The same night that federal agents assassinated Alex Pretti, President Donald Trump hosted a screening of “Melania,” a documentary about his wife fronted by Amazon for $75 million. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was an honored guest.
Amazon, Microsoft, and much of the tech industry have been enabling the rising Trump dictatorship. Both mega-corporations donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. They were among the largest donors to Trump’s $300 million ballroom built on the remains of the East Wing of the White House, which was demolished by Trump last year.
While currying favor with Trump has been a priority, Amazon and Microsoft have been silent about Renee Good, Alex Pretti, the little five-year-old boy stolen from Minneapolis, and the two-year-old boy left alone in a car in Shoreline after his dad was snatched by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Why do anything to get in the way when colluding with Trump fattens the corporate bottomline?
What is weird is that, while Washington state Democratic political leaders have condemned ICE, the state legislature seems intent on purposefully ignoring an opportunity to hold Amazon and Microsoft accountable. This accountability would make Amazon and Microsoft pay the same tax as other companies to fund college grants for Washington students and to lower tuition. Democratic egislative leaders are just sitting on that bill…. you could say colluding with Amazon and Microsoft.
In 2019 Amazon and Microsoft were public proponents for the Workforce Education Investment Act, which included a surtax on advanced computing businesses. It was a tax applied uniformly to all such businesses. However, the House Appropriations Committee adopted an amendment to ratchet down payments from those corporations with over $25 billion in global receipts… two corporations, to be exact – Amazon and Microsoft.
Very few advocates or legislators knew of or understood this amendment. Who did it? Several Democratic lawmakers, including Guy Palumbo, a Democratic state senator who resigned from office to become Amazon’s public policy director, Drew Hansen, now a state senator, who was chair of the House Higher Education Committee in 2019, and Jamie Pedersen, currently Senate Majority Leader for the Democrats.
In 2020 the Legislature made some “corrections” to the Workforce Education Investment Act, authored by Senator Pedersen, which again made sure to cap any payments by Amazon and Microsoft, to give them a significant tax advantage that smaller corporations did not receive. Each year this amounts to the robbery of over $100 million from higher education.
These were both Democratic bills. No Republicans voted for them, while very few Democrats voted no, including Dave Paul, the current chair of the House Postsecondary Education & Workforce Committee and Mari Leavitt, also a member of this committee, perhaps because they realized the gross favoritism to and collusion with Microsoft and Amazon.
Thanks to this loophole, the legislature actually reduced eligibility for the full college grant this past year and tuition goes up and up every year. When I talked with legislators about this loophole over the past five years, their refrain has been that they had a deal with Amazon and Microsoft to support this legislation. How about a deal with citizens of our state trying to afford college? Rather than capitulate to Amazon and Microsoft, how about we stand with students?
That is what House Bill 2098, sponsored by state representative Julia Reed (D-36th Seattle) does: it erases a megacorporate exclusion from taxation and insures proportional taxation across the board. The new revenue – $800 million a year – will fully fund the College Grant program for students from families with incomes up to $150,000, and it will also enable the state to lower tuition. These are what our objectives for progress should be in our state, not to protect the corporate billionaires whose actions are destroying our democracy.
A recent poll shows two-to-one support for this bill. Responding to this statement “this bill would require Amazon and Microsoft to pay the same tax rate as other Washington-based advanced computing companies,” voter support is 77% to 16%. Reducing tuition garners 73% to 17%. Expanding college grants to students with family incomes up to $150,000 gets 67% to 23%.
And yet, since the legislative session began on January 12, Democrats have refused to act to advance HB 2098. The Democratic caucus appears to be held hostage by corporate lobbyists. They are careful not to overturn legislative actions from six years ago, even as a majority of the senators who voted for these loopholes are no longer in the legislature. So while Democratic legislators mourn Alex Pretti and Renee Good they continue to coddle the mega-corporations that are enabling Trump. These are the corporations that are helping Trump to create a fascist state of our nation.
Democrats, don’t you think it is about time you actually worked for Washington students, not global soulless corporations? It is time to pass HB 2098.
John Burbank (Guest Contributor)
John Burbank founded the Seattle-based Economic Opportunity Institute in 1998 and led it until his retirement in 2021.
