I know the corporate media is cheering the recently revealed infrastructure plan by the Democrats as progressive as landmark and transformative, but it is nothing more than a further push into feudalism. This plan is no different than their Covid relief bill where instead of giving us enough money to actually survive a pandemic, the Democrats will give your family $9,000 for your funeral if you die in the noble deed of serving their rich donors while a pandemic rages.
I am all in favor of paid family leave, paid vacation, free childcare and other workers’ rights. However, the Democrats are playing a cynical game here.
How? Because in order to critique this bill they make you attack something as common sense and popular as childcare. They realize this too.
Why this is cynical is they only give these rights to the poorest among us, when not only do these programs rely on universality to survive, but even more craven and most importantly is it just means we are subsidizing the worst of the large corporations who pay starvation wages. This is essentially the taxpayer now subsiding Amazon, McDonalds and Walmart daycare centers. Having free daycare for poor people getting paid starvation wages is like having UBI without cost controls. It isn’t woke or progressive, but just another backhanded way of funneling money to the rich. Making sure workers aren’t being paid starvation wages so their families can not be in poverty should be the obvious goal, not alleviating the childcare dilemma the exploited and poverty stricken workers have.
In this case instead of actually giving every worker a living wage with free childcare, or… *gasp*, the freedom to even have one parent raise the kids instead of having to work 2 or 3 jobs each that would tremendously change their lives, they just subsidize corporate daycare centers so they will get rich and the poor will still work multiple jobs making starvation wages.
However, in maybe the most Orwellian aspect, the government will pay a corporation to raise your kids so their donors can keep exploiting you for massive profits, instead of just paying you to raise your own kid. Of course part of those profits will funnel back to the politician in bribes disguised as family “jobs”, book deals, paid speeches, Netflix production deals, “charitable foundations” and bundled political donations. On a side note, I’ve always imagined the pharma lobby has a warehouse that rivals the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark except nothing but politician’s books they have been forced to buy over the years.
In a sane situation, before trickle down, tax money would be used by the government to create massive public works projects. The government would directly pay the people and then in turn the workers would go to the businesses and spend their money. That is a bottom up approach that has worked for all of history. Now, Democrats are using businesses as the conduit, and as usual the people will just hope that this will trickle down and not disappear in “consulting fees” and other typical donor grift like Obama’s high speed rails and national smart grid that disappeared into consulting fees for their donors. If based on previous plans like this, expect very little infrastructure and a lot of talk about money spent in consulting.
From the electric car chargers to daycare, it all seems like a guise to pretend they are helping the voter, but instead it is just a gigantic giveaway to the corporations to build stuff they would have built anyways. To me it appears this benefits the super rich a lot more than the poor. A lot more. How much faith do you have in corporate trickle down over the last 4 decades? I’m sure there are lots of donors hoping to be the next Solyndra.
If this gets through the senate and it ends up being a true government spending bill, I will admit I was wrong. However, the way this looks now is it is clear this is going to be the government giving private corporations lots of money to do stuff the government could do a lot more efficiently and with much higher wages offered. Don’t hold your breath for anything other than the Democrats subsidizing Walmart’s bottom line by paying for their exploited workers’ daycare and ignore the reason they have to do that is because they can’t afford to raise their own kids on a single Walmart salary. Besides, you want the ultimate proof this is a bad deal? Look how much corporate media is on board. If this was 5 trillion that actually benefited the people first, they would be trashing this every chance they got, like the minimum wage. This is going to benefit the Wall Street, and they all know it.
