Amazon, Bezos, Yuck

I don't buy things from Amazon because I prefer to support local merchants (so there will continue to be local merchants, duh). I wasn't spending a lot of time thinking about Amazon and what it means, though, until I listened to a recent Why Is This Happening podcast about its predatory ways.

The conversation between Chris Hayes and Stacy Mitchell of the Institute of Local Self Reliance lays it all out, and it's bad. I won't say more. Just listen to it.

On a related topic, did you know that Jeff Bezos gives .0906 percent (yes, that is four places after the decimal point and it's a percentage, so it's six places as a number) of his income to charity? As Twitter user Rafael Shimunov says,

If you make $25 an hour, and drop a $20 bill on 2 gofundme's per year, you're giving more of your income to charity than the richest person on earth.

And then he added,

I was too generous, using income.

The median net worth of an American is $11K which means if u give $1 per month to charity you are giving more of your net worth than Bezos, the richest person on earth.

$1 a month would have you giving over 20% more than Bezos.

Billionaires should not exist. They don't earn it, there's no way to earn that kind of money. It can only be done through exploitation.