It’s a small act of defiance, canceling our Amazon Prime membership, but Jeff Bezos isn’t going to build his rocket ship with our money, not if we can do anything about it.
And actually, that was the whole point behind Bezos lining up behind Donald Trump, just as it was for Elon Musk aligning with the MAGA side, wasn’t it?
They’re not true believers, just paper billionaires in search of more billions that they can throw at their literal pie-in-the-sky outer space fever dreams, among other things.
The reality of these things is, in case this wasn’t already obvious, you don’t become a billionaire on your own, despite the mythology.
Bezos built Amazon by exploiting his workforce with productivity quotas that reduce them to having to take a piss in bottles so that they don’t fall behind, and leveraging the federal safety net to take care of his employees’ healthcare and grocery bills.
Where’s Upton Sinclair when we need him, right?
Our small act of solidarity with the men and women who would deliver packages to our house several times a week was leaving a tray of goodies – sweets, sodas – for them to pick from during the holiday season the past couple of years.
Musk amassed his paper billions by piling up our tax dollars in the form of subsidies for the electric vehicles that Trump tells his gas-guzzling base are unreliable.
Funny how that works.
No doubt, Musk won’t advise Trump to cut EV subsidies from the budget when he’s slashing federal spending, and Bezos isn’t going to push for the National Labor Relations Board to play a bigger role in enforcing basic workplace protections.
That’s the reason you sell yourself out to a transactional politician like a Trump.
None of these guys has principles outside of, more for us.
In that sense, the 2024 election worked out well for these three.
Trump avoids prison time for his years of defrauding the government, gets a delay on having to pay the hundreds of millions in civil judgments for more fraud and for defamation, and he gets four more years to figure out new ways to use the federal government to put more money in his pocket.
Bezos and Musk, for their parts, get to whisper in Trump’s ear, and they’re assuming, at least, that it will put more money in their pockets.
Time will tell on that; you’re only useful to Trump as long as you’re useful to Trump, if you know what I’m saying there.
As for our Amazon Prime days being over, it’s defiance, not sacrifice.
We’ll still buy stuff, just not from a company that exploits workers, cuts the margins of small businesses, to put money into the pocket of a wannabe oligarch.
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Chris Graham
