Jeff Bezos Announces $2 Billion Philanthropic Effort To Help Homeless Families and Start Preschools in Low-income Communities (nbcnews.com)

Rick Schumann writes: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie on Thursday announced a $2 billion philanthropic effort aimed at helping homeless families and starting preschools in low-income communities. Bezos, believed to be the world's richest man, with a net worth of more than $160 billion, announced the new program on Twitter. "We're excited to announce the Bezos Day One Fund," he wrote. The fund will be split between the Day 1 Families Fund, which Bezos wrote will "issue annual leadership awards to organizations and civic groups doing compassionate, needle-moving work to provide shelter and hunger support to address the immediate needs of young families." The Day 1 Academies Fund "will launch and operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities," Bezos said. Bezos said that the preschools will be directly operated by the organization and "use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon." "Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession," Bezos wrote. "The child will be the customer." Bezos quoted the poet William Butler Yeats: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

Comments

LOL.

[olsmeister]

Half of the recipients probably will be Amazon employees.

Re:LOL.

[JMJimmy]

But it doesn't get the tax write off that way

Re: LOL.

[pnutjam]

Your Median Income number is for Household Income. If you didn't know that, your welcome. If you did know that, quit lying to people.

idea

[religionofpeas]

He could give his employees decent salaries. That would help.

Re:idea

[TFlan91]

Amazon has 566,000 employees (source).

A cynic would say that is only a one time payout of ~$3,533 per employee. A realist would understand that only the bottom rungs of the income ladder should get this money, so let's redo the math:

Amazon has "125,000 full-time hourly associates in the U.S" (source).

Now it's a one time payout of $16,000!

A "warehouse associate" earns ~$13/hr (source).

That is a staggering (/s) $27,040 per year.

Does Bezos really think that the overhead of starting, yet another, charity and its administrative costs is cheaper than just giving his lowest level employees a decent living wage?

This announcement says, yes, he does think that. But you say, that's just stupid.

So a then you would say, who benefits?

The Day 1 Academies Fund "will launch and operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities," Bezos said.

Bezos said that the preschools will be directly operated by the organization and "use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon."

"Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession," Bezos wrote. "The child will be the customer."

(source)

"The child will be the customer."...

In the age of DeVos, Bezos is going to open private charter schools, for the youngest among us, and run them like a business, but the difference is that the "child will be the customer".

Smell something?

Would someone learn the likes and dislikes of these children and slowly build an "anonymized" ad profile for that child, following them throughout their life span, knowing exactly what products they are likely and not likely to buy?

Now the decision to pass over that wage increase and open a "charity" makes sense.

Re:idea

[Mashiki]

What continues to surprise me is that the warehouse workers simply haven't revolted over this. This is Canada, but it seems more and more that there's simply a lack of employees wanting to do something over it. Back in the 90's, I did a stint at a small company warehouse. These guys were small, had 3 plants in Canada, 2 in the US, 1 in Europe. The min. wage was around $7/hr, I was making $13/hr the second I walked in the door with no experience. A decade ago when I wanted to earn some extra money, I did a stint at what's called a National Parts Distribution Center or NPDC by the big auto companies, or gigantic fucking warehouses that supply entire sections of North America and can backfill auto parts plants thousands of components(hoods and doors, down to entire dashboard assemblies or just the ECU) at a time. Walking in the door, they paid me $21.75/hr(part-time), 3mo I'd have benefits, provided lift truck training, and offered "shunt" or A(truck heavy) and AZ(tractor trailer+air brake) D-Class(license for vehicles weighing 11,000kg+ but not a tractor-trailer) for anyone who wanted them.

Really all this screams to me is that amazon is massively heavy handed on workers trying to unionize, secure any type of improvement to their job positions and so on.

Re:idea

[quanminoan]

These guys should learn from Ford who doubled pay and reduced hours -- you make your workers happy they will come around and work harder for the company, less turnover, less sick days, etc.

Start with your own workers first

[xack]

Proper toilets for a start instead of making your workers go in bottles.

do what now?

[Anonymous Coward]

and "use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon."

So slave labor, minimum wage, shit working conditions...

Re:do what now?

[kelemvor4]

and "use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon."

So slave labor, minimum wage, shit working conditions...

You beat me to it. I bet those preschool teachers are going to be hating life!

More NGO stuff. Goody.

[Tailhook]

Lets make everything Haiti.

I Mean

[American AC in Paris]

This is great. Now other people in need can benefit from Bezos' magnanimity, just like his warehouse employees do.

He makes $260 million every day

[rsilvergun]

This is about 8 days pay for him. That sounds like a lot (8 days pay for me is around $1800 bucks) but if I give $1800 to charity that's a big impact on my life. When you're pulling in $260 million a day it's hardly noticeable.

I'm fed up with ultra rich trying to buy us off with token charitable donation in the hopes we don't demand they take care of their workers. He can start by paying his employees enough that they're not living in the parking lot of his warehouses (excuse me, "fullfillment centers") and they can get off food stamps. Then let's see him give enough to charity that it actually impacts his quality of life.

As it stands I feel like we're being made to go begging to the rich for the basic things needed to run a country and a society...

Re:He makes $260 million every day

[kenh]

He does not make $260M/day - that's asinine, $260M x 365 days/year = $94BN/year

You are confusing his stock appreciation with salary/bonuses. Unrealized earnings aren't income.

Re:He makes $260 million every day

[alvinrod]

He doesn't make anywhere near that. What you meant to say is that his stock valuation increases by that much (and I'm somewhat suspect of your figure as that works out to about $90 billion per year, which is a little over 50% of his current net worth) every day. Even trying to sell ten billion dollars worth of that stock (a little over a months worth of value according to your dubious figures) would likely drive the price down severely as it would represent several thousand times the typical trade volume for Amazon.

I'm fed up with clueless people making impassioned pleas and ignorant rants using bad data and a clear lack of basic reasoning. Also, if you didn't know, we're already having the rich finance the country. The 1% that everyone likes to complain about pay over a third of all income taxes. The bottom half, pay under 5%. The government spending as a percentage of GDP keeps going up over time and yet none of these problems seem to get solved even with all of this government intervention (and several seem to get worse!), so it's little wonder that the people stuck footing the bill are annoyed.

Livable Wages

[sdinfoserv]

If Bezos paid his warehouse slaves a livable wage, there would many fewer poor. But then he wouldn't be worth $163B...
Think of it this way, you could give EVERY SINGLE AMAZON employee (all 563,000) a one time bonus of $177,500, and Bezos would still be worth $63 Billion dollars.
How much does a king need?

Re: Livable Wages

[c6gunner]

Think of it this way, you could give EVERY SINGLE AMAZON employee (all 563,000) a one time bonus of $177,500, and Bezos would still be worth $63 Billion dollars.

No, he would be worth roughly zero dollars as the value of his stock plummeted, half the workforce quit, and the company went tits up.

Haha, actually it's the other way around

[raymorris]

That was funny.

Of course in reality it's the other way around. Amazon and Bezos pay more taxes this way.
Whoever hands out the money doesn't pay income taxes on it. If Amazon gave the money to employees as paychecks, then Amazon wouldn't pay income taxes on it.*

What they've done instead is Bezos is giving it away AFTER Amazon already paid taxes on it and then distributed it to shareholders (Bezos). So Amazon made money, paid the corporate income tax, distributed it to shareholders, then Bezos gave away some of his portion, after the corporate tax was paid.

* Amazon DOES pay FICA taxes on paychecks, which is 7.65%. That's much less than the 22% they actually paid by taking it as profit.

Re:Double-edge sword

[werepants]

The first group is not something that "the rich" can solve, and they can't really solve the second either.

That's exactly what the second group of people need. An opportunity to find work and earn a living and a place to stay while finding and applying for job positions.

Actually, "the rich" can, or at least we as a society can. Utah has had a lot of success giving the homeless exactly this - basic housing while they get back on their feet. It's cheaper, on the whole, than the police, ER, and jail costs that we would otherwise incur. It's not a silver bullet (nothing ever is) but there are meaningful policy steps that we can take to improve the situation.

No, they do not

[rsilvergun]

the poorest still pay sales tax, often when they buy food and medicine. If you go one step up from the poorest and into the working poor you'll find they pay a very high percentage of taxes. State sales tax are not usually progressive. They pay property taxes, Vehicle license taxes, the aforementioned sales tax, etc. The federal programs intended to counterbalance this ("earned income") have been cut back to the point where full time minimum wage disqualifies you. Hell, Missouri just put a work requirement in place for Medicaid but didn't raise the ceiling before you don't qualify for it. Meaning you're forced to go to work to keep access to healthcare but then lose it if you meet the requirement. The poor are well and truly fucked.

Amazon's principles

[manu0601]

Bezos said that the preschools will be directly operated by the organization and "use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon."

You mean, like employee burn out?

Come one, if you want to fix education, just pay your taxes so that schools get more money.