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Amazon Argues With US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on Twitter (thehill.com) 255

Posted by EditorDavid from the why-the-box-smiles dept.
The Hill reports that Amazon engaged in "a heated Twitter exchange" with U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren "after the lawmaker claimed that it and other large corporations 'exploit loopholes and tax havens to pay close to nothing in taxes.'" The exchange began after Warren (Democrat - Massachusetts) tweeted a clip from Thursday's Senate Finance Committee hearing, in which she accused Amazon and other companies of "manipulating the tax code to avoid paying their fair share."

Hours later, the Amazon News Twitter account responded with, "You make the tax laws @SenWarren; we just follow them."

"If you don't like the laws you've created, by all means, change them," Amazon tweeted, adding that the tech giant "has paid billions of dollars in corporate taxes over the past few years alone...." The company added that since 2010, it has invested $350 billion in the U.S. economy and in 2020, added 400,000 new jobs across the country...

Warren later Thursday evening hit back at Amazon, tweeting, "I didn't write the loopholes you exploit... your armies of lawyers and lobbyists did."

"But you bet I'll fight to make you pay your fair share," she continued. "And fight your union-busting. And fight to break up Big Tech so you're not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets."
UPDATE: Bernie Sanders was recently called out on Twitter by the retail chief of Amazon. "I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that's not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace."

A recent article in Recode suggests the tweets may have been encouraged by Jeff Bezos: Amazon has long been at odds with Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren over their criticisms of the company's labor and business practices. But the discord reached a new height last week when Amazon aggressively went after both on Twitter in an unusual attack for a large corporation. With each new snarky tweet from an Amazon executive or the company's official Twitter account, insiders and observers alike asked a version of the same question: "What the hell is going on?"

Turns out that Amazon leaders were following a broad mandate from the very top of the company: Fight back.

Recode has learned that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos expressed dissatisfaction in recent weeks that company officials weren't more aggressive in how they pushed back against criticisms of the company that he and other leaders deem inaccurate or misleading. What followed was a series of snarky and aggressive tweets that ended up fueling their own media cycles.

The timing was likely not coincidental. Bezos and other Amazon leaders are on edge as the company is facing the largest union election in its history at its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse.
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Amazon Argues With US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on Twitter More

Amazon Argues With US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on Twitter

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  • Really? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday March 28, 2021 @02:36PM (#61209276)

    "lawmaker claimed that it and other large corporations 'exploit loopholes"

    Loopholes that said 'lawmakers' left in the tax legislation either by accident (incompetent) or by design (corrupt).

    Just change the laws to close the loopholes but don't ask people to pay more than YOUR laws expect them to.

    • That would require competence, not speeches.

      It's easier to fundraise with video clips of speeches. A paragraph of text saying you were competent and didn't leave (or introduce) loopholes is not as flashy.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      In some cases, sure, but offshoring profits to tax havens isn't a legislative loophole, but an accounting trick that multinational companies can use.

      • Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday March 28, 2021 @04:32PM (#61209726)

        offshoring profits to tax havens isn't a legislative loophole

        Yes it is.

        The tax code is written to allow the offshoring of profits.

        The most obvious way to fix it would be to tax revenue, payroll, or dividends rather than profits.

        • Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)

          by hey! ( 33014 ) on Sunday March 28, 2021 @05:49PM (#61210032) Homepage Journal

          The code is not written *specifically* to allow for it, in the way that legislators slip perks in for their supporters. It's more a bug in the concept of taxing income when applied to a multinational entity.

          Standard accounting practice makes it easy to create fictitious expenses and income. This is a feature, not a bug; it enables you do do things like charge back departmental services for example to justify the money spent on them. It's a management tool. But doing this necessarily creates fictitious profits and losses in various departments. For a single nation company it doesn't affect anything because all those fictitious profits and losses are in the same country and they cancel each other out. For a multinational it creates a tax dodge that was never intended to exist.

          • Neh, the concept is even simpler than this and it really cannot be fixed. Imagine you make a product which costs you a dollar, and you can sell it for $10. You can sell it yourself and book $9 revenue, or you buy a company in a low tax jurisdiction, and that company strikes a massive volume discount price of $1.50, then you book $0.50 revenue per product, while the other company, which you own 100% but is abroad, books $8.50. Your revenue is low, but your stock value goes up because your company owns 100% s

    • so you're point is kind of disingenuous. She's been fighting them for decades, along with fighting for better regulation on Wall Street gambling so that we stop having economic collapses every 10 years.

      Seriously, if we'd just listen to her we'd stop having these cyclic crashes. Economists figured out in the 20s what causes them, but since the folks at the top can always count on a bail out (since if we don't they'll take the entire economy with them thanks to all the power they have) voters keep letting

      • When you let basically anyone vote, how educated do you think your voters will be? Of course they are being hoodwinked into believing whatever the politicians say. Politicians aren't really dumb, they are just corrupt.

        • is that you might be wrong. The goal is to get everyone participating because more voices mean more chances to be correct, provided you're willing to examine your beliefs and self reflect.

          Mind you, education is important. But there's nothing special about individual humans. So you can get better results just by extending education to everyone.

          Finally the main reason you never take away the right to vote from _anyone_ is that once you start it's difficult to stop, and it ends in a dictatorship. You m

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by malkavian ( 9512 )

        No. They didn't. They thought they did, but those things have been tried, put in action in various places, and other things hit the boom and bust instead.

        If you listen, you have another experiment. There's nothing wrong with an experiment done correctly, but it's very unlikely to be this 'magic bullet' you think it is.

      • Warren doesn't understand even basic micro-economics, like supply and demand, let alone macro-economics. Her proposed Wealth Tax has already been attempted and failed miserably in other countries, resulting in repeals. She's either clueless, or just pandering to her ignorant left-wing base.

    • Wait, let me go find the biggest eyeroll gif.

  • How Dare They (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cmdln Daco ( 1183119 ) on Sunday March 28, 2021 @02:37PM (#61209286)

    How dare they heckle senators.

    She's a Senator, you know!

    • It sounds like actually they're mocking her. Definition - tease or laugh at in a scornful or contemptuous manner. All they're missing is a ha-ha or middle finger at the end. Then again, if you can't mock Elizabeth Warren who can you mock? Like when old what's-his-face used to call her Pocahantas. I can see how she had a problem getting into college.

      • She'll forever be known as Pocahontas or Fauxahonthasx after claiming she was native American and it turned out "the results of the DNA test, showing that she had between 1/64th and 1/1024th Native American ancestry" which is less than the average among white Americans

        https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2019/08/19/elizabeth-warren-scrubs-website-of-cherokee-ancestry-claims/amp/

        And indeed she used her fake identity for carreer advancement : https://www.google.com/amp/s/a... [google.com]

        " Warrenâ(TM)s 1986 regis

    • I couldn't believe she actually wrote this:

      "And fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets."

      It makes her sound like an entitled senator princess. After reading it several times,

      I think she was actually trying to make a joke. That only makes sense as a joke if she considers herself as one of the little people, not as one of the most powerful people in the country. She is firmly in the 1%.

    • Exactly. Generally speaking, I like Senator Warren. But that last sentence, "And fight to break up Big Tech so you're not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets," I'm like "Excuse me?"

      That sounds very Trumpian.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by The Rizz ( 1319 )

        I really feel that the implication was to have an implied "with impunity" at the end of that sentence. The comment really reads that way to me, but was left off by her because people typically don't say it while speaking because it's implied by the tone.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tomhath ( 637240 )
        Not "Trumpian" at all. Whining and name calling is very much a left wing tactic. And the Recode author seems obsessed with "snarky" comments. Seriously, it you want to hear snarky just listen to NPR for a few minutes.

    • How dare they heckle senators.

      She's a Senator, you know!

      Well they're welcome to do it, but all it does is make the Amazon PR team look like a bunch of idiots. Here's a pro tip, don't get into public slapfights with elected representatives, wtf.

      • Because she's going to pass a law, right? Sorry, but twitter is the perfect place for anyone to heckle a Senator. Freedom of speech before we give that up completely as well. Clearly, princess warren would be happy with some speech control.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by musicmaker ( 30469 )

          Frankly - freedom of speech at the level the US has chosen it seems pretty damn overrated right now. Half the country voted for an idiot who probably made more false claims than true ones and killed 500k Americans with incompetence. Maybe it's time to start having some laws that restrict Libel, Slander and false claims in a useful way. It's pretty awful that Fox & Friends can just say whatever the heck they want with no consequences for misleading the American people except the country going to hell. Mo

    • Re:How Dare They (Score:5, Funny)

      by chispito ( 1870390 ) on Sunday March 28, 2021 @07:28PM (#61210340)

      How dare they heckle senators.

      She's a Senator, you know!

      Also, this is the War Room.

  • why not? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by renegade600 ( 204461 ) on Sunday March 28, 2021 @02:44PM (#61209320)

    a person or a company would be crazy not to exploit loopholes. I wonder how many loopholes Warren exploits to save money? The reality is, why is she not sponsoring bills, rules or laws to close those loopholes?

    • Re:why not? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JoeRandomHacker ( 983775 ) on Sunday March 28, 2021 @03:00PM (#61209390)

      The reality is, why is she not sponsoring bills, rules or laws to close those loopholes?

      Because complaining about problems energizes the political base more than taking credit for solving problems. (And that's assuming you can actually solve the problems, or at least create the appearance of solving them.) Amazon and Warren are both acting in their own interests based on the incentives surrounding them.

      • Warren is TRYING to solve problems (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday March 28, 2021 @03:34PM (#61209520)
        she didn't have a prayer in hell of doing that under Trump and a GOP controlled senate. Even now there's so many Blue Dogs (e.g. Democratic senators who vote in line with Republicans) that she can't get anything done.

        What we need to do to stop economic crashes is well understood. Warren has written several books on it. She has spoken extensively on the topic, especially on bringing back Glass-Steagal and separating Main Street and Wall Street banks. We've ignored her because of reasons that I'll get down modded for bringing up, so I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

        We massively deregulated Wall Street during the Trump era. A reckoning is coming. Another huge crash that'll hit the /. crowd too (who mostly avoided the mess COVID caused thanks to work from home). It'll make 2008 seem like good times.

        • Save your money and invest after the crash. Sounds like opportunity to me.

    • In 2019, it seems not many [ctfassets.net]. She paid 28% federal tax on $692k of income.

      In 2011, she exploited more loopholes, it seems mostly from home office and business travel deductions [elizabethwarren.com]. She paid 25% federal tax on $616k of income. She also claimed a deduction for moving expenses.

      Other interesting things, she owns a lot of IBM stock, presumably for a while, but no other stock (at least not mentioned on the return). She has a lot of money in an obscure Mormon bank (Zions First), and she has a giant ($300k) capital gain

  • Not powerful enough to heckle? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by malx ( 7723 ) on Sunday March 28, 2021 @02:46PM (#61209328)

    Really? She thinks Amazon (or anyone else) should be so terrified of her Senatorial power they dare not heckle?

    This isn’t someone with a strong commitment to free speech. Or, indeed, to the democratic idea that elected officials serve rather than reign.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      I think they should do a page-one rewrite on the Senate. Let the Senators represent the money. Let's just do it up front.

      Each new and improved Senator will represent 1% of the federal tax revenue. If you want to go complain about Amazon (or the google or whoever), then you would know to contact the Senior Senator of Amazon.

      Whoops.

      I forgot that Amazon don't pay no stinkin' taxes. No Senator for you!

      • I forgot that Amazon don't pay no stinkin' taxes.

        In 2019, Amazon paid $162 million in income taxes, plus $9 Billion in Sales and Use taxes, and $2.4 Billion in payroll and customs taxes.

        I'm pretty sure all of those are more in taxes than you personally paid to the tax collectors...

    • Re:Not powerful enough to heckle? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Sunday March 28, 2021 @03:55PM (#61209596) Homepage Journal

      Her days are numbered and she knows it. In her 2018 Senate campaign, she essentially promised that she would serve as a senator for Massachusetts and not run for President. Once elected, she immediately started running for President, with such a poor campaign that in the Massachusetts primary she not only lost to the front-runner, Biden, but she also lost to Bernie Sanders. In her own state.

      She's also getting older and has accomplished nothing of note for her past two terms, and there's a Kennedy (remember: Massachusetts) that's seeking a Senate seat that only just lost his last attempt but can probably bump an unpopular Senator who's known more for running her mouth than accomplishing anything of note.

      Which means it isn't that surprising that she's trying to get into fights with major companies that don't have a large presence in Massachusetts, because her little Presidential campaign stunt went over incredibly poorly at home. (It's also worth noting that she basically burned bridges with two major groups: the establishment voters went for Biden, the progressive wing went for Bernie, so the fact that she lost both groups in her own state has to be incredibly worrying to her.)

      • Eh if she runs again she could get bumped out in a primary but chances it will not be by Joe Kennedy III who is really a charisma vacuum with no real idea's and all he accomplished was proving his namesake does not have the weight it used to years ago. In a Presidential election year it'll be someone running to her left.

        And if "not accomplishing much" in a Senators term was a real issue in getting re-elected we would have a much different looking Senate right now, how much can any of them say they have "ac

  • That got to her (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Sunday March 28, 2021 @02:48PM (#61209342) Homepage Journal

    > And fight to break up Big Tech so you're not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets."

    a) she is assmad - must have hit pretty close to the mark to get her all riled up like that.
    b) does she really think somebody has to be powerful to heckle a senator on Twitter? She wants to break up Big Tech but doesn't even understand what Twitter is? I imagine she's being mercilessly heckled right now.

    • Itâ(TM)s clear she did not expect to be challenged. How dare Amazon respond to her attacks!

      Seriously, in most cases, politicians tweeting and âoequestioningâ during hearings are simply grandstanding opportunities. How many times have we seen politicians speak abusively to witness for five minutes without asking questions then getting mouthy when their assertions are challenged?

      • I'm not on Amazon's side on this debate, but - lots of politicians (and their aides, who I assume handle the politicians' social media accounts):

        1) really don't understand social media - they see it as a megaphone, and don't seem to grasp other people have the same megaphone (and love to use it).

        2) are surprisingly thin-skinned - if you make a habit of "dishing it out", you should expect others to send it back (especially on social media).

    • Bezos needs to fire the social media team for this. His company is supposed to cover for Democrats, not use facts to reveal their incompetence. Things are not going to plan...

      • His company is supposed to cover for Democrats, not use facts to reveal their incompetence.

        That's only during election years. Once the party is in power you have to exploit intra-party rivalries to get the laws you want passed.

    • maybe she's upset that such an obviously false statement ("You make the tax laws" when in fact nothing she supports has passed since the 2008 crashes and all those were repealed weeks after Trump and the GOP took Congress & the white house) can be made and the voters just kind of roll with it because she's an economics professor and Amazon has professional social media influences really good at pushing voter's buttons...

      You know, the only reason we're not in a depression right now is, ironically, CO

      • maybe she's upset that such an obviously false statement ("You make the tax laws" when in fact nothing she supports has passed since the 2008 crashes and all those were repealed weeks after Trump and the GOP took Congress & the white house)

        It sounds like she's angry because she's an ineffectual Senator.

  • Changing the law is her job (Score:3)

    by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Sunday March 28, 2021 @02:56PM (#61209378)

    If she doesn't like the law she can try and change it. That's literally part of her job.

    But "she didn't make that."

  • Well ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday March 28, 2021 @02:57PM (#61209380)

    Warren later Thursday evening hit back at Amazon, tweeting, "I didn't write the loopholes you exploit... your armies of lawyers and lobbyists did."

    That's most likely true, but... the Senate and the House then voted "Yes" for them with enough votes to pass and the President signed those bills into law. The initial blame may be on the lawyers and lobbyists but the responsibility is on you and your colleagues. Passing the buck here is disingenuous.

  • I know it's popular to think that companies should pay their fair share, but the reality is that any taxes that are successfully levied on a company are simply passed on to their customers. So really it's all of us who pay those taxes anyway. If Amazon is forced to cough up more taxes they'll just raise prices by that same percent. Except for some sectors like agriculture that can't pass their costs on.

    • Re:Who actually pays the taxes? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday March 28, 2021 @03:08PM (#61209432) Homepage Journal

      It is not all of us at all, it is all of us who shop there, and only to the degree to which we do so. I for one go out of my way to avoid shopping with Amazon, so not only am I perfectly content to have their prices go up, I actually welcome it because when Amazon pays a lower tax rate they get an unfair advantage over other businesses and I like more choice in the market.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        Whether it's all people or some people is relatively immaterial. The fact is *people* pay the taxes in one form or another. So while you're correct that companies are hesitant to raise prices too much to cover taxes, the fact is that tax still has to come from somewhere, meaning from *someone*. I read a study recently that estimated nearly 70% of US corporate tax paid by a company is ultimately borne by the workers of that corporation in the form lowered pay. As you pointed out, companies are hesitant t

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nagora ( 177841 )

          Whether it's all people or some people is relatively immaterial

          No, it's the entire point. When Amazon dodges tax, everyone else has to pay for it. When they pay tax then their customers have to pay it or their staff have to pay it. Either way it's their choice to shop or work there.

          I'm very happy if Amazon goes bust. Whether it's because they have to pay their tax or their staff I really don't care. Other companies manage to do both; if Amazon is so incompetent that it can only survive on subsidies (which is what it's getting now) then fuck 'em.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by e3m4n ( 947977 )
        Actually profit margin doesnt drive prices nearly as much as competition does. Amazon can threaten to raise prices, but if raising prices makes their products cost more than competitors, then they risk losing more money than the shrinking profit margins. Its exacly how mom&pops got squeezed out to bigger stores like walmart. And then how brick&mortars got squeezed by tax free online shopping, etc. Amazon has no choice on its array of cheap chinese knock-offs if places like ebay or Bang Good start of

    • but the reality is that any taxes that are successfully levied on a company are simply passed on to their customers.

      That's not really true, companies have two options: subtract the extra taxes from their profits, or raise prices. Typically they do a mix of both. First they reduce their profits (a lot of times the CxO suite doesn't care, since they get their salary either way, unless they have too much stock).

      Later they raise prices to some degree, as everyone else in the industry does the same thing. In a perfect market, if one company raises prices to cover taxes and a second company does not, then everyone will

    • It's a populist scheme, it riles up the rabble to rant about "fair shares". This problem has an easy solution - fuck corporate taxes for the most part, outside of e.g. land and resource use taxes. Instead, just tax rich people more. Tax stock sales more, tax capital gains more, tax high end real estate more, etc.. It's not hard. Then you're getting the money from a person, and it's a lot easier than getting it from a mega-corp.

      But commies gonna commie and it's easy to rile up the rabble against large corpor

  • There's been several of these foot-in-the-mouth tweets coming from 'Amazon News' (the other being the 'delivery deivers peeing in bottles' one) - I can only imagine they've fired one and hired another that's just as bad, much like all of Trump's Press Secretaries.

  • they called her out for saying their employees were peeing in Bottles and pooping in bags to meet quotas, saying it was a ridiculous urban legend. She responded with this [twitter.com]

  • Like it or not, there is still freedom of associate in the United States. And that includes the freedom to form for-profit companies.

    And the congress is precisely the place making the rules for such associations. Her argument would only be matched if Bezos was complaining about drivers losing their packages. It is your job to make the rules, it is Amazon's job to deliver the packages.

  • Politicians job is to get “heckled”, in this case the heckling is just asking her to do her job. Yes, closing loopholes would be part of her job as a lawmaker. Asking her to “do your job” is not what I would call heckling, but I guess some lawmakers are so use to not doing their job that when you ask them to they think it’s heckling.

  • I've got nothing against Senator Warren, but I am struck about her argument. At the local level a few of the members of my City Council have also invoked the "XYZ government problem is not my responsibility" and I don't understand it. At the city level, they are the government, just as at the federal level a Senator is the government. If not you then who?

    Obviously one person doesn't get to make unilateral changes to the law, but I would suggest that it a legislator of any level is responsible for at lea

  • With a double dog dare you have to perform what you're daring someone to do, if they end up refusing to try doing it. So Amazon would then actually make it happen, and pay higher taxes, while also revealing that they had the influence to do so all along.
  • Though he manages to so far have 1582 Likes.

  • I'm really not sure who to root for in this new nadir in american politics and discourse.

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