Rocket man

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

YOU KNOW they’re firetrucking with your head because the rocket actually looks like a penis. All shafts look basically alike – but you know Jeff Bezos didn’t have to make the capsule that precise amount bigger than the rocket to make it resemble so closely the glans.

What can you expect to get from something that looks like that?

Space exploration be damned; we’re getting jammed on Earth.

Jeff Bezos has been doing this to people for years.

Especially his employees.

Excluding lucky artists, no one gets rich unless they cheat others and, the more people you cheat, and the worse you cheat them, the wealthier you get.

There’s a reason it’s called “filthy” rich.

It was only in October 2018 – three years ago! – and only after scandalous media reports of poverty-level wages and only after months of relentless public campaigning led by US Congressman Bernie Sanders, that Jeff Bezos raised Amazon’s own minimum wage to US$15-an-hour.

Predictably, they tried to make it into a public relations gimmick.

Depressingly, it worked.

But Nomadland, the 2021 Best Picture Oscar winner, set out, for those who could stomach its misery, the conditions of workers that have been made, not normal, but standard, by Jeff Bezos and those that admire and copy him.

So Jeff Bezos can afford to perhaps pretend to develop a whole space industry so that he can send himself into outer space.

And Mr Amazon can get every news network to broadcast live his public stroking of his private ego by taking along a 90-year-old Captain Kirk.

We all got to play a little Star Trek mas on Wednesday.

But, just three years ago, the majority of Amazon workers couldn’t afford to feed themselves without food stamps. The median wage of Amazon workers in 2018 was US$28K; the median wage of all American workers was $54K. Looked at that way, Jeff Bezos skimmed and pocketed up to $26 grand from each member of half his workforce.

Bezos makes the Amazon median wage of $28K every nine seconds (Money, May 2018).

In London, where the Vote Leave and Firetruck the Good Friday Agreement Government is bent on making the UK a carbon copy of Jeff Bezos’s USA, walking from Victoria Station to Trafalgar Square, I counted three human stools on the pavement.

There can’t be that many bad doubles in Lunnon Town.

On Wednesday, a whole different cast of excrement, I watched like millions of others, the countdown, the lift-off and the return to the hard cold Earth of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket.

The whole thing took two minutes.

There’s a joke to be made here about the similarity between Bezos’s rocket trip and the length of time taken for another Bezosian exercise but I don’t have the will to make it.

Especially understanding how well and truly Bezos and his type have already screwed the world; in the global economical equivalent of two minutes.

In 2016, the UK charity, Oxfam, calculated 62 individuals were as rich as the entire bottom half of the world’s population – 3.6 billion people.

If ever there were an obscene statistic, that was it. If ever there were a sin to galvanise the world’s religions into defending the exploited, there it was.

But the real picture was actually far worse.

In 2017, using new data tools, Oxfam calculated it wasn’t 62 individuals.

It was eight.

Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helu, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and Michael Bloomberg were as rich as the combined populations of Africa, India and China. Bezos has rocketed to number one but the principle, or lack thereof, remains the same.

Eight men are as rich as half the world.

So there was no new glory last Wednesday, just the same old story: powerful men grabbing more wealth than they could ever spend; and poor sufferers watching from the sidelines in awe.

Even as the mud from the gilded carriages in France in 1789 or the carbon from the pointless rockets of this week splattered all over them.

The headline really should be, “Rocket Man, Firetruck Mankind.”

It’s a pity Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origins design team didn’t add two egg-shaped fuel tanks at the bottom of the shaft.

Perhaps, then, the world wouldn’t be getting shafted from Blue Origins.

And Jeff Bezos’s outer space endeavours would be all in the name of Blue Balls.

BC Pires will not be getting a complimentary lifetime membership in Amazon Prime