The Richest Sociopath in the World

 

[ This article appeared almost a year ago at OpEdNews and Dissident Voice.  It was written before Jeff Bezos divorced his wife, MacKenzie, after 25 years of marriage. While the final settlement affects his total net worth, the important calculations and the overall thrust of the article are still solid.  Wealth inequality of this level is a grotesque, socially destructive artifact of capitalism.  I think I was able to capture the scale of Mr. Bezos's wealth and mind-numbing callousness to his employees and the country which has been instrumental in helping him build his empire.  Mr. Bezos had better hope that the "camel through the eye of a needle" warning was just the mad ravings of a smelly proto-hippie wandering in the desert way back a couple millennia ago. ]

Obviously the above pie chart is a put-on.  It is well-documented that working conditions for most employees of Amazon are abysmal, dehumanizing, bordering on the abuse we normally associate with slavery.

Moreover, the median employee's salary under Jeff Bezos' imperial lordship is $28,446.  No one working a regular job there has paid off their credit cards and is driving to work in a Mercedes.
Jeff Bezos is referred to as The Richest Man in the World and his personal fortune, while growing by $191,000 each minute, is currently estimated at $168 billion.

So "$28,446 vs. $168,000,000,000? While I can acknowledge the simple math, I find the contrast of such numbers on a gut level difficult to grasp.

To get a handle on such inequality, let's try approaching it from different angles.

One way to put the disparity into perspective is to recognize it takes Bezos just under nine seconds to earn what Amazon's median worker does in an entire year.

Another is to recognize that for a worker to go through Jeff Bezos' current personal fortune -- and of course, it continues mounting at accelerating levels as I write this -- at his/her current median annual income of $28,446 per year, WOULD TAKE 5,905,927 YEARS! That's close to 6 million years!
For Jeff Bezos himself to go through his current $168 billion, assuming his earnings stopped dead this very moment -- which as you and I know they won't -- SPENDING $1,000,000 A DAY, would take NEARLY 460 years. Yes, even spending $1 million a day, in the year 2475 he'd still have plenty of cash, tens of million of dollars mad money.  We can feel confident that he wouldn't be foraging through the dumpster behind 7-11.

Now, further consider that while the $28,446 median salary is above the national poverty line for a single individual if that person is the sole breadwinner for a family of four, it is marginally above it, which is why many Amazon employees must rely on government assistance to keep from starving.
As well as calculation, I did some speculation -- a simple exercise in imagination.

Apparently Bezos' wealth generating machine is raking it in so fast, he's currently making $11.5 million per hour ... every hour ... 24 hours a day ... seven days a week. $11,500,000 per hour!

So here's what I was picturing in my mind's eye ...

If for 40 hours of the 168 hours in a week, Bezos were willing to scrape by on a mere $5,840,000 per hour, he could give every one of his 566,000 Amazon employees a $10 per hour raise.  Of course the remaining 128 hours in each week, Bezos could continue earning his normal $11.5 million per hour, not having to share any of it with the pathetic slobs who work for him.

Rhetorical question: Does Jeff Bezos have any concept of what that $10 per hour increase would mean to his employees?

I'm not going to even suggest here I'm offering this for Bezos to entertain.  There are so many advantages to him both as a putative member of the human race and the employer of over a half million workers -- advantages that are so OBVIOUS -- if they haven't occurred to him by now, then his brain functions in ways beyond my understanding.  For one thing, he could point to his new fig leaf of "generosity" and ask people to stop calling him a selfish prick.  Second, Amazon employees I'm sure would respond to his largesse with greater company loyalty and increased tolerance for his onerous working conditions.  And he'd still be the richest SOB on the block and could mock the pauperish Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as pitiable wannabees.

Consider . . .

The most poorly paid Amazon employee now makes $12 per hour.  The $10 per hour raise I proposed would boost those $12 per hour workers right up there with Costco employees, who make an average of $21 per hour.  And with the across-the-board $10 per hour increase, Bezos' higher paid employees would be earning among the finest wages in the world provided by a major corporation.
And by golly, there's a plus side to the plus side . . .

Bezos's bold and gracious gesture would result in a public relations coup of cosmic proportions!  Amazon would no longer be demonized -- well, not quite as much -- by us bleeding-heart lefties as a capitalistic scourge and one-way ticket to Hell for the future of mankind, even if its environmental record is appalling and its business model generally the stuff of steroid-laced neo-feudalism.

Granted, Bezos would have to do some belt-tightening.  He'd have to watch his pennies but could probably manage it, eh?  Maybe he could skip a couple meals and do some of his own weeding at his estate.  After all, after lavishing the $10 per hour raise on all of his employees, he'd only be pulling in $1,705,600,000 per week.  I know I know!  Like me you're probably getting all teary-eyed for the poor guy.

Let me get to the extremely anti-climactic conclusion of this lament qua analysis.

Since nothing will change until the system itself changes, meaning the one in place now that creates, incentivizes, and lionizes the obscenely wealthy -- reference current holder of the Office of President of the United States of America -- I can only recommend this ...

We have been labeling Jeff Bezos as 'The Richest Man in the World'.  Yet, quite honestly I don't personally know any human, man or woman, who behaves like this gluttonous chunk of self-indulgent meat.  It actually makes me nauseous to think we're members of the same species.

Thus, from now on let's use the correct terminology.

Let's call Jeff Bezos what he really is . . .

THE RICHEST SOCIOPATH IN THE WORLD.

We could probably order bumper stickers to help correct the record . . . from Amazon, of course.


[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]



The Richest Sociopath in the World

Book Review: “The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela” by Dan Kovalik

In one concise statement, Dan Kovalik sums up the criminal — if self-serving and for now effective — foreign policy of the U.S. across the planet:

“The US appears to be intentionally spreading chaos throughout strategic portions of the world, leaving virtually no independent state standing to protect their resources, especially oil, from Western exploitation.  And, this goal is being achieved with resounding success, while also achieving the subsidiary goal of enriching the behemoth military-industrial complex.”

A divided Korea, a decimated Vietnam, endless war in Afghanistan, a barely functional Iraq, a destroyed Libya, ongoing destruction of Syria and Venezuela, relentless attacks and incipient war on Iran, give us more than a glimpse into the awesome power of America’s military might, its malice and ruthlessness in projecting that power, its no-holds-barred no-moral-qualms no-body-count no-questions-asked ends-justify-the-means tactical use of genocide, its jaw-dropping hypocrisy in portraying itself as a force of good, its psychopathic exceptionalist world view which judges all other nations and their populations as dispensable, and its ultimate loyalty to a tiny autocratic ruling elite who use “democracy” as just another tool in their bag of tricks to promote absolute corporate tyranny — the framework of fascism Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism — and global hegemony.  It’s for good reason that the U.S. is now often referred to as the Empire of Chaos.

The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela: How the US is Orchestrating a Coup for Oil, as the title suggests, more specifically focuses on the horrors inflicted by the U.S. government on Venezuela.  This thorough, extremely well-researched, and fully supported exposé covers the current crises in and about Venezuela, intentionally and purposefully instigated by the U.S. to overthrow its current government and plunder the country’s rich oil reserves.  Just as importantly it offers rich and revealing historical accounts of America’s past dealings with Venezuela and almost identical scenarios with other Latin American nations, detailing the darkness and corruption that lies at the heart of U.S. foreign policy, and how that has cast a pall of oppression over the entirety of South and Central America, the nations of which have the geographical misfortune of being in America’s self-declared hemisphere of influence — read that as hemisphere of total domination and ruthless exploitation.  From Chile to Haiti to Panama to Honduras to Nicaragua to El Salvador to Colombia, we see the brutal deployment of U.S. political and military assets leaving whole countries impoverished, the poor without hope — often deprived of even food and water — and piles of nameless corpses in escalating numbers, dismissed by the U.S. government and its lapdog media as collateral damage of the Great Imperial Project. 

By the end of Kovalik’s chilling indictment of U.S. malfeasance in its war on the people of Venezuela, what is astonishing and shocking is that the U.S. is again getting away with such overt and illegal aggression, by not only using the same play book, but by using the same players.  With Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, John Bolton as National Security Advisor, and Elliot Abrams as Special Envoy to Venezuela, at the helm of the project to take Venezuela’s government apart and replace it with the puppet regime of the unelected Juan Guaido, we have three of the most notorious of the notorious — murderous, lying thugs — doing the dirty work.  All three have sordid histories of inciting war and orchestrating regime changes.  Abrams was indicted and convicted for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair.

The thought-provoking Plot to Overthrow Venezuela is very well-written, with a clarity, accessibility, and erudition which puts it in a class with the best works of Noam Chomsky.  The Foreword by Oliver Stone is a worthy and deserving way to get things started.  I give it the highest possible recommendation, truly one of the most engaging and informative books I’ve read in ages.

[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]




Book Review: “The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela” by Dan Kovalik