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.

 

 

Democracy vs. Bullshit at Home and Abroad

 A couple of weeks ago I got into a tiresome Twitter argument with a young woman from China over her government’s policies. She didn’t say how old she was, but I am assuming she is young because I have heard her arguments from many young Chinese, but not from older ones.

It started because I criticized Beijing’s claim that it was not suppressing the Uighur minority, but in fact was treating them very generously. Obvious bullshit, but Ms. Hyper-Nationalist wasn’t having any criticism. She accused me of not paying attention to what actual Chinese people have to say - unfair criticism given that I’ve spent much of my professional life studying and reading about modern China and talking to Chinese citizens. In fact, I lived for a total of about two and a half years in different Chinese cities: Hong Kong, Qingdao, and Beijing.

 

 

 

  Some of my fondly remembered Qingdao 

   University students in their dorm (1994)

 

 

What was most troubling about Ms. HN’s arguing was its imperviousness to any news or information that wasn’t approved by the Chinese government. In other words, she has drunk deeply of the Chinese Communist Party’s Kool-Aid and is a full-fledged member of the “China Shall Dominate the World” Cult. I use this insulting phrase with regret because, in fact, I am very fond of China, I admire its culture and I have had countless wonderful experiences with my Chinese friends. I hope these friends will understand my appreciation for them despite my contempt for the policies of the so-called Chinese Communist Party.

 

I say “so-called” Communist Party because the CCP is more fascist than communist. It is led by multi-millionaires who were only able to amass their fortunes after China introduced capitalism into its economy around 1979.* The CCP started describing its new economy back then by using a bullshit slogan to hide its capitalistic essence: “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

 

Right. And I suppose last week’s suppression of Hong Kong’s popular Apple Daily is “freedom of the press with CCP characteristics.”

 

The younger generation of Chinese is being raised on a cult-like diet of fanatic nationalism rooted in a sense of hurt feelings over China’s “century of humiliation.” It is true that western nations and the Japanese, starting in the 1800s, did invade and exploit China. In fact, these countries abused the Chinese very much as the Chinese are abusing the Tibetans and Uighurs today. Maybe someday leaders from these victimized minorities will rise up and denounce China for its decades of humiliation of them.

 

But I digress. What I want to say is that China’s late entry into the capitalist game has brought about a near miraculous economic expansion which has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. Well done, China! But the CCP claims that its “communist” leadership made this miracle possible and demands the strictest loyalty to its dictates. Absolute and heavy-handed control of the press is the rule, with the result that an entire generation of Chinese has grown up believing the CCP’s bullshit message and itching for revenge against a world that caused its “century of humiliation.” Ms. Hyper-Nationalist is very typical of this generation. She is so thoroughly indoctrinated by her upbringing in an environment of thought control that she is incapable of clearly seeing the CCP lies that have victimized her. She has come to believe that western news sources are all “fake news.”

 

Yes, fake news. Which brings me to my final point: there is a lot of similarity between the Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. Both are contemptuous of democracy, both rely heavily on outrageous lies to justify themselves, and both have created large cult-like followings that depend on their members rejecting outside sources of information and only believing the great leader.

 

I’m not alone in thinking this. A Twitter friend, Thomas the Traveler, who watched my back-and-forth with Ms. Hyper-Nat commented that it “Almost felt like an exchange between a Trumper and a normal person.” Exactly.

 

All of this means that we who believe in democracy now must fight on two fronts: internally the enemy of democracy is the Trump Cult, which lives on with the support of Fox News (or, as reporter Jim Acosta calls it, “the bullshit factory”) while internationally, the so-called Chinese Communist Party attempts to spread its authoritarian power outward, much as Imperial Japan did in the 1930s. And like Imperial Japan, the CCP insists that no citizen shall be allowed to challenge its self-adulating bullshit. Gird up, believers in democracy, we’ve got a lot of work to do.

 

 

 

 

 

*It’s not my intention to praise capitalism here, but only to grant that it was capitalism that has driven China’s new-found prosperity.

Republicans vs. Democracy

Today is Memorial Day, a day for remembering the sacrifices of those who fell in our nation’s conflicts. But I have something else on my mind, namely, the possibility that future Memorial Days may commemorate American Democracy itself, which could tragically fall to the current right-wing onslaught against it. Leading the attack on our democracy are Donald Trump and his supporters both in government and at right-wing media sites like Fox News. I don’t think our democracy is doomed, but I could be wrong.

Evidence of the danger we face – those of us who believe in democracy – can be seen in a number of recent polls. Here are the results from a May 27 poll by PRRI (the Public Religion Research Institute).

 

What jumps out from this poll is that Republicans are living in a world of their own, one not shared by most Americans. They are furthest from the mainstream on the idea that “true American patriots” may need to resort to violence in order to “save our country.” But in general, the wacky conspiracy theory beliefs about elite, Satan-worshipping pedophiles, etc., find a much more welcome home among Republicans than they do anywhere else.

 This crazy irrational mindset could easily be swept away if only more people knew the difference between reliable and unreliable sources. But, alas, they don’t, and too many of them continue to trust Fox News, Newsmax, and other bullshit factories*.

 Just as dangerous as the irrational nuttiness of the Republican base are the underhanded tactics practiced by Republican elites. In Texas this weekend, legislation was introduced aimed at discouraging voting by minority voters and making it easier for the state legislature to decide who gets Texas’s electoral votes regardless of who the voters chose. This pro-Republican law was not immediately confirmed as official only because Democratic legislators walked out of the session thereby depriving the legislature of a quorum. But, of course, the law is not utterly dead. It will be re-introduced and the GOP will no doubt find a way around the recalcitrant Democrats and make it the law. In other words, Republicans 1, American Democracy 0.

 Our democracy is in danger because of the Republican party and the media sources that support it. But I believe this attack will fail and I’m optimistic for four reasons. First, because Donald Trump and the other prominent people who are behind it are themselves in serious legal trouble. It’s quite possible that Trump, some members of his family, his attorney Rudy Giuliani, his ally Matt Gaetz, and others in his circle will be convicted of serious crimes before the end of 2021. Some of them my well spend time behind bars, and may even be in the slammer during the 2022 election.

 Secondly, normal, respectable people in the GOP, like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger continue to loudly call out the dishonesty and stupidity of Trump’s “stop the steal” campaign. This campaign, which is the reason for so many Republicans believing that Trump “really” won the election, loses a bit of traction with every month that goes by. Eventually its followers will make up an even smaller minority of American voters than they do now.

 Also, the Democrats won the 2020 presidential election partly because so many Republican suburbanites couldn’t stand Trump’s sleazy and incompetent style of governing. The GOP, with its current dirty dealings, is not giving those voters any reason to return to the party.

 And finally, there is Stacey Abrams, whose heroic effort ensured that Democratic voters in Georgia turned out in sufficient numbers to win the senatorial runoffs there, and with them the Senate as a whole. We need an army of Stacey Abrams to counteract the dirty work the Republicans have been doing in Georgia, Florida, Texas, and so many other states where they are resorting to voter suppression. But with Stacey’s inspiration, along with the intense resentment of those voters whom the Republicans are trying to strip of their rights, we may see an unprecedented surge in Democratic voters in 2022 and 2024. I don’t know about you, but as for me, I’m counting on it.

 

 

*Bullshit Factory is the label offered by CNN reporter Jim Acosta to refer to Fox News. Good enough to steal, so I’m stealing it.