Stop BEZOS Act

Yeah, that's its name.

This 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.

[...]

After [...] fine-print objections dominated initial press coverage, another round of analyses is now looking at the bigger picture.

[...]

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.”

[...]

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.

  Matt Taibbi

This article is worth reading the whole thing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.