Some people say Jeff Bezos is an asshole. But frankly I think “asshole” is an unnecessarily rude term. I would just say he is a person who likes to rake in billions of dollars off the grueling toil of his underpaid employees.
According to Business Insider, Bezos’s net worth increased by 75 billion (yes, billion) dollars in 2020, a year in which most Americans were facing economic hardship. What did Mr. Bezos do to earn this? Well, nothing.
I don’t mean to say that J. Bezos just lazed around doing nothing all through 2020. I only mean he didn’t do anything that justified earning 75 billion dollars.
Of course, there are some who say that Bezos DID earn his 75 billion because The Market (praised be its name) siphoned this amount off to him, and The Market simply distributes wealth according to the unyielding principles of life’s struggles. Then there are others of a different mind who say, “bullshit.” I count myself among these others.
I do not accept that the unyielding principles of life’s struggle are actually unyielding. They yield to the influence of people with power. In the U.S., people with power are people with money, and these people often use their money to support an economic system that helps them get their hands on lots and lots more of it. For example, these people finance the political campaigns of sympathetic senators who, if elected, will in turn appoint Supreme Court justices who will render rulings allowing these people of influence to hide their influence. As an example, consider the Citizens United ruling of 2010.
The principles our economy operates under are not, therefore, unyielding. They yield to people with money and influence.
Former President Ronald Reagan became a conservative Republican only after he married into a family of wealth and influence. He had been a Democrat all his life because Franklin Roosevelt’s government-run programs had saved young Ron Reagan’s family from crushing poverty. Once Ron, as a middle-aged adult, married into Nancy Davis’s wealthy family, he quickly decided that government programs sucked, and so he began to campaign against them. He also decided labor unions needed to be crushed since all they did was help poor people avoid being underpaid and abused.
Which brings us back to Jeff Bezos. Like Reagan, Bezos believes labor unions should not be players in the economic game. Because imagine (as I assume Bezos himself has imagined more than once) what a unionized Amazon work force could do. It could, for example, as a united entity, say to him, “Look boss, you’re a great businessman, but your contribution to this company is not worth millions of times more than our combined contribution is. If this company paid its people - including both us and you - according to our contribution to its success, we would get a lot more and you would get a lot less.”
But this confrontation won’t happen because Amazon employees are not unionized. And they are not unionized partly because Reagan helped undermine unions in the 1980s, and partly because Bezos has fought to keep his employees from being unionized. The unyielding principles of the Market, in other words, yield to the likes of Reagan and Bezos at the expense of people like me and (I assume) you.
Still, I decline to refer to Reagan and Bezos as assholes. They are simply people who believe it is cool to rip the rest of us off.
