Amazon hopes to avoid labor regulation by simply abolishing national watchdogs Amazon, currently locked in a legal battle with the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over the mega-souk's treatment of workers, is arguing the watchdog is unconstitutional. And it's not the only corporation testing that line of reasoning. In a February 15 filing in response to a complaint about Amazon's alleged illegal …
I suppose it depends if you are poor or rich.
No doubt it does for some. But I'm rich, relative to the vast majority of the people in the state I live in (and in the state I lived in prior to that, and the one prior to that, and I support stronger regulation and higher progressive taxes. I find many business practices reprehensible.
It's possible for people to be motivated by something beyond immediate pecuniary self-interest.
FDA? after all they stop companies making bigger profits by putting 'fillers' into the food and other companies from selling 'snake oil' cures
lets face it.... the only reason these agencies exist is because some companies need regulating and cannot be trusted to treat employees/customers/everyone else fairly
Actually, the EPA. There's a case pending with the Supreme Court right now which could limit the EPA's ability to enforce things like air standards across state borders. Because everyone knows that every state is its own self-contained biosphere and the air from one never crossed into the other.
Honestly, I consider this all to be the sort of natural conclusion to the myth that has been created about executives at publicly held companies having a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. It's pure bullshit. Even the guy who came up with the whole maximize shareholder value idea has since completely disavowed it and said that what people have taken it to mean is not even close to what he intended. Along the same lines, we need to stop paying executives with stock options. It was a decent idea, worth trying, but it has backfired spectacularly and should have been done away with decades ago. They get a cash salary like everyone else, which is taxable at the same rate as everyone else.
I'm ok with the stock options as compensation, though the amount given is often ridiculous. But they should have at least a 5 year vesting period. One of the problems of modern corporations is that there is far too much focus on the next quarter at the expense of the long term. That leads to some very bad decisions
I'm not an unreasonable person, so I'd be willing to try making it so stock options are based on future performance set several years out. Using your idea of 5-years, in order for the stock options to be awarded, the company has to meet certain growth targets over the course of 5-years. I'd also tack on employee retention as a sweetener. A small bonus award is given if employee turnover stays below a certain rate, and/or the average tenure of employees is 3+ years. That would include contractors/temps as well, so they can't just go out and hire a bunch of temps, then fire them after a couple of months.
But one thing I am completely inflexible on, is that people who derive the majority of their income from capital gains should have that income taxed at the same rate as income derived from a cash salary. If it makes up ≥50% of your total income for a year, it should be taxed the same as a cash salary.
Assuming you are brought to trial by the NLRB and you subsequently lose, you can appeal that decision in federal court. So, the idea that it's somehow contrary to the separation of powers is prima facie false.
Second, as far as I'm concerned, only meat sack humies have rights under the US Constitution. Do we put fictional characters from movies or video games on trial for murder when they kill people on screen? Do we spend a lot of time worrying about the free speech rights of characters in a Stephen King novel? Then why should we give two wet farts about the supposed rights of an equally fictitious entity like Amazon? It is a contrivance of man and exists at our suffrage.
Amazon's only advantage is everything being in one place. If Amazon keeps sucking more, I doubt people would be too bothered by having to open a couple more browser windows to shop. Amazon is not like supermarkets saving you from driving all over town.
At least for me, all the games going on at Amazon are way more trouble than buying directly from manufacturers and specialty stores.
While there's a certain convenience to a monopoly, I do kind of miss the days when I had about a half dozen different sites I would frequent with my shopping. Before NewEgg was sold to its current owners who seem intent on milking the good name the founders built up for everything it's worth, they were one of my chief go-tos, but there were some others. Now it's basically between Amazon and Best Buy for most things, and Best Buy has been annoying me with some of their recent changes. I get that they're struggling to compete as a brick and mortar company in a digital economy, but the whole total tech support garbage they push means I generally will only order things to be picked up from their locker system, and only if I really need something that day and can be arsed to drive to the other side of town.
Which is all my rambling way of saying, Amazon needs to be hit with an antitrust sueball and broken up to things like their retail arm, then AWS being spun off into a separate unit, and then their streaming service to probably a third company. The problem is, in the US, these kinds of cases take so long, even if they were filed literally on the first day of a new admininstration, even if they win a second term, there's a decent chance the case will still be ongoing and the next person to have the job will kill it. Sort of like what happened with Microsoft. They just barely managed to drag it out long enough for GWB to come along and change the company being forcibly split up to barely being slapped on the wrist.
I believe some of FDR's New Deal measures were ruled invalid by the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds.
By the time those measures were invalidated they had often served their purpose. ;)
FDR faced plenty of opposition at the time and I would imagine the constitutional soundness most of these authorities would have been tested at that time (the 80 years too late?)
With the current bench who knows what further insanity they might release from this Pandora's box?
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