazil, says that the Chinese coronavirus ‘pandemic’ is being used as cover by the globalist elite to destroy small businesses and hasten a new world order based on “expertocracy, climate green religion, and brutal depopulation”.

This globalist elite — inspired by the World Economic Forum’s ‘Build Back Better’ campaign for a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and by the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 — are killing Main Street, together with thousands of jobs, by keeping economies across the Western World in near-permanent lockdown.

“Most people have not noticed yet because at the moment governments can afford to give them subsidies and welfare payments. But the question is: ‘For how long?’ We know this money is coming to an end and that it will soon be over. Next you will see massive unemployment all over Europe as one country pulls down another country.”

The coming economic crisis will be worse than any the world has seen before because all the countries in the Western world will become impoverished simultaneously and be unable to help one another.

“We are seeing the destruction of the economy in all Western countries — from the U.S. and Canada to New Zealand and Western Europe. 2020 as been a big catastrophe in the making. It’s just not here yet but it will be worse — much, much worse — than Weimar.”

It was the decline of Germany’s Weimar Republic — a period of high unemployment, deprivation, and hyperinflation — which led to the rise of Hitler. But however bad it might have been, the coming depression is going to be much worse because society is more atomised and less family-oriented and religious.

“In Weimar you still had large parts of the population who were religious — which gave them a sense of community and mutual help. They also had strong families. Now from Spain to Ireland, you have single households, which is going to make it much harder for people to survive.”

BLOG EDITOR: BEZOS HAS DESTROYED EVERY BOOK STORE IN AMERICA. WHAT'S NEXT?

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.”

The other factor which is going to make this depression almost uniquely horrible is that because all the small businesses are being methodically and deliberately wiped out by government fiat, there will be nothing to make ordinary life bearable.

“We know, for example, that Argentina has had economic crashes. But they were always survivable because there were always small businesses — you could get your car repaired, go to the butcher for meat, the bars and cafes stayed open. In this new crash the bars and cafes will be all closed.”

This has nothing to do with the virus, says Professor Mueller, and everything to do with government policy: “The real pandemic will be the effect of the lockdown.”

“We had a foretaste in 2008. You remember the pictures of lines of people waiting to draw their cash from the bank? This could well happen because you will have a collapse of credit… Unemployment will come. The government will have no funds. It will be mega inflation or a major contraction.

“It was not the virus that did this. It was the lockdown. Most people cannot comprehend it because the dimension explodes anything we are used to.

“History has many examples where we ask ‘How could they do this?’ But they did.

“One should not bank on having money. People say: ‘Oh I have a pension.’ But the government won’t be able to pay your pension. ‘Oh I have some savings.’ But you won’t have any access to your savings account.”

While Mueller says the prognosis is bleak, his disastrous scenario may not come to fruition if Western economies see sense.

The best immediate hope, he says, would have been if Donald Trump got re-elected.

“This will end the lockdowns. There will be a strong, quick recovery. And the Europeans will follow.”

He says he takes no pleasure in warning of disaster.

“I hope it will not happen. I do not make prophecies. I only see the implications of what is happening now with lockdowns, what the future looks like.”

Professor Antony Mueller was talking to James Delingpole on the Delingpod podcast. You can see the full interview here. You can support James’s podcast at https://www.subscribestar.com/jamesdelingpole and https://www.patreon.com/jamesdelingpole

 

WSJ: Amazon Wins by ‘Steamrolling’ Smaller Rivals

LUCAS NOLAN

In a recent article, the Wall Street Journal outlines how e-commerce giant Amazon gains an advantage over smaller competitors, “steamrolling” their business with similar products and services on its massive platform.

In an article titled “How Amazon Wins: By Steamrolling Rivals and Partners,” the Wall Street Journal outlines how the e-commerce giant Amazon uses its vast influence to push out competitors and rivals. The company often does this by targeting items that are selling well and creating their own version of the product, selling it at a cheaper price and undercutting the original manufacturer.

The Wall Street Journal writes:

No competitor is too small to draw Amazon’s sights. It cloned a line of camera tripods that a small outside company sold on Amazon’s site, hurting the vendor’s sales so badly it is now a fraction of its original size, the little firm’s owner said. Amazon said it didn’t violate the company’s intellectual-property rights.

When Amazon decided to compete with furniture retailer Wayfair Inc., Mr. Bezos’s deputies created what they called the Wayfair Parity Team, which studied how Wayfair procured, sold and delivered bulky furniture, eventually replicating a majority of its offerings, said people who worked on the team. Amazon and Wayfair declined to comment on the matter.

Amazon set its sights on Allbirds Inc., the maker of popular shoes using natural and recycled materials, and last year launched a shoe called Galen that looks nearly identical to Allbirds’ bestseller—without the environmentally friendly materials and selling for less than half the price.

Allbirds Co-CEO Joey Zwillinger commented on the situation stating: “You can’t help but look at a trillion-dollar company putting their muscle and their pockets and their machinations of their algorithms and reviewers and private-label machine all behind something that you’ve put your career against. You have this giant machine creating all these headwinds for us.”

As multiple tech companies such as Facebook and Google face antitrust lawsuits, Amazon pushing out competitors could see the company in the sights of the Justice Department next.

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.c

In bipartisan vote: US House approves record $741 billion military spending bill.... HOW MUCH GOES INTO BIDEN CRONY BEZOS' POCKETS???

The overwhelming bipartisan vote by the House of Representatives Tuesday evening to approve the largest military budget in American history demonstrates the reality of capitalist politics. Democrats and Republicans are supposedly at each other’s throats over an array of social and political issues, but they are entirely in agreement on funding the world’s largest and most lethal military machine.

The House vote for the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was by a massive margin, 335–78. Democrats supported passage by 195–37. Republicans supported passage by 140–40. Every leader of the House Democrats backed passage: Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip James Clyburn. They were joined by the top Republicans: Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Minority Whip Steve Scalise and the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, the co-sponsor of the massive bill, Mac Thornberry of Texas.

The margin was far more than the two-thirds required to override a threatened Trump veto, although it is not clear that Trump will actually follow up on his tweets demanding two changes in the bill, neither relevant to its basic purposes. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already said the Senate will pass the NDAA in the next few days. The margin is likely to be even more decisive than in the House.

While rubber-stamping the largest-ever Pentagon budget, the House and Senate remain locked in a protracted stalemate which has blocked the payment of a single dollar of federal supplemental unemployment insurance since the benefit expired last July 31.

The $741 billion for the Pentagon is approximately six times as much as the $121 billion in unemployment benefits paid out to 60 million workers since the coronavirus pandemic struck.

The goal of the NDAA, according to its preamble, is to achieve “irreversible momentum in the implementation of the National Defense Strategy” spelled out by the Pentagon in 2018, which identified “strategic competition” with Russia and China, not terrorism, as the “preeminent challenge” of US military policy. This includes, according to the various subdivisions of the massive bill, achieving “Superiority in the Air”, “Superiority on the Seas,” “Superiority on the Land,” and, in keeping with the demands of Trump, “Superiority in Space.”

After three decades of US-led wars, the outbreak of a third world war, which would be fought with nuclear weapons, is an imminent and concrete danger.

It is not hard to imagine what the rest of the world is to think of this all-out US drive for military power “uber alles”: China, Russia and imperialist powers like Germany, Britain, France and Japan are all engaged in military build-ups to match that in America, bringing ever closer the danger of an uncontrolled military clash between great powers, most of them nuclear armed.

Well short of such an apocalypse, the arms race involves an unforgivable squandering of economic resources needed to meet social concerns such as education, health care, alleviating poverty and retirement security.

One of the largest single components of the Pentagon budget is Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), funded to the tune of $69 billion. This is the spending for ongoing military operations where US forces are deployed: primarily Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, as well as the Persian Gulf, where vast naval and air assets are arrayed against Iran. The OCO also covers active drone missile warfare operations across Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

Democratic and Republican leaders on the committees overseeing Pentagon policies and military budgets gave unanimous support to the NDAA, boasting that the military budget has passed Congress by huge majorities for 59 straight years, and the Fiscal 2021 budget will be number 60.

When it comes to the most critical institution of the capitalist state, there is not even a two-party system in America, there is only one party: the party of the military-intelligence apparatus, which is required both to assert US imperialist interests around the world and to defend the financial aristocracy against the looming threat of social disorder and class conflict at home.

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.

Now considered one of the “Big Four” technology monopolies alongside Apple, Google and Facebook, Amazon controls the largest marketplace on the Internet: Amazon.com. The conglomerate’s reach extends from Whole Foods Market, which Amazon purchased in 2017 for $13.4 billion, to consumer electronics such as the Kindle reader and the voice-controlled Alexa. Amazon subsidiary Kuiper Systems announced in April of this year that it will spend a decade launching 3,236 satellites into space to provide broadband internet.

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.”

MODERN SLAVER JEFF BEZOS

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.”

JEFF BEZOS of AMAZON DECLARES THAT AMERICAN-BORN SLAVES ARE NOT CHEAP ENOUGH. CHINA MUST DELIVER THE REAL SLAVE LABOR!

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.

 

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

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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.

 

Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken speaks during a news conference in Kiev, Ukraine, Friday, March 6, 2015. (AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov)

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.

 

Wall Street, Republicans and militarists back Biden campaign

 

9 July 2020

Anyone who wants to know what type of policies will be pursued by a Biden administration in the event the Democrats win the November 3 presidential election has only to look at the social and political forces that are rallying to his campaign.

BLOG EDITOR: BIDEN WAS ENDORSED VERY EARLY BY WAR PROFITEER AND PARTNER FOR RED CHINA SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN.

They include Wall Street, prominent Republicans and veterans of the Obama national security team.

Thanks to strong support from big business, the presidential campaign of the former vice president outraised President Trump’s reelection campaign in June, according to figures announced by the two campaigns last week. Joe Biden raked in $141 million, while Trump’s campaign took in $131 million.

It was the second consecutive month that Biden collected more in campaign contributions than Trump, following a $6 million edge in May, $80.8 million to $74 million, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.

The Trump campaign still leads in cash in the bank, with $295 million on hand as of July 1, as it had few expenses during the Republican primaries, where Trump had only token opposition. Biden’s campaign was effectively broke at the time of his breakthrough victories in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 3, but he now has amassed a war chest of at least $125 million, according to published estimates.

ActBlue, the online fundraising vehicle for the Democratic Party as a whole, took in $392 million in June, shattering all previous records, the bulk of it in smaller donations and contributions from first-time donors. This is an indication of the widespread popular hostility to Trump, exacerbated by his vitriolic attacks on the mass protests against police violence that took place throughout the month, as well as his refusal to take any serious action to stem the coronavirus pandemic.

BLOG EDITOR: THE RICH KNOW WHO WILL SERVE THEM BEST! ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS.  THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH IN AMERICAN HISTORY OCCURRED DURING THE BANKSTER REGIME OF OBAMA-BIDEN-HOLDER.

But a major factor in Biden’s fundraising surge has been a series of virtual events featuring former President Obama, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Kamala Harris, at which wealthy contributors were invited to give the maximum donation of $5,600 directly to Biden as well as much larger sums to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the political action committee favored by the Biden campaign, Priorities USA, which expects to spend $200 million by itself to support his election.

Under the terms of an agreement between the Biden campaign and the DNC, the Biden Victory Fund can receive checks as large as $620,600 from wealthy donors. The money is then distributed in smaller amounts to the campaign, the DNC and various state parties in order to comply with campaign finance regulations.

According to figures released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”

Trump raised $33.5 million from the broader category of finance, insurance and real estate. He was competitive with Biden among the real estate moguls, who view Trump as one of their own, but trailed badly, with only $7.8 million, from the “securities and investment” subcategory.

In other words, Wall Street favored Biden by better than four to one, and Biden’s $23 million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16 million edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.

Along with the support of the stock exchange and financial institutions, Biden is winning support from sections of the Republican Party. This includes the well publicized Lincoln Project, established by former Republican campaign operatives Reed Galen, John Weaver, Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, with the support of other former party officials like Jennifer Horn, former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, and George Conway, a prominent Republican lawyer and husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.

The Lincoln Project began running television and internet commercials denouncing Trump from a right-wing foreign policy standpoint, criticizing him as soft on China and Russia. One ad, released after the New York Times launched its fabricated and unsubstantiated charge that Russia paid bounties to Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, features a former Navy SEAL who attacks Trump for not ordering military action to kill Russians. The ad is titled “Betrayal.”

BLOG EDITOR: BOTH BIDEN AND GEORGE W BUSH ARE GLOBALIST FOR OPEN BORDERS AND ENDLESS WAR. THE BUSH FAMILY, LONG PARTNERED WITH THE 9-11 INVADING SAUDIS, STARTED TWO WARS AGAINST IRAQ WHICH ARE STILL FILLING THEIR POCKETS.

Another political action committee, “43 Alumni for Biden,” consists of hundreds of former officials in the Republican administration of George W. Bush (the 43rd US president). They declare they are “choosing country over party” in the November election, stating: “We believe that a Biden administration will adhere to the rule of law ... and restore dignity and integrity to the White House.” As a Super PAC, the group can raise unlimited sums of money to run ads attacking Trump or boosting Biden.

The final component in the rapidly coalescing coalition of reactionaries supporting the Biden campaign consists of former military-intelligence officials of the Obama administration, who have made a killing in the lucrative business of “strategic consulting” and now hope to return to power in a Biden administration. Several of them, including former deputy defense secretary Michele Flournoy and former deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state Anthony Blinken, have signed on as Biden’s top national security advisers.

A remarkable article in The American Prospect—a liberal publication that supports Biden against Trump—makes a devastating exposure of these militarists for Biden, under the headline, “How Biden’s Foreign Policy Team Got Rich.”

It documents the creation of a strategic consulting firm called WestExec Advisors (named after West Executive Avenue, the street outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington D.C.). WestExec was founded by two lesser operatives, Sergio Aguirre, former chief of staff to Samantha Power, UN ambassador under Obama, and Nitin Chadda, a former aide to Obama Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.

These two recruited Flournoy and Blinken to serve as the group’s biggest “names.” Flournoy was widely expected to become secretary of defense if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and she is once again at the top of the list for Pentagon boss under Biden.

Under Trump, Flournoy served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the CIA director’s External Advisory Board, before leaving once the 2020 presidential campaign heated up. She is a notorious warmonger, and The American Prospect article details her role in advocating continued US military support to Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen, which has resulted in $3 billion in weapons contracts for Raytheon. WestExec principal Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary, is a member of Raytheon’s board of directors.

WestExec quickly made a splash in Washington with its launch party attended by top former Obama national security aides such as Susan Rice, Tom Donilon and Denis McDonough. It lined up a list of clients so potent that neither WestExec nor the Biden campaign would release the names, for fear of exposing the fact that Biden’s foreign policy advisory group is a wholly owned subsidiary of the big military contractors.

One particularly noxious principal at WestExec is former Deputy CIA Director Avril Haines, who, as The American Prospect put it, “helped design Obama’s program of using drones for extrajudicial killings.” In June, the Biden campaign announced that Haines would oversee foreign policy for the Biden transition team.

While the former drone missile chief prepares plans for the future Biden administration, the current advisers, with their lucrative “consulting” affiliations, are listed by The American Prospect as follows: “Nicholas Burns (The Cohen Group), Kurt Campbell (The Asia Group), Tom Donilon (BlackRock Investment Institute), Wendy Sherman (Albright Stonebridge Group), Julianne Smith (WestExec Advisors) and Jake Sullivan (Macro Advisory Partners). They rarely discuss their connections to corporate power, defense contractors, private equity, and hedge funds, let alone disclose them.”

This is what Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and their various liberal and pseudo-left apologists have embraced as the alternative to the fascistic Trump administration—a government of warmongers and corporate shills, no less committed to the defense of the interests of the American ruling elite.