FOCUS | Amazon to AOC: Excuse You, Our Employees Live Like Kings on $15/Hour

18 June 19

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18 June 19

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News

THE OBSESSION WITH "FREE" SERVICES: There's an old adage in Las Vegas, "Money won is twice as sweet as money earned." It's poor logic. We are on the whole an obsessive society. One of those obsessions is getting something ... anything "for free." The news offerings available from the corporate media providers are ostensibly free. The result of that is clear. Good work always requires honest support. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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FOCUS | Amazon to AOC: Excuse You, Our Employees Live Like Kings on $15/Hour 

ALSO SEE: Amazon's Attack on Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez Is Corporate Gaslighting

Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "The tech giant takes issue with the notion that its founder's wealth is predicated on paying 'starvation wages.'" 

EXCERPT: 

The company responded similarly back in April when Elizabeth Warren introduced a proposal called the Real Corporate Profits tax, which would apply a 7% tax to all corporate profits over $100 million. Under her plan, for instance, Amazon would have paid $698 million in taxes last year, rather than the zero-dollar check it actually wrote Uncle Sam. Amazon, it seemed, did not appreciate being singled out, huffily insisting that it “pays all the taxes we are required to pay in the U.S. and every country where we operate, including paying $2.6 billion in corporate tax and reporting $3.4 billion in tax expense over the last three years,” to which Warren effectively responded, “Did I stutter?”

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Biden Climate Plan Appears to Plagiarize Multiple Sources

06 June 19

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News

WE CANNOT FAIL ON FUNDING - There is too much to lose by failing, and too much to gain by succeeding. We must say no to failure. We have a wonderful Readership, but the truth is that most believe that “someone else” should pay for Reader Supported News. That mindset is causing huge problems. Reader Supported News, embrace the concept, reap the benefits. In earnest. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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Biden Climate Plan Appears to Plagiarize Multiple Sources 

Joe Perticone, Business Insider
Perticone writes: "Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden released on Tuesday a comprehensive proposal to combat global climate change, adding to the mix of candidates who have made rolling back dangerous emissions a central tenet of their campaigns."
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Roger McNamee | A Brief History of How Your Privacy Was Stolen
Roger McNamee, The New York Times
McNamee writes: "In 1982, when I began my career as a technology investor, privacy was not a concern. The denizens of Silicon Valley shared a goal: to improve the lives of the people who used technology."
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Sanders Crashes Walmart Meeting, Blasts 'Starvation Wages'
Cara Korte, CBS News
Korte writes: "Bernie Sanders went to the shareholder meeting of Walmart, the largest private employer in the world and told the company it pays its workers 'starvation wages.'"
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2020 Census Could Lead to Worst Undercount of Black, Latinx People in 30 Years
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR
Wang writes: "Challenges threatening the upcoming 2020 census could put more than 4 million people at risk of being undercounted in next year's national head count, according to new projections by the Urban Institute."
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Before Stonewall, if You Were Attacked for Being Gay, You Were the Criminal
James Polchin, Slate
Polchin writes: "In January of 1943, 31-year-old playwright Tennessee Williams wrote in his journal about the first time he was physically struck by another man."
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Honduras Deploys Security Forces as Doctors and Teachers Demand President's Resignation
Nina Lakhani, Guardian UK
Lakhani writes: "Honduran security forces with teargas and live bullets have been deployed to quell a wave of nationwide protests led by doctors and teachers demanding the resignation of the country's president."
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People Eat at Least 50,000 Plastic Particles a Year, Study Finds
Sarah Gibbens, National Geographic
Gibbens writes: "The tiny pieces of plastic scientists call microplastics are everywhere. They sit at the bottom of the sea, mix into beach sand, and blow in the wind. They're also inside us."
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Taxpayers Subsidizing Low Wage Wal-Mart Workers

Massachusetts residents will be subsidizing LOW WAGE CASINO WORKERS as well!

Bernie Sanders

Today's news from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.):

Starvation Wages: Responding to Sen. Sanders’ assertion that taxpayers subsidize Wal-Mart with Medicaid and food stamps for its underpaid workers, a spokesperson for the discount store told The Huffington Post that only 5 percent of its employees said in a 2005 survey that they used Medicaid. An internal memo from a Wal-Mart VP that same year, however, informed the board of directors that 46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart's 1.3 million U.S. employees were uninsured or on Medicaid.

USPS: Sen. Sanders is speaking out against a Postal Service bill that could end Saturday mail and door-to-door deliveries for homes and businesses. The measure introduced by Sens. Tom Carper and Tom Coburn, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, is weaker than a bill that the Senate passed last year. Sanders is the sponsor of a competing measure with 28 co...sponsors. He maintains that his alternative would save more Postal Service jobs, WTOP-AM news radio in Washington, D.C. reported on Monday.

Prison Transfer: Eleven New England senators, including Sanders, objected to plans to turn a women's prison in Danbury, Conn. into a facility for men, according to an Associated Press report in the Time Argus, Rutland Herald and Brattleboro Reformer. In a letter to the director of the federal Bureau of Prisons, the senators said the plan would leave the region without any prison spaces for females, creating unnecessary hardship for inmates' families.

Student Loans: As a member of the Senate education committee, Sen. Sanders cited Congressional Budget Office projections that interest rates would hit 7.25 percent for undergraduate loans in five years under a bill awaiting President Obama’s approval. By 2018, graduate loans would go up to 8.8 percent and parents would be charged 9.8 percent on loans for their children to attend college, according to the analysis by the non-partisan agency that provides economic data for Congress. “The delegation is correct to give fail marks to this plan,” the Rutland Herald said in an editorial.

Continue reading here: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=E7EF85F0-881B-4BB8-B6B5-6070B0B28B60