BECOME AN AFFILIATE OF T-SHIRT HELL AND MAKE SOME MONEY!
Name: The Republican Party
Age: 166
Occupation: right-winged morons
Last Seen: Washington, DC
Bee-otched For: allowing an Amazon to grow too much
Age: 166
Occupation: right-winged morons
Last Seen: Washington, DC
Bee-otched For: allowing an Amazon to grow too much
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This morning at 3:30, I turned on NBC's Early Today. One of the top stories dealt with somebody buying a house.
That man was Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com.
Bezos - a billionaire 120 times over - bought a monstrosity of a mansion from entertainment mogul David Geffen. It was built for Jack Warner, one of the Warner Bros. in 1937. Geffen - who once used Warners as a distributor for his movies and music - bought the estate for $47 million in 1990.
Bezos bought the mansion for $165 million.
Reportedly, the nearly-14,000 square-foot mansion has several guest houses, a nine-hole golf course and a tennis court.
The news comes a few months after it was announced that Lachlan Murdoch, the son of Fox's Rupert Murdoch bought the mansion used on The Beverly Hillbillies for a paltry $150 million. Lachlan is reportedly worth $7 billion; a chunk of that came from father Rupert's sale of 20th Century Fox to Disney last year.
Tragically, While Bezos, Murdoch and other billionaires get to live in quiet, spacious mansions, hard-working people like me are stuck in neutral. Years ago, if you rented for a long time, you had a problem. Now, it's the normal. While housing costs more, many Americans are being forced to live with crappy wages. It's been over a decade since the minimum wage was raised and with college costs rising and people living in massive debt, who can afford a house right now if they don't have a lot of cash their pocket?
I know, some of you will cry that Bezos deserves it. He started a business over 25 years ago that sold books online and it grew to selling, well, everything. Others tried to copy his ideas and failed miserably at it. Now, it's having an effect on traditional brick and mortar stores and especially malls.
I grew up near Traverse City, MI, where Grand Traverse Mall is the only indoor mall within a 150-mile radius. Sometimes, I would talk to people from towns 50-plus miles away and they would tell me that they used to make the trek to GTM all the time in the 90s and 2000s. Why? Because towns like Gaylord, Cheboygan and Petoskey sure as hell didn't have a Hudson's (though Petoskey does have a very old school downtown JCPenney). Many people didn't want to be caught dead wearing shitty Kmart clothes. Now, if you wanna wear Tommy Bahama and the closest store to you might only do Joe Boxers (no, wait, Kmart's only down to one location in Michigan... Oh, well.), here, they sell their wares online. Grand Traverse Mall these days isn't the cool mall it once was two decades ago. People from 50 or so miles no longer need to go there if they have an internet connection and a credit card. But, hey, I've heard rave reviews about their new Indian restaurant in the food court.
Bezos made his billions by making shopping at home cool, along with that little disc named Alexa that knows everything. In a way, he's doing the same thing Walmart did years ago by creating a lotta abandoned storefronts. Walmart abandoned downtowns while Amazon has made ghost towns out of even the biggest shopping malls. But to Amazon, it's no big deal since they've turned the remains of those old dinosaurs into their distribution centers.
Granted, Amazon does pay their workers better than Walmart and their associates. It is sad, however that I've heard about Amazon's workers being forced to wear diapers to achieve good numbers. After all, those customers gotta have their Tommy Bahama shirts within two days.
Yes, I've ordered from Amazon before and yes, it's not very often, especially since I live in a heavily-retailed part of Grand Rapids. When I do, the experience isn't very positive. Several years ago, I ordered bed sheets and Amazon used a delivery service that lost them. I had to reorder them, but guess what? I ended up with a pair of them by mistake. I did complain since I had to hard time understanding the operator, and he was nice enough to put a big, black dildo in my cart.
But, that's not all. I have a cousin who has a vast vinyl collection and a lot of his wax came from Amazon. One time I was at his house, he ordered a Ghost album and it came severely warped. Since he doesn't live too far from record stores, **maybe** he should have bought it there instead of waiting two extra days to get a new copy. My mother ordered yarn from Amazon and got a giant pack of electrical cover protectors instead. At least Kohl's has an Amazon return center.
If I wanted to buy a vinyl album, I would be rushing to my local Best Buy or even the two-story Barnes and Noble in my neck of the woods. Barnes and Noble.... 'Memba them? They were sold not long ago for just under $500 million.
I know, starting a business is risky. Jeff Bezos tossed the dice and won big, so he gets to sleep in the same bedroom Jack Warner probably banged his future stars 80 years ago. Good for him. Me? My upstairs neighbor seems to have his kids over every weekend and they're LOUD. Every other minute, it sounds like the running of the bulls with them prancing around. And speaking of banging, I sometimes hear squeaking from upstairs at 2 a.m. in the morning. I think somebody needs to pay a visit to Art Van, and it ain't me.
The reality is that I should be thankful. I make a living wage and have more money stashed away in my 401 (K) than my parents ever did. Yes, I'm pushing 40 and still single and yes, my apartment sucks. But at least I'm not living with a parent or even worse, living in a trailer park loaded with toothless MAGA hat-wearing hilljacks and losers who post hateful on certain websites devoted to broadcasting in the state of Michigan.
We the people deserve better. Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have more wealth than the rest of us. And guess what? They don't pay taxes. Back in the day, 94% of their wealth went to taxes. Because of the high tax rate, the middle class had it all: a house, a wife that didn't need to work, paid-for colleges and so much more. Even the Republicans of the past like Eisenhower promoted growth in America, especially with the building of the Interstate Highway system.
Now, Repukes will talk about tax cuts and it's all for the wealthy. Jeff Bezos only spent not even 1% of his wealth and he has a nice house in Los Angeles. Me? I don't even have money for a down payment for a plot of land in the ghetto. Until I win the Lottery, it's going to be squeak, squeak, squeak unless my upstairs neighbor moves out.
But if Bernie Sanders gets elected President of the United States, it will be in the great words of a certain cartoon pig that Jack Warner's studio owns, "Th-th-th-that's All, Folks!" to the overly wealthy.
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Bee-otch of the Day Archives can be seen on http://beeotchoftheday.blogspot.com
Bee-otch of the Day is a production of Chuck69.com, Grand Rapids' site for Stern, politics and more!
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