"Cancel Culture," Race and the Greed of the Billionaire Class

Nike's attempt to prove they care about the poor (screenshot from this ad). Nike will manufacture as many poor as it takes to manufacture shoes for less than 50 cents per hour. 

A fake MacDonalds ad mocking fake corporate caring

by Thomas Neuburger

"The elites will discuss race. They will not discuss class."
—Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is the latest to weigh in on the "cancel culture" wars, saying what any number of widely cancelled others have said before him (for example, Matt Taibbi in this public post; he's even more pointedly analytical in a later, subscriber-only piece).

But Hedges summarizes the situation so well, he's well worth quoting. From his new perch at Robert Sheer's Sheerpost he writes:

The cancel culture — the phenomenon of removing or canceling people, brands or shows from the public domain because of offensive statements or ideologies — is not a threat to the ruling class. Hundreds of corporations, nearly all in the hands of white executives and white board members, enthusiastically pumped out messages on social media condemning racism and demanding justice after George Floyd was choked to death by police in Minneapolis. Police, which along with the prison system are one of the primary instruments of social control over the poor, have taken the knee, along with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of the serially criminal JPMorgan Chase, where only 4 percent of the top executives are Black. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world whose corporation, Amazon, paid no federal income taxes last year and who fires workers that attempt to unionize and tracks warehouse laborers as if they were prisoners, put a “Black Lives Matter” banner on Amazon’s home page.

The rush by the ruling elites to profess solidarity with the protestors and denounce racist rhetoric and racist symbols, supporting the toppling of Confederate statues and banning the Confederate flag, are symbolic assaults on white supremacy. Alone, these gestures will do nothing to reverse the institutional racism that is baked into the DNA of American society. The elites will discuss race. They will not discuss class.

To repeat: Hundreds of corporations, nearly all in the hands of white executives and white board members, enthusiastically pumped out messages on social media condemning racism and demanding justice after George Floyd was choked to death by police in Minneapolis.

In addition, we're drowning in corporate self-polishing-apple ads, like those from Nike and MacDonalds touting how much they care about the market that buys their products, even as they exploit that market for all they can get take it for.

Is it not more than obvious at this point, that corporate America and the purchased "free-market" liberals they keep in office are using this racially charged moment — a moment that should be racially charged — to distract from the other crisis facing America, the one where "minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state," to cite just one of the hundred brutal tortures they inflict on us daily?

Make no mistake: The very very wealthy want even more of our money, want us to have even less control of our government than we have today, and they're more than happy — eager, in fact — to see us fully distracted with worry over which left-sympathizing writer isn't sufficiently sympathetic to violence, based on a tweet.

"But Isn't It Racist to Say Calling Out Racism Is Racist?"

Along with the good and sincere, there are many bad actors here. Along with the principled freedom-of-speech advocates (many, but not all, of those who signed this letter, for example), there are also a great many racists and right-wing opportunists calling out "cancel culture" — and a few "unhinged Zionists" as well — who've done what they now decry. The Right has jumped all over the cancel-culture controversy to try to paint the Left as focused to a fault on the rights of minorities to the exclusion of needs of the rest.

First, if the Right says something is true, does that make it false, or worse, not worth examining? The "liberal left" (as opposed to the actual left) does tend to ignore class as an issue. The cancel-culture controversy is complicated; let's not pretend it's not, or worse, cancel those who don't affirm its simplicity.

Moreover, at what time in modern America has the New York Times, which recently canceled its own editor for the crime of printing Tom Cotton, represented the actual Left, as opposed to that part of the Left that shovels free-market Democrats into office as fast as it can, then works like devils to keep them there? The Times is owned by a corporation with close to two billion dollars in yearly revenue  — advocates for the poor they're not, unless the poor will content themselves with only the smallest of marginal structural changes. 

In the meantime, while we're squabbling over the latest cancellation outrage — many are indeed outrageous, while many are not — America is being rebuilt as we speak into an even greater monopoly than before, with even more wealth going to the even more powerful.

As one wag put it, Jeff Bezos is having a very good crisis. Companies large enough to survive this event are flush with cash and gobbling failed competitors hand over fist. It's been rightly said that when Covid has done its work, we won't recognize the country it left behind.

Watching a Knife Fight While the Town Burns Down

The "cancel culture" war is a distraction, important though it is we have that discussion. While we watch the knife fight in the corner, cheering one side or the other on, the main event, the torched and burning town we all inhabit, consumes itself behind us.
 
 

Appreciating Bernie In Our Era Of Hobson’s Choices

-by Skip Kaltenheuser

One thing we know for certain about what weighed on Bernie’s decision to suspend his campaign is that there are things we do not know for certain. Before and after the October 1st medical adventure his heart embarked on, I wrote he’d be ticking like a Timex and coming from behind like Seabiscuit, both prediction and prayer. I acknowledge my disappointment but refrain from judgment on what I believe to be a clean call. Bernie's not infallible, but I believe he makes clean calls. That belief is why so many support him.

The Covid19 virus was a game-changer that undermined Bernie’s campaign strengths and his chances of overcoming the battery of establishment cannons arrayed against him, the pressure of which would buckle most people half his age. And unlike Perez and Biden, whatever the latest tune they whistle, Bernie wouldn’t have people risking lives in primaries in a game of Covid19 Russian roulette. Biden has a minefield of banana peels before him, but waiting for him to slip from the grasp of his army of handlers and do a face-plant is not a political strategy that inspires. It’s understandable that someone with Bernie’s integrity would focus instead on his ideals and proposals, which to anyone not in a coma or a special interest pocket make more sense with each passing day.

Biden Blunders by Nancy Ohanian

As Naomi Klein has observed, “...during times of crisis, people also are risk-averse. I think the timing of this was such, with the inability to continue campaigning in person, with people just reaching for something that looked and felt safe, I don’t think it was possible to translate that shift in openness to these kinds of policies with a huge electoral swing from Biden towards Bernie, although I was certainly hoping for it up until Bernie’s announcement last night. But while hoping for it, I was keenly aware that the polls were not reflecting it, that it wasn’t happening and that people are not up for that kind of political seesaw in this moment of tumult."

There’ve been logical, solid analyses, as by the anchors of the online political show Rising, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, that the Democratic establishment will eventually blow off anyone not brandishing a ball bat with nails in it, that whatever promises Bernie might elicit from making nice, they’ll be written in sand washed away by the high tide of big donors. And no matter what Bernie says or does, he will be blamed again if Trump wins, as CNN is already about the business of. As in 2016, how dare Bernie practice democracy and provide the country with a choice and an awareness of issues best left concealed from view.

Some might despair that with Bernie stepping back, the progressive movement has lost its lynchpin. Bernie countered that nicely with accomplishments noted in his statement that he was suspending his campaign, (not cremating it, as many in the media have implied), while staying on the ballot to hold and earn delegates to influence the party. Progressive candidates inspired by Bernie certainly aren’t fading away. Charles Booker, running against Mitch McConnell, stated “…make no mistake: our fight for Medicare for All, racial justice, a Green New Deal, and an economy that works for all of us is nowhere close to over.” Mark Gamba, the mayor Milwaukee, Oregon, running against incumbent Blue Dog, Kuirt Schrader, reaffirmed his goals of changing the healthcare system, boldly addressing climate change and holding corporate interests accountable for damage they cause. The grassroots movements supporting such candidates aren’t fading away either.

Here’s Biden’s statement on Bernie stepping out of the race, pre-canned by strategists for sure, but I’d have to say it’s not a bad statement from the point of view of conning people to fill in the blanks with whatever they hope Joe is saying about health care, etc.... Trump was masterful at letting people hear what they wanted. If he’s not too addled, he may be again. But maybe Joe can limp along for awhile on a lack of specificity and a media tossing him softballs, until Biden figures out the peril of not making solid, substantive commitments and standing by them.

Maybe Biden can ride to victory atop a platform of low expectations other than not being Trump. But if Biden wins with wishy-washy, with simply not being Trump, he’ll have nothing resembling a mandate, only a load of disappointed people when he turns out to be Mr. Cellophane, moved about with puppet strings by big donors to whom Bernie, with his small donor cornucopia, must have looked like one of Eliot Ness’s Untouchables. Spurning the money of big donors and owing them nothing made Bernie a dangerous man.

Howie has repeatedly contrasted Biden’s weaknesses and Bernie’s strengths, so I’ll just offer a couple glimpses that glare out.

Recently the Biden camp conferred with Eric Holder about Biden's campaign and his vice-presidential pick. Holder who ushered, covertly from colleagues who’d have been aghast, the pardon of finance criminal fugitive Marc Rich for Bill Clinton’s signature on Clinton's last day in office, after which Rich’s ex-wife donated huge sums to the Clinton library. Does anyone doubt that had that happened a year earlier Clinton would have been impeached, and properly so? Holder, who prosecuted whistleblowers like John Kiriakou, a top counterintelligence agent who exposed CIA torture, just to ruin him and to send a message to others, putting this hero in prison, initially with an effort to throw away the key. Holder, who let bankers off the legal hook laying the groundwork for his law firm, and therefore Holder, to reap fortunes servicing those banks. Read what Holder did to bank whistleblower Brad Birkenfeld on behalf of foreign banks hiding Americans’ money. That’s the short list.

Holder was Wall Street’s early Manchurian candidate for President. He fizzled like a wet fuse, but he's been waiting in the wings if opportunity knocks, raising his profile with an anti-gerrymandering organization that’s run like a campaign. If Biden hadn’t already committed to a female vice-president, I’d bet Holder would pull a Cheney and recommend himself. He’ll certainly be influential in a Biden administration, again looking out for protecting his client bankers from facing serious consequences for misdeeds and greedy maneuvers that are again setting Americans-- and the world-- up for another fall.

American Dream Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

My point is that no one had to worry about Bernie consulting with Eric Holder. Instead Bernie would be throwing a wrench in the revolving door to keep Holder’s ilk out of his administration. Bernie would never have floated the idea of Jamie Dimon as a swell potential member of an administration, perhaps Secretary of the Treasury, as Biden’s camp did. Want some intriguing reading? Read a bit on Dimon here, and on JPMorganChase here, courtesy of Wall Street on Parade. I’m confident that after the election, when the revolving door starts spinning, Bernie will be shouting the dangers loud and clear, channeling public anger that Biden would be a fool not to pay attention to.

By the way, Wall Street called the shots on many of President Obama’s picks, including Holder for Attorney General and Hillary for Secretary of State. That insight came courtesy of WikiLeaks, so one can sense the establishment fervor to destroy Assange. And Wall Street on Parade reports that in the 2020 presidential primaries one Wall Street firm was an instrumental supporter of five different Democratic candidates. Should that leave us wondering at the impressive orchestration of the Super Tuesday endorsements, that maybe some candidates, beyond shooting for Veep or major posts, were being jockeyed to derail progressives and elevate Biden?

Establishment vs Bernie by Nancy Ohanian

Both of Bernie’s presidential campaigns laid bare the hapless state of much of mainstream, corporate media. Take the Washington Post. Does anyone think Jeff Bezos bought that paper because, like Citizen Kane, he thought it might be fun to run a newspaper? The man has a Washington agenda. The Bezos Brigaiders on the editorial pages and covering the campaign are well aware of how many newspapers have hit the skids, with major staff layoffs that leave many journalists scrambling to find public relations work. They don’t have to be geniuses to figure out what the world’s richest man doesn’t like. Bezos doesn’t like antitrust enforcement and close scrutiny and regulation of monopolies. He doesn’t care much for paying taxes. He doesn’t like to be embarrassed and pushed by potential legislation that would penalize him if he doesn’t raise wages and improve working conditions for expendable workers toiling in warehouses and grocery stores and delivering his goods. He doesn’t like unions. So none of the Bezos Brigaiders needs to be told he doesn’t like Bernie Sanders, whose major supporters include Amazon workers and who throws a spotlight on that company's excesses. And so these members of the press decided squashing Bernie is worth shredding their journalistic credibility, continuing a pattern Thomas Frank wonderfully described in 2016 in a Harper’s magazine article, Swat Team.

The New York Times opinion page and campaign coverage has been as relentless whacking Bernie. One can only marvel at how the Gray Lady has become so in the tank for the Wall Street establishment it still won’t acknowledge the folly of Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin eliminating the Glass-Steagall Act, that had separated commercial and investment banking since FDR, becoming a major cause of the 2008 economic debacle. Both Clinton and Rubin were richly rewarded for that, from speaking fees and foundation contributions for Clinton to a job for Rubin with stunning compensation. In Washington, quid pro quo often takes its time, but it gets there.

Did it ever look to you like a contest between those two papers to find the most deranged and angry looking images they could of Bernie? Propaganda 101.

We’ve been treated to the comic spectacle of Comcast media players like Chuck Todd, putting their Orwellian knives into Bernie and his health care proposals between commercials for health care insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And a number of NPR reporters and analysts behaved as if they’re auditioning for Comcast, putting words in interviewee’s mouths and cutting them short if what they said wasn’t supporting the narrative. They all ought get plaques engraved with “But How Will You Pay For It?” Particularly if the big banks start tumbling economic dominoes that most media has routinely ignored.

So we can thank Bernie for making the media fix so apparent that many of us now seek out alternative media voices, voices that represent a much better use of one’s time.

Freedom of the Press by Nancy Ohanian

Consider corporate media's willingness to avert its gaze from a foreign power meddling American elections. I’m not speaking of Russia, the influence of which on the 2016 election I think greatly over-played, to the detriment of focus on critical issues and on what the Trump grifter class is up to. Whatever Russia did I doubt it had much impact next to the tabloids in the grocery store checkout line, let alone our home-grown dark money networks of the Kochs, Mercers and others from the oligarch rogues gallery. More attention should have been paid to the influence of foreign companies' American subsidiaries, including banks. No, I’m speaking of Israel, whose confederates and advocates in the US spent fortunes running ads attacking Bernie in the primaries, supporting the narrative of Bernie being unelectable. Just imagine if it had been Russia, how quickly those covertly undermining our democracy on a behalf of a foreign power would earn the accusation of betraying our country. Just because Bernie called for decency and morality in the treatment of Palestinians systematically oppressed in every way imaginable. That oppression was often done with American indifference or complicity, which Bernie was perceived as a threat to.

Predictably, media was then complicit with ludicrous and flimsy intelligence claims-- intelligence loosely defined-- that Bernie topped Russia’s wish list.

Ironically, Bernie went along a bit with the Russia narrative, something for which he’s been criticized. I’ve no idea how much he really bought into that party orthodoxy. Some purists won’t like what I’m about to say. Things are relative, and running a presidential campaign isn’t the same as seeking sainthood. Look how fast media stood Bernie before a firing squad for giving a harmless nod to educational and medical accomplishments in Cuba, painting him as a fellow traveler to discredit him, particularly in Florida.

On balance, Bernie has given it to us straight more than any other candidate. His consistent drumbeat has changed the conversation. On healthcare, 55% of voters now support single payer health care, only 35% oppose it. Major programs to counter climate change and develop related jobs are now a top priority of many, particularly younger voters. Bernie provided an articulation of the growing wealth gap that helped people better understand what they already sensed going on around them, and the campaign finance fix behind much of it. He provided hope that there was a way to do something about it. Where would the conversation be were it not for Bernie?

While I like and respect some of those who’ve been critical of Bernie over dis and dat, no offense to them but I think Noam Chomsky is better than most in assessing the immediacy of the big picture. Here’s some of his comments on Bernie ending his presidential run.

Chomsky on Democracy Now:

"If Trump is reelected, it’s a indescribable disaster. It means that the policies of the past four years, which have been extremely destructive to the American population, to the world, will be continued and probably accelerated. What this is going to mean for health is bad enough...It will get worse. What this means for the environment or the threat of nuclear war, which no one is talking about but is extremely serious, is indescribable.

Suppose Biden is elected. I would anticipate it would be essentially a continuation of Obama-- nothing very great, but at least not totally destructive, and opportunities for an organized public to change what is being done, to impose pressures.”

“It’s common to say now that the Sanders campaign failed. I think that’s a mistake. I think it was an extraordinary success, completely shifted the arena of debate and discussion. Issues that were unthinkable a couple years ago are now right in the middle of attention.

The worst crime he committed, in the eyes of the establishment, is not the policy he’s proposing; it’s the fact that he was able to inspire popular movements, which had already been developing-- Occupy, Black Lives Matter, many others-- and turn them into an activist movement, which doesn’t just show up every couple years to push a leader and then go home, but applies constant pressure, constant activism and so on. That could affect a Biden administration.”

In the end, we should appreciate Bernie for the enemies he’s chosen, domestic and foreign. And we should appreciate him for the voice he’ll provide as interesting times compound.

Amazon Rips Off 238 Cities, States and Provinces, Then Builds in NYC and DC

Andrew Cuomo's priorities (source)

by Gaius Publius

The world's leading monopolists, Jeff Bezos and Amazon, after much thought (or in fact, very little thought) have picked two cities for their new HQ2, their second national headquarters. Those two cities, of course, were the obvious choices from the start, the only two that made any sense at all.

If you were the world's richest greediest person, looking to re-headquarter what aspires to be the world's most powerful monopoly in cities with prime access to the nation's greatest concentration of money and its greatest concentration of power, in which cities would you build?

New York City and Washington, DC, of course.

Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 Between Long Island City, N.Y., and Arlington, Va.

SEATTLE — After conducting a yearlong search for a second home, Amazon has switched gears and is now finalizing plans to have a total of 50,000 employees in two locations, according to people familiar with the decision-making process.

The company is nearing a deal to move to the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, according to two of the people briefed on the discussions. Amazon is also close to a deal to move to the Crystal City area of Arlington, Va., a Washington suburb, one of the people said. Amazon already has more employees in those two areas than anywhere else outside of Seattle, its home base, and the Bay Area.

Amazon executives met two weeks ago with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the governor’s Manhattan office, said one of the people briefed on the process, adding that the state had offered potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies. Executives met separately with Mayor Bill de Blasio, a person briefed on that discussion said. Long Island City is a short subway ride across the East River from Midtown Manhattan.

The announcement of Amazon's new HQ2 sparked a "frenzied bidding war" among cities eager to be taken to the cleaners by Bezos and his company, and there are dozens stories about those offers, all cast as outrages. For example, one of the losers — Atlanta, Georgia — offered this:

What Georgia offered Amazon: A state-funded academy to train its employees. An exclusive lounge - with free parking - at the world’s busiest airport. A dedicated car on MARTA. And more than $2B in publicly-funded incentives. #gapol https://t.co/cyG7ME6qhN

— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) November 14, 2018

The winners were not the highest bidders, but nevertheless, they offered quite a bit more, beyond mere privileged access to the world's greatest pool of money and its most plentiful supply of corrupt politicians.

New York is giving, among other things, massive capital gains tax cut to Amazon investors ... and, of course, a helipad. Arlington, Virginia added something more politically useful, advance warning of FOIA requests so the company could file for pre-emptive "protective orders."

But the biggest prize in this story is the data delivered to Amazon itself by everyone involved in the bidding process. Keep in mind, 238 states, provinces and cities sent bids to Amazon. Here's what those bids contained:

The big prize #Amazon has gotten out of its #HQ2 stunt is not the PR value of a bunch of city leaders singing its praises, or even the billions of $ in subsidies that it will extort from public coffers.

It’s the data. 1/

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) November 6, 2018

Dozens of cities have shared reams of data with Amazon that their own citizens do not have access to. This includes intel on future infrastructure investments, land use patterns, planned policy changes, and so on. 2/

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) November 6, 2018

Amazon will use this data to build out its empire: To site stores, warehouses, etc. To get in early on the right real estate. To beat out competitors because it knows things they don’t. 3/

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) November 6, 2018

In other words, America’s city leaders are accomplices to a monopolist. 4/

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) November 6, 2018

This includes many political leaders who profess to be champions of equality and justice. 5/

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) November 6, 2018

This is not about 1 city or 2 cities. It’s about a corporation that’s extending its tentacles in every direction -- to extract wealth, insert itself, dominate. 7/7

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) November 6, 2018

Amazon exists, not just to sell its products, but to acquire data that gives them monopoly control of additional markets in which it has no current presence. More from David Dayen writing at In These Times:

But the biggest suckers on HQ2 aren’t New York and Virginia; it’s the other 236 cities that bid on a headquarters they were never going to get. Those bids didn’t just include the size of the bribe; they included a wealth of important data about plans for transportation, housing, education and workforce development. Amazon now has a treasure trove of non-public information about America’s future, in addition to knowing how much cash cities are willing to part with to land an Amazon facility. And it got all that, along with a giant PR benefit from the bidding war, for free.

If you knew a city was going to build a road in a particular place, you could make a lot of money buying up the real estate there. Imagine that on a national scale and you can see how Amazon will grow far wealthier from the data it collected than even the raw dollars extracted from HQ2’s big winners. In fact, this was the real reason Amazon orchestrated the whole charade....

It can even potentially sell this data to other companies who long for similar deals, or at least start up a new business line in negotiating deals between companies and municipal governments.

Monetizing of this new data trove will yield untold billions of dollars in value. It will also embed Amazon deeper and deeper into American life, committing politicians at the state and federal level to become human shields for the company. For example, no senator from New York or Virginia, with Amazon in its backyard, will want to speak too loudly about Amazon’s monopoly attempts. And no mayor or city council member, eager to secure that next warehouse, will have much to say either. [emphasis added]

There's no question that Amazon is evil. The only question is, was it born evil? To answer that, consider this Jeff Bezos story from 1995, the year after Amazon's birth:

Was Amazon born evil? The answer appears to be yes.

GP
 

Jeff Bezos, America's Richest Man, Gets A Bill Named For Him: Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies

Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (BEZOS for short) is the Senate version of a bill Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna introduced to Congress yesterday. It's not popular with plutocrats and oligarchs. One of their newspapers, the Wall Street Journal phrased their coverage as "an unusual public spat between Amazon.com Inc. and Sen. Bernie Sanders over workers’ wages... Sanders specifically targeted Amazon founder and leader Jeff Bezos, contrasting his vast personal wealth with the compensation of the companies' lowest-paid workers." It goes well beyond Bezos-- and Bernie.

First off, the House version, doesn't specifically target Jeff Bezos. Ro Khanna's bill-- co-sponsored by progressives Nanette Barragán (D-CA), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Hank Johnson (D-GA), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Gwen Moore (D-WI), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD)-- is called The Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act and like Bernie's Senate version would make large corporations, not the taxpayer, pay for the costs of federal programs that low-wage employees turn to in order to make ends meet, such as nutrition or housing assistance. Khanna: "Companies are short-changing their employees by not paying a living wage. These companies are creating a drain on the economy by underpaying workers and should be responsible for covering the cost of the programs their employees rely on to make ends meet. It is my hope that this bill will further incentivize these companies to pay their employees a living wage without cutting their hours."

When large corporations underpay their employees, it hurts working families who are living paycheck to paycheck. It also places a burden on the taxpayer, who pay for the benefits and services low-wage workers need to help put food on the table or ease housing costs. In fact, low wages cost taxpayers $152.8 billion per year according to a 2015 University of California, Berkeley Labor Center study.

The reasoning behind the Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act is simple: An employee making minimum wage bagging groceries should not have to rely on nutrition assistance to put food on the table for his or her family. And taxpayers should not have to subsidize low-wage workers so wealthy corporations can get richer.

The Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act would make large corporations pay their fair share. By levying a direct fee equal to the public assistance each corporation’s employees are eligible to receive, the legislation is designed to compel all employers to pay their employees fairly with the goal that ultimately no company would be taxed for underpaying their employees.

Covered public assistance programs in the bill include:

• Medicaid
• Section 8 Housing
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
• National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs (administered under Child Nutrition Act)

Barbara Lee didn't mince words: "Every American should have the basics: affordable housing and a livable wage. It is unconscionable that CEOs siphon off billions to line their own pockets while their employees struggle to make ends meet" and called the bill "a bridge over troubled water for Americans in need by strengthening essential programs for struggling families. Jamie Raskin got to the same conclusion from a different path: "It's very simple. The public should not be in the business of subsidizing giant corporations when they take the low road and pay inadequate compensation to their workers. It's not fair to the taxpayers and it's not fair to the vast majority of high-road businesses which pay their employees a fair day's wage for a fair day's work."

These were some of Bernie's remarks about the bill on introduction:

At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the 3 wealthiest people in America own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent and when 52 percent of all new income goes to the top one percent, the American people are tired of subsidizing multi-billionaires who own some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America.

Let me give you just a few examples of what we are talking about.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is the wealthiest person on earth.

Today, his net worth is $168 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.]

Since the beginning of this year, his wealth has increased by about $260 million-- every single day.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bezos continues to pay many thousands of his Amazon employees wages that are so low that they must rely on food stamps, Medicaid or public housing in order to survive. Programs that are financed by middle class taxpayers.

According to a recent report from the New Food Economy, one out of three Amazon workers in Arizona and 2,400 in Pennsylvania and Ohio need food stamps in order to feed their families.

...In April, Amazon reported that half of its workforce makes less than $28,500 a year-- about $13.67 an hour.

Even that figure is misleading because it doesn’t include an estimated 40% of Amazon’s workforce who are employed through temporary staffing firms.

...But let me be clear: This discussion is not just about Jeff Bezos and Amazon.

The Walton family of Walmart is the wealthiest family in the country with a net worth of nearly $175 billion.

This one family owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans.

Meanwhile, just like Amazon, Walmart pays its workers’ wages that are so inadequate that many of them are forced to depend upon public assistance programs in order to survive at a cost to taxpayers of some $6.2 billion each and every year.

The fast food industry is another major recipient of corporate welfare.

While the co-owner of Burger King, Jorge Paulo Lemann, has a net worth of more than $25 billion, low wages at this fast-food chain cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $356 million a year.

And Burger King is not alone.

McDonald’s workers are actually encouraged to sign up for government assistance-- meaning the company fully acknowledges that it pays its employees wages that are non- livable.

Shockingly, 52 percent of all fast food workers rely on public assistance programs to make ends meet.

...The working families and middle class of this country should not have to subsidize the wealthiest people in the United States of America. That’s absurd. That’s what a rigged economy is all about.

The fact is that if employers in this country simply paid workers a living wage taxpayers would save about $150 billion a year on federal assistance programs and millions of workers would be able to live in dignity and security.

That is why we are proposing legislation to demand that Mr. Bezos, the Walton family of Walmart and other billionaires get off of welfare and start paying their workers a living wage.

Specifically, this bill would establish a 100 percent tax on corporations with 500 or more employees equal to the amount of federal benefits received by their low-wage workers. For example, if a worker at Amazon receives $2,000 in food stamps, Amazon would be taxed $2,000 to cover that cost.

Our legislation gives large, profitable employers a choice: Pay workers a living wage or pay for the public assistance programs their low-wage employees are forced to depend upon.

Let us be very clear: We believe that the government has a moral responsibility to provide for the vulnerable-- the children, the elderly, the sick and the disabled.

But we do not believe that taxpayers should have to expend huge sums of money subsidizing profitable corporations owned by some of the wealthiest people in this country.

Amazon's p.r. department, sounding like a more educated and slicker version of Trump, denied everything.

Offended By The Gadarene Swine Republicans? Is America About To Be Taught A Lesson For Tolerating Toxic Garbage In Our Midst?

Who knew what an advocate of an anti-trust agenda Trump is! He's now threatening to use political power against the owner of the Washington Post-- and using a distorted version of Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren terminology to do it-- for daring to investigate him during the campaign. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is, according to Trump, using the Washington Post as a political tool to keep his taxes low. "The whole system is rigged," he told Sean Hannity. "He’s using the Washington Post, which is peanuts, he’s using that for political purposes to save Amazon in terms of taxes and in terms of antitrust... Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise... He's using the Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don't tax Amazon like they should be taxed. We can't let him get away with it."

Apparently, Trump is trying to prepare the voters for some story Post reporters must have on him. I don't think, though, it's the one about how Trump masquerades as aides on the phone so he can sing his own praises in the third person. That's funny, but unlikely to cause the bloviating asshole to feel any embarrassment-- and unlikely to rattle the cages of the losers who support him.

The voice is instantly familiar; the tone, confident, even cocky; the cadence, distinctly Trumpian. The man on the phone vigorously defending Donald Trump says he’s a media spokesman named John Miller, but then he says, “I’m sort of new here,” and “I’m somebody that he knows and I think somebody that he trusts and likes” and even “I’m going to do this a little, part-time, and then, yeah, go on with my life.”

A recording obtained by The Washington Post captures what New York reporters and editors who covered Trump’s early career experienced in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s: calls from Trump’s Manhattan office that resulted in conversations with “John Miller” or “John Barron”-- public-relations men who sound precisely like Trump himself-- who indeed are Trump, masquerading as an unusually helpful and boastful advocate for himself, according to the journalists and several of Trump’s top aides.

In 1991, Sue Carswell, a reporter at People magazine, called Trump’s office seeking an interview with the developer. She had just been assigned to cover the soap opera surrounding the end of Trump’s 12-year marriage to Ivana, his budding relationship with the model Marla Maples and his rumored affairs with any number of celebrities who regularly appeared on the gossip pages of the New York newspapers.

Within five minutes, Carswell got a return call from Trump’s publicist, a man named John Miller, who immediately jumped into a startlingly frank and detailed explanation of why Trump dumped Maples for the Italian model Carla Bruni. “He really didn’t want to make a commitment,” Miller said. “He’s coming out of a marriage, and he’s starting to do tremendously well financially.”

Miller turned out to be a remarkably forthcoming source-- a spokesman with rare insight into the private thoughts and feelings of his client. “Have you met him?” Miller asked the reporter. “He’s a good guy, and he’s not going to hurt anybody... He treated his wife well and... he will treat Marla well.”

...“Actresses,” Miller said in the call to Carswell, “just call to see if they can go out with him and things.” Madonna “wanted to go out with him.” And Trump’s alter ego boasted that in addition to living with Maples, Trump had “three other girlfriends.”

Miller was consistent about referring to Trump as “he,” but at one point, when asked how important Bruni was in Trump’s busy love life, the spokesman said, “I think it’s somebody that-- you know, she’s beautiful. I saw her once, quickly, and beautiful...” and then he quickly pivoted back into talking about Trump-- then a 44-year-old father of three-- in the third person.

In 1990, Trump testified in a court case that “I believe on occasion I used that name.” He did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Well... technically he didn't respond, but he did run to Hannity and attack and threaten the owner of the reporter's newspaper. Then yesterday-- contradicting his sworn court testimony-- he was on NBC denying he had been passing himself off as Miller. "I have many, many people that are trying to imitate my voice and then you can imagine that, and this sounds like one of the scams, one of the many scams-- doesn’t sound like me... It was not me on the phone. And it doesn't sound like me on the phone, I will tell you that. It was not me on the phone," he lied. Remember, Trump has made an art of manipulating the press and firmly believes that all press, good or bad, helps his brand (his business).

Carswell this week recalled that she immediately recognized something familiar in the Queens accent of Trump’s new publicist. She thought, “It’s so weird that Donald hired someone who sounds just like him.” After the 20-minute interview, she walked down the hall to play the tape to co-workers, who identified Trump’s voice. Carswell then called Cindy Adams, the longtime New York Post gossip columnist who had been close to Trump since the early 1970s. Adams immediately identified the voice as Trump’s.

“Oh, that’s Donald,” Carswell recalled Adams saying. “What is he doing?”

Then Carswell played the tape for Maples, who confirmed it was Trump and burst into tears as she heard Miller deny that a ring Trump gave her implied any intent to marry her.

Carswell, now a reporter-researcher at Vanity Fair, said the tape cuts off mid-interview, leaving out the part in which Miller said that actress Kim Basinger had been trying to date Trump. Hearing the tape for the first time in decades, Carswell said, “This was so farcical, that he pretended to be his own publicist. Here was this so-called billion-dollar real estate mogul, and he can’t hire his own publicist. It also said something about the control he wanted to keep of the news cycle flowing with this story, and I can’t believe he thought he’d get away with it.”

...“One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better,” Trump wrote in his bestseller The Art of the Deal. “The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.”

Trump did not describe using false identities to promote his brand, but he did write about why he strays from the strict truth: “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration-- and a very effective form of promotion.”

...After Carswell’s story appeared-- headlined “Trump Says Goodbye Marla, Hello Carla . . . And a Mysterious PR Man Who Sounds Just Like Donald Calls to Spread the Story”-- Trump invited the reporter out for a night on the town with him and Maples. Carswell says Maples persuaded Trump to issue the invitation as an apology for tricking her. A few weeks later, when People ran a story about Trump and Maples getting engaged, Trump was quoted saying that the John Miller call was a “joke gone awry.”

So far the joke looks like it will be on naive Republican primary voters.

Now even evangelical leaders on catching on the calibre of Trump's character and are warning their congregations that Trump's power play is a threat to "the fundamental integrity of Christian faith and the well-being of society itself" and "a moral threat" to society and to the country. This is from evangelical faith leaders:

The ascendancy of a demagogic candidate and his message, with the angry constituency he is fueling, is a threat to both the values of our faith and the health of our democracy. Donald Trump directly promotes racial and religious bigotry, disrespects the dignity of women, harms civil public discourse, offends moral decency, and seeks to manipulate religion. This is no longer politics as usual, but rather a moral and theological crisis, and thus we are compelled to speak out as faith leaders. This statement is absolutely no tacit endorsement of other candidates, many of whom use the same racial politics often in more subtle ways. But while Donald Trump certainly did not start these long-standing American racial sins, he is bringing our nation’s worst instincts to the political surface, making overt what is often covert, explicit what is often implicit.

Trump’s highly visible and vulgar racial and religious demagoguery presents a danger but also an opportunity-- to publicly expose and resist the worst of American values. By confronting a message so contrary to our Christian values, our religious voices can help provide a powerful way to put our true faith and our better American values forward in the midst of national moral confusion and crisis.

...Donald Trump, a celebrity from the worlds of real estate and reality television, is manipulating this anger for his own political advantage-- at the expense of the common good. Trump is shamelessly using racial resentment, fear, and hatred-- always dangerously present in our society-- to fuel a movement against “the other,” targeting other races, women, cultures, ethnicities, nations, creeds, and a whole global religion.

How many conservatives feel very much like Clinton-hater, PJ O'Rourke, who endorsed Hillary this week as the second worst thing thing that could happen to America.

I endorse her. And all her pomps. And all her empty promises.

Better the devil you know than the Lord of the Flies on his own 757. Flying to and fro in the earth, with gold-plated seatbelt buckles, talking nativist, isolationist, mercantilist, bigoted, rude, and vulgar crap.

...Better to root up the garden of free enterprise with the Democratic pigs than run off a protectionist cliff with the Gadarene swine Republicans.

Ever since Athens in the 5th century B.C. the great enemy of democracy has been the demagogue. But-- O tempora! O mores!-- now we’ve got a firebrand soap box orator who cannot so much as put a coherent sentence together. He likes to “talk bigly.”

Here’s to you, Hillary, for saving your best bloviation for your highly paid speeches to shady bankers. I would, if I could, pay Trump more to shut up.

Hillary, you are the crone in crony capitalism. I endorse you.

I choose Goldman Sachs’s milch cow over the cretin bull siring his herds of mini-Minotaurs-- half-men, half-bullshit-- laying waste to the country.

Better a Marie Antoinette of the left saying, “Let them eat fruit and fiber,” than a Know Nothing who would be Robespierre if he could spell it.

Let me tell you why Hillary is a great presidential candidate-- by comparison.

Don’t rush me here...

Did I mention that she’s the second-worst thing that could happen to America?

She’s a better real-estate developer than Donald Trump.

Trump Taj Mahal Casino, Trump Plaza Hotel, and Trump Entertainment Resorts went bankrupt. Trump restructured $3.5 billion in business debt and $900 million in personal debt. “Restructured” being the Trump way of saying he didn’t pay it. The $39.2 million that it cost taxpayers to investigate Hillary’s Whitewater scam is nothing by comparison.

She doesn’t cheat at golf.

True, Hillary screwed up during the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. As opposed to Donald Trump, who would have sent his supporters to boo and hiss the Islamic extremist attackers and then ask the police to take the extremists away.

Yes, unless Bernie wins the nomination-- you can help him at the thermometer below-- this is going to be the ultimate lesser-of-two-evils election.