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Amazon vs. the Socialists in Seattle

 by Kshama Sawant

Part 2 - A Corporate Tax Haven

As he has himself publicly acknowledged, Bezos largely based his decision to launch Amazon in Seattle on his desire to dodge taxes. Washington State has long been a corporate tax haven, having the most regressive tax system in the entire nation. More than anywhere else in the U.S., the tax burden falls most heavily on working and middle-class people, while big business pays next to nothing. This is no small part of why Seattle has become one of the most deeply unequal cities in the nation.

The region’s corporate elite means to keep it that way. Bezos made national headlines last year when he bullied Seattle to stop the Amazon Tax on the largest 3% of businesses in the city, aided by corporate-bankrolled Mayor Jenny Durkan and the Democratic establishment. Over a modestly-sized tax, Amazon executives acted like mafia dons: threatening to move 7,000 jobs unless the City Council backed down. After the Council passed it unanimously anyway, under the pressure of our movement, Amazon’s lobbyists went to work in the backrooms. Less than one month later, our corporate tax to fund housing and services was repealed, with only myself and one other councilmember voting in opposition.

It bears noting that in spite of the majority of the Council caving on the tax, Amazon moved those 7,000 jobs anyway. Which just goes to show, once again, that bowing down to bullies doesn’t work.

Of course, it’s not only about Amazon. Boeing executives have a long record of extorting billions in handouts from Washington State. And a central feature of neoliberalism has always been its fierce opposition to progressive taxation and workers’ rights. Trump’s tax cuts were only the latest development in the long arc of brutal austerity and deepening inequality – a process that has continued over decades, whether Republicans or Democrats occupied the White House. Fundamentally, this is driven by the bankruptcy of capitalism and its long-term stagnation beginning with the 1970s. Since the end of the post-war boom, profits have increasingly been derived from a relentless squeezing of social services, unions, health care, and the working class as a whole.

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