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"Eleven months into the pandemic, we are living through the most unequal recession in modern American history. For the poor and precarious, this last year was a nightmare that dwarfed the 2007-2008 recession."
"Between March and October, nearly 67 million people lost work. This month alone about 20 million of them are collecting unemployment."
"By the end of 2020, one in five adults with children reported that, at times, they didn’t have enough to eat, while one in five renters were behind on their payments and faced the threat of eviction during the winter months of a still rampant virus."
"At the same time, the wealth of America’s 651 billionaires increased by more than $1 trillion to a total of about $4 trillion. At the start of 2020, Jeff Bezos was the only American with a net worth of more than $100 billion."
"By the end of the year, [Bezos] was joined by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk — and just last week Elon Musk passed Bezos as the richest person in the world."
"Bezos could have distributed the $71.4 billion he made in the last pandemic year to his own endangered workers and he would still have had well more than $100 billion left."
"A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness put it this way:"
"This last point is especially damning since the first and largest Covid-19 relief bill, the CARES Act, handed out billions of dollars worth of benefits to the upper-middle-class, the rich, and corporations."
"Most of us will only remember the $1,200 checks... but the bill also included provisions that favored the already well-off, including higher corporate interest deductions, flexible corporate loss rules, increased charitable tax deductions, and big tax breaks for the super-rich."
"Other parts of the CARES Act like the Paycheck Protection Program, as well as significant allocations to universities and hospitals, gave generously to large corporations and the wealthiest of institutions."
"Now, as the Biden transition team lays the groundwork for another major relief bill, conservative Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia has already threatened that he would 'absolutely not' vote for such $2,000 checks."
"This week, President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn into office and inherit a crisis that demands bold action. He has already said that on day one he will commit his administration to confronting the pandemic, the recession, systemic racism, and climate change."
"Four months ago, during an event with the Poor People’s Campaign, [Biden] also told an audience of more than a million people that “together we can carry on Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign..."
"[Biden] concluded by promising that 'ending poverty will not just be an aspiration, it will be a theory of change to build a new economy that includes everyone.' "
"For this to be possible, however, the Biden administration will need to reject the supremacy of austerity and the ideology of scarcity. It will instead have to invest in an economy that guarantees health care, housing, food, water, and decent work for all its citizens."
"This will, of course, require imagining the sort of restructuring of our society that would, no doubt, be the work of a generation or more."
"But it could at least begin with an honest accounting of the actual abundance hoarded in the bank accounts, stock, and real estate of this country’s richest and the coffers of the Pentagon and the complex that engulfs it, followed by a plan to share it all so much more fairly."
"The Earth does not belong to Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or the white supremacists who laid siege to the U.S. Capitol. The nation must have the moral courage to carry on the work of Reverend King."
"After all, the best hope of successfully navigating the crises of 2021 and beyond must involve King’s dream of building a multi-racial fusion movement to reconstruct society from the bottom up." https://billmoyers.com/story/the-earth-does-not-belong-to-jeff-bezos-or-elon-musk/
