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Don't Just Tax the Uber Rich, Reform the Corporate Structure That Creates Them
The real engine of inequality is structural: corporate and financial practices that concentrate wealth among shareholders while shortchanging other stakeholders who should be benefiting from corporate profits
Mar 13, 2026
Targeting billionaires with California’s proposed wealth tax is an eye-catching idea, but perhaps the real problem is how some of these people become billionaires in the first place.
California has long eyed taxing the ultra rich. In 2024, Assembly Bill 259, backed by progressive Democrats and unions like the California Federation of Teachers, sought annual wealth taxes but was blocked by centrist Democrats, business groups, and Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Now, advocates are going for a one-time 5% levy on roughly 200 billionaires, covering everything they own—stocks, businesses, art, private islands, personal spacecraft, even intellectual property—basically the whole enchilada if they were state residents on January 1, 2026. Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West estimates the tax could raise $100 billion for health and social services.
Backers call it a fair share. Critics cite economic, legal, and retroactive risks.
A one-time California wealth tax might dent the personal fortunes of the Zuckerbergs and Cooks, but it does nothing to slow the corporate machinery that grinds on to produce still more of them.
To many, the logic seems straightforward: Billionaires have absurd, even toxic amounts of money. The richest 1% now own more than the bottom 90% combined. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman note that middle- and working-class Americans often pay higher effective tax rates than the super rich, whose California fortunes grew over $2 trillion in just a few years.
Why not tax them?
But Here’s the Twist
Economist William Lazonick, a long-time critic of the way many US corporations are run, argues that targeting individual fortunes treats the symptom, not the disease. The real engine of inequality is structural: corporate and financial practices that concentrate wealth among shareholders while shortchanging other stakeholders who should be benefiting from corporate profits—and too often creating little of real value to society.
Most billionaires don’t “earn” their fortunes through work. They build wealth by owning stock in corporations. Executives and boards pump up dividends and stock prices, often using stock buybacks, which rocket their own pay into the stratosphere. Managers and professionals with stock options or stock awards can cash in too—but only if they keep their jobs. Everyone else—most workers and the wider public that depends on taxing corporate profits to fund schools, roads, and healthcare—gets left behind.
This shareholder-first model (famously called “the dumbest idea in the world” by former GE CEO Jack Welch), encourages executives and investors to treat companies like giant ATMs, pulling money out rather than reinvesting profits to create lasting value.
Stock buybacks and ownership stakes that line the pockets of executives at the expense of employees, communities, or innovation are a modern form of illth.
Consider Mark Zuckerberg. Nearly all of his mind-boggling fortune—the kind that just bought him a record-smashing $170 million mansion in Miami-Dade County near Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and is funding a bombproof bunker-complex in Kauai that disturbs local wildlife—comes straight from owning stock in Meta Platforms. Meta has spent nearly $200 billion on stock buybacks in the past five years. Those buybacks have fattened the wallets of shareholders, including Meta’s top executives and professionals, while leaving the rest of society out of the gains (Meta is famous for its tax-dodging schemes). With Meta, there aren’t any hedge-fund activists forcing Zuckerberg to do buybacks—they’re happening by choice.
Lazonick points out that “with all the profits that they have, they could be creating stable, high-paid jobs for the workers whom they employ—and thereby put in place powerful social conditions for collective and cumulative learning.” He adds, “Instead they are using stock-based pay, which is always volatile and which results in unstable and inequitable employment, to compete for talent.”
Now, even some of Meta’s highest-paid employees are feeling the squeeze. With stock-based pay being cut back and the AI revolution changing work, some of the people who once seemed untouchable are discovering that their jobs aren’t as secure as they thought.
Then there’s Tim Cook. Much of his wealth comes from stock-based compensation tied to the stock-market performance of Apple Inc. Under his leadership as CEO, Apple’s so-called “Capital Return Program” has spent hundreds of billions on stock buybacks—north of half a trillion dollars when counting programs from the early 2010s on—which have helped push up the share price and richly rewarded executives and shareholders. Lazonick has criticized this trend, arguing that Apple’s huge buybacks reward shareholders who have never provided finance to the company, instead of investing in value-creating workers who are the source of innovation. This is the activity that has Cook extremely rich—though he still buys his underwear on sale at Nordstrom, so it’s not entirely clear why he needs all this money.
His workers could sure use a bigger cut. It is a fact that many of the workers who build, sell, or support Apple products have faced stingy pay and labor issues: Some retail employees have pushed for higher minimum wages and better benefits as recently as 2022, and labor-rights groups have documented low wages and complaints about conditions among Apple’s supply-chain workers.
A one-time California wealth tax might dent the personal fortunes of the Zuckerbergs and Cooks, but it does nothing to slow the corporate machinery that grinds on to produce still more of them.
Historically, reformers recognized this issue. For example, Thorstein Veblen critiqued the ways elites could extract wealth while contributing less to society than might be expected. And early 20th-century progressives championed higher corporate taxes and antitrust laws because they understood that inequality was more structural than individual.
This is what 19th-century critic John Ruskin had in mind when he coined the term “illth.” For Ruskin, true wealth, or “weal,” promotes everyone’s health and prosperity. Illth, by contrast, amasses when money is extracted or hoarded without focusing on social value. Stock buybacks and ownership stakes that line the pockets of executives at the expense of employees, communities, or innovation are a modern form of illth.
We don’t want illth.
Taylor Swift Isn’t the Problem
Now let’s bring in someone we can all relate to—Taylor Swift. Her fortune comes from her creativity, work, and audience engagement. She writes songs, records albums, tours, sells merchandise, and negotiates brand deals. Yes, corporate structures like Ticketmaster’s oligopoly complicate matters—but Swift herself isn’t the CEO of a company extracting illth through financial engineering. Taxing her personal wealth dramatizes the issue without addressing its source.
Policies aimed at corporate engines of inequality, rather than individual fortunes, could reshape the system itself. Lazonick and others have recommended a variety of approaches:
- Ban stock buybacks and suppress predatory value extraction. This curbs wealth concentration at the top.
- Encourage employee ownership or provide employee representation on corporate boards. Gains should benefit a broader group of stakeholders—not just shareholders.
- Reimagine corporate governance. Move towards stakeholder models balancing shareholder yields with social and environmental responsibility.
And last, but not least:
- Strengthen progressive corporate taxation. Close loopholes that allow extreme wealth accumulation.
As Lazonick sees it, whether it happens at the federal, state, or local level, government policy should focus on curbing predatory value extraction and promoting what he calls “progressive value creation”—which means passing laws to stop corporations from being looted, a key source of the exploding wealth of the mega rich. “From this position of regulatory power,” he advises, “we should then decide how the top 0.1% should be taxed.”
The real work, from this perspective, is reforming the structures that concentrate wealth. If we want an economy that fosters health, innovation, and opportunity instead of illth, chasing Taylor Swift won’t cut it. We need to start regulating the corporate engines behind her peers’ billions
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'Kleptocracy in Action': Bernie Sanders Hammers Apple for Swaying Trump With 'Gold Statue'
"Want a tax break or special favor from the government? No problem," Sen. Bernie Sanders quipped.
Aug 08, 2025
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday tore into Apple CEO Tim Cook for scoring a special tax break for his company while presenting U.S. President Donald Trump with a 24-karat gold statue.
As reported by The Washington Post earlier, Cook presented Trump with the gold statue during an event at the White House in which the president announced that Apple would be exempt from the hefty 100% tariffs that he announced this week on imported semiconductors.
In a post on X, Sanders (I-Vt.) linked Trump's reception of the Apple statue to his decision to accept a luxury jet from the Qatari royal family that he will take with him after he leaves office.
"Want a tax break or special favor from the government? No problem," Sanders wrote. "If, unlike Qatar, you can't afford to give Trump a $400 million plane, just walk into the White House with a modest gold statue like Apple CEO Tim Cook. That works, too. Kleptocracy in action."
Sanders' denunciation of Trump's pay-to-play governance comes as he is planning to travel to West Virginia and North Carolina this weekend as the latest stop in his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour in which he'll hammer the recently passed Republican budget package that axed $1 trillion in funding from Medicaid over the span of a decade.
This argument could prove particularly effective in West Virginia, where KFF estimates that 513,000 residents, or roughly 29% of the population, are enrolled in either Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program. What's more, KFF estimates that nearly half of all births in West Virginia are financed by Medicaid.
"I believe from the bottom of my heart, that whether you are in a red state, whether you're in a blue state or a purple state, the American people do not want to see massive tax breaks for billionaires and cuts to Medicaid, education, and nutrition," Sanders said in a Facebook video announcing his trip to the state.
Sanders is scheduled to speak in the city of Wheeling on Friday night before heading to stops in the cities of Lenore and Charleston on Saturday. On Sunday, he's headed to North Carolina, for events in Greensboro and Asheville.
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Warren Asks If Bezos 'Subservience' to Trump Involves Tariff Quid Pro Quo
"What happened in that call?" asked the Democratic senator. "I'm pressing for answers."
May 01, 2025
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday pressed Jeff Bezos for answers after the Amazon founder abruptly ditched a reported plan to display tariff costs to customers following a phone call with President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, the White House lashed out at what Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called "a hostile and political act" following reporting by Punchbowl News that Amazon "will display how much of an item's cost is derived from tariffs—right next to the product's total listed price."
"Yesterday's activity appears to be another example of Big Tech working together with President Trump to seek special favors."
However, after Trump and Bezos spoke over the phone, the president called the multibillionaire "a good guy" who "solved the problem very quickly."
In a letter to Bezos, Warren (D-Mass.) wrote that "these reports raise questions about the nature of your conversations with President Trump, acnd what promises or favors you may have received in exchange for your subservience to him."
"Yesterday's activity appears to be another example of Big Tech working together with President Trump to seek special favors or support his policies in what can appear to be a quid pro quo," the senator continued—an assertion refuted as "inaccurate" by an Amazon spokesperson.
Amazon had plans to show customers how much Trump tariffs are raising prices. Then Bezos got on the phone with Trump and reversed course. What happened in that call? I'm pressing for answers.
[image or embed]
— Elizabeth Warren (@warren.senate.gov) May 1, 2025 at 7:58 AM
"If Amazon had followed through on any plans to provide transparency on tariff costs, it could have provided important information for consumers, allowing them to find out for themselves some of the true costs of President Trump's broad and chaotic tariff policies," Warren added.
Approximately 70% of the products sold on Amazon made in China, which Trump recently hit with a 145% levy on a sweeping range of imported goods. China retaliated with a 125% tariff on U.S. imports. Economists are in near-universal agreement that such tariffs are a regressive tax on consumers. According to reports citing Chinese state media, the Trump administration has reached out to Beijing seeking talks on de-escalating the mutually destructive trade war.
Warren previously pressed Apple CEO Tim Cook over the Trump administration's massive tariff exemptions for company products including iPhones, computers, and microprocessors.
"My concerns about the potential for tariff-related corruption to benefit Big Tech firms—who provided millions in donations to the Trump inaugural committee—and other insiders as the president rolls out, reverses, and modifies his policies have become more acute with each passing day," the senator said in her letter.
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Warren Demands Big Tech CEOs Come Clean on Cozying Up to Trump for Corporate Tax Giveaways
Given that "American taxpayers will shoulder the burden of tax cuts" for major tech companies, she argued, "they deserve answers."
Mar 06, 2025
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren this week sent letters to five Big Tech executives—including the world's three richest individuals—to sound the alarm about their "personal and financial ties to the Trump administration" and how they "may be exploiting" those relationships for billions of dollars in corporate tax breaks.
The Massachusetts Democrat's targets include Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the wealthiest person on Earth and head of President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, which is leading the administration's effort to dismantle the federal bureaucracy.
She also wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta—which owns Facebook and Instagram—as well as Amazon.com founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos. As of Thursday, they are respectively the second- and third-wealthiest people on the planet. Warren's final two letters went to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet, Google's parent company.
"This $75 billion windfall is only one slice of the billions of dollars that you stand to gain from Republican efforts to lower your taxes while raising costs for working families."
Warren and other Democrats on Capitol Hill are intensely critical of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which congressional Republicans passed and Trump signed in 2017. The law was largely crafted to serve rich individuals and businesses, including by slashing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.
Now that the GOP has regained control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, its members are aiming to extend expiring provisions of the TCJA—funded by gutting programs for the working class.
As Warren's office noted in a Thursday statement, the TCJA ended "a corporate tax break known as research and development (R&D) expensing to help pay for their tax cuts for the ultrawealthy. This tax break allowed companies to deduct the total cost of their R&D expenses immediately, instead of deducting them over time, as is the standard practice in the tax code."
"This change was one of the few parts of the 2017 bill that forced companies to pay higher taxes," her office explained. "Now, corporations want to revert back to the pre-2017 rules—and not only do corporations want to apply immediate R&D expensing to future tax years, but they are also pushing to retroactively apply these deductions to 2022, 2023, and 2024."
Warren's letters cite a recent independent analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which found that retroactive application of R&D expensing alone would slash each company's tax bill by billions of dollars—specifically, Tesla: $2.5 billion; Meta: $15 billion; Amazon: $22 billion; Apple: $10 billion; and Alphabet: $24 billion.
In other words, Warren wrote, "collectively, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Tesla are projected to win $75 billion if Congress awards them retroactive R&D tax expensing—nearly double what the federal government spends on child nutrition programs each year and a fantastic return on investment for the millions you have spent lobbying on the tax fight."
"And this $75 billion windfall is only one slice of the billions of dollars that you stand to gain from Republican efforts to lower your taxes while raising costs for working families," she continued, pointing out that GOP lawmakers may "succeed in lowering the corporate tax rate even further, as President Trump has sought, or in handing out other tax giveaways to massive corporations."
Given that "American taxpayers will shoulder the burden of tax cuts" for major tech companies, "they deserve answers," argued Warren, a member of the Senate Finance Committee. She demanded responses to a list of questions by March 19.
Warren's inquiries include how much the companies are spending on lobbying for Republicans' tax legislation, and the R&D provision specifically; which trade associations, lobbying coalitions, or similar entities that they are a part of; and how much they have given, directly or indirectly, to federal elected officials who are advocating for corporate tax giveaways.
The senator also asked "exactly how much" of the retroactive tax breaks that the tech giants would put toward R&D investment and how they expect it will impact the companies' outlook for stock buybacks and executive compensation.
The potential tax law change is just one way Republican control of the federal government could benefit Big Tech. As the watchdog Public Citizen highlighted Tuesday, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Tesla are among dozens of companies with ties to the Trump administration that could benefit from its efforts to end corporate probes and enforcement actions.
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200-to-1: Gap Between CEOs and Workers Grew Even Wider in 2023, Analysis Finds
The finding from The Associated Press adds to the evidence of growing inequality—and helps explain worker dissatisfaction with the economy, as wages fail to rise alongside executive pay, an expert said.
Jun 03, 2024
The median compensation of chief executives at major U.S.-listed firms increased by 12.6% to $16.3 million in 2023, far outpacing the growth in worker wages and widening the CEO-to-worker pay gap to nearly 200-to-1, according to new reporting by the Associated Press on Monday.
The increase in CEO compensation came as private sector workers' pay increased just 4.1% last year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Among hundreds of surveyed firms for the AP analysis, the median gap between CEO pay and median employee pay was 196—up from 185 in 2022.
Experts said the analysis showed that the economic hardship that Americans face and the dissatisfaction they feel with the economy is due to unnecessary wage stagnation, with profits diverted upwards, and not just inflation.
"Most of the focus here is on inflation, which people are really feeling, but they’re feeling the pain of inflation more because they’re not seeing their wages go up enough," Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), told the AP.
NEW: CEO pay at major U.S. companies jumped nearly 13%(!) last year while workers are "feeling the pain of inflation more," says @SarahDAnderson1, "because they’re not seeing their wages go up enough."@Maetron, @PHarloffAP, and @BarbaraOrtutay in @AP: https://t.co/AzUQqU2xgT
— Institute for Policy Studies (@IPS_DC) June 3, 2024
The AP has conducted this analysis annually for the last 14 years, working with business intelligence firm Equilar, which included in the analysis the 341 S&P 500 firms that submitted a proxy statement between January and April 2024. Their work comes on top of a raft of recent academic and nonprofit research on income inequality, including the CEO-to-worker pay ratio.
It's possible that Equilar in fact underestimated the pay gap. Some researchers have found a higher ratio, including the Economic Policy Institute, which found it to be 344-to-1 in the most recent year studied—compared to just 21-to-1 in 1965—using a standardized methodology to determine median worker pay, rather than letting a firm declare its median salary. EPI found that CEO pay soared an astonishing 1,209.2% from 1978 to 2022 while worker pay increased just 15.3% over the same period.
In her work for IPS, Anderson has shown that the S&P 500 CEOs make more in one day than the average American makes in a year.
The rise in CEO compensation in 2023 came primarily because of an increase in stock awards, Equilar found. The S&P 500 rose more than 24% in 2023, after going down in 2022, leading to higher executive compensation.
Hock Tan, the CEO of Broadcom Inc., a semiconductor manufacturer, led the CEO list with pay of about $162 million last year. Tim Cook of Apple Inc. was third at $63.2 million.
Does anyone really think Hock works over a thousand times harder than his engineers? pic.twitter.com/m6ROQesfQN
— Inequality.org (@inequalityorg) May 13, 2024
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has led federal legislative efforts to address the CEO-to-worker pay gap. He reintroduced the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act to the U.S. Senate in January, which would impose a tax penalty on companies with ratios higher than 50 to 1. While popular with workers and progressive economists, critics have dismissed the proposal by calling it a "messaging bill with little chance of becoming law."
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Apple Should Be a Leader in Charitable Giving
Apple's financial performance is unrivaled among American companies, but it's very far from being a leader in corporate giving, as measured by the ratios of giving to pre-tax profits and stock buybacks.
Apr 30, 2023
Here is a letter that Steve Clifford and I sent to the CEO Tim Cook of Apple corporation, whose percentage of charitable giving relative to its taxable income is astoundingly low as compared to other corporations noted below. Apple should increase its charitable giving.
April 24, 2023
Tim Cook, CEO
Apple, Inc.
One Apple Park Way
Cupertino, CA 95014
Dear Tim Cook,
We are writing you regarding Apple’s charitable giving.
Your predecessor reportedly believed that he could do more for the world by making great products than by donating to charitable causes. Apple’s charitable giving has increased substantially since you became CEO, indicating that you don’t share this opinion.
Apple does not report to shareholders (or anyone else) total charitable giving. However, from various press releases, we understand that under your leadership, Apple has:
- Initiated an Employee Matching Giving program that has raised over $880 million since 2011 for almost 44,000 organizations. As this is a 50/50 matching program, we assume Apple contributed $440 million.
- Supported (RED) in its fight against AIDS. We read that in 2010 Apple donated $50 million to (RED) and $50 million to Stanford University Hospitals for the same cause.
- Launched, in January 2021, a Racial Equity and Justice Initiative in the United States with the goal of “building a more just, more equitable world.” Apple made an initial commitment of $100 million, and seven months later, added an additional $30 million.
- Pledged, in November 2019, $2.5 billion to confront California’s housing crisis. By July 2021, $1 billion of this pledge had been deployed. While these funds seem to have been invested in housing funds, they might not properly count as charity. Nonetheless, they are an important and needed action.
Given the philanthropic path you have chosen, we share two observations:
First, it is impossible to accurately calculate how much Apple has donated to charity. One of us is a shareholder, and we both would like to see Apple report its charitable giving in its annual report. Since you presumably are proud of what Apple has accomplished in this endeavor, you should be proud to disclose it.
Second, we urge Apple to become a leader in charitable giving. Apple is viewed by many as the iconic American company with its products, innovation, and brand loyalty. In addition, its financial performance is unrivaled. However, despite its progress since 2011, Apple is very far from being a leader in corporate giving, as measured by the ratios of giving to pre-tax profits and stock buybacks.
The ten most charitable companies among the largest 75 U.S. public companies ranked by market value, donated an average of 1.3% of pre-tax income to charity. * We estimate that Apple’s charitable giving in recent years was less than 0.1% of pre-tax profits. For every $100 in pre-tax profits, Apple donated 10 cents.
We estimate also that Apple donated 10 cents for every $100 spent on stock buybacks. Between 2017 and 2022 Apple spent $427 billion on stock buybacks, again roughly 1,000 times what is donated to charity. (To emphasize the enormity of this amount, a person living 427 billion seconds would have been born in 11.417 B.C.E, centuries before the invention of agriculture.)
As you know, the tax laws allow a corporation to deduct up to 10% of its taxable income for charitable contributions. We request a discussion of these suggestions with you or with any high-level Apple representative.
Sincerely yours,
Steve Clifford
Former CEO and Author of The CEO Pay Machine
P.O. Box 19312
Washington, DC 20036
CC: Apple’s Board of Directors
Interested Parties
Readers can email their reactions to Apple at media.help@apple.com or call 408-996-1010.
| Market Cap | Charitable Giving | |||
| Gilead Sciences | 74 | 2.9% | ||
| Goldman Sachs Group | 69 | 2.5% | ||
| Pfizer | 26 | 1.7% | ||
| Johnson & Johnson | 9 | 1.3% | ||
| Exxon Mobile | 11 | 1.1% | ||
| WellsFargo | 49 | 1.0% | ||
| Alphabet (Google) | 4 | 0.9% | ||
| JPMorgan Chase | 14 | 0.7% | ||
| Microsoft | 2 | 0.7% | ||
| Bank of America | 27 | 0.6% | ||
| Average | 1.3% |
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Letter to Tim Cook and Other Big Business Titans
"You and Apple and the Hedge Fund Titans are not known for your charitable giving... Yet, if asked 'Do you believe in the Golden Rule?' You would probably say 'Yes'—at least in public."
Feb 18, 2023
The victims of the devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Syria need your help now. The surviving families and children and those rescued alive from the rubble are in serious danger in affected wintertime impoverished regions. Refugees in other places fleeing their war-torn homelands are also suffering. International aid agencies are grossly insufficient for these immediate humanitarian necessities.
What are you Big Business Titans doing sitting on massive pay, profits, and tax escapes? Awakening your consciousness for your fellow human beings may be a modest form of redemption. Further, you have access to logistics specialists, delivery systems, communication facilities, and many other contacts and resources. You get your calls returned! Fast!
Tim Cook, you have been making $833 a MINUTE (plus lavish benefits). Remarkably, your compensation is not even in the top ten of operating company CEOs. Moreover, your own cultivated sense of envy knows that there are Hedge Fund Goliaths, who in some recent years, made off with over $2,500 per MINUTE on a forty-hour week.
Tim, you and the Apple corporation are known to pay few taxes given what tax attorneys and tax accountants do for you (especially with Apple taking advantage of foreign tax havens while receiving the fruits of Washington's free government R&D over the years). Your company has so much leftover money, flowing from the deprivation of a million serf laborers in China, and so few productive outlets for this mass of capital that you have set records for stock buybacks—over $400 billion in the last decade.
You and Apple and the Hedge Fund Titans are not known for your charitable giving as a percent of your adjusted gross income. Yet, if asked "Do you believe in the Golden Rule?" you would probably say "Yes"—at least in public.
Use your wealth and newfound empathy to organize direct relief for these earthquake victims and other major refugee areas such as the starving children of Somalia. Deliver food, medicine, clothing, shelter, mobile clinics, and many other available airlifted essentials. Hire skilled people to make it happen. Give your new organization a prominent logo for permanence and for setting an example for other super-rich to emulate.
Your isolation from the public expectation that you enter the above engagements in a significant way is quite remarkable. That should trouble you and your public relations advisors.
Just this week National Public Radio (NPR) featured a startling compilation of what producers of movies and TV shows believe appeals to their viewers. It is no longer awe or envy of the 'rich and famous.' It is no longer the Horatio Alger myth. It is encapsulated in NPR's headline: Why "eat the rich" storylines are taking over TV and movies.
As Bob Dylan sang, "the times, they are a-changin'."
NPR reporter Kristin Schwab related:
Hollywood's depictions of the wealthy—and perhaps societal attitudes toward them—have changed.… The moment isn't random. Think about the extreme economic events we've been through. There's the pandemic, when essential workers kept the country running while the richest 1% amassed a huge sum of wealth—twice as much as the rest of the world put together (her emphasis), according to the non-profit Oxfam. And before that was The Great Recession, which is how we got the term "the 1%."
Mr. Cook, Apple is reportedly making a contribution to the Turkey/Syria relief effort. Are you personally making a contribution? Your Big Business Titan comrades may think they can get away with gated, cold-blooded mentalities. They may be right about that if the mass media doesn't turn its steely gaze toward their hoards of gold and question their "don't give a damn" attitude.
Maybe they just can't help themselves—so busy are they counting their lucre. Here is an idea: ask them to ask their grandchildren, 12 and under, what they want them to do. Absorb their moral authority and MOVE FAST TO HELP THOSE IN NEED!
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FBI is Asking Apple to Create 'Software Equivalent of Cancer': Tim Cook
In interview with ABC News, Apple CEO speaks out about tech company's ongoing privacy fight with government
Feb 25, 2016
In an interview with ABC News on Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke out about the tech company's ongoing privacy fight with the U.S. government, saying the FBI was asking Apple to create "the software equivalent of cancer."
"This case is not about one phone," Cook told anchor David Muir. "This case is about the future. What is at stake here is whether the government can compel Apple to write software that we believe would make hundreds of millions of customers vulnerable around the world, including the U.S."
The interview aired just before Apple's February 26 deadline to respond to the government's order.
With the help of a federal judge, the FBI is asking Apple to break into the iPhone of one of the suspected shooters in last year's attack in San Bernardino, California. The tech company has resisted the order, saying that creating that software would set a dangerous precedent that threatens users' privacy rights and expands government authority.
"We think [the software is] bad news to write," Cook said on Wednesday. "We would never write it, we have never written it, and that is at stake here.... If a court compels Apple to write this piece of software, to place a backdoor in the iPhone, we believe it does put hundreds of millions of customers at risk."
Cook continued:
If a court can ask us to write this piece of software, think about what else they could ask us to write. Maybe it's an operating system for surveillance. Maybe it's the ability for law enforcement to turn on the camera. I mean, I don't know where this stops. But I do know this is not what should be happening in this country. This is not what should be happening in America. If there should be a law that compels us to do it, it should be passed out in the open, and the people of America should get a voice in that. The right place for that debate to occur is in Congress.
As Common Dreams has previously written, the case has already entered slippery slope territory, as the Justice Department is reportedly looking to use backdoor software in about a dozen other undisclosed cases around the country.
Apple has vowed to fight the order all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Theodore J. Boutros, one of the tech company's attorneys in the case, told the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday that the defense will argue the order violates Apple's free speech rights.
"The government here is trying to use this statute from 1789 in a way that it has never been used before. They are seeking a court order to compel Apple to write new software, to compel speech," Boutrous told the Times. "It is not appropriate for the government to obtain through the courts what they couldn't get through the legislative process."
Privacy advocates have rallied around the tech company this week, staging demonstrations outside Apple stores nationwide. The digital rights group Fight for the Future organized the actions.
"People are rallying at Apple stores because what the FBI is demanding here will make all of us less safe, not more safe," the group's campaign director Evan Greer said in a press release. "Their unconstitutional attack on our digital security could put millions of people in danger, so we're giving those people a way to get their voices heard."
Watch Cook's interview below:
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Bolstering Apple Argument, DOJ Wants Data from Dozen Other Phones
Suggesting slipper slope already exists, news reports show outcome of Apple-FBI battle could have wide implications for privacy and encryption
Feb 23, 2016
Contradicting FBI claims that the U.S. government is focused only on a single phone in the landmark privacy case pitting Apple against federal law enforcement, news outlets are reporting Tuesday that the Justice Department is pursuing court orders to force the tech company to help investigators extract data from iPhones in about a dozen undisclosed cases around the country.
The Wall Street Journal reported the news Tuesday morning, citing "people familiar with the matter." According to the paper:
The other phones are at issue in cases where prosecutors have sought, as in the San Bernardino, Calif., terror case, to use an 18th-century law called the All Writs Act to compel the company to help them bypass the passcode security feature of phones that may hold evidence, these people said.
The specifics of the roughly dozen cases haven't been disclosed publicly, but they don't involve terrorism charges, these people said. The 12 cases remain in a kind of limbo amid the bigger, more confrontational legal duel between the government and the company over an iPhone seized in the terror case in California, these people said.
However, as The Verge points out, "With these cases already ongoing, it would be straightforward to compel Apple's assistance in these additional cases after the legal precedent has been set. It's unclear why the Department of Justice pushed the San Bernardino order forward rather than one of the other thirteen cases detailed here. However, the case's high-profile nature likely played a role in the decision."
Indeed, the ramifications could spread far beyond 12 individual smartphones, The Intercept's Jenna McLaughlin wrote on Monday.
"The FBI wants you to believe that its contentious court battle to force Apple to write new software that would let it hack San Bernardino killer Syed Farook's iPhone is only about this one, specific, particularly heinous case," she said. "But the FBI's defenders and friends in state and local law enforcement are going way off message. They say the ruling will greatly impact how they do business."
The Intercept reported:
In Suffolk County, Massachusetts, district attorney's office spokesperson Jake Wark said prosecutors "can't rule out" bringing their own case of a locked cellphone before a judge, too. "It may be a question of finding the right case," he told the Wall Street Journal.
"It's going to have significant ramifications on us locally," Matt Rokus, deputy chief of Wisconsin's Eau Claire Police Department, told the city's Leader-Telegram newspaper on Monday.
In South Dakota, Minnehaha County State's Attorney Aaron McGowan told the Sioux Falls Argus Leader that "the court's ruling could have a significant impact on conducting sensitive criminal investigations."
This aligns with Apple's claim last week that the outcome of this legal tussle could have "implications far beyond the legal case at hand."
Meanwhile, the Justice Department said in a court filing late Monday that Apple has suddenly changed its legal position after years of complying with court orders based on the 1789 All Writs Act.
The filing came in a Brooklyn case involving a methamphetamine dealer. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sought Apple's help to break into a phone owned by the suspect, Jun Feng, saying that despite a guilty plea by Feng, access to the phone data was still needed as part of an ongoing investigation.
Instead of approving the DEA's request to order Apple to help break into Feng's phone, as other judges routinely have done in other cases, U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein asked Apple to weigh in--becoming the first to raise doubts about whether the All Writs Act applied to Apple.
"Apple jumped at the opening provided by Judge Orenstein," CNN reports--and as such, "the seeds of the government's fight with Apple were sown in the Brooklyn courtroom."
"The cases are different, but the underlying legal question is very similar," American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Alex Abdo told NPR. "The question in the New York case is whether the government can rely on this ancient statute to conscript Apple into government service."
As NPR explains, there are some key differences between the two cases. In particular, Feng's iPhone used an older operating system, iOS 7, which makes it relatively easy for Apple to bypass the lock. The iPhone in the San Bernardino case runs Apple's newer operating system, iOS 9, and the company says it would have to create software to get into the phone.
That reflects a conscious shift on Apple's part, Abdo argued. "They didn't want to be in the position, they told the court, of having to serve as a government investigative agent," he said. "They wanted to be out of the business of spying on their customers."
Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in an email to staff on Monday: "Some advocates of the government's order want us to roll back data protections to iOS 7, which we released in September 2013. Starting with iOS 8, we began encrypting data so that not even the iPhone can read without the user's passcode, so if it is lost or stolen, our personal data, conversations, financial and health information are far more secure. We all know that turning back the clock on that progress would be terrible."
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Apple's Tim Cook Defends Encryption. When Will Other Tech CEOs Do So?
More high-profile titans need to use their platforms to make crystal clear how important encryption is to users everywhere
Dec 23, 2015
It seems everywhere he goes these days, Apple CEO Tim Cook is out there forcefully and publicly defending his company's decision to provide iPhone users with end-to-end text messaging and FaceTime encryption to protect against the constant threat of criminal hackers and foreign governments. The question is: when will other tech company leaders follow his lead?
If we're going to avoid having a horrible law banning encryption passed in the next year, more of the tech company giants' high-profile representatives - the Mark Zuckerbergs, Marissa Mayers and Eric Schmidts - need to use their platforms as the world's most well-known technology chiefs to make crystal clear how important encryption is to users everywhere.
US and UK officials have not let up on their months-long PR blitz villainizing encryption in an attempt to force tech companies to provide a surveillance backdoor into their products. This, despite the fact that officials still haven't produced any evidence that encryption was involved in the planning of any of the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.
Not that it should matter; even if terrorists do use encrypted communications apps there are plenty of ways to track them and plenty of reasons to still encourage the technology's use. On 60 Minutes earlier this week, Cook explained why encryption is so important and why installing backdoors for government access to everyone's communications is such a bad idea:
Here's what the situation is on your smartphone today, on your iPhone, there's likely health information, there's financial information. There are intimate conversations with your family, or your co-workers. There's probably business secrets and you should have the ability to protect it. And the only way we know how to do that, is to encrypt it. Why is that? It's because if there's a way to get in, then somebody will find the way in. There have been people that suggest that we should have a back door. But the reality is if you put a back door in, that back doors for everybody, for good guys and bad guys.
Unfortunately, Cook is badly outnumbered by an onslaught of ignorant politicians making misleading and false statements about how encryption works and why we should ban it. And it isn't just a problem in the US and the UK: all over the world, countries are grappling with their sudden loss of power to surveil everything their citizenry says or does. A judge in Brazil briefly ordered Facebook's WhatsApp messaging application be blocked across the entire country because the service has no way of decrypting a suspect's communications.
Thankfully, the court backed down, but in his statement on that ruling, Mark Zuckerberg did not even mention the word "encryption", let alone explain why it's so important that every user be given this protection even if it means that the government can never access the content. While they rightfully oppose the government's push to ban encryption, other tech companies have not been nearly as vocal in public as Apple, in many cases speaking privately through lobbyists or industry representatives.
That's not to say these companies aren't doing anything: They've all released statements at various points condemning attacks on encryption. Facebook's WhatsApp has brought end-to-end encryption to more people—over 800 million—than any other service. Google's engineering team has been a leader in securing much of the web in the post-Snowden era.
But this is more than an engineering fight - it's a political one where public opinion is crucial. And if the CEOs of these tech companies and their highest-profile representatives aren't out there every day loudly fighting for our right to encryption where millions of people can hear them, then it's quite likely we might wake up one day and find that the US or UK has passed some awful bill, which will only encourage China to do the same - and very soon half the world may try to outlaw encryption in some way, shape or form.
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