Tag: Jeff Bezos

Billionaires Do the Two-Step into Space While Most Americans Try to Stay Afloat

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Making Money

Eleven people in the world die every minute — most from preventable causes like hunger. That doesn’t seem to faze three billionaires who could afford to right the world’s ship solely on the rise in their net worth during the pandemic. Instead, these unspeakably greedy billionaires, chief among them Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, are off to the wild blue yonder to turn space into a capitalist profit center via a sub-orbital tourist business. But the vast bulk of Americans need not apply. For the first trip, the Bezos entourage held a lottery. The winning bid? $28 million. “We need to build a road to space so that our children can build the future.” [Jeff Bezos] Considering that in order to snag a seat on Bezos’ next flight, a ticket will cost $300,000 or more, the universe of space travelers and their “kids” is miniscule. Only about two million people in a U.S. population of 333 million could afford a seat on the next joyride. [Vertical Research Partners] Remember this is the guy who could give all Amazon’s U.S. workers (one million+) a one-time $105,000 bonus and still be as filthy rich as he was before the pandemic. What he did instead as the pandemic was raging: eliminated the $2-an-hour pay boost intended to reward frontline workers for continuing to come into work. While he was cheating his workers, he was hard at work building a half billion-dollar yacht. Think that’s as obscene as it gets? Check out “Billionaires Doing the Two-Step in Space While Most Americans Try to Stay Afloat” and you may wind up wishing he stays in space permanently.

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Amazon Workers Get the Deal of a Lifetime: Starvation Wages and Prison Camp Working Conditions

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Amazon Hurts Working-

“The only way I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel.” That’s what Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, plans to do with his personal wealth. Is he kidding or blinded by a combination of greed and ego? You decide. With over 100,000 Amazon workers in the U.S. forced to operate in unheated (in winter) and un-air conditioned (in summer) factories working 12 hour shifts, surveilled by personal tracking devices they are forced to wear, fired for not keeping up with the inhuman quotas Amazon’s managers set for them, urinating in bottles to avoid taking time off to go to the bathroom, not one penny of the $11.2 billion Amazon made in profits in 2018 or the over one quarter of a million dollars it received in refunds from the IRS in 2017 and 2018 plus the zero dollars paid in income taxes in those two years will be spent making life easier for the workers responsible for Amazon’s success. Think of it, with $110 billion dollars in his personal treasure chest, Jeff Bezos is too greedy to spend even a couple of million to upgrade the conditions of servitude at Amazon warehouses. Instead he yearns to go to the moon. Some might say good riddance. In 2019 at Whole Foods, part of his empire, he eliminated health benefits for 1,900 part-time workers. Despite the fact that he, along with 180 other fat cat liars, signed a pledge, “committing to Investing in our employees. This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits.” It took Bezos one month to break that pledge. Just goes to show how worthless promises made by money-grubbers are. If you’re in the mood for a true Halloween horror story, don’t miss “Amazon Workers Get the Deal of a Lifetime: Starvation Wages and Prison Camp Working Conditions.”

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Bezos Sticks It to Amazon Workers: Minimum Wage Up, Earnings Down

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Make Amazon Pay

Here’s a headline grabber: “Richest varmit in the world breaks arm patting himself on the back for raising wages of his workers.” Fake news? Consider the facts: the reigning king of U.S. oligarchs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, announces what purports to be a historic income boost for workers. Operating on the principle that perception is the only reality that counts, he makes sure to get lots of media coverage. It works like a charm. Eager to change the subject from economic inequality to keeping their jobs, a bi-partisan group of politicians aren’t about to second guess a prospective campaign donor even one as soulless as Amazon’s boss. When will our “see no evil, hear no evil” elected leaders hear the voices of outraged workers at the mercy of corporate moguls who promise the moon but deliver “smoke and mirrors?” Seems like the only cure for the lopsided U.S. economic system is to reduce the incentives for bad behavior on the part of the captains of industry. Congress and the president have the power to make workers’ lives so much better. Care to make a bet on how likely they are to do it? Read “Bezos Sticks It to Amazon Workers: Minimum Wage Up, Earnings
Down” before betting the ranch.

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Exceptional America to U.S. Workers: Drop Dead

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“Sis, Boom, Bah” —Whoops of joy from all sectors of the American noise machine, media pundits, neoliberal economists and media talking heads celebrating the rebirth of the American economy. An economic miracle, we are told, that will float all boats. The streets may not be paved with gold —yet but count on it, in the words of one of our former delusional presidents (there’s 45 to choose from), there’ll be a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. In a more recent example, ex-president Obama was still patting himself on the back for all those jobs his administration created “We saw the longest streak of job creation in American history by far… A streak that still continues by the way…”

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