Open letter to Jeff Bezos

Dear Jeff Bezos:

Surprisingly, we have some things in common:

You are believed to be the richest person in the world.

I am believed to be the richest person on the 26th floor.

You run Amazon. I run this website.

You have an estimated $112 billion and you make $215 million a day. I have not made 215 million pennies in my 60 years of employment. 

You own a newspaper (Washington Post) and I used to work for newspapers (N.Y. World-Telegram & Sun, Philadelphia Daily News). 

You were graduated from Princeton with a 4.2 GPA. My GPA when I graduated from Brooklyn College’s Evening Division also had a 4 and a 2, but arranged differently from yours.

Speaking of different, you were born in Albuquerque, N.M., me in Bronx, N.Y.; you have four children, I have two; I kept my original surname, you changed yours (from Jorgensen). 

You have been Time magazine’s Person of the Year, I am in the City Paper’s Hall of Fame. Contrary to rumor, my induction did not cause the publication to fail.

Our twinship diverges when it comes to business.

I have been pro-union my entire life. In 2014, the International Trade Union Confederation named you the “World’s Worst Boss.” TUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow said, “Jeff Bezos represents the inhumanity of employers who are promoting the North American corporate model.”

Your fifth child, Amazon, was born in 1994 and in 25 years it has torched American retailing. Everything you touch seems to turn to gold — except the lives of those who labor in your warehouses, which have been accused of being 21st century sweatshops.

Contrasted with some of your billionaire cohorts — such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who have pledged to give away their fortunes to charity — what you do, Jeff, is to try to extort cities to give you tax breaks in exchange for setting up shop within their city limits. (In fairness, last year you led the billionaire pack in philanthropy.)

Bit also in 2018, Amazon paid no federal tax. WTF?

It was legal, Jeff, but how does it look to those of us who live here in the mud?

Hint: Awful, giving capitalism a label of toxic, self-serving greed that is turning our young people into Socialists. That is political trans.

How do your tactics look to your 650,000 employees? That’s a pretty big army, which someday might turn on you.

Compared with the guys I named above, you are pretty stingy. Their pledged philanthropy is not unique. In earlier eras, after accumulating astonishing wealth, maybe motivated by noblesse oblige (or by guilt), they started paying it back. 

Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, John Rockefeller and other 1 percenters did a lot of good. 

Jeff, pardon my french, but how much fucking money do you need? You can’t spend it all on yourself and your family and friends no matter how hard you try. It’s like trying to empty Lake Erie with a spoon. 

No question the money is yours, and you can do with it what you like.

Why not do some more good?

Wouldn’t it be better to be remembered for endowing free colleges or eradicating a disease or building homes for the homeless rather than just as the guy who drew an arrow from A to Z?