Comment on It's unacceptable that people like Jeff Bezos exist.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.cafe 5 days ago
The problem isn’t Amazon, which employer millions of people and provides services that people obviously love. In fact, many cottage businesses have found success on Amazon, as well as many authors being able to publish their books with the permission of the publishing industry, and much more. Why should we get rid of all that? None of that is the problem.
The problem is profit. If Amazon employees made double or triple their salaries, treated them respectfully, and had great benefits, nobody would complain about them. They’d probably be lauded as a great company.
What’s causing it is Bezos’ untreated OCD, which manifests as uncontrolled compulsive financial hoarding. He sucks so much profit out of the business, that it severely hurts the employees, and the company’s corporate image. If he could figure out how to live below his means, he’d find out that he really doesn’t need enough money for a million lifetimes, he could share that money with his employees, make his customers more comfortable buying from Amazon, and they’d make even more money than they were.
Or America could do what they do with uncontrolled hoarders whose collections start to have a negative affect on those around them - we get them mental help, and give all those cats to new families. That’s what we should do with Bezos. Comfine him a mental hospital until his mania for profit subsides, and give all his neglected money to people who will appreciate it. Or nationalize Amazon, and run it as a government held non-profit, with the proceeds going to fund social programs.
The problem isn’t Amazon, which employer millions of people and provides services that people obviously love.
That’s the thing; Amazon didn’t pull out its success out of nowhere; the consumer made it what it became. Want to have a version of Amazon with healthcare and job security? Then build it yourself. That won’t work because of the customer wanting the cheapest stuff possible? Here’s the crux of the problem. There won’t be corporate reform without consumer reform.
You missed my point. The solution isn’t to let them continue to be bad, until someone goes into competition and beat them with a more moral business model. The moral model can’t succeed when they are competing with someone who is exploiting and manipulating the system.
The solution is to create a business environment where the moral business succeeds, while the immoral business struggles, and eventually decides to follow the rules in order to succeed, or close.
The solution is to create a business environment where the moral business succeeds
Yes, but it will be up to the consumer to create such an environment, either with their wallets or democratically.
The government will have to take a major role in that. Reconfiguring the entire direction of the business environment cannot be left to the easily manipulated vagaries of the American consumer. It has to be much more deliberate than that, with targeted laws and vigorous enforcement.
In the future, we must make it uncomfortable to be super wealthy, like needing permission to spend their money on a second yacht. If the commission determines that’s an unreasonable request, the money will be confiscated, and steered to Social programs. Obviously that’s too much money for them to handle responsibly.
The problem is Amazon. Hope that helps. Throw Bezos in a woodchipper.
Or if you’re willing to take the bitter medicine and view a broader reality, capitalism is the problem and inherently depends on destroying the planet on which we rely on to survive. Bezos is just a particularly severe symptom of the disease of capitalism.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Amazon Let Its Drivers’ Urine Be Sold as an Energy Drink
Love my cottage businesses.
I think there’s an element of truth to this. But trying to medicalize what is, at the end of the day, just economic autocracy presumes that there’s a person who could do Bezos’s job (such that it ever even existed) “ethically”.
This sounds like you’re talking about Trust Busting.
But I’ve got a better idea…
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.cafe 5 days ago
It’s not that hard. All an “Ethical” CEO would have to do is reduce the profits to 25%, and invest the rest into employee pay and benefits. Then market the shit out of that.
That CEO would be an American Hero, and his company would boom, lifting the share price, and keeping the stockholders happy.
But he wouldn’t have multiple yachts, including one he has to sell, because it was “too big.”
7101334@lemmy.world 5 days ago
No, all an ‘ethical’ CEO would have to do is provide workers with the full surplus value produced by their labor. Otherwise he can get put into the woodchipper 75% faster as thanks for him stealing only 25% of my existence.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.cafe 4 days ago
Valid.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days ago
That is, at best, a kind of National Socialism (or perhaps, trade unionism) that’s great at benefiting everyone directly below the CEO but not so great at socializing the wealth accrued by the company at-large. I would argue that even above and beyond the immediate miserable labor practices of Amazon as a company, what you have is an “Infinite Paperclip Machine” under the hood. Amazon is an engine of industry that snatches up cheap raw materials and transforms them into expensive finished products without bothering to ask the question “Do we need another box of paperclips?”
Redistributing profit is nice, I guess. But so long as Amazon operates on the principle of maximized profits, it becomes a meat-grinder of primary accumulation.
He’d be the next Henry Ford, a man famous for really high quality political opinions and a legacy of ecologically friendly public-private partnerships.