Tax them

Jeff Bezos went to space yesterday. Well, the edge of space. The flight was a round trip of 11 minutes. I would very much like to go to space. However, an eleven minute trip with four minutes of weightlessness to return where I started would be, in my opinion, a waste of money. If I go up I want to go UP, with at least a couple orbits, one with me looking down on earth and another with me looking outward into space. Not that I have the millions required for the current tickets. So all an eleven minute flight will accomplish is bragging rights – I went to the edge of space and you didn’t. When Bezos came down he showed how much of an insensitive ass he is. He said:

I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.

Yeah, he thanked his employees for putting up with being underpaid so he could earn hundreds of billions off their labor so he could afford to develop his own rocket. Sheesh. Hunter of Daily Kos reported a few responses to the flight. They’re similar to mine, such as this one from Sen. Elizabeth Warren:

Jeff Bezos forgot to thank all the hardworking Americans who actually paid taxes to keep this country running while he and Amazon paid nothing.

She added it is time for a that wealth tax. Aldous J Pennyfarthing of Kos added the snark this desperately needed:

Tuesday morning, we were all treated to headlines about Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ “historic” space flight. I’m not exactly sure what’s meant by “historic.” It wouldn’t be the first time a billionaire burned through gobs of money and resources to accomplish something a monkey did 72 years ago. Indeed, the first time was last week, when Virgin Atlantic CEO Richard Branson also slipped the surly bonds of our endangered Earth to gape at the planet most billionaires have only metaphorically left behind.

There is a tiny bit of good in this flight. Bezos took Wally Funk along. Sixty years ago she went through all the qualification exams to be a Mercury astronaut, in many cases ranking quite high compared to her male peers. She wasn’t chosen to be an astronaut for a simple reason – she is a woman. So congratulations to Ms. Funk for getting to space, though sixty years late, and becoming the oldest person to make it that far off the earth. Pennyfarthing concluded:

Maybe it’s time we put an end to billionaires and use our nation’s resources for the good of everyone, not just those in the rarefied echelons of society. And maybe—just maybe—the media could stop fawning over a guy who’s 72 years behind a monkey.

Dan Price, who cut his CEO pay to make sure his employees were paid enough, tweeted:

Jeff Bezos made $1.13 billion today as he went to space. That's the same amount 36,000 full-time warehouse workers will make combined, all year. And Bezos paid the lowest tax rate of anyone of those 36,000 people.

Ady Barkan tweeted:

As Bezos, Branson, and Musk have their spaceship waving contest, 800,000 disabled Americans sit on waiting lists—waiting to find out if they'll be ripped away from home, forced to live in institutions to stay alive. Our families are more important than their egos. Tax them.

Rep. Adam Schiff tweeted:

Listen, I’m all for space exploration and it must have been an amazing view. But maybe – and I’m just spitballing here – if Amazon and other companies paid their fair share in taxes, we could lift all kids — if not into space — at least out of poverty. Sincerely, Earthlings

Mark Sumner of Kos noted the Tokyo Olympics are about to start (and some preliminary rounds of some sports are already being played). Already, there are athletes testing positive for COVID. The city of Tokyo has seen a surge of cases in the last week. Dealing with the highly contagious delta variant means doing all those things we’re tired of doing. Sumner wrote:

A lot of people are ready to settle into the idea that COVID-19 will simply become an endemic disease, one that can be addressed with vaccine boosters and the expectation that the unvaccinated will continue to get ill. That can’t happen. Because accepting COVID-19 as something that’s “here to stay” is signing onto a death sentence that goes way beyond the unvaccinated.

Sumner gave his reasons why persistent COVID is a bad idea. The US healthcare system can’t handle it. Hospitals are set up to run at 66% capacity, so running at 100% for long periods of time means higher death rates because staff can’t handle the load. That leads to exhausted staff. Also, the number of trained people needed for an ongoing pandemic is just not there. The American patchwork of private hospitals and private insurance patched together with federal plans cannot hold. We have already made the problem worse through closing and consolidating hundreds of hospitals. The recovering economy has had big supply chain problems. Those would be worse under perpetual COVID. That would mean a lot more people declared essential and forced back to unsafe industries – as GOP lawmakers pass laws to protect businesses from liability lawsuits. The people who are unvaccinated are not just those who refuse (the ones we delight in heaping scorn on). The unvaccinated include children under 12, for whom there is no authorized vaccine, as government officials demand they return to in-person learning and also ban masks and other protections. The unvaccinated also include the immunocompromised. A cancer patient should not also worry about catching COVID. Viruses mutate and become more contagious. More versions mean a higher chance of a version that resists the current vaccine. We’ve been underestimating the threat of this virus. The US has reported 606 thousand dead. Models suggest the real number is over a million. India reported 414 thousand dead. That number may actually be four million. We must work to eliminate COVID, because we can’t live with it. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted several conservatives who are now calling for people to get the vaccine. One of them is Chris Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, which is more conservative than Fox News. Dworkin quoted a tweet from Tom Nichols:

Apparently, Republicans are starting to realize that a Republican-driven reignition of the pandemic might be bad for Republicans.

Maybe the concern was the rise of the delta variant which prompted the two percent drop in the Dow on Monday (which bounced back Tuesday and today). But not all conservatives or Republicans are promoting vaccines. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post wrote:

“People are refusing to take the Vaccine because they don’t trust his Administration,” the former president said in a statement Sunday, referring to President Biden. “They don’t trust the Election results, and they certainly don’t trust the Fake News.” There you have it: Trump is telling his supporters that they are correct not to trust the federal government on vaccines, because this sentiment should flow naturally from their suspicion that the election was stolen from him. Expressing the former has been magically transformed into a way to show fealty to the latter.

Back in March of 2020 when the pandemic hit Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, issued lockdown orders. She based her authority on the Emergency Powers of the Governor Act, passed in 1945. The Republican controlled legislature did not like the idea Whitmer was protecting the health of Michigan’s residents. They declared executive overreach and took their case to the state Supreme Court, where conservatives had a one person advantage (which they lost in the November election). In October the Supremes ruled that 1945 act was unconstitutional. Before the Court heard the case a group formed, called Unlock Michigan. They started collecting petition signatures to take advantage of a loophole in the state constitution. The court’s ruling didn’t stop them – they declared they wanted to “keep it dead.” That loophole is if enough signatures are gathered a proposal can be approved by the legislature without the possibility of a veto by the governor. If the legislature does not act on the proposal it goes before voters. Laina Stebbins of Michigan Advance reported that enough signatures were gathered. And the Michigan Senate, then House, quickly approved the proposal to overturn the law the governor had used to keep us safe. It will not go before voters. Alas, four House Democrats voted for it, saying they did not want to disrespect the Court. Other Democrats spoke strongly against what the Republicans were doing. Some of the comments were about how anti democracy the whole thing was. One talked about the political theater (the law had already been overturned). Others talked about how this took away a tool to combat the virus – as the delta variant of COVID is surging around the country. I conclude again: they want us dead.