Big, Beautiful… Betrayal

In the midst of the terrible Trump tax bill moving through Congress, Ralph invites Sarah Anderson who directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies to discuss the massive tax loopholes huge companies like Amazon get that allow them to pay far less in taxes than ordinary working people. Then, Greg LeRoy from Good Jobs First joins us to discuss how state taxpayers are footing the bill for these massive data centers companies like Google are building all over the country. Plus, Ralph has some choice words for passive unions and responds to listener feedback about our guest last week, Nadav Wieman.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and is a co-editor of the IPS website Inequality.org. Her research covers a wide range of international and domestic economic issues, including inequality, CEO pay, taxes, labor, and Wall Street reform.

They're (Congress is) planning to give huge new tax giveaways to large corporations like Amazon and wealthy people like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. And partially paying for those tax cuts for the wealthy by slashing programs that mean so much to so many Americans like Medicaid and food assistance.”

Sarah Anderson

We're not going to have a healthy, thriving society and economy as long as we have the extreme levels of inequality that we have today.

Sarah Anderson

Dubbed “the leading national watchdog of state and local economic development subsidies,” “an encyclopedia of information regarding subsidies,” “God’s witness to corporate welfare,” and “the OG of ensuring that state and local tax policy actually supports good jobs, sustainability, and equity,”* Greg founded Good Jobs First in 1998 upon winning the Public Interest Pioneer Award. He has trained and consulted for state and local governments, associations of public officials, labor-management committees, unions, community groups, tax and budget watchdogs, environmentalists, and smart growth advocates more than 30 years.

Public education and public health are the two biggest losers in every state giving away money to data centers right now.

Greg Le Roy

We know of no other form of state spending that is so out of control. Therefore, we recommend that states cancel their data center tax exemptions. Such subsidies are absolutely unnecessary for an extremely profitable industry dominated by some of the most valuable corporations on earth such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google.

Good Jobs First report: “Cloudy With a Loss of Spending Control”

They've (Congress has) known for years that the ordinary worker pays a higher tax rate than these loophole-ridden corporations.

Ralph Nader

In my message to Trump, I ask him, "Why is he afraid of Netanyahu? And doesn't he want to come to the rescue of these innocent babies by saying, ‘Mr. Netanyahu, the taxpayers in this country are paying for thousands of trucks stalled at the border of Gaza full of medicine, food, water, electricity, fuel, and other critical necessities? We're going to put a little American flag on each one of these trucks, and don't you dare block them.’”

…No answer.

Ralph Nader

News 5/23/25

1. It seems as though the dam in Israeli politics against acknowledging the horrors in Gaza is beginning to break. In an interview with the BBC this week, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stated that what Israel "is currently doing in Gaza is very close to a war crime. Thousands of innocent Palestinians are being killed.” He went on to say, “the war has no objective and has no chance of achieving anything that could