Jeremy Mohler of the nonpartisan “In the Public Interest,” the leading voice against privatization of the public sector, notes that billionaire Jeff Bezos made into space sixty years after the public-funded NASA.
He writes:
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said the quiet part loud on Tuesday after flying to space in his own rocket:
“I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.”
He was right. Subjecting warehouse workers and delivery drivers to grueling conditions—even all but forcing them to pee in bottles instead of take bathroom breaks—has made Bezos the world’s richest person…
This is why we need a much, much fairer tax system.
One that doesn’t allow corporations like Amazon to get away with paying less in taxes than teachers, nurses, and even Amazon workers themselves. Bezos himself paid no income tax in 2007 and 2011…
One that doesn’t shell out massive subsidies to corporations like Amazon, while our communities get little in return. Bezos’s rocket company, Blue Origin, has received more than $72 million in state and local subsidies.
If it was fairer, our government could afford to make people’s lives better here, you know, on Earth. By doing things like Raleigh, North Carolina, just did when it extended free public bus fares through the rest of the year. And like Washington, D.C., just did when it raised taxes on the rich to fund housing vouchers, subsidies for day-care workers’ wages, and monthly tax credits for low-income families.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Congratulations for what? Doing what the Soviets did 60 years ago?
Anyway, while taxing Amazon is a good idea, fixing the system that allows Amazon to be Amazon in the first place would be a better idea. Enforce anti-trust laws. Raise the minimum wage in line with productivity (at least $25/hr). Force Amazon to pay for all time worked, including waiting in security lines. Unionize all Amazon warehouses and drivers. Etc.
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The Teamsters Union has agreed to organize Amazon workers. If they pull it off, it would be the first big win for organized labor in many years.https://www.npr.org/2021/06/22/1009213361/the-teamsters-want-to-unionize-amazon-workers-heres-what-that-means
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These billionaires have so much money to play with that they can create their own mini-NASA, (BASA?). All the uber-wealthy and their corporations should be paying much more in taxes, NOW! Of course Tesla and Bezos are benefiting from all the tax supported efforts, experience and knowledge bases of NASA over the decades. All that being said, space travel, rocketry is still very dangerous; just when you think everything is safe and secure, a rocket explodes or a system fails and people die.
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They essentially ARE an offshoot of NASA.
They’ve got former NASA scientists and engineers working for them AND they are getting NASA contracts
AND their businesses all benefit one way or another from public funding.
Eg, Amazon is exists only because of publicly created and funded highways”, both the “information superhighway” (internet) and physical highways.
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Plus, all their rocket science is based on the collective knowledge created by decades of publicly funded NASA research.
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The idea that ideas and businesses are created by individuals out of nothingness is just absurd.
But that is the basis of our current economic model.
It’s also the basis of the billionaire hero myth.
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The government, ie we the people, pay for the research and development. Then private companies benefit, and the public continues to pay for the service. Plus, with so many tax loopholes, billionaires and corporations write the tax law to benefit themselves.
The latest corporate scheme is to privatize basic utilities like water and electricity. By starving local governments, many municipalities take money from private equity to lease their public service, They public is still paying for the infrastructure, but the private company raises rates and controls billing. Some residents wind up with a lien on their property when they cannot pay the outrageous bill. https://prospect.org/infrastructure/federal-windfall-private-equity-courts-public-utilities/
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Jeff Bezos bought a museum last year in Washington D.C. for $23 million, and turned it into a party house for the express purpose of inviting political power brokers in order to influence them. I wonder how many beds there are in the party house. The rich and the powerful are in bed together. “Nothing will fundamentally change.”
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Some day, we will all be in Jeff Bezos’ Zoo
The Bezos Zoo
The Bezos Zoo
Is coming soon
With quite a few
Of prole baboon
The coming day
When one percent
Will gladly pay
To see us pent
In monkey cage
For all to view
And Larry Page
Will have one too
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There is a very big question to be answered in the matter of taxing billionaires. How do we tap the advantages of a technology that aggressively cuts costs with technology without harming society. Bezos arguably made his money from tapping into technology. While he might have also taken advantage of a large group of workers, the greater harm might have been done to the millions of workers who were never hired because of his dependence on robotics and automation.
Just before I read this, I was contemplating how I can do a better job of the history of the industrial revolution and its political fallout during the nineteenth century. The good and bad of the advent of modern society, industrial production, and the political and social ramifications is a complex topic for the average ninth grader. No one would argue that we were better off as human beings when everyone had to work long hours to procure food and clothing at a local level. Still, we miss the pastoral life of being with family as we make our living and we miss learning from those dear to us the crafts needed to sustain life. Every time we gain something, we lose something. How do I communicate this to the students?
You see the questions are the same. Technology has always meant that the first users of it gain tremendous advantage, whether economic, military, or social. When huge economic advantage results from technological developments, the person who uses this to his advantage rarely is the sort to step back and contemplate whether more will be lost than gained. How do we teach the Bezos people in the world that their tremendous accumulation of wealth means they are responsible for much more than they think?
My own solution is to limit the amount of money a person my have. I do not know if we can even do that practically, but the concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few is not a sustainable economic model, and we should try through taxation and governmental oversight to keep certain people from becoming so powerful economically that they over-influence governments to take actions that are harmful to the people of the world.
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“the concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few is not a sustainable economic model”
The natural equivalent (which doesn’t exist for obvious reasons) would be just a very few individuals of a particular species having all the resources (including all the mates).
It’s an absurd model. Any species for which that was actually the case would quickly go extinct — which should be a big Giant flashing Red warning buoy saying “Danger, jagged rocks — and sunken ships –just below the surface.”
But economists, politicians and lots of other nitwits nonetheless believe there is nothing wrong with the model.
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SDP: Many believe that concentration of wealth is a result of technological blips in history that take care of themselves naturally on our continual march ever upward. I suppose that might seem true to those who ignore the medieval period of Europe or the strict caste system in India. During these periods, strict stratification of societies meant general economic failure which masqueraded as wealth and grandiose opulence among the few. Society, indeed technology, stagnated and the rich suffered right along with the poor, though usually not as much.
In fact, the enlightenment was fueled by the spreading of wealth among an ever-widening circle that began to demand political power. Ultimately, the circle began to questioned established mores that underpinned traditional society, and slavery began to fall away even as monarchy became under fire.
It can be argued that the spreading of wealth stimulates the growth of freedom
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The technological “blip” we are currently in is fundamentally different from all the others and has the potential to mean the end of the human species.
It’s entire purpose is to replace all humans with machines, including (especially?! the thinking ones.
Ironically, the careers that face the biggest threat of replacement in the not too distant future are professional ones (doctors, lawyers, accountants, CEOs, wall street analysts, etc). Any professional who works primarily with their mind and not their hands will soon be replaced by computers which are quicky becoming better than humans at tasks like interpreting xrays, diagnosing disease, balancing books, making investment decisions, etc
The careers that will remain somewhat immune longest are ones like plumber, electrician, handyman, etc, although eventually robots will even take over such jobs.
And it may be that robots will just decide at some point that humans are not worth keeping around.
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Technological advancement is not accomplished by giving advantages to Standard Oil, Central Railroad, JP Morgan, hedge funds, Walmart, or Microsoft. Technological advancement takes place when the playing field is level, creating competition. Monopolies and stock market leaches come along and squash innovation. How do we both further improvements to our lives and at the same time make sure those improvements benefit the many instead of the few? Break the monopolies up. Bust a trust.
By the way, I couldn’t have done a better job of explaining the two sides of the Second Industrial Revolution than you did here, Roy. Nailed it.
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Speaking of NASA and going down memory lane, I recall the killer comments of Norman Mailer and Mort Sahl regarding NASA and the ex-Nazi rocket scientists we snagged after WWII. Mailer compared NASAism to Naziism because of all the Nazis we had working at NASA. Sahl quipped that von Braun should have changed the title of one of his books to, “I Aimed for the Stars but Missed and Hit London Instead.” Von Braun had a lot of blood on his hands, he should have been tried for crimes against humanity.
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Not just NASA and von Braun
The US government also hired NAZI chemical and germ warfare experts like Kurt Blome
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Blome
If you are deemed “useful”, your past is irrelevant and you will get a “Get out of jail free” card.
It pays (and keeps paying) to sell your soul.
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TAXES? Get Government off my back: I have a gun, and a wall around my house, and I will homeschool my kids, and I have my wife running our private military, and I am working on my own vaccine against Marxism!!!
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Ha ha! What need we of a country? We can each have our own little countries. How patriotic! Ha ha! Like the Dark Ages but with assault rifles. Love it! As soon as I figure out how to get running water without an aqueduct, I’ll be right there with you! Good one.
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Bezos doesn’t impress me at all.
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