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      Bezos faces criticism after executives met with Trump on day of Post’s non-endorsement

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      The multi-billionaire owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, continued facing criticism throughout the weekend because executives from his aerospace company met with Donald Trump on the same day the newspaper prevented its editorial team from publishing an endorsement of his opponent in the US presidential election.Senior news and opinion leaders at the Washington Post flew to Miami in late September 2024 to meet with Bezos, who had reservations about the paper issuing an endorsement in the 5 November election, the New York Times reported.Amazon and the space exploration company Blue Origin are among Bezos-owned businesses that still compete for lucrative federal government contracts.And the Post on Friday announced it would not endorse a candidate in the 5 November election after its editorial board had already drafted its endorsement of Kamala Harris.Friday’s announcement did not mention Amazon or Blue Origin. But within hours, high-ranking officials of the latter company briefly met with Trump after a campaign speech in Austin, Texas, as the Republican nominee seeks a second presidency.Trump met with Blue Origin chief executive officer David Limp and vice-president of government relations Megan Mitchell, the Associated Press reported.Meanwhile, CNN reported that the Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, had also recently reached out to speak with the former president by phone.Those reported overtures were eviscerated by Washington Post editor-at-large and longtime columnist Robert Kagan, who resigned on Friday. On Saturday, he argued that the meeting Blue Origin executives had with Trump would not have taken place if the Post had endorsed the Democratic vice-president as it planned.“Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do – and then met with the Blue Origin people,” Kagan told the Daily Beast on Saturday. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.”The Post’s publisher Will Lewis, hired by Bezos in January, defended the paper’s owner by claiming the decision to spike the Harris endorsement was his. But that has done little to defuse criticism from within the newspaper’s ranks as well as the wave of subscription cancelations that has met the institution.Eighteen opinion columnists at the Washington Post signed a dissenting column against the decision, calling it “a terrible mistake”. The paper has already made endorsements this election cycle, including in a US senate seat race in Maryland. The Washington Post endorsed Hillary Clinton when Trump won the presidency in 2016. It endorsed Joe Biden when Trump lost in 2020, despite Trump’s pledges to retaliate against anyone who opposed him.In their criticism of the Post’s decision on Friday, former and current employees cite the dangers to democracy posed by Trump, who has openly expressed his admiration for authoritarian rule amid his appeals for voters to return him to office.The former Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who broke the Watergate story, called the decision “disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process”.The former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron said in a post on X, “This is cowardice with democracy as its casualty”.The cartoon team at the paper published a dark formless image protesting against the non-endorsement decision, playing on the “democracy dies in darkness” slogan that the Post adopted in 2017, five years after its purchase by Bezos.High-profile readers, including the bestselling author Stephen King as well as the former congresswoman and vocal Trump critic Liz Cheney, announced the cancellation of their Washington Post subscriptions with many others in protest.The Post’s non-endorsement came shortly after the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, refused to allow the editorial board publish an endorsement of Harris.Many pointed out how the stances from the Post and the LA Times seems to fit the definition of “anticipatory obedience” as spelled out in On Tyranny, Tim Snyder’s bestselling guide to authoritarianism. Snyder defines the term as “giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian” before the authoritarian is in position to compel that handover.Bezos is the second wealthiest person in the world behind Elon Musk, who has become a prominent supporter of Trump’s campaign for a second presidency. He bought the Washington Post in 2013 for $250m.In 2021, Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon, claiming during a podcast interview that he intended to devote more time to Blue Origin.The New York Times reported Bezos had begun to get more involved in the paper in 2023 as it faced significant financial losses, a stream of employee departures and low morale.His pick of Lewis as publisher in January seemingly did little to help morale at the paper. Employees and devotees of the paper were worried that Lewis was brought on to the Post despite allegations that he “fraudulently obtained phone and company records in newspaper articles” as a journalist in London, as the New York Times reported.Nonetheless, in a memo to newsroom leaders in June 2024, Bezos wrote, “The journalistic standards and ethics at the Post will not change.” More

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      The Washington Post and LA Times refused to endorse a candidate. Why? | Margaret Sullivan

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      The choice for president has seldom been starker.On one side is Donald Trump, a felonious and twice-impeached conman, raring to finish off the job of dismantling American democracy. On the other is Kamala Harris, a capable and experienced leader who stands for traditional democratic principles.Nevertheless – and shockingly – the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post have decided to sit this one out. Both major news organizations, each owned by a billionaire, announced this week that their editorial boards would not make a presidential endorsement, despite their decades-long traditions of doing so.There’s no other way to see this other than as an appalling display of cowardice and a dereliction of their public duty.At the Los Angeles Times, the decision rests clearly with Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the ailing paper in 2018, raising great hopes of a resurgence there.At the Post (where I was the media columnist from 2016 to 2022), the editorial page editor David Shipley said he owned the decision, but it clearly came from above – specifically from the publisher, Will Lewis, the veteran of Rupert Murdoch’s media properties, hand-picked last year by the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. Was Bezos himself the author of this abhorrent decision? Maybe not, but it could not have come as a surprise.All of this may look like nonpartisan neutrality, or be intended to, but it’s far from that. For one thing, it’s a shameful smackdown of both papers’ reporting and opinion-writing staffs who have done important work exposing Trump’s dangers for many years.It’s also a strong statement of preference. The papers’ leaders have made it clear that they either want Trump (who is, after all, a boon to large personal fortunes) or that they don’t wish to risk the ex-president’s wrath and retribution if he wins. If the latter was a factor, it’s based on a shortsighted judgment, since Trump has been a hazard to press rights and would only be emboldened in a second term.“Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage,” the wrote former Washington Post editor Marty Baron on Friday on X, blasting the Post’s decision. He predicted that Trump would see this as an invitation to try further to intimidate Bezos, a dynamic detailed in Baron’s 2023 book Collision of Power.The editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times, Mariel Garza, resigned this week over the owner’s decision to kill off the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Harris.“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza told Columbia Journalism Review’s editor, Sewell Chan. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”Others, including a Pulitzer prize-winning editorial writer at the California paper, followed her principled lead. The Washington Post editor at large Robert Kagan resigned in protest, too. They do so at considerable personal cost, since there are so few similar positions in today’s financially troubled media industry.Some news organizations upheld their duty and remained true to their mission.The New York Times endorsed Harris last month, calling her “the only patriotic choice for president”, and writing that Trump “has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest”.The Guardian, too, strongly endorsed Harris, saying she would “unlock democracy’s potential, not give in to its flaws”, and calling Trump a “transactional and corrupting politician”.Meanwhile, the Murdoch-controlled New York Post has endorsed Trump. Although that decision lacks a moral core, it’s far from surprising.But the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post decisions are, in their way, far worse.They constitute “an abdication”, said Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. (I run an ethics center and teach there.)The refusal to endorse, he told me, “tacitly equalizes two wildly distinct candidates, one of whom has tried to overturn a presidential election and one of whom has not”.As for the message this refusal sends to the public? It’s ugly.Readers will reasonably conclude that the newspapers were intimidated. And people will fairly question, Cobb said, when else they “have chosen expediency over courage”.This is no moment to stand at the sidelines – shrugging, speechless and self-interested.With the most consequential election of the modern era only days away, the silence is deafening.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Collision of Power review: Marty Baron on Bezos, the Post and Trump

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      Marty Baron led the Washington Post as executive editor for eight years, retiring in 2021. All told, newsrooms he led won 17 Pulitzer prizes, 10 of them at the Post. Liev Schreiber portrayed him in Spotlight, the 2015 Oscar-winning movie that depicted a Boston Globe investigation of sexual predation by priests.Baron has stories to tell. His first book has a tantalizing subtitle – Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post – and he dives right in.In August 2013, “five days after the announcement that Bezos would buy the Post, Trump heaped praise on both Bezos and the paper”, Baron recalls.“I think it’s a great move for him, I think it’s great for the Washington Post,” Trump remarked. Beyond that, Trump, then a mere reality TV star, called Bezos “amazing” and proclaimed that he was a “fan” of the paper.Trump soon fell out of love. In December 2015, as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, he accused Bezos and Amazon of scamming the American taxpayer. In March 2018, as president, he began hammering away at the supposed Amazon “post office scam”. But the deference Trump demanded never arrived.Baron’s book is timely. Last month, Trump barked that Comcast, owner of NBC and MSNBC, should be investigated for “treason”, and will be if he is re-elected next year.His Republican opponents offered no pushback. This was not a surprise. During his first presidential run, and then as president, Trump repeatedly called the media the “enemy of the people”, treating reporters as foils. To Baron, that echoed Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Goebbels. Threats of violence against the press wafted through campaign rallies. In late October 2016, in Miami, Trump whipped a crowd into a frenzy against Katy Tur of MSNBC. On Twitter, death threats circulated like “loose trash”, she recalled.Baron writes: “The middle finger he had given the press was about to become a fist. My own mood was one of stoic acceptance.” Throughout his book, his tone is measured and concerned, not simply alarmed. He calls for objectivity but he knows the press is under attack. Nationally, investigative journalism thrives. Locally, it dies.This being a Trump book, Baron also deals some dish. According to Baron, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, tried to oust him from the Post.“Trump and his team would go after the Post and everyone else in the media who didn’t bend to his wishes,” Baron writes. “In December 2019, Kushner would lean on [the Post publisher Fred] Ryan to withdraw support for me and our Russia investigation. ‘He aims to get me fired,’ I told Ryan.”Kushner “suggested the Post issue an apology and there be a ‘reckoning of some sort’”, Baron writes. No apology followed. Baron kept his job.The Post came with a storied history: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers and more. It was no one’s toy or bauble. It was not the New York Observer, once owned by Kushner, whose own memoir reportedly received an assist from Ken Kurson, a former Observer editor pardoned by Trump on cyberstalking charges only to plead guilty to state charges of spying on his wife.In Collision of Power, Baron also describes a White House dinner in June 2017, months after the inauguration, at which Trump unleashed a torrent of grievance and self-adulation.“He had better relations with foreign leaders than Obama, who was lazy and never called them.” His predecessor had “left disasters around the world for him to solve”.In the same breath, Baron says, Trump took to task the chief executive of Macy’s for pulling Trump-branded products in reaction to his calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”. The store, Trump said, “would have been picketed by only 20 Mexicans. Who cares?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBaron also captures Trump throwing jabs at Benjamin Netanyahu, complaining of how little the US received in exchange for aid to Israel. Fresh off a trip there, and advised he couldn’t leverage aid to broker peace with the Palestinians, Trump was annoyed.“I was told ‘there’s no connection,’” Trump told Bezos, Baron, Ryan and Fred Hiatt, another Post editor. “He was incredulous. ‘No connection?’”Trump’s take, Baron says, foreshadowed reporting by Barak Ravid of Axios, that Trump “said he was surprised to find that the Palestinians want a peace deal more than the Israelis”. In his own book, Trump’s Peace, Ravid captures Trump saying of Netanyahu, “fuck him”, and reducing American Jews to antisemitic caricatures.A postscript: Trump’s dinner with Baron and Bezos was held on 15 June 2017, the night of the congressional baseball game. Trump chose to hang out with a bunch of reporters despite the shooting, at practice for that game, of Steve Scalise of Louisiana, a House Republican leader and Trump supporter, who was left fighting for his life.Of course, this is not surprising. In summer 2020, when protests for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd came close to the White House, Trump hid in the basement. More recently, John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, has confirmed that Trump refused to be seen with wounded veterans. In the Trump White House, bravura was common, compassion and bravery near-non-existent.A year after Trump was ejected from power, Baron retired and went to work on his book. As it comes out, Scalise is both battling cancer and plotting to become House speaker. Trump, 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination again.From the beginning, as Baron saw close up, Trump “had the makings of an autocrat”. In the next election, the tenor of coverage will be vital. Should Trump win, the plight of the press may be uncertain. Either way, Baron says, journalists will need “idealism, determination and courage”.
      Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post is published in the US by Macmillan More

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      The US ultra-rich justify their low tax rates with three myths – all rubbish | Robert Reich

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      The US ultra-rich justify their low tax rates with three myths – all of them rubbishRobert ReichA record share of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of billionaires, who pay a lower tax rate than the average American. This is indefensible On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office released a study of trends in the distribution of family wealth between 1989 and 2019.Over those 30 years, the richest 1% of families increased their share of total national wealth from 27% to 34%. Families in the bottom half of the economy now hold a mere 2%.Meanwhile, a record share of the nation’s wealth remains in the hands of the nation’s billionaires, who are also paying a lower tax rate than the average American.How do the ultra-wealthy justify their wealth and their low tax rates? By using three myths – all of which are utter rubbish.The first is trickle-down economics.Billionaires (and their apologists) claim that their wealth trickles down to everyone else as they invest it and create jobs.Really? For more than 40 years, as wealth at the top has soared, almost nothing has trickled down. Adjusted for inflation, the median wage today is barely higher than it was four decades ago.Trump provided a giant tax cut to the wealthiest Americans, promising it would generate $4,000 increased income for everyone else. Did you receive it?In reality, the super-wealthy don’t create jobs or raise wages. Jobs are created when average working people earn enough money to buy all the goods and services they produce, pushing companies to hire more people and pay them higher wages.The second myth is the “free market”.The ultra-rich claim they’re being rewarded by the impersonal market for creating and doing what people are willing to pay them for.The wages of other Americans have stagnated, they say, because most Americans are worth less in the market now that new technologies and globalization have made their jobs redundant.Baloney. Even if they’re being rewarded, there’s no reason why the “free market’ would reward vast multiples of what the rich were rewarded with decades ago.The market can induce great feats of invention and entrepreneurship with lures of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars – not billions.As to the rest of us succumbing to labor-replacing globalization and labor-saving technologies, no other advanced nation has nearly the degree of inequality found in the United States, yet all these nations have been exposed to the same forces of globalization and technological change.In reality, the ultra-wealthy have rigged the so-called “free market” in the US for their own benefit. Billionaires’ campaign contributions have soared from a relatively modest $31m in the 2010 elections to $1.2bn in the most recent presidential cycle – a nearly 40-fold increase.What have they got for their money? Tax cuts, freedom to bash unions and monopolize markets and government bailouts. Their pockets have been further lined by privatization and deregulation.The third myth is that they’re superior human beings.They portray themselves as “self-made” rugged individuals who “did it on their own” and therefore deserve their billions.Bupkis. Six of the 10 wealthiest Americans alive today are heirs to fortunes passed on to them by wealthy ancestors.Others had the advantages that come with wealthy parents.Jeff Bezos’s garage-based start was funded by a quarter-million-dollar investment from his parents. Bill Gates’s mother used her business connections to help land a software deal with IBM that made Microsoft. Elon Musk came from a family that reportedly owned shares of an emerald mine in southern Africa.Don’t fall for these three myths.Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke.The so-called free market has been distorted by huge campaign contributions from the ultra-rich.Don’t lionize the ultra-rich as superior “self-made” human beings who deserve their billions. They were lucky and had connections.In reality, there is no justification for today’s extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top. It’s distorting our politics, rigging our markets and granting unprecedented power to a handful of people.The last time America faced anything comparable was at the start of the 20th century.In 1910, former president Theodore Roosevelt warned that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power” could destroy American democracy.Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. The estate tax was enacted in 1916, and the capital gains tax in 1922.Since that time, both have eroded. As the rich have accumulated greater wealth, they have also amassed more political power – and have used that political power to reduce their taxes.Teddy Roosevelt understood something about the American economy and the ultra-rich that has now re-emerged, even more extreme and more dangerous. We must understand it, too – and act.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionInequalityTax and spendingJeff BezosElon MuskBill GatescommentReuse this content More

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      The US has a ruling class – and Americans must stand up to it | Bernie Sanders

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      The US has a ruling class – and Americans must stand up to itBernie SandersIn the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. This is unsustainable Let’s be clear. The most important economic and political issues facing this country are the extraordinary levels of income and wealth inequality, the rapidly growing concentration of ownership, the long-term decline of the American middle class and the evolution of this country into oligarchy.We know how important these issues are because our ruling class works overtime to prevent them from being seriously discussed. They are barely mentioned in the halls of Congress, where most members are dependent on the campaign contributions of the wealthy and their Super Pacs. They are not much discussed in the corporate media, in which a handful of conglomerates determine what we see, hear and discuss.So what’s going on?We now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the last hundred years. In the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. Today, 45% of all new income goes to the top 1%, and CEOs of large corporations make a record-breaking 350 times what their workers earn.Meanwhile, as the very rich become much richer, working families continue to struggle. Unbelievably, despite huge increases in worker productivity, wages (accounting for real inflation) are lower today than they were almost 50 years ago. When I was a kid growing up, most families were able to be supported by one breadwinner. Now an overwhelming majority of households need two paychecks to survive.Today, half of our people live paycheck to paycheck and millions struggle on starvation wages. Despite a lifetime of work, half of older Americans have no savings and no idea how they will ever be able to retire with dignity, while 55% of seniors are trying to survive on an income of less than $25,000 a year.Since 1975, there has been a massive redistribution of wealth in America that has gone in exactly the wrong direction. Over the past 47 years, according to the Rand Corporation, $50tn in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of American society to the top 1%, primarily because a growing percentage of corporate profits has been flowing into the stock portfolios of the wealthy and the powerful.During this terrible pandemic, when thousands of essential workers died doing their jobs, some 700 billionaires in America became nearly $2tn richer. Today, while the working class falls further behind, multibillionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are off taking joyrides on rocket ships to outer space, buying $500m super-yachts and living in mansions with 25 bathrooms.Disgracefully, we now have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any developed nation on Earth and millions of kids, disproportionately Black and brown, face food insecurity. While psychologists tell us that the first four years are the most important for human development, our childcare system is largely dysfunctional – with an inadequate number of slots, outrageously high costs and pathetically low wages for staff. We remain the only major country without paid family and medical leave.In terms of higher education, we should remember that 50 years ago tuition was free or virtually free in major public universities throughout the country. Today, higher education is unaffordable for millions of young people. There are now some 45 million Americans struggling with student debt.Today over 70 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured and millions more are finding it hard to pay for the rising cost of healthcare and prescription drugs, which are more expensive here than anywhere else in the world. The cost of housing is also soaring. Not only are some 600,000 Americans homeless, but nearly 18m households are spending 50% or more of their limited incomes on housing.It’s not just income and wealth inequality that is plaguing our nation. It is the maldistribution of economic and political power.Today we have more concentration of ownership than at any time in the modern history of this country. In sector after sector a handful of giant corporations control what is produced and how much we pay for it. Unbelievably, just three Wall Street firms (Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street) control assets of over $20tn and are the major stockholders in 96% of S&P 500 companies. In terms of media, some eight multinational media conglomerates control what we see, hear and read.In terms of political power, the situation is the same. A small number of billionaires and CEOs, through their Super Pacs, dark money and campaign contributions, play a huge role in determining who gets elected and who gets defeated. There are now an increasing number of campaigns in which Super Pacs actually spend more money on campaigns than the candidates, who become the puppets to their big money puppeteers. In the 2022 Democratic primaries, billionaires spent tens of millions trying to defeat progressive candidates who were standing up for working families.Dr Martin Luther King Jr was right when he said: “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power” in America. That statement is even more true today.Let us have the courage to stand together and fight back against corporate greed. Let us fight back against massive income and wealth inequality. Let us fight back against a corrupt political system.Let us stand together and finally create an economy and a government that works for all, not just the 1%.
      Bernie Sanders is a US senator from Vermont and the chairman of the Senate budget committee
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionUS CongressBernie SandersRichard BransonElon MuskUS economyJeff BezoscommentReuse this content More

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      Oh no. Is Jeff Bezos preparing to run for office? | Hamilton Nolan

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      Oh no. Is Jeff Bezos preparing to run for office?Hamilton NolanWhen an unaccountable billionaire starts putting himself out in the world as a Public Policy Thinker, alarm bells should ring Jeff Bezos is getting nervous. You can tell because he’s going on Twitter more, the universal activity of those who are channeling their restlessness in an unhealthy way. This should make the rest of us nervous, too. This is a big, flashing warning sign that America’s richest union-buster is about to throw himself more forcefully into politics – an inevitability that could have many bad outcomes, but only one good one.For the past week, the centi-billionaire Amazon founder has been firing off tweets not about his typical, anodyne interests – improved penis-shaped rocket design, luxury head wax – but rather about his policy opinions. Though Bezos (or whichever PR drone drafts his tweets) writes with the bloodlessness of a man who has attended too many management consulting meetings, it is easy to imagine the seething anger that must have been present in order to prompt him to produce them in the first place. On May 13, he criticized one of Joe Biden’s economic pronouncements, tweeting that “Raising corp taxes is fine to discuss. Taming inflation is critical to discuss. Mushing them together is just misdirection.”He followed that up with another, saying “the administration tried hard to inject even more stimulus into an already over-heated, inflationary economy and only Manchin saved them from themselves. Inflation is a regressive tax that most hurts the least affluent.” On Monday, he again railed against the failed Democratic stimulus bills, saying they would have added to inflation.‘Extra level of power’: billionaires who have bought up the mediaRead moreIt would be too easy to point out here that, actually, union-busting is a tax that most hurts the least affluent, or to point out that Bezos could mitigate inflation’s damage by giving his own employees a raise. The notable thing here is not that the staggeringly wealthy executive chairman of one of the world’s most powerful companies would bristle at talk of raising corporate taxes, or that he would bemoan the pandemic-era stimulus packages that saved millions of Americans from total economic disaster. For Amazon, which depends on the existence of a nationwide standing army of desperate people who are willing to take unstable, low-wage warehouse and delivery jobs, the sales benefits of all of that stimulus money have been mitigated by what it has done to the labor market. As demand for employees has soared, it has become harder to hire people; and, more importantly, it has helped to embolden workers to the degree necessary to vote for a union, as Amazon warehouse workers did in Staten Island last month. Like Walmart and every other low-margin retail megacorp whose profits are dependent on total control of an infinite, compliant workforce, Amazon believes that unions are an existential threat. The economic conditions created in part by government stimulus programs have momentarily made things more conducive to organized labor, and therefore, must be crushed, reversed, and judged as historic mistakes, so that policymakers don’t go thinking about doing such a thing again.Of course Bezos believes all this. Duh. We knew he was a rat-bastard union-busting ultra-rich guy many years ago. The fact that he is flying his dumb Twitter flag like a bargain-basement Elon Musk is not really worth getting exercised about. What is distressing is what this signals about Bezos’s future plans. Because when an unaccountable rich business guy starts suddenly putting himself out in the world as a Public Policy Thinker, you can be sure that he is about to start seriously leaning into the world of political influence. And that means that we are now threatened by the very real possibility that Bezos is about to make himself the next, even richer Mike Bloomberg – something that could have devastating effects on the weak-willed functionaries of the already pathetic Democratic party.Though Bezos is certainly an economic Republican, it is hard to imagine him placing his political bets on being a Republican, if only because of what it would mean for his social life. No, if he decides that he must really jump into politics – to protect his own interests, and due to the classic rich-guy belief that nobody poorer than himself should be in charge – he is bound to use the Democratic party as his tool. He could, if he got annoyed enough, flood the party with so much incoming money that the entire “centrist” wing would crawl to his doorstep on its knees, begging to write any bill he wants. The big-picture impact would be to add a huge weight to the neoliberal side of the party’s scale, a powerful force trying to tilt the party away from its recent tiptoes towards progressivism, and towards the vision of the Democrats as the sober new corporate-friendly counterweight to the psycho Maga capture of the Republicans.Last month, Bernie Sanders sent a letter to Joe Biden calling on him to stop giving federal contracts to companies that break federal labor law, especially via illegal union-busting. That simple move could take billions of dollars away from Amazon, which – in the eyes of a labor-friendly NLRB, at least – is guilty of a lot of illegal union-busting. (Amazon disputes this.) It is also a great example of what could be the new vision of the Democrats: not the slick operators trying to arbitrage corporate campaign donations, but rather the party of labor, the party ready to take seriously its own rhetoric about the dangers of rising economic inequality. The Democratic response to the rise of crazies on the right does not need to be to simply try to woo Republican donors away; instead, the Democrats can become the actual populists, the ones who side with working people against the power of capital. (The Republican version of populism, which mostly means “being prepared to wear a John Deere ballcap while you say racist things”, pales in comparison.)Look, I love to see one of the world’s richest men spending his precious time whining on Twitter. That’s time that he’s not union-busting or coming up with aggressive new algorithms to monetize our lives, and besides, I know that time spent on Twitter will make him miserable, which I support. But I am here to warn you that this is a very bad omen. The last thing we need is Jeff Bezos transforming himself into the Democratic party’s biggest power-broker. Just keep playing with your rockets, Jeff. The farther away from Earth you get, the better for everyone.
      Hamilton Nolan is a labor reporter at In These Times
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      Share the Profits! Why US business must return to rewarding workers properly | Robert Reich

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      Share the profits! Why US businesses must return to rewarding workers properlyRobert ReichThe economy is booming and corporate profits are huge, but American wages still stagnate. History provides the answer According to this week’s release from the commerce department, the US economy has been growing at its fastest pace in almost 40 years. Corporate profits are their highest in 70 years. And the stock market, although gyrating wildly of late, is still scoring record gains.Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corrupts | Robert ReichRead moreSo why do most Americans remain gloomy about the economy? Mainly because their real (inflation-adjusted) wages continue to go nowhere.Steeply-rising profits, economic growth and stock market highs – coupled with near-stagnant wages – has been the story of the American economy for decades. Most economic gains have gone to the top.So why not share the profits?Profit-sharing was tried with great success in the early decades of the 20th century but is now all but forgotten. In 1916, Sears, Roebuck & Co, then one of America’s largest corporations with more than 30,000 employees, announced it would begin to share profits with its employees, giving workers shares of stock and thereby making them part-owners.The idea caught on. Other companies that joined the profit-sharing bandwagon included Procter & Gamble, Pillsbury, Kodak and US Steel.The Bureau of Labor Statistics suggested profit-sharing as a means of reducing “frequent and often violent disputes” between employers and workers. Profit-sharing gave workers an incentive to be more productive, since the success of the company meant higher profits would be shared. It also reduced the need for layoffs during recessions because payroll costs dropped as profits did.By the 1950s, Sears workers had accumulated enough stock that they owned a quarter of the company. And by 1968, the typical Sears salesperson could retire with a nest egg worth well over $1m, in today’s dollars.The downside was that when profits went down, workers’ paychecks would shrink. And if a company went bankrupt, workers would lose all their investments in it. The best profit-sharing plans took the form of cash bonuses that employees could invest however they wish, on top of predictable wages.But profit-sharing with regular employees all but disappeared in large US corporations. Ever since the early 1980s when corporate “raiders” (now private-equity managers) began demanding high returns, corporations stopped granting employees shares of stock, presumably because they didn’t want to dilute share prices. Sears phased out its profit-sharing plan in the 1970s.Yet, just as profit-sharing with regular employees disappeared, profit-sharing with top executives took off, as big Wall Street banks, hedge funds, private equity funds and high-tech companies began doling out huge wads of stock and stock options to their MVPs.The result? Share prices and chief executive pay (composed increasingly of shares of stock and options to buy stock) have gone into the stratosphere, while the wages of the typical worker have barely risen.Researchers have found that before the 1980s, almost all the increases in share prices on the US stock market could be accounted for by overall economic growth. But since then, a large portion of the increases have come out of what used to go into wages.Jeff Bezos, who now owns around 10% of Amazon’s shares, is worth $170.4bn. Other top Amazon executives hold hundreds of millions of dollars of shares. But most of Amazon’s employees, such as warehouse workers, haven’t shared in the bounty.Amazon used to give out stock to hundreds of thousands of its employees. But in 2018 it stopped the practice and instead raised its minimum hourly wage to $15. The wage raise got headlines and was good PR – Amazon is still touting it – but the decision to end stock awards was more significant. It hurt employees far more than the increased minimum helped them.Corporate sedition is more damaging to America than the Capitol attack | Robert ReichRead moreIf Amazon’s 1.2 million employees together owned the same proportion of Amazon’s stock as Sears workers did in the 1950s – a quarter of the company – each Amazon worker would now own shares worth an average of more than $350,000.America’s trend toward higher profits, higher share prices, mounting executive pay but near stagnant wages is unsustainable, economically and politically.Profit-sharing is one answer. But how can it be encouraged? Reduce corporate taxes on companies that share profits with all their workers, and increase taxes on those that do not.Sharing profits with all workers is a logical and necessary step to making the system work for the many, not the few.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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      in World Politics

      Should Billionaires Be Taxed Differently?

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      As a columnist for The Washington Post, Megan McArdle works for the Post’s owner, a man named Jeff Bezos. Over the past two decades, McArdle has had numerous other prestigious bosses. She boasts a solid career in high-level journalism, having worked for The Atlantic, Newsweek, The Economist and Bloomberg, among others. Bloomberg View’s executive editor, David Shipley, once called her “an extraordinary writer and thinker.”

      Early on, in 2001, McArdle broke onto the scene as the author of a blog, “Live from the WTC,” at a time when most people were not yet addicted to the internet and few even knew what the word blog meant. Making her mark as a blogger required one of two talents: the ability to come up regularly with remarkable scoops and cutting insights, or developing a shrill, brutally opiniated voice capable of irritating the right class of adversaries and resonating with a crowd of equally opinionated followers. McArdle long ago branded herself a libertarian. That quite naturally helped to define her as the second type of celebrated blogger. She has consistently lived up to that billing, even as an opinion writer for the revered Washington Post.

      ProPublica Reveals the US Is a Tax Haven

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      McArdle has now weighed in on ProPublica’s blockbuster scoop last week concerning the tax returns of the 25 richest Americans. New York Times editor Spencer Bokat-Lindell prudently commented: “Depending on your point of view, it was either one of the most important stories of the year or an invented scandal.” The Times author exposes the significant complications when wishing to address the issue of taxing the super-rich. He coyly conceals his own point of view. 

      In her column in The Washington Post bearing the title, “Think Twice Before Changing the Tax Rules to Soak Billionaires,” McArdle doesn’t hesitate to trumpet her point of view urbi et orbi. “Think twice” of course means: Read my article and stop complaining. She suggests that taxing the rich more would be undemocratic because it would mean treating them differently from other citizens. That would be an injustice. Her jibe, “soak billionaires,” suggests that taxing them would be torture similar to waterboarding.

      Then McArdle offers this: “We talk a lot about rich people ‘paying their fair share,’ but we’re rarely clear on what exactly we mean by that.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Fair share:

      An amount corresponding to the implicit rules of equitability that apply in any society that values solidarity, meaning that no such amount can be determined in a society with an ideological bias against solidarity

      Contextual Note

      McArdle may have been inspired by former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who, to the rhetorical question, “Who is society?” gave this response: “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women.” That means fairness is in the eye of the beholder. It also means all’s fair in love and war… and tax avoidance. In any case, the two ladies appear to share a similar train of thought. In the idea of “fair share,” it isn’t the concept of “fair” that upsets either of the ladies. It’s the idea of “share.” In McArdle’s mind, the noun “share” simply designates a unit of ownership in a corporation’s stock. Society, in this sense, is hardly different from a community of shareholders, some owning many more shares than others.

      The columnist speculates about what it would mean if the wealthy were taxed on the added value of the stocks they own. She imagines a melodramatic scenario in which “they might be forced to sell off stock of a business they spent decades building.” Shares cannot be shared, so they must be sold. That would be downright tragic because the builders might just stop building and then where would society be? But having made her melodramatic point, she doesn’t even try to imagine how such things would play out in the real world. Like Kurtz in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” she simply invokes “The horror! The horror!”

      McArdle’s shock at the idea of entrepreneurs losing their life’s work makes no sense for two fairly obvious reasons. The first is theoretical, the second pragmatic. In theory, a wealthy person could be forced to sell stock to pay a percentage of capital gains. That person’s share of the company would be correspondingly diminished, but in almost all cases only slightly, since the tax would only represent a percentage of the gain in value. Owning 10% of a company valued at $1.5 billion is better than owning 12% of a company valued at $1 billion. In the long term, having to sell those more shares could end up reducing the person’s future wealth. It would not reduce their current wealth.

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      But because real billionaires tend to be well advised and own portfolios that allow them a wide range of options, they never make such sacrifices. Whether it is to buy a yacht or pay taxes, they rarely if ever liquefy any assets. They borrow against those assets, which has the added value of reducing their declared income on which they would normally pay taxes.

      For most people, income represents the money they must earn to survive or maintain a lifestyle. Because wealthy owners of businesses decide on their own remuneration, they avoid having a substantial taxable income by living lavishly off money they borrow from a bank and pay back with interest. The interest is the only “penalty” they pay for their prodigality. It is nowhere near what they would pay in taxes. It’s an ideal solution. Banks love lending money to the rich because there is zero risk. The wealthy avoid taxes. Their tax lawyers and accounts earn a decent fee. The society of ordinary taxpayers reaps no benefit other than whatever trickles down from the high profit margins of those who sell yachts and luxury goods.

      McArdle doesn’t want to know about such systemic truth. Instead, she returns to her imaginary vision of a system obsessed by its envy of the rich and intent on invoking the idea of fairness to constrain their freedom. She confesses that, “given a choice between letting billionaires spend fortunes reaching for the stars, or destroying those fortunes so that the rest of us don’t have to look at them, then personally, I’ll take the rockets.”

      Historical Note

      The rockets that Megan McArdle refers to are those that her boss, Jeff Bezos, is building thanks to his astronomic fortune, some of which he has invested in his space venture, Blue Origin. Is it a coincidence that she works for Bezos’ newspaper and that she uncritically assesses his personal indulgences?

      Her previous column, with the title “Why Aren’t We Talking More About UFOs?” clearly advances the interests of Blue Origin. The more concerned Americans are about alien invasions — whether from outer space, China or Russia — the more public money (provided by ordinary taxpayers) will be available to support Blue Origin, a company that is about to receive a gift offered by Congress of $10 billion to colonize the moon, even after losing out in a public bid to fellow billionaire Elon Musk’s venture, SpaceX. 

      McArdle probably thinks of Blue Origin as yet another example “of a business [Jeff Bezos] spent decades building.” His lobbyists have convinced the government to spend billions on it, while Bezos himself skirts his tax obligation. She complains that the argument demanding “‘taxes on untaxed capital gains’ is what you come up with if you just don’t think anyone should have enough money to be able to shoot themselves into space.” The “you” she refers to is ProPublica, which dared to make that case, and anyone else equally feeble-minded enough to begrudge billionaires their private pleasures. 

      Bezos’ ownership of the Post is paying off. When making the decision to buy the paper in 2013, he reasoned: “The Washington Post has an incredibly important role to play in this democracy. There’s no doubt in my mind about that.” Had he waited a year to consider the findings of a Princeton study published in 2014 with the title, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” he might have more accurately explained: The Washington Post has an incredibly important role to play in this plutocracy.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More