The $200-Billion
Problem
So amidst the political grandstanding and the fascistic race war and the protests and the racially-motivated killings and the mask-haters throwing temper tantrums, it recently came out that Jeff Bezos is worth $200-billion.
You know, Bezos. The guy that owns the Washington Post and the super-conglomerate that is Amazon. The guy that lost half his wealth to his now-ex, and now is worth about $200,000,000,000.
That’s a lot of zeros. I could go on and on coming up with jokes about how big that number is. I could tell you that Bezos would be making the equivalent of a lifetime of your paychecks in the time it takes you to just finish reading this paragraph. But, really, it’s not worth wasting time like that.
I will say that Bezos is worth 200 times more than a certain orange-skinned narcissist in the White House will ever make even if he doesn’t end up in prison. And I’m sure that fact alone has said orange-skinned narcissist infuriated. No wonder why he hates Bezos and wants to make his businesses suffer!
But he’s not alone in the group of people that are infuriated knowing that the guy who is in charge of the mega-glom Amazon has so much money that it’s outright obscene. We’re not just talking rich or even filthy rich. It’s not even “Breaking Bad” rich or Mexican drug cartel rich. We’re talking obscenely filthy disgusting Saudi Big Oil rich!
Now I’m sure you’ll have a whole bunch of people that will give that condescending glare and try to “educate” us about the fact that Bezos’ “worth” is really diversified into stocks and bonds and holdings and various different money programs and it’s not really physical dollar value. I mean, yeah, if Bezos could sell all of his stocks and cash in all his bonds and withdraw all of his various accounts today and put them all into physical dollar bills, then it might be actually be $200,000,000,000. But who would want to count? And that amount of withdrawal would certainly cause some serious reverberations in the financial world.
Yes, a lot of Bezos’ “value” is hypothetical. The stock market is all speculative. Stock can be “worth” a thousand dollars today and then ten cents tomorrow. Its value is ultimately meaningless until you buy or sell. We’ve all seen it happen enough times. We’ve been watching it with the Dow Jones in just this past year.
But the fact of the matter is that Jeff Bezos, as CEO of Amazon, is disgustingly rich. His companies prosper, while the people at the bottom of his various corporate pyramids are not.
And that is a problem for a lot of people. They want to know why Bezos – and, by extension, the rest of the corporate CEOs – can get so obscenely rich on the backs of the underpaid and undervalued haggard employees. Why they’re not getting paid more. Why they’re not getting hazard pay in the middle of working during a global pandemic. Why their health and dental insurance packages are crap and cost more and more while covering less and less. How can people at the bottom of the corporate pyramid be so undervalued and underappreciated and have to work harder and harder while the ones at the top get filthy rich and richer at every financial quarter?
So here’s the answer: because that is the name of the game in American business.
Let’s get brutally honest here... the name of the game for American business is profit, profit, profit. Profit first. Profit second. Profit third, fourth, and fifth. Profit ad infinitum and ad nauseum. It’s not about keeping the business going. It’s not about providing a first-rate product or service, or customer satisfaction, or winning awards, or whatever other artificial metric you can come up with. It’s not even about the longevity of the business. It is all about the profit.
A business can be running for ten years and still be considered a “loser” if they don’t make profit for all of those ten years, while a young upstart competitive company can be considered an “overwhelming success” in their first fiscal quarter simply because of profit. And guess what? That upstart company will buy out and shut down that ten-year-old business and then go bankrupt in the following quarter, and the execs still be considered “successes” simply because of the profit made before the bankruptcy.
And what is profit, you ask? Profit is simply what is left of revenue after all the expenses are paid. “Revenue” is money coming in. All of those sales made on Amazon or through Amazon or distributed by Amazon. All of the investment money from stock purchases. “Expenses” include all of the salaries and benefits and overhead and materials and distribution costs and taxes and consulting costs for everyone below the upper executive levels. In other words, everyone in Amazon that works for Bezos all the way down to the people who sweep the floors and clean the toilets and mow the lawn are all “expenses”.
The name of the game, then, is not just to make a profit, but to do so each and every financial quarter and in ever-increasing amounts. It’s not enough to simply say “we made two-percent profit this quarter”. No, that’s not good enough for the gods of Wall Street. They expect you to give a number in advance of how much more you’ll make this quarter and then the next, and if you can’t make it, then you and your business are considered losers, and your stock value crashes, and you’re looking at getting bought out and/or replaced.
And it does not matter one whit about how you make that profit; just that you do. If you have to slash income and jobs and benefits down to the bone marrow, so be it. If you have to not pay certain bills, or to hold off on paying those bills to make those numbers, then so be it. If you have to shuffle numbers to dummy companies like Enron did two decades ago and get an accounting firm to lie about it, then so be it. If you have to deliver substandard or even dangerously defective product because you used bargain-basement materials to keep expenses down, then so be it.
Because once you do make those numbers, then the financial world loves you and your investors reward you with more stock options and bonuses and perks. And that is all that really matters to the corporate executives. It’s about making profit so they can get paid.
That is why Jeff Bezos is worth $200-billion along with all of the other big corporate executives in all of the other companies, and why the rest of us are getting underpaid and undervalued. It is all about profit.
Do I think it’s right? Of course not! I’m not saying this to defend what has been going on. I’m explaining this to you so you can understand where the real evil is. It isn’t about Amazon or even Jeff Bezos! It’s about a business and financial system that values profit over everything else. It is the game that is broken, not the players. Bezos and the other players are simply playing the game as it is currently meant to be played.
If you want Bezos and all the other business executives to change things so that employees get paid better and get better benefits, you can’t do it by taxes or regulations. We have all seen how a change in government can undo any and all of those things in less than a decade. There needs to be a sea change in businesses and in the game that they play. It needs to stop being about profit first, last, and always. Then, no matter who is in government, will the world of business do what is right.
Millionaires and billionaires and even hypothetical trillionaires come and go. Jeff Bezos is just the latest of business players to either praise or scorn. Think about all of the businesses that used to be king that are now going away for good. The constant that remains is how the game is played. That is where your outrage should be. That is what needs to change for all of us to improve.
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