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Tag: jeff bezos
Texas Republicans Aim To Punish Firms For Backing Abortion Rights

Texas Republicans Aim To Punish Firms For Backing Abortion Rights

Far-right Republican state lawmakers want to make it impossible for Texans to buy anything on Amazon, buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks, or even buy a Tesla, all to further their attack on abortion.

Fourteen Republicans want to pass a law that bans any company from doing business in the state of Texas with companies that have pledged to assist employees in obtaining abortion care outside of the Lone Star State, The Texas Tribune reports.

GOP stateRep. Briscoe Cain and 13 other Republican “members of the state House of Representatives have pledged to introduce bills in the coming legislative session that would bar corporations from doing business in Texas if they pay for abortions in states where the procedure is legal.”

“This would explicitly prevent firms from offering employees access to abortion-related care through health insurance benefits. It would also expose executives to criminal prosecution under pre-Roe anti-abortion laws the Legislature never repealed, the legislators say.”

An NCRM search found a dozen companies that have publicly vowed to assist their employees access abortions outside of Texas, including Tesla, which recently moved to Texas from California.


Other companies include Amazon, Starbucks, Lyft, Uber, Salesforce, Yelp, Match Group, Bumble, Apple, Levi Strauss, and CitiBank.

Back in March Rep. Cain – who was accused by Democrat Beto O’Rourke of making a “death threat” against him – targeted CitiBank, saying “he had sent a cease-and-desist letter to Citigroup’s chief executive, Jane Fraser, calling the policy a ‘misuse of shareholder money,'” The New York Times reported.

At that time Cain threatened to ban local governments from doing business with any company that assisted employees. Now he’s set the bar higher by wanting to ban the companies from doing business in Texas entirely.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

How Corporate Greed Is Causing Tornado Deaths

How Corporate Greed Is Causing Tornado Deaths

In its ranking of business values, corporate America proudly provides a special place for elevated moral behavior. That place is the trash can.

Indeed, several years ago, free-market extremist Milton Friedman actually decreed that the only ethical obligation a corporation has to society is to deliver as much profit as possible to its big investors — everybody else be damned. Any awfulness caused by their self-indulgent policy of profit maximization is excused by claiming that their iniquities "broke no laws." But — hello — they write the laws, intentionally defining corporate immorality as always technically legal.

America experienced the result of this mentality just before Christmas, when a line of supercell tornadoes ripped through Midwestern states, demolishing homes, businesses and even whole towns, killing more than 90 people. "A tragedy," wailed CEOs, the media and public officials! But wait: Those deaths were not destiny. No question that a twisting 190-mph vortex comes at us with cataclysmic power, but we're not helpless in the face of its fury. For years, an effective, comparatively cheap defense against killer tornadoes has been readily available: Safe rooms.

Basically, these are simple, concrete rooms built inside homes, schools, factories, shopping centers and elsewhere. People can shelter safely in them during big blows, surviving even if the building around them is shredded. Emergency management officials report that they provide "near absolute protection" from tornadoes. A decade ago, safety officials, insurance providers, consumer advocates and others had proposed amending our building codes to require these inexpensive, lifesaving structures in new commercial and public buildings. Such a provision would've saved many workers who were crushed in an Amazon warehouse, a candle-making factory and other buildings destroyed in December's storms.

But they died, because in 2012, members of a little-known industry-controlled group, the International Code Council, had quietly vetoed the proposal, calling it "overly restrictive," even declaring it "way too soon to do a knee jerk reaction" to tornado deaths.

All those buildings smashed by December's tornadoes were corporate death sites because their shoddy construction "broke no laws." Let's ask corporate America if it's still too soon for Congress to mandate tornado-safe rooms.

The morning after the horrific tornado smashed a huge Amazon warehouse in Illinois, killing six workers on the night shift, corporate CEO Jeff Bezos issued a personal video message.

But instead of expressing distress and sorrow, Boss Bezos was perversely giddy. That's because the narcissistic gazillionaire had not made the video to mourn the deaths. Rather, ignoring Amazon's Illinois disaster, he had chosen this hour of tragedy to gloat to the world that his private space tourism business had just rocketed a small group of extremely rich thrill seekers on a 10-minute joyride some 66 miles up to the edge of space. As reported by the "Popular Information" newsletter, Bezos even dressed up in a pretend astronaut costume for this PR video, grinning proudly as he exclaimed that everyone involved was really "happy."

Back on Planet Earth, though, the families and co-workers of the employees crushed when Amazon's cheaply built structure collapsed on them were not happy with him. It took Bezos some 12 hours after his self-congratulatory media event before he finally issued a perfunctory tweet professing to be "heartbroken over the loss of our teammates."

But they weren't "lost" to a storm — they were killed by a deliberate corporate culture that routinely cuts corners on worker safety to put more profit in corporate pockets. First, the building itself was thrown up quickly with cheap, preassembled, 40-foot-high concrete walls that collapse inward in a tornado; second, Amazon's employees were expected to stay on the job that night even though there was a high risk of tornadoes; third, Amazon never bothered to hold tornado drills; and fourth, nearly all of the workers were classified as "contractors," letting Amazon dodge liability for on-the-job harm.

Oh, and Jeff might also want to reconsider one more bit of the corporate arrogance he revealed in this ugly incident: Those dead workers were not his "teammates," as he so cynically called them — even a high-flying captain doesn't treat teammates as throwaway units, carelessly sacrificing their lives for a few more dollars in corporate profit.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

There’s Rich, Ugly Rich, And Jeff Bezos

There’s Rich, Ugly Rich, And Jeff Bezos

When I was just a tyke, cowboy television actors were marketed as role models and heroes for little backyard cowpokes like me, and we could send off a cereal box top to get a certificate making us "Pals of the Saddle" or some-such with Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy or other "heroes."

Cute for a four year-old. Less so for 57-year-old Jeff "Space Boy" Bezos.

Yet there he was in July — the gazillionaire profiteer, labor exploiter, and tax scofflaw who heads the Amazon online retail syndicate — all dressed up and playacting as a heroic conqueror of space. Marketed as some combination of the Wright brothers' innovation and the Apollo 11 moon landing, Little Jeff's trip on his private Blue Origin rocket ship was essentially a very expensive, high-tech carnival ride. The whole thing took only 11 minutes, barely got into suborbital space, achieved no scientific purpose, and did zero to enhance American prestige in the world.

As for personal genius or heroics, Bezos didn't invent or build the spacecraft, didn't have any role in flying it (the trip up and down was fully automated), and didn't face any cosmic unknowns (he didn't even have to wear a spacesuit). All he really did was buy the spacecraft — a cheap bauble for the world's richest man.

But he did get to dress up in a sort of space-style jogging outfit with his name and his Blue Origin corporate logo emblazoned on it. Then, like a little boy getting a cereal-box certificate proclaiming him a cowboy, when the diminutive mega-billionaire floated back to terra firma, he held a fake ceremony at which some former NASA official pinned a set of phony "astronaut wings" on him, custom designed by his own corporation. More pathetically, his corporate lobbyists are said to be appealing to Washington officials to award official astronaut wings to this uber-rich space tourist.

So, there you have the new pantheon of America's flight heroes: the Wright brothers, Amelia Earhart, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong ... and Jeff "Space Boy" Bezos. Did I mention "pathetic"?

I cheered when Bezos, the richest man on Earth, had himself rocketed into space. But then he came back down.

There's nothing irredeemably wrong about being rich — indeed, as Mark Twain put it, "I'm opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position." One good role model for handling wealth, rather than letting it handle you, is music superstar Dolly Parton. She donated a cool million bucks to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2020 to help finance its development of the Moderna vaccine that's now preventing millions of people from dying with COVID-19.

Then there's ugly rich, like Amazon kingpin "Space Boy" Bezos, who keeps spending gobs of his unsurpassed net worth on vainglorious purchases that end up revealing his essential worthlessness. Last year, he paid half a billion dollars for a yacht that's three football fields long and still not big enough to float his ego. So, last month, combining cluelessness with callousness, he actually ran a global media campaign to glorify himself for spending untold billions on his ego trip up to the edge of space. Back on Earth, he publicly blurted out that Amazon's underpaid and abused workforce should be applauded, because "you guys paid for all this."

Meanwhile, Wall Street speculators keep bloating Space Boy's personal fortune. On just one day last year, his wealth was jacked up by $8 billion ! One day! For doing nothing — he didn't work longer, harder or smarter. Well, he has been diligent about one task: tax dodging. Even though his wealth now tops $162 billion, he's had years in which he's paid zero income tax for the support of our nation.

But this year, Jeff suddenly became a philanthropist! Increasingly ridiculed as a self-indulgent rich jerk, he loudly announced he was giving $200 million to charitable causes. Wow — how generous. Except ... that's no sacrifice for Jeff, it's pocket change — doling out two big bills means he still has $161.8 billion in his vault.

We don't need his self-serving "charity"; we need a wealth tax to restore a bit of fairness and to support America's common good.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Warren And Whitehouse Demand Probe Of Tax Avoidance By Ultra-Wealthy

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

Two prominent members of the Senate Finance Committee are calling for an investigation into tax avoidance by the ultrawealthy, citing ProPublica's "Secret IRS Files" series.

In a letter sent today, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) wrote to the committee's chairman, Ron Wyden (D-OR), that the "bombshell" and "deeply troubling" report requires an investigation into "how the nation's wealthiest individuals are using a series of legal tax loopholes to avoid paying their fair share of income taxes." The senators also requested that the Senate hold hearings and develop legislation to address the loopholes' "impact on the nation's finances and ability to pay for investments in infrastructure, health care, the economy, and the environment."

Last month ProPublica began publishing a series of stories about tax avoidance among the ultra-wealthy, based on a vast trove of tax data concerning thousands of the wealthiest American taxpayers and covering more than 15 years. ProPublica conducted an unprecedented analysis that compared the ultra-wealthy's taxes to the growth in their fortunes, calculating that the 25 richest Americans pay a "true tax rate" of just 3.4 percent.

The wealthy pay so little in taxes primarily because they keep their incomes low, the article explained, often borrowing against their fortunes to fund their lifestyles. Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Tesla's Elon Musk, Bloomberg L.P.'s Michael Bloomberg and other billionaires have each paid no federal income taxes in one or more recent years. The tax avoidance techniques described in "The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Taxes" are legal, and routine among the ultrawealthy.

In a subsequent article, ProPublica highlighted how some rich people, such as Peter Thiel, have been able to use Roth individual retirement accounts, intended as vehicles to bolster middle-class savings, to create vast untaxed fortunes. A third article showed how billionaires use a provision in the tax code to reduce their taxes after buying sports teams.

Banks and financial institutions are lending more to the rich than ever, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal last week. The senators called for an investigation of banks and wealth management firms to understand the techniques, strategies and products offered to the wealthy that enable them to avoid paying taxes. Morgan Stanley's wealth management clients have $68 billion worth of loans backed by securities and other investments, more than double the amount they had five years ago, and Bank of America has loans worth over $62 billion, the Journal reported.

In March, Warren introduced a bill, co-sponsored by Whitehouse, that would create a tax on the wealth of the richest Americans. Most Republicans and some Democrats oppose such a measure.

Update, July 14, 2021: In a statement, Wyden said that he agreed with the points raised by Warren and Whitehouse. "The country's wealthiest — who profited immensely during the pandemic — have not been paying their fair share," he said. "I've been working on a proposal to fix this broken system since 2019 and continue to work to get the bill ready for release. I'm also going to work with my colleagues on other ways the committee can tackle this issue."