#1113 – Chicago Teachers Union “Endorses” Guillotine Built By Protesters Outside Jeff Bezos’ House

It's a 'Cut Throat' World These Days

Like they say, a rising tide lifts all boats, and while hundreds of thousands of newly minted Robinhood traders have been brought along for the ride as tech valuations soared during the spring and summer, the real winners – as always – will be the insiders, like CEO Jeff Bezos, who saw his personal wealth eclipse $200 billion this week.

Sophisticated people understand that market valuations fluctuate often, sometimes dramatically, and that what goes up, typically, must come down. Whatever changes his net wealth has undergone on paper, he still owns roughly the same list of assets from before the pandemic. But to America’s most dedicated leftists, Bezos latest personal wealth milestone was a PR opportunity that couldn’t be passed up. And so a group of crypto-communists purporting to be former Amazon employees constructed a guillotine – yes, an actual working guillotine – outside of Bezos’ home in Chicago.

Officially, the “protest” was organized to call for a $30 minimum wage, which is double the $15 minimum wage that is now in place in some of America’s most costly cities.

Any small business owner – say the owner of a coffee shop – can probably explain why paying someone $30 an hour to pour coffee, or to assemble McDonald’s food, simply isn’t feasible from a business economics perspective, unless American consumers suddenly start queuing up for $20 cups of plain ol’ coffee.

We suspect Chris Smalls, the “former Amazon employee” who led the protest, probably couldn’t offer a similarly thorough economic argument for why people deserve $30 an hour.

“Give a good reason why we don’t deserve a $30 minimum wage when this man makes $4,000 a second,” he said.

Bezos’ base salary is actually a paltry $80,000.

Smalls told the crowd about the long hours he worked at Amazon’s Staten Island shipping center without “adequate” pay (he likely received at least the same $15 an hour that protesters like him were demanding just a couple of years ago, or more). He finally walked out in protest over Amazon’s handling of the coronavirus, and was fired shortly afterward.

 

As if the guillotine wasn’t disturbing enough, Smalls shouted that he planned to go to every single one of Bezos’s homes and perform a similar stunt until “you meet our demands”.

“Hey, Jeff Bezos. I’m going to let you know something today: We are just getting started,” he said. “We’re going to go to every single location you’ve got across the country and set up shop until you meet our demands as workers.”

“If we don’t get, we shut it down!” they repeatedly shouted.

Seeing the stunt, the Chicago Teachers Union, which organized a teachers’ strike last year and ended up shutting students out of classrooms for 2 weeks, tweeted its support “in solidarity” with the workers of the world (though they missed an excellent opportunity for a pun with “be headed”).

 

It’s just one more reason why the US should get rid of all public-sector unions immediately – be they teachers, cops or workers at the DMV.

 

It’s also telling that Twitter hasn’t removed the Chicago Union’s tweet. Just imagine if President Trump had tweeted his support for a guillotine effigy placed outside Nancy Pelosi’s house?

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