Pure capitalism has an implied responsibility after one becomes overwhelmingly successful, they would be inclined to reinvest the excess into society. Donations to schools, social programs, not-for-profits, and so on. And higher wages for the workers who made you immensely successful, better benefits, higher quality of life overall to incentivize people wanting to work for you, and if all successful companies did this, trickle-down economics would be real.
In unregulated corrupted capitalism, however, that excess instead is used to lobby government to make even more successful, shaping laws to shield companies from labor rights, destroy unions, surpress minimum wage, dodge taxes, and deflect hidden production costs like environmental pollution or outsourced slave labor. They use their economic leverage to remove legal responsibilities they have participating in society, while at the same time leaning on society’s resources like roads, police, emergency services, and infrastructure more than any individual ever could. Imagine how successful Bezos would be if taxpayers didn’t provide roads for his deliveries.
It’s all a big game of monopoly to them and at the end of the game, one guy has all the money and everyone else is bankrupt, in poverty, jail, or just trying to collect $200 a week to not starve. And then new generations are born into the game wherever their parents were at on the board, with no game reset. People wonder why the birth rate is dropping.
At the end of the game though our pieces all go into the same box.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
And Bernie the sheepdog will make sure nothing of substance happens to change that.
The thing that’s unacceptable is not that manual labor gets replaced by robots. That’s a good thing.
The thing that’s unacceptable is that Jeff Bezos can amass such wealth and that you don’t get a basic income and housing without needing to work for it.
The worst part of Lemmy is this stupid kind of leftism.
No u
It’s inevitable that people like Jeff Bezos exist. It’s called capitalism. The System is working as expected.
NATIONALIZE AMAZON
Use it to fund UBI and other social causes.
Just saying, if we burn buildings with no human, there will be no human casualties, only BILLIONAIRE ASSETS getting burned… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, keep burning BILLIONAIRE ASSETS and the BILLIONAIRE became MILLIONAIRE… ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
If Bernie Sanders was a cartoon character I think he just might be Lemongrab…
As bad as these Sociopathic Oligarchs are now, imagine when they start reaching Trillionaire status, and can start competing with entire nations. They will manufacture their own armies of Slaughterbots, and demand anything they want.
It is inevitable. Unless we end them.
It works so much better when you use all the zeroes. Makes it easier to compare.
290,000,000,000dollar net worth10,000,000dollar penthouse120,000,000dollar met gala500,000,000dollar yacht600,000workers
With his net worth, he could give every one of those workers $100,000 and still have ~80% of his net worth.
Just some back of the envelope math. With $290 billion, he could give each of those 600,000 people $10k a year for the next 48 years and still have $2 billion left over. And that is without considering interest or investment in the meantime.
The best thing about Jeff Bezos is Mackenzie Scott.
He reminds me of someone…
Zorg understood people in a way that Bezos doesn’t. All these billionaires are half robot weirdos.
He’s my favorite example to bust the “smarts and hard work” myth of billionaires. He had parents with good, union jobs that allowed him to go to Princeton, where he dropped out of a physics major (into CS) because it was too difficult. The school’s connections, though, got him a job at a hedge fund, where he was assigned to study the investment potential of e-commerce on the nascent Web. He saw the enormous potential, but was so bad at his job that he couldn’t convince the other executives that they wanted some of that money. So he left the job, got a large loan from his parents, and started Cadabra in a garage he rented in a conscious nod to Silicon Valley mythos. Oh, Cadabra? He was going to call it that, but his lawyer convinced him to go with his second choice of name, because that one sounds too much like cadaver. The company was profitable in a month, and then he used all manner of dirty tricks to run the competition out of the market.
Nothing in his story indicates anything but dumb luck of randomly being the one in the right time and place to succeed. If it was smarts and hard work, there were hundreds of other e-commerce contenders who put in at least as much as he did.
It’s hard to overstate how much Amazon has changed the economy. It has quite possibly the longest and most consequential game of enshittification in play. It’s already taken over a giant chunk of the retail market and destroyed local businesses in ways Wal-Mart and their like could only dream of.
It’s brought worker exploitation to Gilded Age levels. And there’s no doubt the ultimate goal is to create a monopoly over retail, so that they will later dictate prices. They’re already redirecting popular products to their own cheap, shittier versions in the searches they control. Their long term goal, like all tech companies that touch real world commerce, is to “disrupt” the system that worked for everyone before them, aka what’s left of competition in late stage capitalism, and replace it with monopoly.
Bezos is a would-be feudalist lord of retail in a technofascist hellscape. Peter Thiel will handle the surveillance. And they’ll all ride out the apocalypse on wherever they relocated Epstein’s island.
When I buy things online these days, much rarer than in previous - I deliberately avoid Amazon. For all the reasons you said, and a handful of others lol!
At least half the time the product comes in an Amazon box anyway. I think you might be understating how successful Amazon has been at reshaping things.
“b-b-but Amazon creates JOBS!! Jeff Bezos DESERVES that money!!!”
- Guy who doesn’t understand that jobs “created” by Amazon are jobs destroyed elsewhere by its monopoly
