Jeff Bezos' and Amazon's Progressively Worsening Dilemma

The wealthiest man on the planet Jeff Bezos and his company
Amazon take pride in their progressive politics and values,
but may be tripped up by that very brand of politics and its
practitioners on Seattle's City Council, and their fall will be
prove quite painful.

The two came to loggerheads in 2018 when the Seattle City
Council imposed a $250 "head tax" for each employee at
any business which garners $20 million or more in annual
revenue to fund housing and various services for the homeless.
Amazon, having over 53,000 employees in that particular area,
strenuously objected to what they rightly saw as a tax on job
creation. Moreover, Amazon sparked a pushback that caused
the City Council to vote to repeal the levy, 7-2,  just one month
after unanimously passing the measure.

With a local election coming up, there were seven seats on Seattle's
City Council to be contested in a local election. Amazon had
given over $1.4 million to a PAC run by the Seattle Metropolitan
Chamber of Commerce. Mark McIntyre, the PAC's executive
director, said although there were no genuine conservative
candidates running for the seats being contested, Seattle's voters
had a choice between left-of-center "candidates who see an
opportunity to work with businesses (both) large and small,"
and those "who would prefer to demonize the business
community." One of the incumbents, Kshama Sawant, is
squarely in the latter camp, as a member of the Socialist
Alternative Party. He wanted an even bigger head tax
($1,000!) per employee and called the repeal a "cowardly
betrayal".

Although 56% of Seattle's voters back a tax on large businesses
to fund housing, they aren't exactly enamored of the City
Council; according to the Crosscut/Elway poll released just
a week ago 69% had a negative opinion of the Council,
and 67% said they want to change the direction of the Council,
being on the lookout for candidates who would bring about
that change.

The national Democrats were paying close attention to the Seattle
races and have treated Jeff Bezos as if he had joined the Repub-
lican Party, with socialist-inclined Democrat candidates
for president Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren
obliquely attacking Bezos via decrying corporate money spent
trying to slant elections in their favor. The far-lefties in Seattle,
with their allies on the City Council, want in fact to tilt their
elections forever in favor of the progressives and other lefty
apologists favoring economic ideas which would make it
difficult, if not outright impossible, for businesses of any and
all sizes to do business in Seattle. The progs plan to make
Seattle's system a lasting tool for their political whims,
maintaining and increasing power. It must then behoove Bezos
to ask himself why he is a progressive, and weigh the pros and
cons of remaining one. Your bemused Peasant wants to see
the look on his face when he sees the scale tilted so far toward
radical statism with all its business and economy-choking
taxes, regulation and unrestrained government that it falls over
on its side. And now that Seattle's elections have been held and
have been won by the radicals, we'll get to see that very sight.
It isn't likely to be a pretty one.


MEM