Courtesy of Pam Martens
Jeffrey Bezos
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Last Tuesday, June 8, at 4:59 a.m. EDT, the public interest news outlet, ProPublica, dropped a bombshell. A source unknown to it had leaked “a vast trove of IRS data on the tax returns of thousands” of the richest Americans, including the top 25 billionaires in the country as of 2018. The data covered numerous years of tax filings and showed that some of the most well known billionaires in the U.S. had paid no income taxes in some years.
Carefully reading through the ProPublica material, a few critical details emerge. First, ProPublica does not appear to have tax return data for years later than 2018. Since it’s now June of 2021, that suggests that someone in the Trump administration might have downloaded this data to a thumb drive and waited until recently to leak it. ProPublica acknowledges that it’s had the data for “months,” as its reporters attempted to analyze the data and verify its authenticity.
Someone in the Trump camp might be attempting to normalize billionaires not paying taxes. The New York Times had obtained Donald Trump’s tax returns last year and published an article in September showing that he had “paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.”
One aspect of the historic leak of IRS data that has failed to garner the interest of corporate media is the stunning rise of Jeff Bezos, founder, CEO and Chairman of Amazon, to the status of the richest man in the U.S. – in the span of one year.
According to Forbes, Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, ranked as number 1 on the Forbes list of U.S. billionaires for 24 consecutive years, running from 1994 through 2017.
In announcing in 2018 that Bezos had eclipsed Gates in wealth and was now the richest American, Forbes wrote the following in October 2018: “Bezos is also the first person to appear in the ranks with a fortune of more than $100 billion — he clocked in at $160 billion. Bezos was also the biggest gainer on this year’s list: his fortune rose $78.5 billion since last year, thanks to the more than 100% runup in the price of Amazon stock, the biggest one-year gain since we’ve been tracking fortunes.”
Amazon’s stock has been actively traded for years in the Dark Pools of Wall Street’s mega banks. Was the share price of Amazon manipulated by those Dark Pools in 2018? Nobody knows because…the trading is dark.
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