Amazon's Philosopher King
Jeff Bezos is just another bloviating billionaire talking his book on CNBC. Taxes are still coming out of your check.
This Week In Blunders – May 17-23
“Money is the best deodorant.” – Elizabeth Taylor
Somewhere in Queens there’s a nurse who needs more disposable income to shop at Whole Foods and keep the Amazon economy humming.
Jeff Bezos has a solution. No more taxes for her, or the rest of the afflicted working class.
“We shouldn't be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington,” he said on CNBC this week. “They should be sending her an apology.”
It’s not enough to sit quietly when you’re the world’s fourth-richest man. You have to be a philosopher king.
Bezos must have climbed down from his $575 million super yacht, still aglow from his $50 million wedding, onto one of his multimillion-dollar Gulf Stream jets, to one of his cash-incinerating rocket factories, to dispense his wisdom.
Here is the mind-blowing revelation he delivered:
“I think what’s going on is that it’s kind of a tale of two economies, so you have a bunch of people in this country who are doing really well, but you also have a bunch of people in this country who are struggling.”
Wow! Has not a single economist even considered that until just now?
It must be one of those K-shaped economies, huh?
Thank the good Lord there’s finally a guy worth $275 billion willing to explain inequality to all those hundred-aires and thousand-aires hoping to get rich watching CNBC.
This, of course, is about as clueless as the time Bezos thanked Amazon employees and customers for paying for his expensive vacation in outer space.
And if all those poor workers should pay zero in taxes, should all those poor billionaires pay more to fill the gap?
Well, um, ah, yeah, that’s I guess, a policy debate, Bezos hemmed, but …
“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens.”
Meantime, it would be nice if everyone stopped picking on billionaires because, billionaires have feelings, too, ya know.
“Politicians are using the kind of age-old technique ,” Bezos said. “Picking a villain and pointing fingers, but the problem is that doesn’t solve anything.”
Oh, but yes, it does. In fact, it solves everything in our purported democracy. Because politicians need two things to stay in office: Money from the rich and votes from the poor.
That’s why they trash the uber rich in public. And suck-up behind closed doors.
All the billionaire class needs to do, while in nearly full control of almost everything, is put up with a bit of populist rhetoric around election time.
A nurse in Queens would love a tax break, but she doesn’t need a lecture about billionaire victimhood. Bezos should just get back in his rocket and take off.
At least crypto flows through the Strait
Where did Iran get the billions needed to fight us?
Through the world’s largest crypto platform, Binance, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
The Journal got ahold of internal Binance compliance reports showing that an “anti-sanction operator” named Babak Zanjani made $850 million in crypto transactions on a single trading account.
The loot was part of the billions that have flowed through Binance and funded Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp.’s in the two years preceding the U.S.-Iran war, The Journal reports.
Zanjani’s involvement had not been previously reported. Binance disputes the report but this has been going on for a long time.
In November 2023, Binance pleaded guilty to criminal charges and agreed to pay more than $4 billion in penalties for allowing transactions involving sanctioned nations, including Iran.
And in April 2024, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison for anti-money laundering law violations.
Then in October, President Donald Trump pardoned Zhao.
Read More: Bombing Iran With Crypto
Was it because Binance backed a crypto venture tied to his family’s World Liberty Financial? Nah, it was because Zhao was just another victim of a Biden witch hunt, according to Trump.
So Zhao caught a billionaire break. Binance is still in business. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Oil is $100 a barrel. And the national average price for a gallon of gasoline is $4.53.
Happy Memorial Day, everybody! Pleasant travels!
Queso, what were they thinking?
The Food and Drug Administration warned a New Jersey cheesemaker in 2020 that its plant was contaminated with listeria. The company shipped the cheese anyway.
In 2021, a listeria outbreak linked to its queso fresco put at least 13 people in the hospital and led to one death across Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York.
Abuelito Cheese Inc. pleaded guilty on Thursday to distributing contaminated food. It faces five years of probation and a fine of $500,000 when it is scheduled for sentencing Oct. 15.
It may also face a raft of lawsuits from victims and their families.
No individuals were charged. Perhaps it would have been cruel and unusual punishment for an Abuelito executive stand for a mug shot and say “cheese.”
Make Nicotine Great Again
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is championing a rebranding of nicotine. Just grab a pouch or a patch and buzz along.
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Always interesting how billionaires get to be billionaires without knowing how to balance a check book. If you take revenue away (lose a job, someone dies, has a health issue and has to be hospitalized, or stops working/paying taxes), you gotta make it up somewhere.
If you stop taxing the nurse in Queens - which would probably improve her life, lifespan, and stress of having to work in a stressful job and not making enough to shop at Whole Foods - then where is the money for the 'slush fund' and 'ballroom/security bunker' and ICE and CBP going to come from?
Since the days of Ronald Reagan, the idea has been to 'leave the wealthy alone' to 'create jobs,' and make up for tax cuts to the wealthy - who, during the nation's actual economic heyday, were taxed at 90% (1944-1963) - from those who actually drive the economy (workers, aka 'consumers,' since the 1950s at least).
Want to know why or how the 'middle class' grew in the US after WWII? Because workers could make a 'liveable wage' for a family of 4 at any number of jobs, without a college degree, producing goods that were exported and sold domestically.
The 'Masters of the Universe' weren't stock brokers or in 'finance,' or tech, they were the 'MadMen,' advertisers able to bring consumers to products whether good for them or just good for the producers of those products. Like Big Tobacco.
And they had pensions, in addition to (until Ronald Reagan) untaxed Social Security benefits, on which to retire.
Now, if Bezos, instead of spending millions on propaganda films like "Melania," wants to help that nurse in Queens, he might consider donating millions to her town, to at least maybe potentially reduce her property taxes, or maybe build a hospital at which she could work for better wages...