The Daily Populous Wednesday July 21st, 2021 day edition
Authored by businessinsider.com and submitted by nikan69

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not pleased with a response from Jeff Bezos about his space voyage.

"Amazon workers did pay for this — with lower wages, union busting, a frenzied and inhumane workplace," Ocasio-Cortez said.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Jeff Bezos following his return to Earth after briefly flying to space with Blue Origin, the spaceflight company he started in 2000.

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After Bezos' brief orbital trip, he addressed a crowd while donning a cowboy hat, saying he wanted "thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this."

Ocasio-Cortez responded on Twitter, telling Bezos: "Yes, Amazon workers did pay for this — with lower wages, union busting, a frenzied and inhumane workplace, and delivery drivers not having health insurance during a pandemic."

"And Amazon customers are paying for it with Amazon abusing their market power to hurt small business," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

An employee at an Amazon warehouse in Indiana, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisal, said workers did not seem aware that Bezos — who stepped down as company CEO earlier this month — was blasting off today.

"It's just business as usual for us," they told Insider.

They were not particularly impressed by their former boss' gratitude for enabling the trip, either.

"I guess he's thanking us for putting the money in his pocket to do so by our hard work, sacrificing our bonuses and stock options to make it possible," they said. "We didn't get anything out of it."

Do you work at Amazon? Email your thoughts to these reporters: cdavis@insider.com and aharoun@insider.com

AE_WILLIAMS on July 20th, 2021 at 22:27 UTC »

Many moons ago, I worked at a company that was at the forefront of Single Stage to Orbit technology (SSTO). The team I was on contributed to a wonderful, for the time, experimental craft, that took off and landed vertically. This was the DC-X.

It took off, it landed, and one time, it blew up.

Since then, instead of 'doing rocketry' like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, that company has shied away from these kinds of things. They pour money into conventional aircraft engines, and the second stage of the Atlas Centaur.

Once, I worked on Space Shuttle engines... they last flew for NASA in 2011.

TEN. YEARS. AGO.

Seeing Branson and Bezos take their site-seeing tours into space made me sad...because, if we hadn't, as a nation, spent TRILLIONS of dollars on warfare and other stupid things (and don't get me started...) think of how much further NASA could have advanced.

Imagine if we would have put 1,000 X Jeff Bezos billion dollars into a moon base. Or a trip to Mars. Towards ANYTHING... back when a trillion was real money.

We could have even spent that TRILLION on green projects, like maybe blocking the sun with space curtains, to cool the planet. Or learning to live with the Earth, instead of off her bounties.

But instead, people get jealous of these guys, and pay their taxes, which pay for police to beat the crap out of them for smoking a natural plant.

It's just sad... is all.

snakebite75 on July 20th, 2021 at 21:02 UTC »

For everyone saying "Amazon didn't pay for it, Blue Origin did"!! Read the fucking article.

> After Bezos' brief orbital trip, he addressed a crowd while donning a cowboy hat, saying he wanted "thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this."

Bezos said the Amazon workers and customers paid for it, AOC was just responding to him.

Confident_Dimensions on July 20th, 2021 at 19:49 UTC »

She's right. Every dollar spent that went to Bezo's vanity trip could have been re-allocated to higher wages for Amazon workers.