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The ruthless boss of Amazon.com, that Pac-Man of retailers that aims to put every other retailer out of business, is feigning shock and hurt over an article in the New York Times. [1]
The article gave an inside look at the cutthroat corporate culture Amazon's white collar workers are subjected to. The company is a veritable pressure-cooker cum police state in the Red Chinese style, with workers reporting on each other and holding victims up for criticism.
This is not the first establishment-media expose of the hellish work conditions imposed by the slave driver Bezos. Previous stories have reported on the terrible situation of the lowly wage-serfs who fulfill the orders, scurrying around the warehouses like rats on amphetamines to pack and ship merchandise. (Turns out not everything is "virtual" at a "digital-New Economy" company like Amazon. Someone still has to deal with grubby material reality. As for "New," In fact it's the same old capitalist exploitation in this "New" economy.)
These previous stories created no ripple in the media culture. Apparently the differences this time are that the New York Times is a media body with more mass, and thus a powerful gravitational force, and the workers in the article are the white collar ones.
Bezos wasted no time reacting to the negative publicity. In addition to mobilizing cadres of his workers to defend Amazon and avow rebuttals to the Times, Bezos dispatched his chief flack, Jay Carney, to CBS television to deny all. Yeah, that Carney, Obama's former chief mouthpiece. A very practiced liar who worked for a master liar. Before that, Carney came from Time magazine, which says a lot about kind of people who are called "journalists" in America. (And elsewhere, too. Maybe you're starting to see why I call these creatures propagandists, not "journalists.")
And Bezos himself weighed in, pretending he has no idea his company isn't a Garden of Eden of a workplace. He laid down a letter on his employees' heads, in which he acted the part of Captain Renault in "Casablanca," "discovering" there was gambling going on in Rick's Café Americain. He decried the “shockingly callous management practices” described in the Times article, while simultaneously claiming disbelief (unlike Renault). [2]
“I don’t think any company adopting the approach portrayed could survive, much less thrive, in today’s highly competitive tech hiring market,” exclaimed Bezos. In other words, it can't be true, because Amazon is so big. (It doesn't manage to make profits, by the way. That hasn't stopped "investors" from kiting its stock ever higher.) That's in the spirit of the bumper sticker slogan If You're So Smart, How Come You're Not Rich?
So we have stunned disbelief, rebuttal, and also denial:
“I don’t recognize this Amazon and I very much hope you don’t, either.”
Hint: You DON'T AGREE with this trash article, DO you? Surely Jeff Bezos would see it if it were true. Want to argue with the Boss about it?
Then he laid his trap. He called on any of his serfs who knew of “stories like those reported” to report to him directly.
“Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero,” he purred reassuringly, assuming the pose of an "enlightened" employer.
Now, if the stories are untrue, as he asserts, and someone comes to him saying otherwise, that means he's found a malcontent and possible traitorous source for the Times.
This is a place that deliberately "culls" a certain percentage of employees every year. It is an utterly ruthless meatgrinder. Now what do you suppose will happen to any employee foolish enough to take Bezos up on his offer and reveal hiim/herself to be "negative" and "disloyal"? (Not to mention a suspected source for the Times "hatchet job.")
Well, What Would Mao Do?
We know what he would do, because he did it.
Mao, in addition to being a ruthless, power-mad totalitarian, was an extremely deceitful, treacherous, and manipulative man. One of his power plays was a ruse labeled "Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom." After many years of repression, people had learned to hide their true feelings. In order to smoke out those who weren't thoroughly brainwashed but merely outwardly conforming, he came up with a trick to get them to expose themselves. He launched a campaign, with great fanfare, the one I just named, in which people were led to believe that the government had turned over a new leaf and decided to allow people to express themselves freely. People were encouraged to write slogans on walls and so on. After a suitable number of suckers took the bait, the repression came. The secret doubters, non-conformists, and those capable of independent thought had announced themselves, making the job of the "security services" (repression forces) laughably easy.
Bezos' letter strikes me as a mini-Thousand Flowers Blooming gambit.
The letter is a feint, designed to lure the naive into exposing themselves for termination. (But only termination from a job, not from life.)
Obama pulled the same nasty trick on millions of "illegal" immigrants, luring them into applying for temporary deferment of deportation if they applied, which requires them to come forward, identify themselves, give up their addresses and phone numbers and place of work, for easy rounding up later. Very few have even been approved so far. Obama has been the King of Deportations, deporting more people than any other president in U.S. history, locking up women and child refugees from Central America fleeing for their lives, and more. He created a reign of fear in immigrant communities with his Orwellian-named "Secure Communities" program. And while pretending to be targeting hardened criminals, people with ancient shoplifting beefs get ripped out of society, losing everything, with families smashed up in the process and scattered to the winds. It's been one ruse after another with Obama on the immigration question. (As on most matters with the Prevaricator-in-Chief.)
The lesson for normal humans is, Don't Ever Trust Anyone In Power.
1] "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace- The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions," New York Times, August 15, 2015.
2] "Jeff Bezos and Amazon Employees Join Debate Over Its Culture," New York Times, August 17, 2015.
The article gave an inside look at the cutthroat corporate culture Amazon's white collar workers are subjected to. The company is a veritable pressure-cooker cum police state in the Red Chinese style, with workers reporting on each other and holding victims up for criticism.
This is not the first establishment-media expose of the hellish work conditions imposed by the slave driver Bezos. Previous stories have reported on the terrible situation of the lowly wage-serfs who fulfill the orders, scurrying around the warehouses like rats on amphetamines to pack and ship merchandise. (Turns out not everything is "virtual" at a "digital-New Economy" company like Amazon. Someone still has to deal with grubby material reality. As for "New," In fact it's the same old capitalist exploitation in this "New" economy.)
These previous stories created no ripple in the media culture. Apparently the differences this time are that the New York Times is a media body with more mass, and thus a powerful gravitational force, and the workers in the article are the white collar ones.
Bezos wasted no time reacting to the negative publicity. In addition to mobilizing cadres of his workers to defend Amazon and avow rebuttals to the Times, Bezos dispatched his chief flack, Jay Carney, to CBS television to deny all. Yeah, that Carney, Obama's former chief mouthpiece. A very practiced liar who worked for a master liar. Before that, Carney came from Time magazine, which says a lot about kind of people who are called "journalists" in America. (And elsewhere, too. Maybe you're starting to see why I call these creatures propagandists, not "journalists.")
And Bezos himself weighed in, pretending he has no idea his company isn't a Garden of Eden of a workplace. He laid down a letter on his employees' heads, in which he acted the part of Captain Renault in "Casablanca," "discovering" there was gambling going on in Rick's Café Americain. He decried the “shockingly callous management practices” described in the Times article, while simultaneously claiming disbelief (unlike Renault). [2]
“I don’t think any company adopting the approach portrayed could survive, much less thrive, in today’s highly competitive tech hiring market,” exclaimed Bezos. In other words, it can't be true, because Amazon is so big. (It doesn't manage to make profits, by the way. That hasn't stopped "investors" from kiting its stock ever higher.) That's in the spirit of the bumper sticker slogan If You're So Smart, How Come You're Not Rich?
So we have stunned disbelief, rebuttal, and also denial:
“I don’t recognize this Amazon and I very much hope you don’t, either.”
Hint: You DON'T AGREE with this trash article, DO you? Surely Jeff Bezos would see it if it were true. Want to argue with the Boss about it?
Then he laid his trap. He called on any of his serfs who knew of “stories like those reported” to report to him directly.
“Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero,” he purred reassuringly, assuming the pose of an "enlightened" employer.
Now, if the stories are untrue, as he asserts, and someone comes to him saying otherwise, that means he's found a malcontent and possible traitorous source for the Times.
This is a place that deliberately "culls" a certain percentage of employees every year. It is an utterly ruthless meatgrinder. Now what do you suppose will happen to any employee foolish enough to take Bezos up on his offer and reveal hiim/herself to be "negative" and "disloyal"? (Not to mention a suspected source for the Times "hatchet job.")
Well, What Would Mao Do?
We know what he would do, because he did it.
Mao, in addition to being a ruthless, power-mad totalitarian, was an extremely deceitful, treacherous, and manipulative man. One of his power plays was a ruse labeled "Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom." After many years of repression, people had learned to hide their true feelings. In order to smoke out those who weren't thoroughly brainwashed but merely outwardly conforming, he came up with a trick to get them to expose themselves. He launched a campaign, with great fanfare, the one I just named, in which people were led to believe that the government had turned over a new leaf and decided to allow people to express themselves freely. People were encouraged to write slogans on walls and so on. After a suitable number of suckers took the bait, the repression came. The secret doubters, non-conformists, and those capable of independent thought had announced themselves, making the job of the "security services" (repression forces) laughably easy.
Bezos' letter strikes me as a mini-Thousand Flowers Blooming gambit.
The letter is a feint, designed to lure the naive into exposing themselves for termination. (But only termination from a job, not from life.)
Obama pulled the same nasty trick on millions of "illegal" immigrants, luring them into applying for temporary deferment of deportation if they applied, which requires them to come forward, identify themselves, give up their addresses and phone numbers and place of work, for easy rounding up later. Very few have even been approved so far. Obama has been the King of Deportations, deporting more people than any other president in U.S. history, locking up women and child refugees from Central America fleeing for their lives, and more. He created a reign of fear in immigrant communities with his Orwellian-named "Secure Communities" program. And while pretending to be targeting hardened criminals, people with ancient shoplifting beefs get ripped out of society, losing everything, with families smashed up in the process and scattered to the winds. It's been one ruse after another with Obama on the immigration question. (As on most matters with the Prevaricator-in-Chief.)
The lesson for normal humans is, Don't Ever Trust Anyone In Power.
1] "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace- The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions," New York Times, August 15, 2015.
2] "Jeff Bezos and Amazon Employees Join Debate Over Its Culture," New York Times, August 17, 2015.
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