March 10, 2010 03:36 AM UTC

Don't let Amazon.com push Colorado around

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• by: Alan

Colorado doesn’t take well to being bullied.

Yesterday, one of the world’s biggest online retailers, Amazon, announced that it will no longer pay referral fees to Colorado bloggers and nonprofit charities who advertise Amazon’s products on their websites. The reason? Amazon is unhappy about a law passed in our state, asking online retailers to help in the collection of the state’s longstanding 2.9% tax–a tax we all already pay to merchants every day, both online and offline.

That’s right: in a move leaders from around the state have called ‘tyrannical’ and ‘pure duplicity,’ Amazon, with no warning, closed the accounts of Colorado website owners–many of whom are individual bloggers and nonprofit organizations–in protest of routine collection of state sales taxes. What they’ve done won’t allow them to evade the new law. All they have done is punish our neighbors in order to score cheap political points.

Sign our pledge to shop elsewhere until Amazon stops using Colorado residents as pawns:

http://progressnowcolorado.org/ShopMainStreet

After profiting from millions of dollars in tax-free sales to Colorado residents for years, Amazon is determined to protect their unfair advantage over local brick-and-mortar retailers. When the state legislature passed a law to enforce collection of taxes for online purchases, lawmakers understood that one of the key effects would be leveling the playing field between massive online merchants like Amazon and local retailers who pay their taxes and employ Coloradans.

It’s true that online sales have enjoyed preferential tax benefits in many areas, giving them a needed competitive advantage during the industry’s early years. But today, the logic of that approach has been turned on its head: online sales are proliferating while Main Street goes out of business.

Local businesses like Tattered Cover Books and Ultimate Electronics, who employ thousands of Colorado residents and pay their sales taxes back into the community, have suffered greatly while giant corporations like Amazon profited from their tax-free sales advantage. Today, with Colorado in the midst of the greatest fiscal crisis since the Great Depression, properly collecting taxes owed on these purchases means millions of dollars in badly-needed revenue for schools, roads, and health care.

That’s the choice: stand up for our local job-creating businesses, and collect the revenue the state is already owed to help pay for vital public services. Or, get bullied by a giant corporation that has already helped put retailers in your neighborhood out of business, and now is willing to do the same to its own partners out of spite.

Tell Amazon that we won’t be pushed around!

http://progressnowcolorado.org/ShopMainStreet

Thanks for everything you do every day to stand up for our common interests. We’ll share your name and comments with Amazon, elected officials, and the press, and keep you up to date about further developments.