Friday, May 15, 2020

MODERN SLAVER JEFF BEZOS WITH $300 MILLION IN HOMES ON TRACK TO BECOME AMERICA'S FIRST TRILLIONAIRE - BUT SAYS HE CAN'T AFFORD TO PAY LIVING WAGES AT AMAZON WAREHOUSES

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on Track to Become World’s First Trillionaire
Jeff Bezos arrive at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party on Sunday, March 4, 2018, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
2:39

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is reportedly on track to become the world’s first trillionaire, with a recent study showing that his net worth has grown an average of 34 percent over the last five years. The research predicts Bezos will become a trillionaire in 2026.
USA Today reports that a recent study from the business analysis firm Comparisun alleges that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is very likely to become the world’s first trillionaire after seeing his net worth grow on an average of 34 percent over the last five years.
Comparisun’s projections show that Bezos could reach trillionaire status by 2026 based on taking Bezos’ average percentage of yearly growth over the past five years and applying it to future years. Following Bezos, the next several likely trillionaires are Chinese tycoons, including Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba.
Bezos’ net worth was estimated at $143 billion as of Thursday morning according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. Bezos’ net worth has surged by more than $28 billion in comparison to this time last year.
Breitbart News recently reported that e-commerce giant Amazon plans to stop paying warehouse workers an extra $2 per hour at the end of the month after raising workers’ wages beginning in March to compensate them for coming into work during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide operations told Recode: “We’re going to do one more extension on it and push it out until the end of the month.” The $2 raise has been in effect since mid-March alongside increased overtime pay and was originally planned to run until the end of April but was extended by the company.
Amazon also cut a policy that allowed workers to take unlimited amounts of unpaid time off in order to allow workers to stay home if they felt unsafe coming to work during the pandemic. One Amazon employee told the Guardian: “Now they’re forcing people to go to work because if you run out of unpaid time off, that’s it, you’re fired.”
Amazon told Business Insider that its pay incentives for employees since the beginning of the pandemic have reached nearly $800 million. The firm also expects to spend $4 billion on increased wages, personal protective equipment, and increased cleaning of its facilities.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com


Danhof–Of Foxes, Hens, and Amazon’s Corruption: Disgraced SPLC Blacklists Charities from ‘Smile’ Program

Mural of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Thierry Ehrmann/Flickr
5:35
Why is one of America’s most discredited and polarizing nonprofits allowed to control the charitable giving program of one of America’s richest companies? And why is that nonprofit allowed to reap a windfall from that charitable program while restricting access to organizations with which it disagrees politically?
These are questions that someone at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) really needs to start asking. Until then, we at the Free Enterprise Project (FEP) are demanding answers and a course correction to this fraudulent scheme.
The nonprofit in question is the disgraced Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the corporate charitable platform is the AmazonSmile program. Amazon claims that it will donate 0.5 percent of all eligible purchases made through AmazonSmile towards a charity of the customer’s choice.
That’s a lie.
It’s a lie because not all charities are eligible for AmazonSmile. Customers don’t always get to choose their charity of choice, because many IRS-recognized charities are excluded from participation. And here’s the rub: Amazon doesn’t pick and choose eligible nonprofits itself. The fox that guards that henhouse is the staff at the SPLC.
You read that right. Amazon allows a collection of bigoted leftists to run its charitable giving program.
A far-left organization that started with a noble goal of advancing civil rights, the SPLC has morphed into a group that currently exists primarily to smear conservatives and Americans of faith. And while many of its worst attributes were a long-kept internal secret scantly reported on in the local Alabama press, last year liberal publications such as the Washington Post and the New Yorker exposed SPLC’s scandals and finally admitted that it was little more than a fundraising machine whose “hate” system lacked credibility.
Writing in the New Yorker, former SPLC staffer Bob Moser wrote that “it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam,” and went on to note that SPLC co-founder Morris Dees “viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals.” Also last year, Dees and SPLC President Richard Cohen both resigned in disgrace when numerous allegations of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racial discrimination within the organization surfaced. However, the fundraising racket and unreliable hate labels that they created persist.
Today the SPLC is known mostly for publishing an annual “hate map,” which it claims is a census of the hate groups operating within the United States. In reality, this cynical yearly exercise is little more than a public listing of SPLC’s political enemies.
How else can one explain SPLC categorizing groups such as the Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) with the Ku Klux Klan? ADF is the nation’s preeminent legal advocate for religious liberty. Litigating to advance the principles espoused by America’s founders and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, ADF has scored 10 victories at the United States Supreme Court since 2011. What exactly have the racists at the Ku Klux Klan done in that timeframe?
Everyone knows the Klan is a hate group. What the SPLC is trying to do is convince gullible leftists that conservative and religious organizations are morally equivalent to the KKK. It’s reprehensible and it’s fake news. And Amazon’s partnership lends a corporate veneer of credibility that only perpetuates this false narrative. Making this partnership even more duplicitous is the fact that the SPLC generates significant income – again from gullible leftists – through the AmazonSmile program.
At the Free Enterprise Project, we are fed up with Amazon’s support for these anti-religious zealots, and we are doing something about it. But we need your help.
We are calling on religious Americans and conservatives to stand up and demand an end to this insipid relationship. First, please sign our petition to voice displeasure with Amazon’s leadership. Second, if you are an Amazon investor, please vote for our shareholder resolution focused on the SPLC’s control over AmazonSmile.
In this resolution, we note that Amazon is engaging in viewpoint discrimination by letting the SPLC arbitrarily pick winners and losers for the Smile program. As leaders of a public company, Amazon’s board and management have a fiduciary legal obligation to act as stewards on behalf of all Amazon shareholders – not just those investors who hold radical leftist views.
The left is very adept at gaining traction for its shareholder proposals. It’s time to show businesses such as Amazon that conservative investors can also engage with the corporate ballot box and demand change.
Amazon, and many large American businesses, routinely take actions that offend conservative values. They do so with impunity because conservatives rarely coalesce to take on bad corporate actors and actions. It’s hard to fathom a corporate action more loathsome to the right than Amazon’s partnership with the SPLC. Let’s come together and put an end to it.
Justin Danhof is the general counsel of the National Center for Public Policy Research and the director of the Center’s Free Enterprise Project.

We're facing 'the worst economic contraction' in modern history: Economist


Markets Reporter
The U.S. economy is facing the worst contraction in modern history — and a “confidence shock” will make the recovery slow, says one economist. 
Frances Donald, head of macro strategy at Manulife, predicts GDP this quarter could shrink by a whopping 20% amid the coronavirus pandemic
“We are going to see, without hyperbole, the worst economic contraction in modern economic history. It will be likely double digits,” Donald told Yahoo Finance. “We are not looking for growth to come back online really until the fourth quarter of this year.”
The latest jobless claims show more than 4.4 million Americans filed for first time unemployment last week. Since the spread of the outbreak, more than 26 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance as companies big and small have laid off or furloughed employees and shuttered commerce.
“What worries me as an economist is that we can give people their jobs back when we turn the economy back on. Not all of them but some,” she says. “But there is a confidence shock at play here. Are we going to be able to make these workers who lost their job whole? Probably not.”

‘Sizable confidence shock’

Donald says individual behaviors will make it hard for the economy to bounce back quickly once states re-open. 
“We're dealing with a sizable confidence shock, a size-able financial hit that is not going to be easy to unwind,” said Donald. “I think this is going to have a permanent stain on the way that Americans think, the way they behave, the way they save in this future.”
Some sectors will take longer to come back than others. 
“It's a lot easier to press a button and put a manufacturing plant back online, so you might see a V-shaped recovery in manufacturing and construction” said Donald. “But for services, for confidence that flows through into the things that you and I buy on a day to day basis, that's going to take a lot longer.”
Aggressive moves from the Federal Reserve and stimulus aid from Congress have been aimed at mitigating the fallout of COVID-19. 
Still, Donald predicts 1%-2% growth for the next several years. She says federal, state and local governments may be able to provide boosts in the years ahead.
“If we do see large-scale infrastructure spending, if we do see productivity boosts, then we might actually be able to break out of this slow-growth environment come three, four years from now,” says Donald. 
“But the next couple of years are going to be marked by deflationary concern, slow spending, high savings rates,” she added.

No comments: