  Recently it has been shown that the vacuum state in QED is infinitely
degenerate. Moreover a transition among the degenerate vacua is induced in any
nontrivial scattering process and determined from the associated soft factor.
Conventional computations of scattering amplitudes in QED do not account for
this vacuum degeneracy and therefore always give zero. This vanishing of all
conventional QED amplitudes is usually attributed to infrared divergences. Here
we show that if these vacuum transitions are properly accounted for, the
resulting amplitudes are nonzero and infrared finite. Our construction of
finite amplitudes is mathematically equivalent to, and amounts to a physical
reinterpretation of, the 1970 construction of Faddeev and Kulish.
