Make Amazon Pay was formed in 2020 and has since helped to organize a number of strikes and protests against company policies. The campaign states on its website: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon became a trillion dollar corporation, with Bezos becoming the first person in history to amass $200 billion in personal wealth. Meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers risked their lives as essential workers, and only briefly received an increase in pay.”
How US capitalism established the modern two-party system of bourgeois rule
The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865–1915, by Jon Grinspan, Bloomsbury, 2021
The subtitle of Jon Grinspan’s recently published book, The Age of Acrimony, is somewhat misleading. It reads, “How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865–1915.”
Americans were and are divided into mutually antagonistic classes, however. A more accurate description would be, at least in part, “How US capitalism established the modern two-party system of bourgeois rule.” As the author shows, this included the effective disenfranchisement of the poorest and most exploited sections of the working class—the restriction, not the “fixing,” of democracy.
Grinspan, the curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, has written an interesting and informative book, even if limited both in its scope and by its theoretical outlook. He deals with the half-century following the US Civil War.
The Second American Revolution ended chattel slavery, and the Reconstruction Period was characterized by significant reforms, including the extension of the right to vote to several million former slaves. It soon gave way to counterrevolution, however. The Republican Party abandoned Reconstruction. The Compromise of 1877, which installed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House—after a bitterly disputed election in which Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote—in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the former Confederacy, was a fundamental turning point.
The shift reflected the dominant interests of the ascendant bourgeoisie. Having established its supremacy through the Civil War, it was more than willing to make a deal with its former foes. Slavery did not return, but it was supplanted by the Jim Crow system of segregation, terror and second-class citizenship for the African-American population in the South, while the North led the way in the massive industrialization of the country.
Republicans continued to “wave the bloody shirt” well into the 1880s and even later, using memories of the Civil War to appeal to a broader base that remembered the fight against slavery. The Democrats rebuilt their electoral fortunes, based both upon the former slaveholders and their supporters in the South, and the growing patronage machines in the northern cities, resting on the growth of industry and the working class, including several million immigrants.
Election campaigns during the 1870s were a time of torchlight parades and mass activity. The large voter turnouts included newly enfranchised African-Americans—women’s suffrage would not arrive for almost another half-century.
Party affiliation was emphasized, but political issues receded into the background in the years after Reconstruction. This was a time when the class struggle erupted in such battles as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Partisanship was a way to divert attention from the class issues and the need for the political independence of the working class. Voters were instead divided along tribal lines, into the two big parties of big business. Although much has changed in the past 150 years, similar techniques are used today.
Grinspan writes about the fears of the ruling class during this period:
Racist pogroms tore apart southern cities, and ethnic and class tensions caused riots in Manhattan in 1870, 1871 and 1874. Across the Atlantic, Paris exploded in 1871, as the revolutionary Paris Commune seized control of the city, before being brutally put down by the French state, which massacred twenty thousand. Americans frightened themselves with predictions of their own coming commune… Then, in the spring of 1877, one hundred thousand railroad workers struck around the United States, protesting the wage cuts that had shrunk their earnings by nearly one-quarter since 1873. The movement was crushed by state militias and federal troops, killing about one hundred strikers. Fearing communes abroad and strikers at home, the wealthy began to talk about the coming fall of civilization, pointing to various barbarians at various gates.
The reference to the Paris Commune is particularly significant, reflecting the international character of the class struggle as the system of capitalist production grew. Both Democrats and Republicans began to rely on growing middle-class layers as a force for political stability, a buffer and a means of silencing a revolutionary movement within the working class.
The subsequent decades continued to be ones of explosive class struggle as well as political instability. The “irrepressible conflict” that led to the Civil War reemerged in another form, this time the conflict between expanding capitalism and the powerful working class that grew alongside it.
Between 1865 and 1901, three US presidents (Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley) were assassinated. Grinspan briefly mentions the infamous Haymarket frame-up of Chicago anarchists in 1886. He writes:
Cities were training militias, passing vagrancy laws, and restricting public rallies with permitting requirements. And across the nation, strikers were met with truncheons and rifles. The National Guard was called out 328 times between 1886 and 1895. In 1894, an Ohioan named Jacob Coxey led a ragtag assembly of unemployed protesters in the first march on Washington. ‘Coxey’s army,’ as they were called, were beaten and arrested for trampling on the grass around Capitol Hill. To the well-to-do of the 1890s, public gatherings seemed newly ominous.
The Civil War marked the completion of the bourgeois revolution in the United States. The abolition of slavery cleared the path for the system of “free labor” across the country. The Gilded Age, in which Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt and Carnegie became household names, was marked by extremes of inequality never previously seen. It also saw explosive class struggles. The Great Railroad Strike was followed by the Homestead and Pullman strikes in 1892 and 1894, respectively, brutally suppressed by the state.
This was the context within which the ruling class began to move away from the kind of “mass democracy” it had earlier utilized, in favor of “respectability” and “civility” in politics. Mass political involvement was deemed too dangerous at a time of mass struggle.
During this same period, lynching was rapidly increasing in the South, and poll taxes and other methods effectively disenfranchised the freed slaves and their children, but also many poor whites. In the Northern states the techniques were different, but the results were somewhat similar. As Grinspan describes it in his book, as well as in an article in the Washington Post several months ago, “‘reformers’ could not simply disenfranchise their lower classes. But perhaps, they schemed, they might make participation unappealing enough to discourage turnout.” Among other techniques, “states passed new registration laws and literacy requirements, moved polling places into unfriendly neighborhoods, and most employers stopped letting their workers take time off to vote.”
This all accompanied—paradoxically it would seem—the Progressive Era of the first two decades of the 20th century. It was not, in fact, at all inconsistent. Many reformers found the infringement of voting rights perfectly acceptable, just as they supported the contemporaneous efforts to restrict immigration, efforts that led to the passage of the draconian Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which imposed quotas that reduced immigration from southern and eastern Europe to a small fraction of previous levels, while banning immigration from most of Asia.
The reformist wing of the ruling class saw measures such as antitrust laws, factory inspections, the end of child labor and similar legislation as necessary to forestall revolution. This became especially urgent after the 1905 Revolution in Russia, to which the author briefly alludes. The reforms that ascendant American capitalism could then afford were not the result of the sudden growth of charity among the employers. They came in response to the continuing development of the class struggle, including the founding and early growth of the Industrial Workers of the World. This period also corresponded to the emergence of the United States as an imperialist power, able to bribe a labor aristocracy—a thin layer of labor bureaucrats and privileged workers.
Not surprisingly, Grinspan discounts the growth of the socialist movement, barely mentioning Eugene Debs in an aside. He separates the relatively small socialist movement from the great stirrings of the working class, and accepts the falsehood that socialism was alien to the US. He neglects to mention the enormous impact in the US of the 1917 Russian Revolution, as well as internationally, and the leadership role of socialists and communists in the building of the industrial unions in the US in later decades.
The infringements on voting met with a good deal of success. Voter turnout fell from a high of 82.6 percent of eligible voters in 1876 to 48.9 percent in 1924. Grinspan writes: “From 1896 to 1900, turnout fell 6.1 percent. It crashed another 8 percent by 1904, plunged 6.6 percent in 1912, and crashed a full 12.4 percent by 1920.” By 1924, he continues, “for the first time in the history of American democracy, stay-at-homes made up the majority of eligible voters.”
The collapse of voting “was most extreme in the Deep South, where Jim Crow voting laws disenfranchised Black voters, discouraged poor Whites, and enthroned a small, White, wealthy, Democratic electorate. On average, half as many Southerners voted after 1900 as before.” This was not confined to the disenfranchisement of African-Americans. “In Florida, turnout dropped 52 percent; in South Carolina it fell 65.6 percent between 1880 and 1916. Just 17.5 percent of eligible South Carolinians voted in 1916…”
Grinspan is informative when demonstrating that race was not the only factor, and not even the biggest factor, in the hollowing out of American democracy over the last century. Voter turnout fell during this period, he writes, “especially among populations who were poorer, younger, immigrants or African-Americans. Election Day in the 19th century was a thrilling holiday. In the 20th century, it required literacy, identification papers, education, leave from work …”
He refers to Joe Biden’s hypocritical warning about new voting laws that risk “backsliding into the days of Jim Crow,” and adds, “… there is a stronger, subtler parallel: the deliberate discouragement of working class voters, around 1900, by wealthier Americans scared that ‘hordes of native and foreign barbarians, all armed with the ballot’ would replace them at the polls.”
The Jim Crow measures, accompanied by violence or the threat of violence, were the most blatant, but they were part of a broader pattern. As Grinspan notes, “while the Voting Rights Act of 1965 fought racial discrimination in voting, the discouragements preventing low-income participation have never been addressed.” He points out that the 66 percent turnout in the polarized election of 2020 was the highest percentage in 120 years and was far below the participation of eligible voters in the late 19th century. Thus, during a century when American imperialism regularly posed as the symbol of democracy, it was effectively disenfranchising many millions of its own citizens.
While Grinspan himself may shrink from this conclusion, his study and the statistics he compiles confirm the words of Lenin, the leader of the 1917 October Revolution, on the nature of democracy under capitalism:
Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.
This book brings its survey of US voting up only to the early 20th century, but it is necessary to consider at least briefly what has happened since 1915, and where American democracy stands today. The relatively stable two-party system inaugurated in the early 20th century has endured, with some minor challenges, until fairly recently. The American working class has remained politically disenfranchised, failing to build mass parties as happened in Europe and elsewhere.
This can be ascribed in part to the remaining resources of US imperialism, as the leading global capitalist power. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was able to pose as the “friend of labor” and steal the political thunder of fascistic figures like Huey Long.
Even more decisive, however, was the crisis of working-class leadership, and above all the role of Stalinism, in systematically betraying the working class internationally. In the US, the Stalinists were crucial in helping to tie the insurgent labor movement to Roosevelt’s Democrats, and in the post-World War II period the anticommunist trade union bureaucracy, basing itself on the temporary postwar boom, took over the task of strangling the movement of the working class.
The last four decades, however, have witnessed a fundamental change. Everywhere the existing parties and trade unions—including the Stalinists—have been transformed and integrated into the capitalist state. Racial politics, in the form of the identity politics embraced by the Democrats, has supplemented racism and xenophobia as a means of dividing the working class. The accelerating crisis and decline of American capitalism has led, especially since the stolen election of 2000, to new and more extreme attacks on basic democratic rights.
This is part of the explosive growth of inequality, a Second Gilded Age even more extreme than the first. This level of inequality is not compatible with rights that have been won or tolerated in the past. This is the significance of the emergence of Trump, the ongoing transformation of the Republicans into a fascist party, and the complicity and bankruptcy of the Democrats in the face of the fascist danger.
This deepening onslaught on the working class is provoking a response, visible today in such developments as the growing strike wave as well as the mass protests against police killings. A period of revolutionary struggle has opened up, in the US and internationally.
The defense of the right to vote is bound up with the struggle for the political independence of the working class. It must answer the capitalist state’s suppression of democracy with genuine workers’ democracy and a workers’ state. The fight for socialism, smashing the capitalist class’s stranglehold on economic life, is the only answer to the COVID-19 pandemic and the threat of war and fascist dictatorship.
Bezos ‘Greases’ Way Into Dem Establishment With $100 Million Obama Donation
Obama-Biden alum Jay Carney arranged the massive gift
Faced with scorn from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos appears ready to "grease" his way into the Democratic establishment with a $100 million donation to the Obama Foundation, according to Puck News.
The donation was arranged by Amazon executive and former Obama press secretary Jay Carney. The no-strings-attached gift comes as Bezos faces growing opposition from the left. The gift is the largest ever made to the foundation, which has chosen to forgo the traditional presidential library in favor of building a privately managed presidential center.
Bezos's donation comes at a difficult political moment for Amazon. Lawmakers from both parties fault the company for its poor treatment of workers and abuse of its market power. The company has also come under fire for banning conservative voices. This year, Amazon banned a book that criticizes transgender ideology and blocked an ad for a book that criticizes the Black Lives Matter movement.
Bezos has tasked Carney, who served as then-vice president Joe Biden's communications director, to ingratiate Amazon with Democratic lawmakers. Under Carney's leadership, Amazon's lobbying team has grown from about two dozen to 250 members. Reuters reported Friday that Carney has successfully lobbied to kill privacy protections for consumers in 25 states.
Amazon is not the only Bezos project to pique the ire of leading Democrats. NASA administrator and former Democratic senator Bill Nelson blamed Bezos's Blue Origin for causing a delay in a U.S. return to the moon. The space exploration company sued NASA after it lost a major contract to Elon Musk's SpaceX.
Obama's presidential center is the first presidential library or museum to be run by a partisan nonprofit, rather than by the National Archives and Records Administration. Bezos's ex-wife Mackenzie Scott and Bill and Melinda Gates have already made substantial donations to the center, which presidential scholars worry will become a partisan slush fund.
Activists on Chicago's South Side said the center will force out longtime neighborhood residents. The center received a tax-free, 99-year lease on almost 20 acres of public parkland from the city of Chicago, for $10 in total. The center will be allowed to charge fees and keep the profits.
Bezos has ramped up his philanthropy over the past four years, pledging millions of dollars to liberal causes and figures. Earlier this year, he pledged $1 billion to conservation efforts and gave $100 million to CNN contributor Van Jones.
Inside Jeff Bezos Mansions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVURsBK1-zY
Jeff Bezos' $400 Million Flying Fox Yacht
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRYEcushHjc
Inside Jeff Bezos' $21,000,000 Car Collection
IRS data shows: US billionaires' true tax rate
far lower than that of workers
On June 8, ProPublica published the first in a projected series of articles documenting the massive scale of legally sanctioned tax evasion carried out by America’s ever-expanding class of billionaires. The article, based on an exhaustive study of leaked Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents, focuses on the period from 2014 through 2018. It demonstrates that in the course of those five years, the 25 richest Americans paid federal taxes on their increased wealth at a far lower rate than the typical US household.
The report also cites tax data on billionaire oligarchs such as Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg going back to the first decade of the current century, showing that they paid little or no taxes regardless of which big business party—Democrats or Republicans—occupied the White House. It explains as well that even were the Biden administration to carry out its promised increases in income tax rates for the rich, the impact on the vast fortunes of today’s robber barons would be minimal.
The authors state that in determining the increased wealth of America’s “top 0.001 percent,” they included not simply their salaries, which in many cases comprise only a small share of their actual income, but also “investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.”
Billionaires Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk (All originals from Wikimedia Commons)
The result, they note, demolishes “the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most.” They continue: “The IRS records show that the wealthiest can—perfectly legally—pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.”
ProPublica’s revelations provide insight into how the capitalist system and its various state institutions and rigged legal system promote a parasitic financial aristocracy that lives in a world apart from the rest of humanity. Unlike workers, who depend on their wages to survive and pay the full income tax rate, the ultra-wealthy avoid taxes by obtaining massive loans from banks, borrowing against the value of their ever growing and artificially inflated assets, such as stocks and real estate, which are not taxable until they are sold.
In order to calculate what ProPublica terms the “true tax rate” of the 25 richest Americans, the report compares how much in taxes these individuals paid over a given period to how much their wealth grew, using wealth estimates published by Forbes magazine.
Between 2014 and 2018, Forbes estimated that these 25 people saw their wealth increase collectively by $401 billion. The documents obtained by ProPublica show that these same individuals collectively paid $13.6 billion in federal income taxes over the same time period, for a true tax rate of only 3.4 percent. By contrast, ProPublica found that between 2014 and 2018, a typical US worker in his or her 40s experienced a net wealth expansion of about $65,000. That same worker’s tax bills “were almost as much, nearly $62,000, over that five-year period.”
Over that same period, according to ProPublica, Warren Buffett’s wealth increased by $24.3 billion, but the Berkshire Hathaway mogul paid only $23.7 million in taxes, resulting in a true tax rate of 0.10 percent.
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ wealth soared by a staggering $99 billion, but he paid just $973 million in taxes, yielding a true tax rate of less than 1 percent.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is another “pandemic profiteer.” He saw his wealth skyrocket this past year, in part by violating a state-ordered shutdown and illegally restarting production at the Fremont, California, Tesla factory, leading to hundreds of coronavirus infections. Between 2014 and 2018 his wealth grew by $13.9 billion, while he paid $455 million in taxes, resulting in a true tax rate of 3.27 percent.
The reporting confirms the Marxist analysis of the capitalist state, described in the Communist Manifesto as “… a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” The various loopholes and tax avoidance schemes employed by the ruling class are legal, have been for decades, and will continue to be so under Biden or any other Democratic administration.
As then-candidate Joe Biden assured wealthy donors at a Manhattan campaign fundraising event in January 2019, should he become president, “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.” Nearly six months into his presidency, Biden has kept his promises to his wealthy benefactors, as evinced by his recent retreat from his proposal to raise corporate taxes by a few percentage points.
Among other facts included in the ProPublica report:
· Bezos, the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes in 2007 and 2011. In 2011, despite his overall wealth holding steady at $18 billion, Bezos filed a tax return in which he claimed to have lost money. The IRS not only approved the billionaire’s tax return, it granted him a $4,000 tax credit for his children!
· Musk, now the second richest person in the world, did not pay any federal income taxes in 2018.
· Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as billionaire investors Carl Icahn and George Soros, have also had years when they paid nothing in federal income taxes. Soros, worth an estimated $8.6 billion as of March 2021, paid no federal income taxes for three years in a row.
According to the ProPublica report, when the super-rich do pay something in income taxes, their true tax rate is far lower than that of the typical working class household, with a median income of $70,000. For instance, between 2006 and 2018, while Bezos’ wealth surged by over $120 billion, he paid, on average, $1.09 in taxes for every $100 in wealth growth. But over the same period, the median American household paid $160 in taxes for every $100 in wealth growth—paying more in taxes than it gained in wealth.
Overall, ProPublica found that the richest 25 Americans pay a far lower income tax rate, an average of 15.8 percent of adjusted gross income, than do many workers, once taxes for Social Security and Medicare are included. To highlight the point, ProPublica found that by the end of 2018, the 25 richest Americans were worth $1.1 trillion and collectively paid a federal tax bill of $1.9 billion.
The $1.1 trillion in collective wealth hoarded by 25 people equals the combined annual wages of roughly 14.3 million American workers, who in 2018 paid $143 billion in federal taxes, or over 75 times more than the billionaires.
On Tuesday, in response to a reporter’s question about the ProPublica report, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had nothing to say about its damning content. Instead, she threatened criminal prosecution of those who leaked the IRS documents to ProPublica.
“Any unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information by a person of access is illegal and we take this very seriously,” said Psaki. She added that the IRS commissioner has referred the matter to investigators and that the FBI and Justice Department would also be investigating.
THERE'S NO ONE UP HIGH TECH'S ASS MORE THAN BIDEN! THERE WILL BE NO HIGH-TECH ANTI-TRUST UNDER THE BIDEN REGIME!
The donation comes after the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust introduced five bills last summer aimed to curb anti-competitive practices in the tech industry. The bills have been presented as a bipartisan effort to rein in the power of dominant Silicon Valley companies.
IT PAYS TO OWN A FEW DEMOCRAT POLS
A video on the Make Amazon Pay website further states: “Amazon’s wealth has increased so much during the pandemic that its owners could pay all 1.3 million of its employees a $690,000 COVID bonus and still be as rich as they were in 2020.”
Read more at Business Insider here.
Jeff Bezos Donates $100 Million to Obama Foundation
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is donating $100 million to the Obama Foundation in the wake of Amazon clashing with the Biden administration over antitrust issues.
Bezos’ $100 million donation to the Obama Foundation, made in honor of late Rep. John Lewis, is the foundation’s largest individual contribution received to date, the Obama Foundation announced in a Monday press release.
Jeff Bezos lectures normal people about climate change Pool/Getty)
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND – NOVEMBER 08: Former US President Barack Obama delivers a speech while attending day nine of the COP26 at SECC on November 8, 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
The donation comes after the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust introduced five bills last summer aimed to curb anti-competitive practices in the tech industry. The bills have been presented as a bipartisan effort to rein in the power of dominant Silicon Valley companies.
One bill aimed to prevent technology companies from favoring their own products and services on their platform, a practice that Google and Amazon have been accused of. Another targeted the use of data obtained from competitors to gain an advantage over them, a practice that has made Amazon the subject of an EU antitrust investigation.
Moreover, Lina Khan, the Chairperson of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), is reportedly probing Amazon’s $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM Studios. In June, Amazon demanded that Khan recuse herself from any FTC probes of the company, reported New York Post.
Bezos’ nine-figure gift to the Obama Foundation was arranged by former Obama press secretary and current Amazon senior vice president of global corporate affairs Jay Carney, according to a report by Puck News.
The Obama Foundation says Bezos’ donation will “help expand the scope of programming that reaches emerging leaders in the United States and around the world,” adding that Bezos “has asked for the Plaza at the Obama Presidential Center to be named the John Lewis Plaza.”
While the foundation was vague regarding what Bezos’ donation will be spent on, it said that the money will give “the next generation of emerging leaders” the “necessary tools, resources, and training needed to be the change they want to see in the world, just as Congressman Lewis did.”
“I’m thrilled to support President and Mrs. Obama and their Foundation in its mission to train and inspire tomorrow’s leaders,” Bezos said.
Earlier this month, former President Barack Obama jetted into Glasgow, Scotland, for the COP26 climate conference to tell “old folks” to “get out of the way.”
“From the perspective of the Obama Foundation, one of the things I’m most excited about is to see the young activists from around the world who are taking up the baton and not just working in their own countries, but now forming a collective movement across borders to tell the older generation that has gotten us into this mess that we all have an obligation to dig our way out of it,” Obama said in a recorded a video message.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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