Here’s an arresting statistic: Back at the beginning of September, if Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos were to have given each of his 876,000 employees a $105,000 bonus, he would have been left with roughly as much wealth as he had in mid-March, at the start of the pandemic.
That figure comes from a new Oxfam report highlighting the staggering amount of money being made in the top echelons of American business at a time of widespread death and economic devastation.
“The continued flow of shareholder payouts during the economic and public health crises ‘underscores the degree to which decision making by corporate managers has become disconnected from any sense of community or national obligation,’ said Oren Cass, a former senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the director of American Compass, a think tank advocating for what Cass calls a ‘pro-worker conservatism.’ Cass was not involved with the Oxfam report.”
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