Amazon’s attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is corporate gaslighting | Arwa Mahdawi
The tech giant’s PR chief has accused the congresswoman of ‘making stuff up’, but its audacity in positioning itself as a benevolent activist is jawdropping
For the love of cheap consumer goods and next-day delivery, can we all just give Amazon a break? I don’t mean a tax break; it has had enough of those already. I mean can we please stop bullying the trillion-dollar multinational and its billionaire owner? After all, it is not Jeff Bezos’s fault that he has more money than he knows what to do with. It is not his fault he makes more money in 12 seconds than his lowest-paid employees make in a year. He can’t do anything about that! Nevertheless, people keep criticising the poor guy and suggesting his billions are ill-begotten.
In the past, Amazon has weathered criticism quietly. In the past few weeks, though, the company seems to have taken a leaf out of Donald Trump’s Twitter book and has been belligerently calling out its critics. Last week, Joe Biden tweeted that the company ought to pay more tax. Amazon responded by tweeting that it pays “every penny” it owes and suggesting snarkily that Biden’s complaint was with the US’s tax laws, not the company. On Monday, it was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s turn to be lectured. The congresswoman recently told ABC News that she believes Bezos’s billionaire status is partly due to Amazon paying “starvation wages” and taking “billions of dollars of government subsidies”. This is nonsense, according to Amazon. It tweeted: “AOC is just wrong. Amazon is a leader on pay at $15 min wage + full benefits from day one. We also lobby to raise federal min wage.”