Why was the wealthiest, most powerful country on earth dependent on the charity of a profit-making software company to outfit medical personnel with basic protection in the face of a pandemic?
Individuals like Mr. Benioff [CEO of Salesforce] had benefited from public goods financed by taxpayers — the schools that educated their employees; the internet; roads, bridges and other infrastructure enabling commerce. Then they deployed lobbyists, accountants and lawyers to master legal forms of tax evasion that starved the system of resources. He and his fellow billionaires could crow about giving back in part because of how comprehensively they had taken.
Billionaires have snapped up real estate, shares of stock and other companies at distressed prices. They have applied their lobbying muscle to turn gargantuan, taxpayer-financed bailout packages like the CARES Act and a perk engineered for real estate developers into corporate welfare schemes for the wealthiest people on earth.
Laurence D. Fink, the world’s largest asset manager, has broadcast his own dedication to stakeholder capitalism and social justice while squeezing poor countries to pay impossible debts in the midst of the pandemic.
Jeff Bezos has amassed enough wealth from his e-commerce empire to blast himself into space, as the employees left behind on earth spent the first months of the outbreak laboring in Amazon warehouses without adequate protective gear.
Between March 2020 and the middle of October 2021, America’s
billionaires saw their collective wealth soar by 70 percent, exceeding
$5 trillion, according to an analysis
of Forbes data by Americans for Tax Fairness and the left-leaning
Institute for Policy Studies. That mountain of money was controlled by a
mere 745 people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/business/davos-man-marc-benioff-book.html?searchResultPosition=1