Bernie Sanders' Anti-Amazon Bill Is an Indictment of the Media, Too
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
18 September 18
In going after Jeff Bezos, Bernie Sanders tries to shame the press into
seeing a problem hiding in plain sight
his new piece of legislation sounds audacious at first. It tells companies
like Amazon: if you pay your workers so poorly that they have to go on food
stamps, the government is going to hit you with a 100 percent tax on such
subsidies.
Sponsored by Bernie Sanders and California House Democrat Ro Khanna, the
bill is called the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act, or Stop
BEZOS Act.
Initially, Sanders was thrashed in the press for his "ham-fisted" proposal.
"In Bernie Sanders vs. Jeff Bezos, Only Workers Lose," read the USA Today
headline. "Bernie Sanders Picks The Wrong Kind of Fight With Amazon," blared
Bloomberg.
Many reports cited the objections of the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities (CBPP), in particular those of senior analyst and former chief
economic adviser to Joe Biden, Jared Bernstein.
The CBPP and Bernstein fretted about "unintended side effects" to the bill,
including hiring discrimination against applicants likely to go on public
assistance, and pressure from employers "not to sign up for Medicaid or
other benefits."
Humorously, the CBPP - which receives at least $2 million from the Walmart
foundation, one of the targets of the legislation - also claimed the bill
"could prompt corporate lobbying efforts to cut assistance programs." The
"could" is the funny part. Such lobbying has already been going on every day
for decades.
After such fine-print objections dominated initial press coverage, another
round of analyses is now looking at the bigger picture. "Liberals Should
Stop Attacking Bernie Sanders for targeting Jeff Bezos and Amazon. He's on
the Right Track," reads the Los Angeles Times headline. "Sanders Finds Prime
Target In Amazon," was The Hill's take.
Even Vox is saying things like, "You need to take [Sanders] seriously, not
literally." They're beginning to grasp that this bill is as much about
messaging as policy, an attempt to put eyes where they should have been
years ago.
Sanders has always been intensely interested in the media. I remember years
ago, he called a bunch of reporters he knew to his office and essentially
chewed us out for not covering issues like income inequality aggressively
enough. I left that meeting feeling like I had a D+ report card plastered to
my forehead.
I don't think I'm breaking news when I say that while Sanders appreciates
good journalism, he believes the media in general has been grossly deficient
in its mission to educate audiences about serious social problems. He said
this last year: "You can turn the TV and watch it hour after hour, channel
after channel after channel, and not see one relevant piece of information."
Not one relevant piece? Even I thought that was harsh. But this is who
Sanders is. His idea of what's normal and acceptable media coverage and what
isn't is a little different from most. And it's become increasingly clear
that he's lost patience waiting for the news media to pay attention to this
particularly loathsome problem of CEOs using public subsidies to pad their
bottom lines.
The issue in his campaigns against companies like Disney, Walmart, Burger
King and Amazon is simple: our biggest and most successful companies use a
business model that involves giant workforces earning beneath-subsistence
wages, if not worse (particularly abroad). This business model would not
work without the active cooperation of governments around the world.
Amazon and Walmart are particular villains on this score. On the supply end,
they gobble up super-cheap products assembled in unfree labor zones like
China, where workers are treated so badly that some have threatened mass
suicides to improve conditions.
Then, on the distribution end, in wealthy consumer countries like the U.S.,
these same companies pay many workers such low wages that they end up on
public assistance. One study showed that in Arizona, for instance, 1 in 3
Amazon workers are on food stamps.
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos is worth $160 billion, and, according to one
infuriating study, earns the median salary of an Amazon employee every nine
seconds. If you go by net worth in stock holdings, Bezos earns about $277
million a day.
This set of circumstances is a profound comment on how the modern global
economy functions. Misguided policies like the establishment of Permanent
Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China long ago committed us to a world in
which the industrial democracies of the West would be increasingly reliant
upon human rights abusers in places like China to serve as mercantile
suppliers. As manufacturing headed to the third world, domestic distributors
became concentrated and de-unionized.
Amazon is one of great examples, having successfully prevented unionization
throughout the firm. In 2000, when the Communications Workers of America
attempted to organize Amazon call center employees, the company simply shut
down the center.
Author James Bloodworth attempted to do an Upton Sinclair-style report a few
years back, going undercover at an Amazon warehouse in Staffordshire,
England. Among other things, he reported that workers urinated in bottles
out of fear of being punished for "idle time."
Maybe there are better ways for the government to say that no company whose
CEO makes over $100 million a day should be living off workers who pee in
bottles and shop with food stamps. Perhaps the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities can ask Walmart for a grant to come up with a better name for
that kind of profiteering.
It is true that there are other ways to address this problem, like raising
the minimum wage, enhancing protections for workers trying to unionize, and
making better use of anti-trust laws, so that monopolist firms don't have
such an easy time dictating low wages. Sanders is in favor of all of those
things, too. A traditional politician would be content to eke out a few
victories on those fronts.
But this bill has symbolism that goes beyond all that. Crude as it is, Stop
BEZOS basically says that government has to stop allowing itself to be used
as a welfare mechanism for billionaires. Elected officials should be more
offended that they're paying out gobs of taxpayer money to add decimal
points to already-bottomless personal fortunes of people like the CEOs of
Amazon and Walmart.
There's an argument to be made, and people like Ezra Klein at Vox are
already making it, that Sanders has gone too far this time, in emphasizing
symbolism over policy specifics. Klein argues that Sanders is a big enough
name now that he can finally "attract excellent staff and advisers" and
bring in "a much broader network of lefty policy thinkers," who presumably
can help him "learn more about the workability of policy."
Translated, this means: Bernie has enough poll support now that he can
finally hire all the Beltway bullshit artists who spent the last 40 years
turning the Democratic Party into a subsidiary of the Chamber of Commerce.
With respect to Klein, I don't think he fully grasps the symbolism here,
which is intended as an indictment of people like him and me, too. If
journalists like us spent less time fawning over people like Bezos and more
time drumming up outrage over his exploitative practices, maybe Sanders
isn't sponsoring this bill. But we didn't, and so here we are. Can we
finally start calling these people the names they deserve?
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