Imagine my surprise when I went to my Amazon Prime Video channel this past week and discovered that they were now going to show ads while I watched shows unless I paid them an extra three dollars a month. What one Reddit user called “an extortion pop-up” appeared on my screen and let me know this bad news. I guess I missed the memo.

What?!  Is Jeff Bezos so hard up that he has to squeeze more money out of us?  I guess the $550 billion he made last year wasn’t quite enough.  I know he built a sailing yacht so big that he wanted a Dutch town to dismantle an historic bridge so that it could sail through. The Koru, as the yacht is called, is the world’s largest sailing yacht and cost $500 million to construct. Locals protested the dismantling of the bridge, so the yacht company towed it out by a different route under cover of darkness.

It’s rather satisfying to see the public push back on these billionaires, though such “victories” are Pyrrhic.

So here we are with another Amazon fee, on top of the $139  annual Prime fee I already pay which gets me free two-day shipping and Prime video.

This is the same Amazon that discontinued AmazonSmile, which let its users donate 0.5% of all eligible purchases to a charity of their choice.  In the 10 years that AmazonSmile was in operation, half a billion dollars were donated to charities.  They discontinued the program, saying, “The program has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped. With so many eligible organizations — more than 1 million globally — our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin.” Well, I’m calling BS on that. And the many local charities who received even a tiny piece of that pie expressed displeasure as well.

Jeff, it’s people like you (and Elon, Mark Z., et. al.) who give late-stage capitalism a bad name. 

Late-stage capitalism is characterized by wealth increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, a growing impoverished class (how many people under the age of 35 do you know who can afford to buy a home?), environmental destruction (climate change), and politics run by corporations.  I’d say we’re there on all counts.

We are certainly living in the new Gilded Age, replete with robber barons, as the middle class of America is disappearing, and more enter the ranks of the working poor.

The superrich have no incentive nor desire to pay their fair share of taxes.  They jet off to Davos to decide how they will improve the world.  The government doesn’t need my money, they protest. I know how to fix things better than they do. 

Dutch economist Rutger Bregman famously confronted them at Davos in 2019, saying, “I hear people talking the language of participation, justice, equality, and transparency but almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right? And of the rich just not paying their fair share. It feels like I’m at a firefighters’ conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water.”

And yet Jeff tries to squeeze more blood out of those turnips.