America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Friday, December 17, 2021
NANCY PELOSI HOWLS IT'S A FREE MARKET ECONOMY AND BILLIONAIRES SHOULD PLUNDER WITH IMPUNITY - Time’s person of the year Elon Musk: Worshipping the pandemic profiteer
Time’s person of the year Elon Musk: Worshipping the pandemic profiteer
“Since the finance aristocracy made the laws, was at the head of the administration of the state, had command of all the organized public authorities, dominated public opinion through the actual state of affairs and through the press, the same prostitution, the same shameless cheating, the same mania to get rich was repeated in every sphere, from the court to the Café Borgne to get rich not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others, Clashing every moment with the bourgeois laws themselves, an unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of bourgeois society—lusts wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes crapuleux [debauched], where money, filth, and blood commingle. The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society.” — Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France
Time magazine, expressing the spirit of the rich and complacent, utterly indifferent to human suffering, has declared Elon Musk their 2021 person of the year. Musk is the epitome of the most loathsome creatures on planet Earth: the pandemic profiteers, those who have seen their wealth skyrocket while millions of human beings lost their lives, because capitalist governments all over the world refused to carry out elementary public health measures in order to fuel the rise of the financial markets.
The five million official COVID deaths count for nothing, in the eyes of the corporate media, for which Time speaks, compared to the $250 billion increase in the wealth of Elon Musk—$50,000 for every life snuffed out by the pandemic.
Musk’s accomplishments for the year include being investigated for fatal car crashes involving the fictitious “full self-driving” feature on his company Tesla’s cars, pretending that Tesla was developing and going to sell a robot, and watching speculation in his company’s stock elevate him to the position of richest man in the world.
According to Time: “The man from the future where technology makes all things possible is a throwback to our glorious industrial past, before America stagnated and stopped producing anything but rules, restrictions, limits, obstacles and Facebook.”
Time envisions Musk as a modern robber baron whose ruthless determination will transcend meager things like law and society to shape the future. If ordinary workers are killed or maimed in the process, Time considers it a small price for progress. One of the many problems with Time’s narrative is that Musk’s fortune has almost nothing to do with production.
Over the course of the pandemic, Elon Musk’s wealth grew from a mere $25 billion in early 2020 to just over $300 billion in October 2021 before settling to a mere $250 billion today. Detached entirely from any developments in production, Tesla share price grew from only $86 at the end of 2019 to over $1,200 in November 2021. Only in the second quarter of 2021 did Tesla make its first net profits from auto sales without relying on government emission credits or speculation in cryptocurrency.
The cars that roll off of Tesla’s line have a reputation of shoddy production and glaring design flaws. According to tesladeaths.com, 10 people have died using the Tesla’s autopilot feature currently being sold as “Full Self-Driving.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is currently investigating 11 incidents since 2018 where Teslas using autopilot crashed into parked emergency vehicles.
Tesla’s total market valuation is now almost $1 trillion, roughly five times the valuation of the largest car company by revenue, Toyota. Tesla produces less than 1 million cars a year compared to more than 7.5 million by Toyota. At this point, the main value of Tesla’s stock is not from any actual innovation but the conviction that its price will continue to rise. It has become the most important single driver of the upward thrust of world financial markets.
Musk has benefited wildly from the government decision to prop up financial markets at all cost. In response to the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve and other central banks have created a deluge of risk-free money seeking profitable investment, through their policies of quantitative easing. Keeping interest rates low and backing markets through government purchase of toxic assets created the speculative storm for Tesla’s rise, but why did lightning strike that minor car company? Why has its carnival barker CEO been elevated to unprecedented heights of wealth that so enamor the editors of Time?
The Time piece presents Musk as an innovative genius and unquestioningly repeats some of his most absurd statements. Musk claims SpaceX will land its first manned mission to Mars in five years. Given transit times and launch windows, a Mars mission would have to already be in production. The fuel needed to take off from Mars would be roughly 20 times what it takes to return from the Moon, and would, of course, have to be transported all the way from Earth, but Musk optimistically predicts that his company SpaceX will manage to land on the Moon in three years, repeating NASA’s achievement of 1969 a mere 55 years later. As a courtesy, Time didn’t bring up Musk’s ramblings about solving urban traffic congestion with elevators and tunnels.
In Musk’s pseudo-scientific musings, which have attracted a following on social media, an increasingly desperate and disoriented layer of the middle class seeks salvation in technological solutions to the many crises of capitalism; solutions that require no fundamental change in society, nor even any discomfort for the comfortable. Reeling from the blows of the pandemic, social unrest and economic turmoil, this layer is looking for a capitalist messiah.
According to the Time profile of Musk: “This was the year we emerged from the hundred-year plague only to find there was no normal to go back to, a year that felt like the cusp of a brave or terrifying new world, with nobody in charge and everything up for renegotiation.” It would surely surprise the families and loved ones of the 1,200 Americans dying every day from the pandemic that “we” have emerged from the disaster, but this is the claim that underpins the writers’ quasi-religious ecstasy.
“Musk is our avatar of infinite possibility,” they gush, “our usher to the remade world, where shopworn practices are cast aside and the unprecedented becomes logical, where Earth and humanity can still be saved.” Potential barriers to this paradise like public health or democracy should not get in the way: “Perhaps this vision of the greater good comes with a human cost. But if many never voted or signed up for Musk’s wild zero-gravity ride, that is of no consequence to him.”
Time’s sentiment is echoed by the arch-imperialist Thomas Friedman in a recent New York Times column headlined: “Want to save the Earth? We Need a Lot More Elon Musks.” Describing the development of vaccines against COVID-19, Friedman wrote, “We fought back with the only tools we have that are as big and powerful as Mother Nature—Father Profit and New Tech.” In Friedman’s view, climate change will only be solved “when Father Profit and risk-taking entrepreneurs produce transformative technologies that enable ordinary people to have extraordinary impacts on our climate without sacrificing much—by just being good consumers of these new technologies.”
It is striking that in the second year of the pandemic Time did not do the obvious and give their award to the frontline health care workers who have saved so many lives across the world, nor the scientists and technicians that developed life-saving vaccines. If such awards must be given, an appropriate candidate would be the Chinese health care workers, who by putting the zero-COVID policy into practice and eliminating local transmission have saved millions of lives.
In sharp contrast to those fighting the pandemic, Elon Musk demonstrated his genius at the beginning by predicting there would be “zero new cases” by the end of April 2020. Throughout the pandemic he has tweeted anti-vaccine claims and defied public health orders, leading to widespread outbreaks at the Fremont, California, Tesla plant. His tweets daring the government to arrest him were met with praise from then President Trump and California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom.
He regularly uses his social media accounts to manipulate stock and cryptocurrency prices, which resulted in a slap on the wrist from the SEC. When Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon tweeted that Musk should pay income taxes, the man of the year retorted with a juvenile obscenity.
The financial markets don’t care one way or the other about Musk’s vulgarity, but they are drawn to his promise of a future where “shopworn practices” like safety standards are “cast aside” and where wealth never needs to pay lip service to democracy.
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.”
THE BARONESS OF LA RAZA NANCY PELOSI AND HER TESLA STOCK CON
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D., Calif.) husband hit pay dirt on Monday as Tesla's valuation rose to $1 trillion.
NANCY PELOSI'S SO CALLED 'FREE MARKET' FOR CRONIES:
The news comes as Pelosi spearheads legislation that doles out tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to the electric vehicle industry, including Tesla, with provisions to build charging stations for cars and incentivize electric car purchases through tax credits.
“I don’t know that anybody since John Rockefeller has had an
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
The president shared a clip Monday highlighting a CBS 60 Minutes report featuring author and Breitbart senior contributor Peter Schweizer’s investigation into Pelosi and her husband participating in at least eight different stock IPOs while in Congress.
How Wealth Inequality Spiraled Out of Control | Robert Reich
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
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said members of Congress and their spouses should not be barred from trading individual stocks as part of the STOCK Act, citing a “free market economy.”
During a press briefing on Wednesday, in response to a report from Insider showing that 49 members of Congress (Democrats and Republicans) have failed to disclose their transactions in accordance with Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012, Pelosi was asked if members of Congress and their spouses should be banned from trading individual stocks, thereby preventing insider trading,
“We’re a free-market economy,” Pelosi explained. “They should be able to participate in that.”
Pelosi did note that members of Congress should be revealing their stock transactions, which would show possible insider trading:
As noted by Insider, the STOCK Act of 2012, legislation Andrew Breitbart heavily backed, was designed to combat possible insider trading and conflicts of interests among members of Congress, forcing “lawmakers to be more transparent about their personal financial dealings”:
A key provision of the law mandates that lawmakers publicly — and quickly — disclose any stock trade made by themselves, a spouse, or a dependent child.
But many members of Congress have not fully complied with the law. They offer excuses including ignorance of the law, clerical errors, and mistakes by an accountant. Insider has chronicled this widespread nature of this phenomenon in a new project, “Conflicted Congress.”
Lawmakers who violate the STOCK Act could be fined up to $200, a small penalty that has led several ethics watchdog groups to call for harsher penalties or an all-out ban on lawmakers from trading stocks – a practice by which Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul, have become considerably wealthy. This year, for instance, weeks prior to the House Judiciary Committee’s vote on the antitrust legislation aimed at some major Big Tech companies, Paul Pelosi began “exercising call options to acquire 4,000 shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, at a strike price of $1,200,” according to Bloomberg. The trade netted Pelosi a $4.8 million gain.
Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer has been a heavy proponent of the STOCK Act since its inception with his 2011 book Throw Them All Out, which formed the basis for a 60 Minutes report about unethical stock trades in Congress.
Pelosi: Dems Are Using Cash for Kids As 'Leverage' to Pass BBB
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi joins other Democrats in raising awareness of the Child Tax Credit, in Los Angeles on July 15, 2021 -- the day the first payments went out. (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)
(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
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
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.
(Chart via Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget)
“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
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.”
“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!
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.
The Amazon distribution center is partially collapsed after being hit by a tornado on Friday, Dec. 10, 2021 in Edwardsville, Ill. (Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP)
Jeff Bezos speaks about his flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard into space during a press conference on July 20, 2021 in Van Horn, Texas. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
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.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolanor contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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