Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) says Amazon’s “obsession with speed creates uniquely dangerous warehouses.” But his campaign appears to have an affinity for that speed, having spent nearly $2 million at Amazon since 2012, a Washington Free Beacon review of federal spending disclosures found.
Sanders has logged at least 5,148 purchases from Amazon in the last 12 years, marking a grand total of $1,727,763.46, campaign finance reports show. Most of the purchases were for office supplies, and the amount spent on individual transactions ranged from as little as seven dollars to those totaling in the thousands.
Those spending habits extended to Sanders’s 2024 reelection campaign, during which Sanders spent more than $40,000 at Amazon, disclosures show. Only the Senate campaigns of Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) and David Trone (D., Md.) spent more at the online retail giant, albeit only slightly. Schiff spent roughly $51,000, while Trone spent roughly $47,000.
Such a purchase history is an ironic twist for the 83-year-old lawmaker, who is arguably Amazon’s most outspoken critic on the Hill. During his second presidential run in 2019, Sanders said he would “absolutely” look into breaking up Amazon because the company has “incredible power over the economy, over the political life of this country in a very dangerous sense.” And on Sunday, he released a Senate report titled “The ‘Injury-Productivity Trade-off’: How Amazon’s Obsession with Speed Creates Uniquely Dangerous Warehouses.”
“Amazon’s warehouse workers have raised the alarm for years about unsafe working conditions and a corporate culture that prioritizes speed and profit over worker health and safety,” the 160-page report states. “Many of these workers live with severe injuries and permanent disabilities because of the company’s insistence on enforcing grueling productivity quotas and its refusal to adequately care for injured workers.”
Sanders is also a sharp critic of Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos, who he says “has more money than could be spent in a million lifetimes.” Bezos’s net worth is estimated to be roughly $240 billion.
Sanders has gone so far as to accuse Bezos of using the Washington Post, which the billionaire owns, to conspire against his political agenda. “I talk about [Amazon paying] ‘nothing’ in taxes,” Sanders said on the campaign trail in 2019.
“And then I wonder why the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me,” he continued. “I don’t know why.”
Sanders later walked back those comments and said, “This is not a conspiracy theory.”
Amazon told CBS News in a statement that Sanders’s report “is wrong on the facts and weaves together out-of-date documents and unverifiable anecdotes to create a preconceived narrative.”
One warehouse worker interviewed by Sanders’s office said, “I don’t even use Amazon anymore, I’d rather wait … than have some poor employee in an Amazon warehouse get battered and bruised so I can get my book within six hours.”
Sanders’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
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