Biden presses forward with February 2022 resumption of student loan repayments
The Biden administration has reiterated that it will not extend the current student loan payment pause beyond February 1, 2022, despite the continuing spread of COVID-19 and the arrival of the more infectious Omicron variant of the coronavirus.
When asked last Friday about any possibility of an extension of the pause, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that the administration was “still assessing the impact of the Omicron variant,” but a high priority is “a smooth transition back into repayment.”
Making it clear that the administration had in fact made up its mind on the matter, Psaki went on to say, “In the coming weeks, we will release more details about our plan and will engage directly with student loan borrowers to ensure that they have the resources they need and are in the appropriate repayment plan.”
In August, the White House announced its “final extension” of the payment pause on federal student loans that began under the Trump administration in March 2020. The program put a freeze on loan balances and halted payments due and interest accrual. The policy also placed on hold any collections, garnishments and tax refund interceptions on defaulted loans.
Combined federal and private loan debt in the US is estimated at $1.6 trillion. There are 42.2 million people with balances on federal student loans. According to a household debt study by NerdWallet, the average US household with student loans owes approximately $57,500 and average debt ranges from $28,950 for a bachelor’s degree and $183,302 for students with a veterinary degree.
Like all the pandemic relief programs contained in the $2.2 trillion CARES Act passed in March 2020 with overwhelming bipartisan support, the student loan payment pause was fundamentally aimed at securing the financial interests of the ruling elite. Fully aware that the economic impact of the pandemic would mean that tens of millions of borrowers would not be able to make payments, the Democrats and Republicans acted to prevent a wave of catastrophic defaults that could threaten the entire capitalist financial system.
It is within this context that a group of leading congressional Democrats have submitted a letter to the White House urging President Biden to reconsider his plan to restart loan payments within two months.
In their letter of December 8, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Charles Schumer of New York and Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts state, “In order to prevent the student debt crisis from dragging down on our economic recovery, undermining the effectiveness of the American Rescue Plan, and causing unnecessary pain and stress for American families, we strongly urge you to extend the pause on student loan payments and interest and act to cancel student debt.”
The trio based their appeal to the White House on an analysis performed by the Democratic Party-affiliated Roosevelt Institute on the economic impact of forcing borrowers to resume student loan payments on February 1, 2022. According to the study, if the resumption of payments were implemented, “$85.48 billion annually will be stripped from 18,125,800 student loan borrowers’ budgets.”
Furthermore, the Roosevelt Institute says the income retained by borrowers from the repayment pause improved their “economic security” and, above all, “injected necessary consumer spending across communities during the pandemic, complementing the monetary and fiscal policies intended to prevent the American economy from slipping into an unnecessarily long recession.”
In other words, the proposal to extend the payment pause, as well as the proposal to cancel up to $50,000 of student debt per borrower, is aimed at “pumping billions of dollars per year back into our national economy,” not addressing the imposition of the financial burden of higher education upon the public that is a hallmark of American capitalist society.
Expressing the opposition within the ruling establishment to the proposal from Warren, Schumer and Pressley, Forbes published an article on December 7 entitled, “No, Biden Won’t Extend Student Loan Relief Again.”
Senior Contributor Zack Friedman wrote, “These senators know that the Biden administration is unlikely to extend student loan relief indefinitely. Precedent suggests if there were any extension, it would be date-specific. Previously, members of Congress have called for specific extensions beyond January 31, 2022, including extensions to both March 31, 2022, and September 30, 2022. For some reason, this letter doesn’t have a specific date.”
Right-wing political figures in the Republican Party are using the discussion about the student loan crisis as an opportunity to attack the financial aid programs altogether. The Wall Street Journal quoted a congressional aide who remarked that the response of several Republicans was to say of the students who graduate with degrees that earn modest incomes while carrying massive debt, “Why are they able to borrow so much if they’re only able to make that much?”
Other unnamed Republicans, the Journal said, “largely favor shrinking the government’s role in funding student loans.” The former chief operating officer of the office of Federal Student Aid, A. Wayne Johnson, who is now a Republican campaigning for a US congressional seat in Georgia, called the Plus federal student loan program a “runaway train.”
ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS FOR OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. JOE BIDEN IS RIGHT THERE RUNNING THEIR SHOW!
How Wealth Inequality Spiraled Out of Control | Robert Reich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOI8RuhW7q0
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.
According to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the SALT tax provision will overwhelmingly benefit the top 10 percent of income earners, with virtually nothing going to the remaining 90 percent, i.e., the working class and lower-middle class. The measure will particularly benefit the top one percent, those who make over $867,000 a year. They will see a tax cut in the tens of thousands of dollars.
BIDENOMICS.... these are the clowns CNN wants to see replace senile Joe. Shocking!
Tucker: This is how dumb CNN is
Analysis: Joe Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ Would Make the Rich Even Richer
Wharton Study: Bidenflation Will Cost Families $3,500 This Year, Low-Incomes Hardest Hit
Bidenflation will cost families an additional $3,500 this year, impacting low-income families the hardest, a study released Wednesday showed.
According to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School’s budget model, Americans on average will have to spend $3,500 more in 2021 to sustain their consumption of years past in 2019 and 2020.
The study also suggests low-income families will be disproportionally impacted. The study estimated lower-income families will have to spend seven percent more money to maintain their previous consumption patterns, while higher-income families will only have to spend six percent more.
“Lower-income groups spent relatively more on food, energy, and shelter, while higher-income groups spent relatively more on other commodities and services,” the study states.
Across the consumption basket of income groups, the bottom 20 percent of families saw the price of their consumption increase 6.8 percent, or $2,120.
The top five percent of income-earning families will only experience a 6.1 percent ($7,636) increase in consumption.
Meanwhile, the top five percent of income-earning families will only experience a 6.1 percent ($7,636) increase in consumption.
“Since higher-income groups had a bigger increase in expenditures in all categories, they also saw a bigger increase in total expenditure,” the study read. “However, because of variation in the composition of consumption bundles, we find that higher-income households had smaller percentage increases in their total expenditure.”
The Penn Wharton study comes after Bidenflation has reached a 40 year-high, increasing 6.8 percent from 2020. The cost of energy, food, housing, transpiration, vehicles, clothing, and hotels have all increased under President Biden.
Yet Americans do not have faith Biden will squash inflation. A Monday poll revealed 53 percent of Americans believe the economy, due to inflation, is becoming worse, while only 15 percent believe Biden is improving the economy:
Income doesn’t change the perception of inflation. Americans earning less than $50,000 were just as likely to say inflation is a very serious problem as those earning between $50,000 and $100,000 or those earning more than $100,000.
A Sunday poll showed a majority (56 percent) of voters do not think Biden is concerned about American families incurring massive price increases. The numbers among just Democrats are no more favorable. Only 48 percent of Democrats believe Biden is concerned about inflation.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø
THERE IS NO GREATER THREAT TO AMERICAN, THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS OR AMERICAN BORDERS THAN AS PERPETRATED BY THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY
BIDEN CRONY JEFF 'BEZOSHEAD' BEZOS RECENTLY HANDED THE PHONY OBAMA LIBRARY A 'GIFT' OF $100 MILLION. JOE LOVES THE SMELL OF THAT! HE'S PLANNING A 'PRESDIENTIAL LIBRARY' AS WELL.
Make Amazon Pay wrote in a list of demands on its website: “The pandemic has exposed how Amazon places profits ahead of workers, society, and our planet. Amazon takes too much and gives back too little. It is time to Make Amazon Pay.”
Pelosi: Dems Are Using Cash for Kids As 'Leverage' to Pass BBB
(CNSNews.com) - Unless Senate Democrats join House Democrats in passing the partisan "Build Back Better Act (BBB)," there will be no more direct cash payments to millions of American families with children.
On Tuesday, a reporter asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) if she would consider a stand-alone bill extending the monthly Child Tax Credit payments so the direct cash infusions can continue in 2022.
Pelosi admitted that she's using the payments as "leverage" to force passage of the Democrat agenda, much of contained in the multi-trillion-dollar BBB:
"Of course, we could pass that in the House," said Pelosi, who repeatedly insists that everything she does is “for the children."
Whether we could pass it in the Senate remains to be seen. But I don't want to let anybody off the hook on the BBB to say, well, we covered that one thing, so now the pressure is off. I think that that is really important leverage in a discussion on BBB that the children and their families will suffer without that payment.
Not everybody gets it on a monthly basis, but those who need it the most do. And so, we're just still optimistic about BBB passing. And perhaps even if it were after the first of the year, which I hope it is not, that it could be retroactive if it's early enough in the first of the year.
The Child Tax Credit gives qualifying families up to $3,600 a year for every child under age six and up to $3,000 a year for every child 6-17.
Normally, the credit is deducted from a family's taxable income. But Democrats, in the American Rescue Plan, raised the amount from $2,000 and delivered the credit in the form of monthly cash payments.
They also made families with little or no income -- those who don't pay any taxes -- eligible for the monthly payments.
Yesterday's (Dec. 15) payment could be the last one of its kind, unless Democrats pass the BBB, which extends the cash infusions for one year -- in addition to establishing other big government programs such as subsidized child care, paid family and medical leave, free pre-school for toddlers, help with home purchases, the green new deal, and much more -- all of it supposedly "fully paid for," as President Biden and his supporters insist.
Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee argue that "[g]ood jobs and rising paychecks do more to lift Americans out of poverty than dependence on never-ending government checks. There are a number of factors contributing to poverty. Rewarding work and helping the poor become self-sufficient is the surest path out of poverty," they say.
Republicans say Democrats intend to make the monthly cash payments permanent, starting with the one-year extension contained in BBB.
Republicans reject the Democrat claim that the Child Tax Credit has reduced child poverty by 40 percent.
"There is no sound evidence to back up this claim. Democrats cite a flawed study by the Poverty Center at Columbia University that assumes all eligible children are enrolled in the program -– which they are not," they say.
"In July, a left-leaning organization noted that only 720,000 of the approximately 7 million kids that are eligible but not already registered with the IRS were successfully receiving new child tax credit -- and that 90 percent or more of the kids the IRS needed to reach have not been reached."
Republicans also point to studies showing "that many recipients have used the Child Tax Credit to pad their savings or save for retirement. While commendable, that’s not its purpose," they say.
Moreover, the monthly payments are believed to be contributing to the shortage of willing workers.
ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS FOR OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. JOE BIDEN IS RIGHT THERE RUNNING THEIR SHOW!
How Wealth Inequality Spiraled Out of Control | Robert Reich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOI8RuhW7q0
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.
According to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the SALT tax provision will overwhelmingly benefit the top 10 percent of income earners, with virtually nothing going to the remaining 90 percent, i.e., the working class and lower-middle class. The measure will particularly benefit the top one percent, those who make over $867,000 a year. They will see a tax cut in the tens of thousands of dollars.
“I don’t know that anybody since John Rockefeller has had as unfeathered power as Mark Zuckerberg has right now where no one stands up to him inside his company, no one stands up to him on the board, no one stands up to him in Congress, no one stands up to him at the White House, no one really stands up to him in the media. He is a robber baron. Elon Musk is a robber baron. These people are robber barons,” Scarborough proclaimed. JOE SCARBOROUGH
PAST THEIR LIES.... THE REAL ECONOMY:
WHY ARE THEY AFRAID? ECONOMIC PERIL IF RATES GO HIGHER, SMALL BUSINESSES FEAR 2022, RENTS HIGHER
Market Chaos is Coming
Tucker: This is how dumb CNN is
Analysis: Joe Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ Would Make the Rich Even Richer
President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better Act” is set to give a tax cut to about 67 percent of the nation’s richest Americans — those earning more than $885,000 every year.
A new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reveals that the filibuster-proof reconciliation package will give a tax cut to two-thirds of the top one percent of earners even as the top one percent now hold more wealth than the entire American middle class.
“This is true despite the fact that Build Back Better would raise taxes substantially for the extremely rich (mainly those making over $10 million per year),” the analysis states.
In effect, those in the top one percent would receive an average tax cut of more than $16,000 in 2022 under Biden’s plan. The tax cuts for the wealthy would be a result of the plan’s increasing the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap.
As Breitbart News has reported, the plan amounts to a $625 billion tax cut for the wealthiest of Americans living primarily in blue states.
“In other words, the largest tax cuts in dollars in Build Back Better would go to households in the top five percent and especially the top one percent,” the analysis continues. “Many make millions of dollars of annual income and tens of millions of dollars in assets.”
At the same time, Biden’s plan would squeeze an extra $200 billion out of American taxpayers by mostly targeting working and middle class earners with more Internal Revenue Services (IRS) audits.
The plan ensures nearly 600,000 more working and middle class Americans earning $75,000 or less a year would be audited by the IRS. Of those new IRS audits, more than 313,000 would target the poorest of Americans who earn $25,000 or less a year.
Biden’s “Build Back Better Act” has already passed the House, thanks entirely to Democrat support, and now awaits scrutiny in the United States Senate.
In 2017, former President Trump had the SALT deduction capped at $10,000. Since then, Democrats have sought to deliver their wealthy, blue state donors with a massive tax cut by eliminating the cap altogether or greatly increasing it.
Biden, for instance, had sought to include tax cuts for his billionaire donors in a Chinese coronavirus relief package earlier this year. The plan was ultimately cut from the package. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in May 2020, also tried to include the plan in a coronavirus relief package.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
House Democrats pass stripped-down social welfare bill with massive tax cut for the rich
On Friday morning, the House of Representatives passed its version of President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” social welfare and climate bill. As expected, the measure was approved on a party-line vote, with 220 Democrats voting “Yes” and all 212 Republicans voting “No.” One Democrat, Jared Golden of Maine, a conservative former Marine who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, broke ranks and voted in opposition to the bill.
Golden had announced that he would oppose the bill because it included a massive tax break for the wealthy. The outcome of months of internal Democratic Party wrangling was the decision of the Biden White House and the party leadership to strip the bill of all major tax increases opposed by big business and slash the top line figure for social programs and climate protection in half, from $3.25 trillion to $1.75 trillion over 10 years.
That, however, did not satisfy the Wall Street and corporate interests that dictate government policy and control both major parties. Earlier this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi incorporated into the bill a measure demanded by wealthy donors in high-tax states such as New York, New Jersey and California. It was the lifting of a $10,000 cap on deductions on federal income taxes to compensate for state and local taxes. The cap was imposed as part of the Trump tax bill passed in December of 2017, which slashed taxes for corporations and the wealthy.
Until then, there was no limit on the amount of federal tax deductions for state and local taxes that wealthy people in generally pro-Democratic high-tax states could claim by itemizing their federal tax returns. In imposing the limit, Trump and the Republicans were targeting states that historically vote “blue” in federal elections.
This infuriated the Democrats’ wealthy backers, who demanded that the Biden budget bill raise the limit on so-called SALT (state and local tax) deductions. The Democrats acceded by adding to the bill a provision raising the limit to $80,000 for each of the next nine years.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this tax windfall for the wealthy will cost the federal government $285 billion over the 10-year span covered by the bill, making it the second most costly item in the legislation. It is topped only by a combined $390 billion for universal pre-school for three- and four-year-old children and limited subsidies for child care.
It is considerably higher than the allocation for clean energy and climate resilience ($220 billion), four weeks of paid family and medical leave ($195 billion), clean energy and electricity tax credits ($190 billion), affordable housing ($170 billion), Medicaid home- and community-based services ($150 billion), a one-year extension of the expanded child tax credit ($130 billion), and tax credits for health insurance premiums under Obamacare ($125 billion).
It would help pay for programs that were severely cut or dropped outright from the bill under pressure from big business and its most open mouthpieces in the Democratic Party, such as senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. These include free community college (eliminated); the ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry, thereby lowering their costs (reduced to a shell program affecting only a handful of drugs and not even starting until 2024); and Medicare coverage for dental, hearing and vision (reduced to limited subsidies for hearing aids).
According to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the SALT tax provision will overwhelmingly benefit the top 10 percent of income earners, with virtually nothing going to the remaining 90 percent, i.e., the working class and lower-middle class. The measure will particularly benefit the top one percent, those who make over $867,000 a year. They will see a tax cut in the tens of thousands of dollars.
“Anything you do to eliminate the SALT cap is going to be regressive, because that tax is overwhelmingly paid by very high-income people,” said Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center. “Anything you do to lower that tax doesn’t matter for most people.”
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) reported that a family of four in Washington D.C. making $1 million per year would receive 10 times as much tax relief next year from expanding the state and local tax deductions as a middle-class family would receive from an expansion of the child tax credit. The CRFB said that two-thirds of households making more than $1 million a year would get a tax cut under the legislation because of the increase in the state and local property tax deduction.
Pointing to the brazen hypocrisy of Biden and the Democratic Party, Marx Goldwein, senior policy director at the CRFB, said, “We’re debating about whether to give lower- and middle-class families a thousand dollars more a year through the child tax credit, while giving upper-class families $10,000 or more through SALT. That’s counter to everything the Democrats have been saying Build Back Better is about and everything they said about the Trump tax cuts.”
According to a report from the Tax Foundation, raising the SALT cap would more than offset other tax increases for the wealthy in 2022 included in the House bill. These include a 15 percent minimum corporate tax, a 1 percent tax on stock buybacks, increased taxes on US companies’ foreign profits, and a surtax of 5 percent on those with adjusted gross income over $10 million and 8 percent on those making more than $25 million.
In a column in the Financial Times on Thursday, Edward Luce alluded to the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics and linked it to the Build Back Better bill:
The result is a bill that caters best to the most powerful slice of Americans—the very wealthy. They can sleep easy now that the carried interest loophole, which allows private equity partners to be taxed at lower than ordinary income rates—as Warren Buffett pointed out, they pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries—is probably safe. As it stands, the bill will also give wealthy Americans a bigger tax cut than they got from Trump’s big 2017 tax bill.
Even this miserable travesty of social reform will be further gutted if not blocked outright in the Senate, where passage will require the support of all 50 Democrats. Neither Manchin nor Sinema has signed on to the bill, the former having declared his opposition to even a completely inadequate a four-week paid leave provision, while calling for means testing and work requirements for other social benefits.
The so-called “progressives”—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, the more than 100-strong House Progressive Caucus—capitulated to the demand of Biden and the most right-wing factions in the Democratic caucuses to pass the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. This bill was backed by virtually every corporate lobby group, without having secured the agreement of Manchin and Sinema to support Senate passage of the broader “Build Back Better” social spending bill, against which the corporations have waged a massive lobbying campaign.
Sanders, for his part, has denounced the inclusion of the SALT provision in the House bill but is supporting a modified version in the Senate bill, according to which eligibility for expanded tax deductions would be limited to people making less than $400,000 a year. On the other hand, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, widely known as the “senator from Wall Street,” is supporting an even bigger deduction than that provided by the House.
BEZOSHEAD REDEFINES THE TERM 'CAPITALIST PIG'
Amazon, this year alone, petitioned for nearly 3,000 employment-based green cards for their foreign visa workers and foreign nationals seeking to take high-paying white collar jobs. Microsoft and Google, likewise, petitioned for more than 3,300 employment-based green cards.
WHAT IF THIS PIG HANDED OVER TO THE TORNADO VICTIMS THE SAME
AMOUNT OF LOOT HE SQUANDERED TAKING
A TEN MINUTE JOY RIDE INTO SPACE???
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, every candidate pledged to repeal the Trump tax cut for the rich. Biden has repeatedly called his domestic agenda a “blue collar” program. While declaring ad nauseam that “I am a capitalist,” who has nothing against people becoming billionaires, he has called on Wall Street to “pay their fair share.”
As a senator, Biden vigorously voted for several similar bills. In short, based on his voting record, Joe Biden is not (and never was) a champion of disadvantaged Americans, unless you consider multi-billion-dollar credit card corporations and millionaires “disadvantaged.” Chris Talgo
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY LOVES THEIR
TECH BILLIONAIRES FOR OPEN BORDERS!!!
Scarborough: Zuckerberg, Musk ‘Robber Barons’; Tax Cuts ‘Grotesque’
MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough blasted Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla founder and space entrepreneur Elon Musk on Thursday.
Scarborough described the two tech giants as “robber barons.” He also lamented the tax cuts from the 1980s and 1990s, which he supported, as well as the GOP’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, arguing they “created the greatest income redistribution in the history of the planet.”
“I don’t know that anybody since John Rockefeller has had as unfeathered power as Mark Zuckerberg has right now where no one stands up to him inside his company, no one stands up to him on the board, no one stands up to him in Congress, no one stands up to him at the White House, no one really stands up to him in the media. He is a robber baron. Elon Musk is a robber baron. These people are robber barons,” Scarborough proclaimed.
“And we have seen the greatest transfer of wealth, which Republicans love to say, ‘Oh, we don’t like to redistribute income.’ Oh, really? Well, the tax policies that I have supported through the ’80s and ’90s and continued to be supported by Republicans in the 21s century have created the greatest income redistribution in the history of this planet from middle-class Americans to the Elon Musks of the world,” he added. “It’s grotesque.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent
“Amazon won’t let us leave”: Latest US tornado disaster exposes ruling elite’s indifference to life
“Amazon won’t let us leave” - The final text message sent by Larry Virden to his partner of 13 years, Cherie Jones, before he and five of his coworkers were killed Friday night when a tornado destroyed Amazon’s fulfillment center in Edwardsville, Illinois
The outbreak of tornadoes which ripped through the central United States Friday night into Saturday morning, leaving a path of death and destruction which stretches from Arkansas through Kentucky, has exposed the reality of brutal sweatshop conditions in the heart of America and the naked indifference of the ruling elite to workers' lives.
The deadliest December tornado outbreak in US history has killed at least 88 people, including children, with many more still missing. The death toll is expected to rise beyond 100 as recovery workers sift through the hundreds of miles of rubble and the critically injured succumb to their wounds. Homes were blown away like little more than pieces of paper as families desperately sheltered in their bathrooms and factories crumpled with workers still inside.
In scenes reminiscent of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire disaster more than a century ago–in which 146 garment workers in New York City were killed because exit doors were locked–workers report that they were trapped in their factories by management as the storms bore down on them.
Hours of advanced storm warnings were dismissed by plant managers at the Amazon fulfillment center in Edwardsville, Illinois and the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky so they could keep holiday production running full bore with Christmas just two weeks away. Production could not be halted for a single shift to ensure everyone’s safety, lest it cut into the corporate bottom line.
Workers at the Mayfield plant report that management had threatened to fire anyone who left to seek shelter after multiple tornado warnings were issued for the area. “Even with weather like this, you’re still going to fire me?” 20-year-old worker Evan Johnson asked a manager. Their response, “Yes.” According to Johnson, a roll call was taken to determine if anyone had left.
Forklift operator Mark Saxton, 37, confirmed to NBC News that workers were not given the option to go home but sent back to the line after the first tornado warning. “That’s the thing. We should have been able to leave,” Saxton explained. “The first warning came, and they just had us go in the hallway. After the warning, they had us go back to work. They never offered us to go home.”
When the tornado hit, it leveled the Kentucky candle factory, trapping dozens of workers under the rubble and leaving eight dead. Workers were slaving away for as little as $8 an hour on 10-12 hour shifts with mandatory overtime. There were also work release prisoners working in the factory under the guard of a deputy who was killed in the collapse.
For its part, Amazon refused to cancel the shift in Edwardsville. As the threat grew more dire, management tried to hustle workers into shelter areas in the interior of the building, but the building was too flimsy to withstand the storm and it collapsed around them, killing six.
As news of the destruction of the Amazon facility in Illinois broke, workers from across the country took to an internal company message board to express their concerns about the lack of safety precautions.
“I have been here six-and-a-half years and have never once been involved in a tornado safety drill on my shift, as well as have not taken part in a fire safety drill in about two years,” one employee wrote, according to The Intercept. “This whole situation has got me thinking our site really needs to revise its safety drills because you never know when disaster and tragedy can strike.”
Amazon has pledged $1 million to the recovery effort in Edwardsville, equivalent to what founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos adds to his net worth every 7 minutes. While his workers were being killed in a tornado, Bezos used his weekend to host a lavish party and launch his Blue Origin rocket into space. Bezos reportedly spent $5.5 billion on his space ship company.
Tornados are not a rare or unpredictable phenomenon in the central and southern United States. Meteorologists can predict their formation and path with significant accuracy. In fact, the first tornado warning came from the National Weather Service early Thursday morning and local news stations in St. Louis, Missouri and Paducah, Kentucky were reporting on the possibility of storms as early as Wednesday.
The damage which these storms routinely cause is not inevitable since with the proper material and techniques homes and factories can be built to withstand high winds and debris. Emergency shelters can be built to protect anyone caught in the path of these storms. However, in the pursuit of profit, these more expensive options are often ignored, and cheap housing, such as trailer homes, is allowed to be built in tornado-prone areas.
What this latest disaster–and the repeated deadly impact of tornadoes–exposes is the complete indifference of the American ruling class to the lives of the working class. The homicidal attitude which they hold is that workers are expendable. If they die, they die; another worker can take their place and insurance will cover the rest.
This homicidal indifference to life has been on full display with the policies pursued throughout the COVID-19 pandemic which have resulted in the deaths of more than 800,000 Americans and counting. Employers across the country have sought to cover up outbreaks and suppress information about workers killed. More than 3,600 health care workers were killed by the virus in the first year of the pandemic alone. Hundreds of teachers and school staff have fallen to the virus as schools have served as superspreader sites across the country. Amazon admitted in October 2020 that 20,000 of its employees had tested positive for COVID-19. The number who have died remains unknown as the company continues to conceal the numbers.
The opposition to lockdowns pursued by President Trump has been continued under President Biden with his “vaccines only” strategy in the face of more infectious variants, resulting in more deaths in the second year of the pandemic than in the first. On average, nearly 1,300 Americans continue to die every day from COVID-19.
Just like the victims of coronavirus, those killed in this weekend’s storms are the victims of social murder. While the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911 sparked a movement for regulations to improve workplace safety, there will be nothing of the sort this time around. Amazon can expect a mere slap-on-the-wrist fine from health and safety regulators, something which executives at the trillion-dollar global corporation already factor in as a cost of doing business.
Workers at Amazon and in every workplace across the country must form rank-and-file safety committees to hold management to account for their crimes and ensure safe working conditions, whether the threat comes from the weather or COVID-19. The wealth of billionaires like Bezos must be expropriated and large corporations like Amazon placed under the democratic control of the working class. If the lives of the working class are to take precedence over profit, the workers themselves must take charge of society and run the economy in accordance with human need.
THIS DEMOCRAT PARTY PIG BEZOS WILL NOT BE GOING WITHOUT A ROOF!
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
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
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.
Inside Jeff Bezos Mansions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVURsBK1-zY
Jeff Bezos' $400 Million Flying Fox Yacht
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRYEcushHjc
Inside Jeff Bezos' $21,000,000 Car Collection
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu-Vy9Q6U4A
‘I Want Them to Answer for This:’ Families of Amazon Workers Killed in Tornado Speak Out Against Company
E-commerce giant Amazon is reportedly facing criticism and scrutiny by the families of workers killed and injured when an Illinois warehouse collapsed during a tornado over its safety policies. The building collapse killed at least six Amazon employees, with the sister of one casualty saying: “I want them to answer for this, I want this to be a starting point of places taking the lives of their employees seriously and treating them as more than a number.”
Breitbart News previously reported that the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union criticized e-commerce giant Amazon, saying that workers should never have been asked to work during severe weather conditions that resulted in the roof of an Illinois warehouse collapsing, killing at least six workers.
Now, more are coming forward to criticize the company including the families of the six workers who were killed. The sister of one victim commented on social media: “This never would have happened if they cared about lives over productivity.”
Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement that the company is “deeply saddened” by the deaths. One of the victims, Clayton Cope, 29, spoke to his family on the phone before the building in the town of Edwardsville, Illinois collapsed.
Clayton’s mother Carla said that she called her son to warn him about the incoming tornado. Carla told the NBC affiliate station KSDK: “We told him it looked like the storm was heading that way and that he needed to get to shelter.” Clayton reportedly told his mother he would first warn his co-workers.
Now many are beginning to raise questions about whether adequate shelter was available for workers, whether they were advised to go there immediately, and whether workers should have been in the warehouse at all during the weather warning.
David Kosiak, 26, who has worked at the facility for three months, commented: “I was just getting in the building and they started screaming, “Shelter in place!’ We were in the bathrooms. That’s where they sent us.”
He added: “It sounded like a train came through the building. The ceiling tiles came flying down. It was very loud. They made us shelter in place until we left — it was at least two-and-a-half hours in there.”
The sister of Clayton Cope told BBC News that from the conversation between her brother and her parents, he and the other workers were not immediately told to shelter after the first warning siren. “Everyone knows that all Amazon cares about is productivity,” Cope’s sister wrote on social media.
She added that she didn’t believe her brother would have died if the company “got them [the employees] to safety after the storm started to get bad and took it seriously.”
“No one would have been frantically getting to the shelter last minute and my brother wouldn’t have had to help people get to the shelter and put his life at risk,” she added. “I want them to answer for this, I want this to be a starting point of places taking the lives of their employees seriously and treating them as more than a number.”
Read more at BBC News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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