Liberalism Is a Hell of a Drug: How We Clap for Bezos and Cuss Out the Single Mama on EBT

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.On May 4, 2026, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos served as honorary co-chairs of the Met Gala. According to reporting, they put up at least $10 million to sponsor the event, with some sources citing the figure as high as $20 million. The night raised a record $42 million for the Costume Institute, the highest fundraising total in the gala’s history, with tech money powering most of it. This was the first year a tech figure served as lead sponsor, and the first year multiple major tech companies bought tables at the same event.Now I want y’all to sit with that. Sit with the choreography of it. A man whose company is named in lawsuits, congressional reports, and human rights investigations from Tel Aviv to Tukwila buys himself a seat at the table where the cultural elite gathers to celebrate themselves, and the press treats it like fashion week. Mark Ruffalo collaborated on a viral video, Olivia Rodrigo skipped her usual carpet, and an organized direct action group projected images onto Bezos’ own $120 million Madison Square Park condo. The protest centered Mary Hill, a 72-year-old Amazon warehouse worker living paycheck to paycheck while battling cancer. They called the contraprogramming the Ball Without Billionaires. That’s the smoke that should be everywhere. But the algorithm decided dresses were more important.Two things can be true. Lauren Sánchez can wear Schiaparelli inspired by Madame X and that be aesthetically interesting AND the entire spectacle can be obscene given who funded it and what that funder’s empire is doing on three continents. Both. At the same time. Y’all gotta build the muscle to hold both.Receipts: The Bezos Tax RecordNow let me give you what the Chop Up Show been built on. Receipts. Not vibes. Not feelings. Documented, reported, sourced receipts from journalists who risked their careers to put this in the public record.In 2021, ProPublica obtained over fifteen years of IRS data covering thousands of the wealthiest Americans. What they found should have ended the conversation about who is and isn’t paying their fair share in this country. Forever. According to that reporting, Jeff Bezos paid zero dollars in federal income tax in 2007, and he did it again in 2011. In the year he paid zero in 2011, he was already worth an estimated $18 billion. He even claimed a $4,000 tax credit for his children. A welfare credit. For his children. While being one of the richest men in the world.And before somebody runs in here with the “well that was a long time ago” dodge, let me hit you with the bigger picture. From 2006 to 2018, ProPublica found Bezos’ wealth grew by over $127 billion while he paid roughly $1.4 billion in personal federal taxes. That works out to a true tax rate of about 1.1 percent on the actual growth of his fortune. ProPublica’s analysis of the 2014 to 2018 window pegged his “true tax rate” at 0.98 percent. Less than one percent. And during that same period, the typical American household in his age bracket paid more in taxes than they accumulated in wealth.Let me say that one more time for the folks in the back. Y’all are paying taxes faster than y’all are building wealth, while Bezos is building wealth faster than the federal government can tax it. That is not a glitch in the system. That IS the system.How the Trick Works: The “Buy, Borrow, Die” PlaybookNow somebody finna ask, “Well how is this legal?” And that’s the right question. Because the legality is the indictment. The strategy has a name in tax policy circles. It’s called “buy, borrow, die,” and it works like this.Step one, BUY. Bezos kept his Amazon salary at roughly $80,000 per year for two decades. He told the New York Times he asked the compensation committee not to give him any comp because he would have “felt icky” about it. Translation, taking salary triggers ordinary income tax. Holding stock does not. So he held stock. The federal government can’t tax wealth that hasn’t been converted to income.Step two, BORROW. When he needs to fund a yacht, a rocket company, a Madison Square Park penthouse, or a Met Gala sponsorship, he doesn’t sell his stock and trigger capital gains. He borrows against it. Loans are not income. The IRS doesn’t tax loans. Wall Street will hand a man like Bezos credit at rates a school teacher trying to fix her transmission cannot dream of. He lives like a king and pays like a peasant.Step three, DIE. Under current US tax law, when stock is passed to heirs at death, the cost basis steps up to the value at the time of death. Decades of unrealized gains, untaxed during his lifetime, get wiped clean for his children. The dynastic wealth gets passed down with the federal tax bill effectively zeroed out.That is the loophole. That is how a man worth roughly $239 billion as of late 2025 has spent multiple years paying nothing while a single mother working at a Whole Foods owned by his company gets her wages garnished if she falls behind on a $200 utility bill. Every accusation is a confession, and every time a politician calls poor people lazy while protecting this loophole, they are confessing whose interests they actually serve.Project Nimbus: Where Cloud Computing Meets GenocideNow let’s talk about where some of that untaxed wealth goes. Because Bezos isn’t hoarding $239 billion under a mattress. He’s deploying it. And one of the places it’s deployed is a contract called Project Nimbus.In 2021, Amazon and Google jointly signed a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government to provide cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning services to Israeli government agencies, including the Ministry of Defense and the IDF. According to investigative reporting from +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian published in late 2025 and early 2026, leaked Israeli Finance Ministry documents revealed extraordinary contractual conditions Israel imposed on the two American tech giants, including obligations to secretly notify Israeli officials if foreign courts ordered the companies to hand over data, and a clause barring Google and Amazon from limiting or revoking Israeli government access even when Israeli conduct conflicted with the companies’ own policies. Microsoft reportedly competed for the same contract and refused those demands. Google and Amazon said yes.Internal Israeli procurement documents reportedly mandate that Israeli defense manufacturers, including Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, purchase cloud services from Amazon and Google. That means the technical infrastructure underwriting the surveillance, targeting, and data analysis used during what United Nations experts and multiple governments have called a genocide in Gaza is running, in part, on AWS servers. Servers funded with money the federal government did not collect because Bezos’ effective tax rate is functionally a rounding error.Inside Amazon, over 300 workers signed an internal letter calling on CEO Andy Jassy to end the company’s involvement in Project Nimbus. They were ignored. Inside Google, more than 90 workers signed a similar letter, and dozens were fired for sit-in protests. They were ignored. The fungibility of Black and Brown life across the diaspora is not theoretical. Wilderson and Hartman have been telling us for decades that the structures built to render certain bodies disposable do not stay confined to one group. Project Nimbus is the contract receipt for that thesis.Amazon Is Slavery Fast Forward 400 YearsA speaker at the Ball Without Billionaires action put it plainly. Amazon is slavery fast forward 400 years. The pickers in the warehouse, that’s the actual job title for the workers who fill the boxes, are running the same productivity logic our ancestors ran in cotton fields. Quotas. Surveillance. Bodies as units of output. Bathroom breaks regulated to the second. Now with robots, metrics, data dashboards, and algorithmic write-ups, but the core process is unchanged.And let’s talk about the union fight, because this is where the rubber meets the road. Workers at the JFK8 facility in Staten Island voted to unionize in April 2022 with the Amazon Labor Union. Amazon refused to bargain. They challenged the election. They tied it up in court. As of recent reporting, it took over 1,500 days for the National Labor Relations Board to issue a bargaining order. Four years. Four years a billionaire used the legal system, funded in large part by tax revenue he didn’t pay, to stall the constitutional right of workers to collectively bargain. The same Bezos who can write a $20 million check for a costume gala in one night cannot find his way to a bargaining table in four years. That is not an oversight. That is strategy.Where is the smoke for that? Where is the Wall Street Journal opinion page? Where is the cable news outrage cycle? Y’all save that energy for women on TANF buying a birthday cake.ICE, Ring, and the Surveillance ArchitectureThen there’s the surveillance side of the empire. Amazon Web Services hosts the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology system, known as HART, which is designed to store biometric data including iris scans, voiceprints, palmprints, and in some cases DNA samples on hundreds of millions of people. AWS also provides technical infrastructure to Palantir, a Peter Thiel company that contracts directly with ICE. Documents obtained by the Project on Government Oversight showed Amazon executives meeting with ICE officials in 2018 to pitch Rekognition, the company’s facial recognition product, for immigration enforcement uses.In late 2025 and early 2026, public scrutiny intensified over a planned partnership between Amazon’s Ring and Flock Safety, a license-plate-reader company whose data is widely accessible to ICE through local law enforcement partners. After weeks of organized backlash, including a viral Super Bowl ad controversy and public pressure from Senator Ron Wyden’s office, Ring announced in February 2026 that it was canceling the planned Flock integration. Pressure works. Organizing works. The same playbook your grandparents used in Montgomery still works. They just don’t want you to know it does.Two things can be true. Ring may not have a direct ICE contract, AND the architecture Amazon has built creates downstream surveillance access that immigration authorities have repeatedly tapped through local police partnerships. Both. At the same time. Don’t let the corporate denial be the end of the analysis. Follow the data trail.Conservative Contradictions and Welfare Queens The welfare queen is one of the most successful pieces of political fiction this country ever produced. Reagan workshopped her on the 1976 campaign trail using a real woman named Linda Taylor — who was actually a serial criminal, not a typical aid recipient — and turned her into a racialized archetype that has shaped American policy for fifty years. The image was always coded: the Cadillac, the furs, the multiple aliases, the implication that she was why your paycheck wasn't stretching. And it worked. It justified gutting AFDC, it built the bipartisan consensus for the 1996 welfare reform bill, and it trained a generation of voters to read "government assistance" as Black, female, and undeserving. But here's where the contradiction snaps the whole frame in half. The actual welfare queen is Jeff Bezos. The actual welfare queen is Elon Musk taking $38 billion in government contracts, subsidies, and tax credits across his companies, by Washington Post reporting. The actual welfare queens are the Walton heirs, whose Walmart workforce relies on so much SNAP and Medicaid that taxpayers effectively subsidize their poverty wages to the tune of billions a year. We've got billionaires paying zero in federal income tax in multiple documented years, sitting on stepped-up basis loopholes that wipe out lifetimes of capital gains for their children, while their companies harvest federal contracts, municipal tax breaks, and HQ2-style bidding wars where cities literally hand them public money to show up. That is welfare. That is government transfer to private benefit. That is the textbook definition. But y'all won't call it that, because the racial coding of the original trope did its job — it taught America to see a Black woman with a grocery cart as a threat to the republic and a white man with a rocket company as an innovator. Every accusation is a confession. When politicians scream about "dependency" while protecting Bezos's tax architecture, they're not describing the poor. They're describing themselves and the class they serve. The welfare queen was never on the corner. She's been at Davos this whole time. Let that marinate.The Billionaire Welfare ClassThe phrase I keep using on the show, and I’m gonna keep using it because it’s accurate, is the billionaire welfare class. These are people whose entire economic position is subsidized by the public. By tax breaks they wrote. By infrastructure they didn’t build. By labor they don’t pay fairly. By legal systems funded by taxpayers and weaponized against critics. By federal contracts they then turn around and use to surveil the very public that funded them.Bezos has reportedly donated $10 million-plus to a super PAC. He poured millions into a documentary project. He just dropped at least $10 million, possibly $20 million, on a single night of fashion. None of those numbers, taken individually, would close out his federal tax liability if it were calculated on his actual wealth growth. But because the tax code is structured to count income, not wealth, and because most of his wealth is held as unrealized stock gains, the bill never comes due. He gets to be a philanthropist with money that should have been a public investment. He gets to play patron of the arts with revenue the IRS never saw.That is welfare. That is government transfer. That is the public subsidizing the private. Y’all just been trained not to call it that when the recipient wears a suit instead of a hoodie.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Liberalism Is a Hell of a DrugI’m gonna keep saying it. Liberalism is a hell of a drug. The liberal framework cannot indict Bezos because it cannot indict the system that produced him. So it produces takes about “smart philanthropy” and “innovation” and “what would we do without Amazon Prime.” It produces Anna Wintour calling Lauren Sánchez a “wonderful asset.” It produces “well at least he’s giving back.”SNCC was not liberal. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was not liberal. Baldwin was not a liberal, no matter how many times Aaron Sorkin tried to make him one. Black Leftism, rooted in the Black radical tradition, in racial capitalism analysis from Cedric Robinson, in the political economy work of Walter Rodney, in the structural critiques of Angela Davis and the late bell hooks, has always been able to name what liberalism cannot. Capitalism is the engine. Antiblackness is the lubricant. The billionaire is a logical output, not a glitch. You cannot reform your way to an economy that does not produce a Jeff Bezos. You have to dismantle the conditions that make him possible.Huey said it best, and I’m gonna anchor every piece I write on billionaires with this until I draw my last breath. “The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.” Conscious Lee’s remix for 2026, the first lesson y’all must learn is that this system is doomed. Unless y’all understand that, y’all will keep mistaking spectacle for substance, and y’all will keep clapping for our exploiters.Where We Go From HereI am not interested in moralizing at you. Moralizing is what liberals do when they don’t have a strategy. I am interested in equipping you. So here’s where we go.Number one, change the language. Stop saying “tax avoidance” when you mean wealth extraction. Stop saying “philanthropy” when you mean reputation laundering. Start using “billionaire welfare class” in every conversation, on every platform, in every comment thread. Language structures politics. Reclaim the words.Number two, support the workers actually fighting Amazon. The Amazon Labor Union, the Teamsters’ organizing efforts at delivery stations, and the Make Amazon Pay coalition are doing the slow, unglamorous work of class struggle. They need money, bodies at picket lines, and amplification. Not just tweets. Show up.Number three, demand a wealth tax, a billionaire minimum tax, and the closure of the stepped-up basis loophole. The Biden administration proposed taxing unrealized gains at death, and the proposal died because the donor class killed it. Resurrect it. Make every congressional candidate who wants your vote answer for it. On record. In writing. Hold them to it.Number four, divest. Where you can, divest. Cancel Prime if you can survive without it. Buy from local Black-owned and worker-owned businesses where possible. Pressure your university, your union pension, your city council, to divest from companies tied to Project Nimbus and surveillance contracts. The boycott is not a tactic of the past. It worked in Montgomery, it worked in Soweto, it works now.Number five, build the political analysis. Read Wilderson. Read Hartman. Read Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism.” Read “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.” Read Charles Mills’ “The Racial Contract.” Listen to your elders, the ones who lived through COINTELPRO and can tell you what it looks like when a state surveils its own people on behalf of capital. Education is elevation. The information is here. The question is whether you’re going to engage it or keep doom scrolling.ClosingMary Hill is 72 years old. She works in an Amazon warehouse. She has cancer. She lives paycheck to paycheck. Jeff Bezos earns, by some calculations, roughly $8 million per hour. He paid zero federal income tax in 2007 and 2011. He just dropped up to $20 million on a costume party in the same week leaked documents revealed his company’s contractual entanglement with a state actively conducting genocide. He has used the legal system, funded by taxpayers, to delay a union contract for over four years.And y’all wanna talk about who’s lazy. Y’all wanna lecture Black women about respectability. Y’all wanna ask why people are angry. This is why people are angry. This is why I do this work. This is why The Chop Up Show keeps running these receipts even when the algorithm doesn’t reward it. Because somebody has to keep saying it out loud until enough of us refuse to look away.Let that marinate. Then come back tomorrow ready to organize.SUPPORT INDEPENDENT BLACK POLITICAL EDUCATIONI do this work without corporate sponsors. No billionaire foundations bankroll The Chop Up Show. No legacy media outlet writes my checks. The reason I can sit here and run receipts on a man worth $239 billion is because I don’t answer to a man worth $239 billion. That independence is paid for by you.When you become a paid subscriber to Education Is Elevation, you are doing more than supporting a writer. You are funding the kind of long-form, sourced, unflinching political analysis that public education media used to produce before the field collapsed. You are keeping a Black-led, debate-trained, Pan-Africanist research practice alive in a moment when billionaires are buying newsrooms and gutting them in real time. The Washington Post, owned by the same Bezos this article is about, just laid off roughly one-third of its staff. That void doesn’t fill itself. We fill it.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Five Key Takeaways1. Bezos has paid $0 in federal income tax in multiple documented years.According to ProPublica’s 2021 reporting on a leaked trove of IRS records, Jeff Bezos paid zero federal income taxes in both 2007 and 2011. In 2011, while worth an estimated $18 billion, he even claimed a $4,000 tax credit for his children. This is not speculation. It is documented from federal records.2. His real, wealth-adjusted tax rate is roughly 1 percent.ProPublica’s analysis of Bezos’ 2014 to 2018 tax record found a “true tax rate” of 0.98 percent, calculated against the actual growth of his wealth. From 2006 to 2018, his wealth grew by over $127 billion while he paid roughly $1.4 billion in federal taxes, a true tax rate of about 1.1 percent.3. $20 million for a Met Gala, $1.2 billion for Project Nimbus.Reports place Bezos’ sponsorship of the 2026 Met Gala at $10 million to $20 million. Meanwhile, Amazon and Google jointly hold a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government providing cloud and AI services tied to military operations in Gaza. The math of his discretionary spending tells the moral story.4. Amazon’s union-busting cost workers more than 1,500 days.Workers at the Staten Island JFK8 facility unionized in 2022 and waited over four years for a National Labor Relations Board bargaining order against Amazon’s refusal to negotiate. The same legal system that protects billionaires from taxes is used to delay workers from contracts.5. This is welfare. Name it.Tax loopholes, federal contracts, public infrastructure, and legal subsidies make up an entire ecosystem of public support for private billionaire wealth. The phrase “billionaire welfare class” is not rhetorical flourish. It is descriptive accuracy. Use it.RELEVANT RECIEPTS Eisinger, J., Ernsthausen, J., & Kiel, P. (2021, June 8). The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax. ProPublica.Frankel, T. C. (2021, June 9). IRS records show wealthiest Americans, including Bezos and Musk, paid little in income taxes as share of wealth, report says. The Washington Post.Americans for Tax Fairness. (2021). Summary of ProPublica’s Report on Billionaire Tax Dodgers.Loewenstein, A., Berger, Y., et al. (2026, February 4). Inside Israel’s deal with Google and Amazon. +972 Magazine / Local Call / The Guardian.Democracy Now. (2025, October 31). Report: Google and Amazon Violated Their Own Terms of Service in Israel’s $1.2 Billion “Project Nimbus” Deal.Conger, K., & Roose, K. (n.d.). Project Nimbus. Wikipedia overview and aggregated reporting.American Civil Liberties Union. (2018, October). Amazon Met With ICE Officials to Market Its Facial Recognition Product.McGee, A. / Snopes / CNN Business. (2026, January–February). Coverage of the Ring × Flock partnership and its cancellation. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe