I lay out how corporate bribery and AI theater roll downhill onto workers as a hidden corruption tax. From Amazon’s $40M payoff to the regime to mass layoffs and “too big to fail” bailouts, the pattern is simple: executives gamble, the public pays.
Chapters:
00:00 – The corruption tax: how executive bets hit workers
01:05 – The $40M “documentary” as open-air bribery
02:10 – AI hype cycles and numbers that don’t add up
03:05 – Too big to fail, bailouts, and the call to break them up
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Music Credit: Good_B_Music
Mentioned in this episode:
Left in Exile Intro
Left in Exile Outro
Transcripts
Dr. Jim: [:
And one decision in particular stands out as the mother of all dumb Decisions, and it's the Amazon Executive Board's decision to pay $40 million to the Trump regime to do a documentary about a secondhand Russian mail order bride. No one wanted to see this. Nobody was interested in this, but what you saw was Amazon executives forking over $40 million to this regime as a payoff.
kirt the regulatory scrutiny [:
What have we seen since this open air bribery deal was consummated? Well, what we've seen is Amazon, like many of the other tech companies that have greased the skids and put money in the pockets of this regime, they've doubled and tripled down into the idea that they are going to be the first to achieve general intelligence and.
You've seen them invest heavily into ai. You've seen their balance sheets look great. You've seen their stock prices go up, but what else have you seen? What, what you've seen is that there's no real growth that's actually going on. It's. The AI ecosystem shifting money from one pocket to another and creating the appearance that something big is about to happen and that these companies are healthier than what they are.
ing of a trillion dollars in [:
And Amazon and other companies like them understand the game. They're at a stage where they're too big to fail, and if they do fail, it's gonna be the taxpayer that bails them out. This is going to be a disaster that they are cooking up that's gonna be worse than the housing crisis. It's gonna make the housing crisis look like a walk in the park and in the end.
Who pays?
It's the employees that always pay. Over the last handful of years, you've seen Amazon and other FANG companies lay off tens of thousands of people. Amazon just announced another layoff of 16,000 people. They're playing fast and loose with the lives of everyday Americans and the average worker, and it's well past the time that these companies need to be busted up and broken up because the amount of influence that they have, not only in the political landscape, but the economic landscape is too big for us to ignore
companies this big that can [:
Should not exist without massive. Regulatory scrutiny. So when you look at the case of Amazon, their executives made a decision to do a $40 million payoff to see if they can grease the skids and continue dumping money into a technology that hasn't been proven.
And when it all falls down. Those bets that they made, those payoffs that they gave are gonna get called in and it's gonna be up to the citizen to save them. That's the way that corporate America is now structured, and for all of us that are watching this on the sidelines.
We need to be loud and aggressive in demanding that these companies cease their payoffs, cease their rent seeking, and most importantly, these companies need to be busted up.
