“Just turn around and not look"

I was checking the men’s pro basketball schedule last night – the Trail Blazers have at least two games left, and at least one at home – when I noticed how many of the games are being telecast only on Prime Video. Hmm, I thought, to watch basketball on TV now, you have to pay Jeff Bezos.

It’s the same thing if you want to read the Washington Post. It’s the same thing if you want to walk to the old Nature’s grocery store. And forget any other form of bricks-and-mortar retail. If you don’t want to drive, park, and then go find the empty spot on the shelf where the item you want used to be (or the empty building where the store used to be), you have to pay Jeff Bezos.

Maybe this is getting out of control, I thought. Maybe I ought to take the younger set’s advice and stop using Amazon for everything.

Then today a friend sent me a link to this absolute horror story, about a death in the Amazon warehouse in Troutdale, just outside of Portland. A worker keeled over, and according to the story, his co-workers were ordered to let him die, rather than stop “fulfilling” orders and help him. The stricken employee did not make it.

That, my friends, is pure, pure evil.

I remember as a kid hearing my elders explain that when construction workers fell into the concrete being poured for the bases of the Pulaski Skyway, they didn’t stop pouring. There was a plaque somewhere with the dead men’s names on it. But that was 95 years ago. And at least the skyway is still there. The guy in Troutdale died so that somebody's zit cream could get delivered on a Tuesday rather than a Wednesday.

Where are the labor regulators? We know the Cabinet secretary is too busy “fulfilling” other needs, but what about the supposedly pro-labor State of Oregon? It really is time to bring the chrome-dome oligarch and his ilk down a few pegs, for all our sakes.