Who to Boycott

There are some in business who treat workers like property

This piece is a commentary on a group of people I think represents a grave threat to humanity. It contains an occasional colorful metaphor. You have been warned!

There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of wealth. That is, provided it is driven by the goal of beneficently applying that wealth. On the other hand, the pursuit of wealth for the sake of hoarding it is a morally deficient position that society should continuously rebuke. The possession of wealth equivalent to what could solve significant societal problems, and the failure to apply it toward real-world harm is, in my view, the most morally depraved position one can take.

In a previous piece, I wrote:

Billionaires live in a world of logical fallacy, riddled with overconfidence in their abilities while simultaneously dismissing the primary driver of their success—luck. Every single billionaire’s fortune can be tied to this one trait. Typically, it involves some combination of right-place-right-time along with starting with wealth or connections.

This is not an opinion plucked from thin air—it is supported by ample evidence (click any of the links in that paragraph for a quick start at analyzing it). Billionaires—or the super wealthy in general—pose the greatest threat to the well-being of people. There are two primary reasons for this. First, they believe through their misguided views of self, and prove by their action, that they inhabit a world separate and apart from everyone else. Second, a great many of them loathe the people who exist in that world “beneath” them.

A World Apart

Everyone has probably heard by now that extremely rich people pay a substantially lower amount of taxes per capita than the rest of us. And not just in the USA, though the focus below is primarily there. Some pay none at all. Jeff Bezos, for example, paid zero federal income taxes in 2007 and 2011. He was a multibillionaire both of those years. Business Insider calculated that in 2017 Bezos made over 8 million dollars per hour. To put it in a broader perspective, he acquires (on average) the equivalent of Nepal’s entire GDP about every 8 months.

Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn, and George Soros—all billionaires—also had years where they paid zero dollars in income taxes. Donald Trump had years where he paid less than a thousand. Carl Icahn defended this egregious situation, stating “There’s a reason it’s called income tax. The reason is if, if you’re a poor person, a rich person, if you are Apple — if you have no income, you don’t pay taxes.” Icahn doubled down by saying, “Do you think a rich person should pay taxes no matter what? I don’t think it’s germane. How can you ask me that question?” Yes, Carl. You should… because you use ethically challenged ways to misname income to avoid being properly taxed.

What Icahn conveniently left out of his defense of failing to contribute to the nation’s general fund is that the super-rich use immoral, if legal, methods to avoid having “income” to claim. As ProPublica put it:

The Bezoses of the world have no need to be paid a salary. Bezos’ Amazon wages have long been set at the middle-class level of around $80,000 a year… Steve Jobs took $1 in salary when he returned to Apple in the 1990s. Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Google’s Larry Page have all done the same.

Income is expensive because it is the primary focus of most countries’ tax system. When a super-rich person makes a claim about "not taking a salary” out of some altruistic motivation, they are flat-out lying to you. The ProPublica report lays it out:

The top 25 wealthiest Americans reported $158 million in wages in 2018, according to the IRS data. That’s a mere 1.1% of what they listed on their tax forms as their total reported income. The rest mostly came from dividends and the sale of stock, bonds or other investments, which are taxed at lower rates than wages.

The chicanery only begins there. What wealthy people do is tie their capital assets to loans—which provides the cash they use day-to-day—that have no taxable value just like our mortgages are not taxed as income. The difference is we pay our mortgages from our income, while the super-rich pay off these loans through dividends from their huge capital gains or other assets, which further reduces their taxable burden. Moreover,

The affluent often hold assets until death, avoiding capital gains taxes by passing property to heirs. The value of the inherited property generally adjusts to what it’s worth on the date of death, known as a “step-up in basis.”

The ProPublica report described this legal wrangling in relation to Warren Buffet’s methodology this way:

Buffett has famously held onto his stock in the company he founded, Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate that owns Geico, Duracell and significant stakes in American Express and Coca-Cola. That has allowed Buffett to largely avoid transforming his wealth into income. From 2015 through 2018, he reported annual income ranging from $11.6 million to $25 million. That may seem like a lot, but Buffett ranks as roughly the world’s sixth-richest person—he’s worth $110 billion as of Forbes’ estimate in May 2021. At least 14,000 U.S. taxpayers in 2015 reported higher income than him, according to IRS data.

There’s also a second strategy Buffett relies on that minimizes income, and therefore, taxes. Berkshire does not pay a dividend, the sum (a piece of the profits, in theory) that many companies pay each quarter to those who own their stock. Buffett has always argued that it is better to use that money to find investments for Berkshire that will further boost the value of shares held by him and other investors. If Berkshire had offered anywhere close to the average dividend in recent years, Buffett would have received over $1 billion in dividend income and owed hundreds of millions in taxes each year.

For context, Buffett is the billionaire known for publicly calling for raising taxes on the rich. He proposed an increase in both income taxes and estate or “death” taxes, the latter of which allows the dynasty-like passing on of wealth to family members. But, if Buffett is so concerned about rich people paying their fair share like everyone else, then why play the shell game with his current income? The answer is because he is happy to pay his fair share of taxes… but only after he’s dead.

Raising the income tax on mega-wealthy people will have little effect given that they already deftly evade the current rates as illustrated above. On taxes generally, he told Newsweek, “I believe the money [the tax he should be paying now… like the rest of us] will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing U.S. debt.” That is arrogance at its peak.

No individual taxpayer gets to decide how the general fund (i.e. your taxes) is spent, and neither should some condescending, near-centenarian billionaire. Society should not be forced to await the day that the super-rich die for them finally to contribute to that same society in which they live.

Even those that pay some taxes pay at a rate normal people could only dream of. ProPublica conducted a detailed examination of tax records of billionaires and found that many of the world’s richest paid income tax at rates ranging between 0.10% to 3.27%. On a $100,000 per year salary, someone taxed at Warren Buffet’s rate of 0.10% would pay a hundred bucks. Yet, when called upon to pay a fair share some, like the perennially despicable Elon Musk, they whine and cry about it.

Maybe petulant children should not be allowed to have billions of dollars?

Declining to pay taxes is not the only area in which one can readily see that these folks view themselves as separate and apart from the rest of us. Most of them happily contribute to the severe environmental degradation the rest of us will suffer from long before—and much worse than—they do. Globalissues.org notes that according to an Oxfam report, the richest 10% of people produce half of earth's climate-harming fossil-fuel emissions, while the poorest half contribute a mere 10%.

These wealthy people are simply too important—in their own minds, anyway—to alter their habits of taking private jets and yachts everywhere, and living in gigantic, resource-consuming houses, while the rest of us drink out of toxic paper straws and endure stupid and ineffective plastic bag bans.

Here’s an example provided by SiliconJets on Mastodon.

A #gulfstream G650ER (Reg: N68885) reportedly owned by #markzuckerberg has just completed a flight which was tracked since Sat Sep 16 2023 02:19:54 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time). During this flight it has emitted an estimated 16249 kg of #CO2. If owner had flown commercial, the predicted average #emissions would have been 842 kg.

Here’s another:

A #gulfstream G650 (Reg: N628TS) reportedly owned by #elonmusk has just completed a flight which was tracked since Sat Sep 16 2023 02:19:46 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time). During this flight it has emitted an estimated 3258 kg of #CO2. If owner had flown commercial, the predicted average #emissions would have been 169 kg.

Follow that account to see how often this happens daily.

Their disregard for society doesn’t end at the enormous environmental damage they inflict. Sometimes, they put their contempt for everyone else on public notice. Let’s return to Jeff Bezos for a minute. In 2019, MacKenzie Bezos (now, MacKenzie Scott) decided that even she—his wife at the time—couldn’t tolerate his impudent personality after 25 years of marriage. Maybe it had a little to do with the fact that while still married, he texted his mistress things like “I love you, alive girl. I will show you with my body, and my lips and my eyes, very soon” along with pictures of his genitals.

Upon their divorce, MacKenzie Scott announced that she will donate to good causes a “disproportionate amount of money" and "keep at it until the safe is empty.” In 2020, she had donated more than $586 million. By comparison, Jeff gave a record-high charity donation that same year but in most years gave far less, suggesting he did it in 2020 only to avoid being upstaged by his ex-wife. And his illusion of philanthropy eroded quickly thereafter.

In 2022, Jeff Bezos received a massive yacht he ordered from the Dutch firm Oceanco, for which he paid more than a half a billion dollars. Built in the Netherlands, neither Bezos nor Oceanco apparently realized that the overtly-compensating yacht would not make it from the shipyard to the ocean because of at least one historic bridge in the way. So, Bezos sought to have that bridge, the Koningshaven Bridge, dismantled which would allow his yacht to sail on through. Built about 100 years ago, the bridge is considered a historic landmark in the Netherlands. The BBC reported:

[T]he middle section of the Dutch city's bridge, known locally as De Hef, would be temporarily removed to allow the 130ft (40m) high boat to sail through.

The move is controversial because the steel bridge has a long history, and is now a national monument. It previously went through a major renovation which saw it out of action from 2014 to 2017, when officials said it would not be dismantled again.

Put plainly, Bezos didn’t care about the historicity of the landmark, he just wanted to get his environmentally damaging yacht out to sea. The Rotterdam mayor’s office, who tentatively agreed to the dismantlement, made the feeble argument that “the jobs created by the construction of the vessel prompted the plan, and pledged the bridge would be rebuilt in its current form.” The mayor’s spokesperson further whined, “It's the only route to the sea.”

Nevertheless, after a great deal of protest, Bezos’ stand-in for his manhood was towed to the Greenport shipyard after locals threatened to throw eggs at it if he dismantled the bridge. Apparently it was not the only route to the sea. This is one small example of the local people fighting back against abuse when their spineless politicians fail to represent them.

This is a list of numerous billionaires’ emission rates by their luxury items.

Unfortunately, the reason so many of the super-rich stomp upon the well-being of others is because governments cower to them, like the Rotterdam mayor did. In other cases large swaths of people blindly support the super-rich, perhaps the result of being duped by their fabricated narratives of their alleged genius or philanthropy.

Donald Trump, another privileged mega-rich person (for now, anyway), literally had to steal top secret information, including nuclear secrets, attempt to hold onto power by fraud and force, and conspire in a massive criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States before finally being forced into facing potential accountability—despite a very long history of otherwise uncharged criminality. And still about 40% of the American electorate support this criminal. Here’s a brief summary of his criminal career—much of it uncharged (which I wrote before prosecutors handed down his latest indictments):

[Trump] is currently under indictment for 34 counts of falsifying business records related to an alleged coverup of a payment to aid his election in 2016—a conspiracy for which one defendant already served prison time. Trump’s Chief Financial Officer, Allen Weisselberg, pleaded guilty to a 15-years-long tax scheme, seemingly facilitated or outright engineered by Trump’s company. That plea related to criminal convictions of Trump Corporation and Trump Payroll Corporation for 17 different crimes related to tax fraud and others. The Trump Corporation is also accused in a civil suit of falsifying records and manipulating assets to unlawfully obtain loans and other benefits. The Trump Foundation, a self-proclaimed charity, was shut down for fraud and fined $2 million. Trump also settled with the Federal government over housing discrimination against African Americans, paid $25 million in compensation to students scammed by his “university,” paid $10 million for failing to follow regulations meant to deter money laundering, among many others.

The United States Internal Revenue Service has routinely targeted lower income people to audit rather than the wealthiest and most likely tax-dodgers. The Supreme Court of the USA regularly favors the rich. Trump escaped numerous criminal charges by buying his way out of them. Elon Musk engaged in unilateral foreign policy decisions without consequence, which is a crime under the Logan Act (18 U.S. Code § 953). This is the same guy whose entire financial empire is built on a history of fraud, though he has so far managed to buy his way out of any potential criminal liability. Plainly speaking, the super wealthy do almost whatever they want because authorities rarely do anything about it, except maybe accept a check.

Yet, people hail these wealthy folks as heroes and geniuses. It is self-aggrandizing nonsense. Elon Musk is not a genius. Bill Gates is not a philanthropist. Yvon Chouinard of Pategonia did not “donate” his company to an environmental cause. (If you don’t know that story, Chouinard simply turned his company into a political PAC where he and his family still earn the full profit, but with an even lower tax burden). It’s all a scam. And, to top it off, the super rich—Musk, Chouinard, Buffet, and others—despise you.

Unfettered Contempt

Recently, I ran across a video of a guy named Tim Gurner speaking at some property summit that aptly sums up how most of the super-rich view everyone else. Gurner is the CEO of the Gurner Group, a real estate company that caters to other super-rich people. With a net worth estimated at around $514 million, Gurner is not a billionaire, but he certainly qualifies as super-rich. He is a prime example of what the rich think of the rest of us, but he is an outlier in that he was brash—or dumb—enough to say it on video. Here is what he unabashedly said:

I think the problem that we’ve had is that people decided they didn’t really want to work so much anymore through COVID and that has had a massive issue on productivity.

Gurner actually accused people of not wanting to work during the COVID pandemic. As a reminder, the world saw 6,957,216 reported COVID-caused deaths during the pandemic. In the early phase of the pandemic, in just the United States, unemployment reached 1.5 million due to layoffs. Layoffs do not comprise a failure of ‘wanting’ to work. Billionaires procured an average 54% increase in their wealth during the pandemic. Of the millionaires, 493 became billionaires during the pandemic.

The middle class, which has consistently shrunk over the last 50 years by any metric, suffered a net loss of income during the pandemic either from unemployment, inflation, or both. Some argue that without the various stimulus packages offered by some governments, the middle class might have suffered a financially fatal blow.

In places outside of the USA and Europe, many did in fact suffer critical financial losses and stand to continue losing long after. Globally, more than 100 million people fell into the category of “extreme poverty” resultant from the pandemic. But sure, no one wants to work.

Gurney shoved his foot farther into his vile mouth:

They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years and we need to see that change. We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50% in my view. We need to see pain in the economy.

Yes, he said that. On the record. Knowing full well he was on video.

This loser must have missed the reams of reporting about how much more CEOs make than their average worker—you know, the people who generate the revenue through their labor, something CEOs do not do. The Institute for Policy Studies reported in 2022 that American CEOs’ pay compared to median workers rated 670-to-1 (meaning the average CEO received $670 in compensation for every $1 the worker received).

In 2020 that ratio was 604-to-1. And 49 companies had ratios above 1,000-to-1. The Guardian further pointed out that “two-thirds of low-wage corporations that cut worker pay in 2021 also spent billions inflating CEO pay through stock buybacks.” But Gurner wants YOU, the worker, to feel more “pain.” Here’s why:

We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.

This terrible person thinks everyone unlucky enough to fail to reach his level of wealth, should be a serf. The definition of serf is: A member of the lowest feudal class, legally bound to a landed estate and required to perform labor for the lord of that estate in exchange for a personal allotment of land. This line of thinking drives people of his ilk to constantly assault workers who demand fair wages and working conditions.

Look at the now-former CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, another disgusting human being. Schultz once said, “It’s my belief that the efforts of unionization in America are in many ways a manifestation of a much bigger problem.” This is because unions ensure workers receive fair deals with their employers. The bigger problem Schultz is deftly not articulating there is that he might have to pay people fairly if they successfully organize.

Gurner reflected on this in his own callous, immoral way.

There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around.

More serfdom implied there. In his distorted view, workers should feel lucky to have a job, no matter how egregiously low-paying or lacking in benefits or good working conditions. What Gurner fails to realize is that the sole source of his own wealth comes from those workers. There is no need for a CEO absent the labor of workers. And frankly Gurner, and the twits like him, increasingly make the argument for why there is no need for CEOs at all. He still wasn’t finished:

We’ve got to kill that attitude and that has to come through hurting the economy, which is what the whole global—the world—is trying to do. The governments around the world are tying to increase unemployment to get that to some sort of normality and we’re seeing it. I think every employer now is seeing it. I mean, there is definitely massive layoffs going off. People might not be talking about it, but people are definitely laying people off and we’re starting to see less arrogance in the employment market and that has to continue because that will cascade across the costs balance.

Gurner wants to “kill” the “attitude” that workers recognize employers need them (not the other way around as Gurner would like it). He proposes to increase unemployment to make workers desperate, and thereby vulnerable to the whim of super-rich fools like him. Fascinatingly, Gurner does not see the irony in his use of the word arrogance in that utterly tone-deaf part of his rant.

Make no mistake about his point, he wants to subjugate workers to maintain the “costs balance.” What is that costs balance? $670 in compensation for every $1 people like him bestow upon their lucky, gracious workers.

Don’t take my word for it. Watch his contempt for workers drip out for yourself.

After the video surfaced and people far and wide excoriated him for his garbage views, Gurner attempted to walk back his comments. He pathetically offered this, “My comments were deeply insensitive to employees, tradies and families across Australia who are affected by these cost-of-living pressures and job losses.” UK Labor MP Jerome Laxale wrote that Gurner’s statements “associate with a cartoon supervillain, not the CEO of a company in 2023.” Sadly, Laxale must not be paying much attention to corporate executives.

Former Business Insider CTO

This lady was the head of PR at IAC, which represents brands like OkCupid, Vimeo, and Ask.com.

Imagine giving power to such people who unhesitatingly declare how much they hate you. That’s what society has allowed to happen over the last 50 years. Sure, no one elects this trash (though in America we elect plenty of other trash, like here, here, here, here, here, and here, to name just a few). But people waste time and energy boycotting companies over social issues that threaten very little to no harm, and allow the truly villainous ones, run by people like the clowns outlined throughout this article, to continuously erode every aspect of our quality of life.

So if you’re inspired to do some boycotting against companies or CEOs who are actually dangerous to you—financially or otherwise, start with some of these:

Starbucks:

Frontier Air Lines:

Herman Miller Furniture:

Twitter (X) / Starlink / Tesla:

The NRA:

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I am the executive director of the EALS Global Foundation. You can follow me at the Evidence Files Medium page for essays on law, politics, and history follow the Evidence Files Facebook for regular updates, or Buy me A Coffee if you wish to support my work.