An Essay of Opinion

If you think Jeff Bezos is not going to take over the government and murder your family, I have some bad news for you.  Jeff Bezos does not care about you, he does not wake up and think about you in the morning while he slurps up his flavorless sustenance breakfast paste (I cannot confirm that that is what he eats for breakfast but let’s be honest I can’t really picture Bezos caring about/deriving pleasure from human food). He wakes up and grimaces, his wrinkled thumb of a forehead creasing even more than usual as his mortal enemy, the American Dream, creeps into his mind. I know this seems like a humorous piece, like due to my casual tone there’s gonna be some “Gotcha!” moment at the end, where I decide that maybe OK, he’s not actually that bad. Let me say right now there’s no such moment coming. Any attempt at humor in my writing is to get you to pay attention to what’s going on right under your noses, because for some reason Americans don’t really seem to care much at all about who is controlling their lives. So if I can make you chuckle along the way you’re welcome, but make no mistake: if you ignore this information and push it off as some sort of goofy conspiracy, you will regret it.

Before I delve into some of the more insidious goings on Bezos has going on let’s talk about who he is as a person. A Princeton graduate, he founded Amazon in 1994 and in the 25 years since it has made him the richest man on the face of the earth. Rich enough to end world hunger many times over, which he chooses not to do. But hey, don’t listen to me, that’s just based on a statistic from the World Health Organization. Then again, why do something as unrewarding and forgettable as eradicate hunger worldwide when you could, say, work low wage earners so hard they  have to pee in bottles to meet their quotas and attempt suicide on the job often (necessitating emergency services 189 times over a five year span according to naturalnews.com of 2019)? The answer is one we will never truly know, but it seems certain that having billions of dollars does something strange and horrible to a person. Or as Sam Wilkin, renowned economist, may have you believe, being a horrible person certainly has something to do with making billions of dollars. Wilkins asserts that going back as far as the Roman emperor Marcus Crassus, and continuing with the grossly wealthy American industrialist families and today’s tech giants, there were two variables consistent with success. Psychopathic ruthlessness and lack of empathy. Indeed, whether it is a correlation or causation, I believe that all of our elite globalist ‘businesspeople’ exercise quite a psychopathic ruthlessness each day, as they fret over their favorite team’s game or what color of Givenchy suit to wear as their fellow Americans die in the streets without healthcare. I wonder if a billionaire puts their window up when they pass a homeless person on the street? I don’t think so. I think they must enjoy how we suffer; if they had a human conscience or capacity for love they could not be who they are. No wonder Jeff Bezos spends 1.6 million dollars per year on private security, while lecturing the rest of us to “Step back and think about what a great society we have”, from his ivory tower. If it’s so great, why put 1.6 million dollars worth of gates and guards and guns between yourself and that same society, Jeff? I think it’s because he knows that although our society is very great to him, Bezos has not been so great to our society. He knows this, and knows we may not realize it yet, but he’s scared of what will happen when we do.

“OK,” you’re probably saying to yourself. “So rich people are bad, I kind of agree with you on that. But how does that mean Jeff Bezos is going to take over our government and kill my family?” And that’s a good question. I am glad you asked. Unfortunately, this opinion piece is not simply on how Jeff Bezos is the same as all the other soulless rich people who dominated an industry, created a monopoly, and sat around playing with enough wealth to save generations of lives but ultimately decided not to. This piece is on how he is much, much worse. His supervillain-esque reign is different than any other the modern world has ever seen for its domination of multiple industries (catalyzed by the technological revolution), his personal desire to control the media, and his successfully sneaky integration into the US federal government.

I searched ‘Monopolies in America” on Bing and Google, and racked my brain about how I’d been taught about monopolies in school to see what whoever it is that makes these decisions would like me to know about monopolies in America. Before I get into what they presented me with, let’s first briefly explore what, ideologically, a monopoly is, and what threats monopolies in America represent.  To consider monopolies hyperbolically, think of communism- basically the ultimate example of one central power dominating an industry, but instead of one company, the entity in control is also the government. Communism represents the same threats as a monopoly: with no competition, no opposing voices, the dominating force is free to throttle and abuse the common people. Now let’s see how the media overlords want you to understand monopolies. When I searched the internet for monopolies in America I found pictures of the children’s game Monopoly representing articles that, although sometimes informative, often reinforced the supposed strength of our anti-monopoly laws. I remember learning about the classic Coca Cola example- that’s what a monopoly was to me, a reasonably harmless, if successful, soda company that would hurt the other soda companies’ profits. There’s a reason why the powers that be want monopolies to be appreciated in a harmless way. Per William Lultz, ‘According to Lilia Borlongan-Alvarez, in an article entitled “The trouble with business gobbledygook” (20 March 2010):

“[T]he current global financial crisis which has led to the mass firing of employees has spawned popular euphemisms which both government and private organizations find convenient to use to protect the latter from embarrassment or legal action.”’

i.e.: large corporations in America and the American Government have a history of using euphemistic rhetoric to save their own images and avoid litigation. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why no one seems to be paying attention to Amazon’s government takeover, and it’s important to understand there is a reason why it’s not at the forefront of the news; so that the following facts sound like a crackpot conspiracy theory.

“Pentagon Cloud Contract Investigation Uncovers Potential Ethical Violations, Narrows Competition to Amazon and Microsoft.” This is the title of a Washington Post article from 2019 that I cannot read without personally putting 112$ into Jeff Bezos’ pocket. After searching the web, I found the article duplicated on triblive.com/news: “The Pentagon separately determined that alleged conflicts of interest on the part of Amazon Web Services did not adversely affect the procurement, concluding an investigation it opened in late February. The Pentagon’s investigation did uncover “potential ethical violations” that would be forwarded to the Defense Department inspector general for further inquiry, Smith said Monday.” So… Amazon, who lobbies more than any other company in the tech industry (lobby which here basically means to give ex-government officials money to tell their buddies what to say) is still in the race for the prize of 10B dollars and the government’s most sensitive defense information even though the government did find potential ethical violations in their conduct. But don’t worry, another part of the government will investigate that later so that after Amazon has a lot of dirt on them and their 10B dollars and nothing can be done anymore we will maybe get to learn what the violations were. And don’t forget, I only got to read this by way of a website that I’m sure paid Amazon owner Jeff Bezos for the pleasure of using the article written by his personal newspaper. About his company’s success if not dishonest if not dystopian achievement of a huge fortune from the taxpayers in exchange for his company to also control the military’s sensitive information.

Take a second to take all that in, reread it maybe.

I tried to restructure those sentences so they wouldn’t sound so long and winding and confusing, but I decided to leave them that way. There’s really no better way to phrase it. Jeff Bezos’ domination of more and more facets of American life is just that- long, winding, and confusing in nature. Enough is reported on the surface, even though his own newspaper, that people assume it must all be legal. And once you connect enough dots to start to see the whole picture, you are writing giant run-on sentences that people may have to read a couple of times. And who’s got time to read things twice? You can just go watch some amazon prime or do some online shopping. But you are different. You made it this far. So you get to see into the future with me.

Here’s where the opinion comes in. So far, I have been laying out the facts. Follow my sources if you don’t believe it. But what do all these facts mean, and how’s your family going to end up murdered? Well, a couple of ways. First off, the price of regular goods such as clothes, books, and foods will increase astronomically, as jobs become scarcer and lower paying. Then, the intersectionality of markets which Amazon dominates will lead to massive confusion and misinformation about the cause of the shortage of jobs and high cost of goods.

Price gouging is a classic and simple concept; a large company with many resources can afford to give great prices on a good until all competition is starved out, at which point they raise the prices astronomically, and no other entity exists to offer a more reasonable price. This is bad enough in a classic monopoly over one item or industry, but Amazon has already displayed a strong and quickly growing control over multiple industries- starting with bookstores and retail clothing stores and spreading to multimedia, grocery delivery, and government cloud contracting, amongst others. If their momentum continues, and Amazon does continue to monopolize more industries, they could eventually control the prices of all goods, across all markets. It would then be up to them if they wanted to charge a reasonable price or not. But they wouldn’t take advantage of the scarcity of a product and use real people fearing for their lives just to make a few extra billion bucks right? Well, if you give any weight to the fact that it seems they price gouged victims of Hurricane Irma in advance, on the price of water, maybe it’s not super unrealistic to see them doing this to you and your family when given the chance. Not only will the price of goods be exponentially higher, with one company running the delivery, production, and sales of many types of products the supply chain will become extremely streamlined and dependent upon robotics. Amazon has already expressed a desire to further roboticize their factories, even going so far as to acquire entire robotics companies and host contests to see which robots can outperform humans by the most. Considering this fact in conjunction with how bad we’ve already established Amazon treats their low wage employees, it is no stretch of the imagination to think that if they can replace all of these workers with robots, they will. And it’s only a matter of time. With no job at Amazon, few other companies in existence to offer jobs, and skyrocketing price of all Amazon goods, you may as well consider your family murdered.

There is one way that humans avoid being taken advantage of in this modern age, and that is by mass communication via the media. With Bezos already personally owning a large news publication, owning Amazon Prime, and has stated that he wishes to further his foray into the world of media, Amazon will have an iron grasp on the information that we have access to in this hypothetical post-Bezos world. It will easily be able to manipulate the narrative on why our country is in such bad shape, perpetuating American’s anger and hopelessness.

    So now you see. Tell your friends…Jeff Bezos is going to take over our country and murder their families. Don’t shop at Amazon, and support your local businesses as well as politicians whose policies protect all American businesses, not just Amazonian supergiants. And remember, its not that Jeff Bezos hates you, he just really, really doesn’t care.