Jeff Bezos

What’s a few days without an Amazon scandal? Here’s one that’s gotten hot over the last day or two, as detailed by David Sirota for a Seattle Times commentary: “Following a 70 percent earnings increase last quarter, the company this week terminated its business relationships with its Colorado affiliates. The move was a response to new Colorado legislation compelling online retailers to either collect the sales taxes that every other business collects, or at least disclose that customers must pay the levy to the state themselves.”

As Sirota puts it, Amazon’s “punitive petulance” seems aimed at “sending a deliberate message to lawmakers in every other state: Make us play by the same tax rules as other businesses, and your state will be punished, too.” In short, the company seems opposed to “that most capitalist of principles: fair competition. It instead relies on a rigged market.”

He goes on to give a devastating portrait of Amazon head Jeff Bezos as “the typical dot-com shark, he shrouds old-fashioned suit-and-cigar ruthlessness in business-casual attire, ear-to-ear grins and Charlie Rose-ready colloquialisms. But beneath the earth tones and triumphalist techno-babble is the same boor who offshored a Seattle call center the moment employees pondered a union.”

But at the heart of it all, says Sirota, is the fact that Amazon has “built an entire business model based on tax avoidance,” a practice with wide-ranging implications, because…

Unfortunately, so have many other firms, as evidenced by America’s $300 billion annual gap between taxes owed and paid. And as more commerce is transacted through tax-avoiding Internet conglomerates, that gap could grow, honest local business could be further disadvantaged and deficits could explode, forcing ever deeper cuts to public services.

This is the dystopian outcome that multinational corporations and anti-government activists aim for in today’s tax wars — and they could make it a reality.