Don Dealga

“Before 2020 ended Bezos came to personify the rapacious opportunism of the billionaire class who were extracting wealth from a public health emergency, at the expense of employees laboring in proximity to the virus.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“Bandit monks and mafiosi monks were nothing new to the long-suffering inhabitants of rural Sicily.”
― Norman Lewis, Honoured Society: The Sicilian Mafia observed

“Tax policies written by Davos Man for his own benefit had enhanced the divide. A pair of University of California at Berkeley economists2, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, tallied up all the taxes that Americans paid, from federal, state, and local income taxes to sales taxes and capital gains on investments. They had concluded that the richest four hundred Americans, whose average wealth was $6.7 billion, had seen their effective tax rate cut by more than half since 1962—from 54 percent to 23 percent. Over the same period, those in the bottom half, who earned about $18,500 a year, had seen their tax burden increase, from 22.5 percent to 24 percent.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man

“Part of why individuals like Benioff could crow about giving back was because of how comprehensively they had taken to begin with. They had benefited from public goods financed by taxpayers—the schools that educated their employees; the internet, developed by publicly funded research; the roads, the bridges, and the rest of modern infrastructure, which enabled commerce—and then deployed their lobbyists, accountants, and lawyers to master legal forms of tax evasion that starved the system.”
― Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man