They create jobs, etc. — so what is it that’s problematic?
Here is a pundit lauding what Amazon.com has accomplished:
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https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/amazon-is-a-rousing-us-success-story-to-be-cheered
Amazon announces plans to hire 100,000 workers in the US and Canada
“A hundred new package sorting centers and other facilities will open in September. Starting wage of at least $15 per hour. Socialists moan about Amazon. They want to break it up. But socialists don’t create jobs. Bezos created over 1,000,000 jobs with another 100,000 on the way. The Amazon success story is US capitalism at its finest.”
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Those big, successful corporations offer employment and they provide goods and services.
So . . . what do we find problematic?
(Even aside from the fact that the creation of jobs in one area of the economy comes at the expense of loss of jobs in other areas of the economy. Online shopping is killing in-person retail. But that’s not my point. I have no more love for Lord & Taylor than for Amazon.)
The behemoths grow to become economic empires.
Empires (political or economic) tend to have certain noxious characteristics.
In focusing on the bottom line, they tend to be less than sensitive to individuals, ecosystems, communities. To put it another way: they tend be anti-social, anti-ecological, and anti-communitarian.
The vast mass of employees are cogs in what is essentially a productive megamachine. Wealth funnels to a relatively small layer of owners, stockholders, and managerial/technological elites.
They’re almost always preoccupied with growth, power, and influence . . . often to the point of irresponsibility. After all, their domain of interest is not the local bioregion, it’s the global marketplace.
The global marketplace is antithetical to every one of the Ten Key Values of the Greens:
Ecology
Community
Responsibility
Democracy
Justice
Sustainability
Nonviolence
Decentralization
Feminism
Respect for Diversity
