The ruling class needs a very poignant reminder that their perceived value is entirely manufactured by the working class, on whose shoulders they stand. These people have no real value if the people they exploit are able exert their own agency.
Fuck these parasites. And as a matter of course, fuck the foo fighters.
We have to all work together to give those consequences. Workers need to act as a united force to push back against the ruling class. Checking out hurt the movement. Help us show them the consequences.
History has a way of repeating itself. Best we can hope for is a soft reset. It will always be this way until human avarice is somehow ejected from our genome.
Most of the people in those concerts are employed. They’ll have stock with Amazon, as does everyone working for Amazon on a full time, permanent contract.
You do realise Amazon is a public company, don’t you? If your country allows fractional shares, you could become an owner of Amazon for £10.
Is the “ruling class” anyone who has a report at Amazon?
" if you’re under retirement age and quit your job tomorrow, do you have enough assets to comfortably live out the rest of your life"
This gets to it. Basically bourgeoisie is the owning class and proletariat is the class that can only survive via labor, but as the post says it's a bit more complicated these days. You could have a business owner or landlord who gets the same amount of paycheck as say a high-paid tech person, or actor, or doctor, or something. And the former is petty bourgeois and the latter is not, because the former owns assets and the latter, if they lose their job, will before long need to find another one in order to survive.
Now you could have someone getting a wage that's been high enough for a long enough time that they have been able to acquire assets that could bring in income, which changes things somewhat. But the main thing to analyze is the relationship to resources, land, and means of production.
They aren’t “solving it”, yet. They’re desperate to do something to wake up the stock and for investors to have some, any belief in the future of the business.
Whether they’re actually solving anything remains to be seen.
I wonder when "selling out" or being called a "sell out" stopped being a thing. It happened during my lifetime for sure. Now basically everyone everywhere you look in the music business not only is one, but the public seems to not even consider it an option to not sell out, and I think most people dream of being able to be a sell out themselves so much they pardon others preemptively and almost instinctively.
But like in this case, Dave Grohl is already a multimillionaire, does he really have to further prostitute himself for Amazon cash?
I'm kind of bewildered by it, like there wasn't any expectations but this is the sort of thing a creatively spent band would do, one of their best (imo) albums came out last year they absolutely could've passed on this. I'm hoping they at least put on a dogshit show, "Corporate magazines still suck" on Rolling Stone type move.
🤷 and maybe someone was holding his dog hostage until he performed, but that pic doesn't look like someone who is having a terrible time fulfilling his label obligations
I can't find much about this gig online, but the Setlist.fm page lists this as a 'private event' for Amazon Web Services.
AWS is not the part of Amazon where employees have to piss in bottles. It's their cloud hosting subsidiary, and the most profitable part of the company. I also can't find any mention that it's just the executives of AWS either. It seems more likely to me that this would have been open to the employees of AWS in general as it is the most profitable part of Amazon and the crowd in the pictures seems quite big if it were only made up of 'AWS executives who like the Foo Fighters'.
Its a yearly event that collects directors and above fork across the company to a week long "convention" that is supposed to be about building cohesive between leadership.
The author went in 2022, when they had bon jovi play, and said it was just a boozy networking event where leadership was dictated to by the execs with no actual exchange of ideas.
In 2022, Amazon made a record profits, but even then they were admonished to save money. Still, no layoffs.
This year? They also made record profits, but had record layoffs, yet the party goes on.
The authors overall point is that Amazon is successful by asking people to "lean in," to go the extra mile. When you freeze wages and layoff 10,000s of people while threatening more and still throw your 10 million dollar party for yourself, you are telling good people to not only leave, but to lean right the fuck out before they do.
To think this is a problem with just Amazon is silly. This is every American corporation. The executives of every major corporation in this country treat themselves very very well on company dimes while their workers all languish in starvation wages. The only way to fight this is to raise the minimum wage to something that is livable for the average worker. The government needs to force these companies to behave. They will never and I mean abso-fucking-lutely never choose to treat their workers with respect and dignity by paying them a decent living wage.
And the politicians that are in all of their pockets will never ever go against their corporate masters. The only way to make them listen is to get every single American to acknowledge that this is something that is needed and then push their politicians to do it or threaten their jobs by voting for someone else. This goes for both Democrats and Republicans, not quite equally but there's definitely a few Democrats that need to be replaced.
My last job, we removed two departments and fired them all, then forced to have a "virtual retreat" to save money. Three months later, they showed a PowerPoint how this was their best year ever.
By that point, I was already looking for a new job.
Bentonville AR is being turned into a bicyclists haven. To the tune of Arkansas laws are making it that bicyclists don't have to pay attention to traffic laws. That's neat, wonder why... Ah. And while bicycling is one of the better things I guess billionaires can do, in the region buying bicycles are far beyond affordable anymore to a walmart wage because it's gotten so over the top fancy, and the Waltons literally have a helicopter with a bike rack to fly out to the trails. My dad is irritated because of how often it shakes his house as it goes over.
Same city, Alice Walton had a really nice museum built in the area that was surely out of the good of her heart... Ah. Unless really local, one might not know of her nickname "Drunken Alice" where she has a history of dwi's and wrecks, including one where someone was killed, yet somehow nothing seems to stick.
Yea... I've got a bit of an axe to grind with the Waltons having grown up in their personal playground, I agree with you to think this is a problem with just Amazon is ludicrous, and despite only living a state away it's amazing to hear how people bitch about Amazon, it's chokeholds, it's problems, its wrecking of the country, and gives a full pass to Walmart. We live in an oligarchy.
Completely unrelated to my bitching about Walmart, but a perfect example of execs doing this nonsense and how I got in trouble because I can't stop snarking: Worked for a medical testing facility, ran by a doctor. Said doctor buys himself a brand new shiny Lamborghini, then through the whole email has an announcement that for one day for 4 hours where any of the staff can get a picture with the Lambo and share on the company page. Now I met said doc once during training, but otherwise worked 3rd shift with two other people, he certainly never showed up when we had issues.
So when the day happened, it was one of those I commented it's the first time I think I'm glad that 3rd shift gets ignored on any staff events. Think about it for a second, then ask the others "Who has the newest car?", turns out was a Nissan Juke. So each of us go out and get a picture with the Juke, then sent the pictures in to where people were supposed to send in the pics with the Lambo. Turns out they got 4 pictures, the 3 with the Juke, and 1 with the Lambo. Got told by our manager said doc was pissed and to keep our heads down.
The only way to fight this is to raise the minimum wage to something that is livable for the average worker.
Then what do you do when only the Amazons and Walmarts of the world with the deepest pockets can afford that, and small business basically ceases to exist, as a result? People talk a lot about 'if you can't pay a livable wage you don't deserve to be in business', but the same people also complain about monopolies and lack of choice at the same time. How do you propose this be reconciled?
Also, no one's ever going to be able to begin to enforce a "living wage", even if they wanted to, until that wage is given a concrete definition--at the very least, a formula with variables to account for cost of living differences across the country. Until then, all this clamoring for a "living wage" is completely pointless.
The funny thing is that people always forget about old money - people who don't know what work is or what actual money is. And who see billionaires as just mere peasants.
There is a lot of old money where I grew up, and it was funny hearing about Blackrock trying to buy their properties. They would offer these people ten times the value, but old money was just “but, that’s just a little bit more money in the money bin. I have a massive house and estate to look at the peasants. Why would I bother?”
And now imagine old money in Europe. For example, the British aristocracy owns at least 30% of land in England (that's the official number, but Land Registry doesn't have information about who owns 15% of land at all and it is most likely owned by aristocracy as well). And England has a leasehold system. So if Blackrock would come to a king or some lord to buy some of their land, the land would be sold to them easily as a long term lease, for like 100+ years. And then Blackrock would also pay yearly rent on top of that. Because you ain't buying shit here, dirty peasant.
Another thing to keep in mind is that old money here have their wealth for over a thousand years. They're not simply entrenched, they're a part of the fabric of the country itself. They have all kinds of exceptions in the laws and regulations and exist above everyone else not only in social status, but also in economic and political status as well.
People can hate the rich as much as they want, but there's a layer in the society which doesn't care about the existence of the rich and the poor. And they are all related to each other through centuries of strategic marriages, so basically one incredibly large family spread across the whole of Europe.
This is no different than seeing all of them old farts at the golf course. Taking breaks from fucking everyone underneath them over just to swing at a few holes they'll probably be tired half way of playing.
Yup, this is really maximize shareholder value. I can totally see this teambuilding event doubling dividends. Wait? You said the company never pays dividends and rarely buys back its stock? Wow, I am really seeing those profits!
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