What Jeff Bezos Deserves

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.

 

 

Your Brain on Testosterone

Michael Lewis’s 1989 book, Liar’s Poker, offers a brilliant inside view of the criminal and virtual criminal behavior of Wall Street investment banks. “Virtual criminal behavior” (my expression, not Lewis’s) is behavior that should be against the law but isn’t because Wall Street money - due to its political influence - spawns laws that facilitate stealing from the public.

Lewis is clearly not very proud of some of his actions at Salomon Brothers where he worked as a bond trader. One that I remember in particular was his selling of crappy AT&T bonds to a German sucker named Herman, promising they were a good deal. What Lewis only discovered later was that the bonds were guaranteed losers. He had been encouraged by higher ups to sell them because Salomon owned them and wanted to unload them on a customer so they, Salomon, wouldn’t have to eat the loss. That’s how investment banks, and Wall Street generally, work: they find ordinary citizens, cultivate their trust, then steal from them. Meanwhile they spend a fortune on key political campaigns in order to make sure their stealing can continue uninterrupted by federal agents.

In addition to insight into the specifics of Wall Street criminality, Lewis reveals the testosterone-heavy language of the Wall Street trader. Before he suckered Herman into buying the crappy bonds, Lewis was known as a geek, a pathetically wimpy and unmasculine figure. Once he made the sleazy sale, he was on his way to becoming what Wall Street calls “a big swinging dick,” that is, a success. It was possible for women to become big swinging dicks, but they rarely did. I wonder how those who did felt about the language.

This imagery, where success and domination suggest a penis of unnatural dimensions, reminded me of what Lyndon Johnson said after bombing parts of North Vietnam to smithereens. “I didn’t just screw Ho Chi Minh,” he bragged, “I cut his pecker off.”

I’m not sure how Johnson felt about himself and his own pecker after he had to slink out of the White House in 1969. He may have felt like a dick, but surely not a big swinging one.

I am by no means the only one to be struck by the connection between success in competition on one hand and masculinity with all its appendages thereunto appertaining on the other. Joshua Goldstein, for example, has written an entire book on this topic: War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa.

I think of war as a kabuki of destructive stupidity and a fertile breeder of personal tragedy. But, since I am also in possession of a penis, I wish I could find a valid way to take exception to the presumed connection between these two entities.

There is, unfortunately, a connection between masculinity and aggressiveness. But it isn’t rooted in the penis; it’s testosterone, an anabolic steroid generated mainly in the testes. It makes men horny and contentious. (Women less so, since their bodies only generate about 12% as much testosterone as do men’s.)

There was an ad back in the 1970s designed to discourage drug use that focused on egg imagery. It opened with a man holding an ordinary egg while he intoned, “This is your brain.” Then, he cracked the egg and dropped it into a frying pan where it immediately began to sizzle. He then continued, “This is your brain on drugs.”

I never found that ad particularly convincing since I like fried eggs much better than raw ones, but nevertheless I did not become a drug addict.

Anyway, I would like to propose a new ad, one aimed strictly at men, with images something like this:

This is your brain.

This is your brain on testosterone.

Of course, women are capable of leading nations in war as did Golda Meir for Israel and Margaret Thatcher for the Britons. And, speaking of Britons, there was the famous warrior queen Boudicca who threw her bad, fighting self into fierce battle against the Romans.

                    Warrior Queen Boudicca on the Rampage

But these are exceptional cases. Most war promoters, like most Wall Street traitors [sic], are men. Of course the way we construct masculinity in our society, how we perceive and think about it, is at least as significant as the effects of any anabolic steroids that course through men’s veins. But still, this biochemical gender difference is a cross-cultural constant and it closely correlates with some pretty nasty behaviors.

Both capitalism and war are largely testosterone-driven systems. The hyper-competitive mentality of testosterone-afflicted Wall Streeters encourages them to act in ways that normal people consider pathologically anti-social. The same also happens all too often on the battlefield. Who can help us overcome this madness? Well, I guess today is as appropriate as any day for me to express my wish that more female voices be heard amidst the current cacophony of self-aggrandizing baritones. Happy Mother’s Day.

They're Here, and Just in Time

Lots of news this week: Steve Jobs, American iCon, has died, the Occupy Wall Street movement is finally getting lots of media attention, and the amazingly talented Cyndi Lauper, now appearing at the local House of Blues, continues to misspell her own first name.

Occupy Wall Street is the real story, and I say this even though I consider their claim to be “the other 99%” of Americans an exaggeration. This is because they don’t represent that roughly 28% who insist on voting against their own interests even when a stone blind bat could see the unhelpfulness of such a tendency.

The 28% I'm talking about includes those people who still approved of George W. Bush in 2008, after he had dragged us into two wars, (one of which was unnecessarily long and the other absolutely unnecessary), had shifted the tax burden away from his super-rich friends and onto the backs of the rest of us, and, finally, led the economy into the worst disaster we've seen since the 1930s. So, who are those 28% that still approved of Bush even after he brought about Mondo Catastrofico? I don’t know, but I don't think they sympathize with the Occupy Wall Streeters. In other words, these good Wall Street demonstrators might want to change their slogan to “We are the other 72 percent!” Admittedly not too catchy, but more accurate.

The 28 percent who tend to vote for and support the interests of the super-rich (i.e., the one percent) would benefit from a more enlightened understanding of human nature. Such an understanding might convince many of them to see the errors of their ways and, who knows, maybe even get them to admit that G. W. Bush did not deserve their unwavering devotion.






Ganz bestimmt, Herr Goethe!


From Wikipedia






The key feature of human nature that needs to be more widely understood is that which binds us, against our own will sometimes, to our fellow humans. This feature is rooted in our brain chemistry, which in turn is a function of evolutionary processes that have made Homo sapiens the all-time mammalian champions of mutual help and support. When we are behaving naturally, we tend to feel for each other, share the sufferings of each other, and strive to help each other.

Such a statement is likely to provoke denunciations of “Kumbaya singer!” from the ranks of the 28-percenters, but, let me assure you, I like Kumbaya no more than I like pickled pigs’ feet, which is to say, not very much.

What I do like are the neural and behavioral studies, now arriving in an endless stream, that have identified mirror neurons and other brain components that underlie our inability to separate ourselves from each other. Call me a socialist if you must, but current research proves beyond a doubt that we are, above all, social creatures.

Admittedly, we can be trained to disqualify certain fellow humans from any right to our sympathy (i.e., dehumanize them), whether they be racially, religiously, ethnically or politically different. But this takes training. Our natural impulse, particularly when we are face to face with each other, is to look out for each other.

But, you say, what about murder? War? Enslavement? Rape? Theft? Going through the express check-out line with more than 10 items? Yes, these things do happen, and they are anti-social, but they are, except in the most dysfunctional of societies, newsworthy aberrations. What is not news is the constant, neuron-based, tide-like pull of the social impulses, the ones that mark us as inescapably linked to each other.

Here’s another possible objection to the “We are social” model: What about the benefits of capitalism, the encouragement it gives to individualistic, competitive striving?

I grant that a measure of competitive striving is also natural to us, and can be constructive, but only when channeled along socially responsible paths. Our problems today stem from the all-too-numerous examples of destructive, anti-social striving, the kind of striving that has characterized, for example, Enron, Halliburton, BP, the tobacco companies, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and other outfits whose natural habitat is Wall Street. Their striving has been aimed at personal enrichment even at the expense of social devastation.

Which brings us back to the OWSers. The “99 percent” they promote is more an aspiration than a reality, but it still speaks to the fact that the American economy, since about 1980 has been steadily drawn into the clutches of the super-rich - that one percent who use their money to buy Congress and the White House and then engender laws designed for their own benefit and at our expense. Theirs is a destructively selfish competitive striving.

Eliminating, or at least drastically reducing, the influence of their money on our elections would go a long way toward compelling our elected leaders to pay more attention to us than to those who fund their campaigns. The most obvious device for accomplishing this would be publicly funded federal elections.

Of course these same moneyed interests would claim that publicly funded elections amount to a “government take-over,” but the truth is that government is where our democratic rights make their home. The main problem with our democratic house today is not that it is governmental, but that it has been steadily taken over by non-governmental, moneyed interests. Wall Street represents these interests, so the OWS movement is a big, fat, bold step in the right direction. Even though some of these protestors seem unfocused, and, this being New York, they bring with them a healthy dose of the theatrically bizarre, they still, in my opinion, deserve our praise and support. If they manage to effectively focus our sustained anger they will indeed be the people we have been waiting for.