[Aunche]

I emphasized in my original comment that I was not diminishing the accomplishments of previous civil rights and labor activists. It's hard to deny how even they are primarily admired for their complaining rather than organizational abilities, and this is what activists primarily try to emulate now.

I agree that Tesla deserves their poor reputation, but Amazon genuinely seems like they care about workers' well-being. People perceive labor to be "exploited" because automation and globalization mean that American workers no longer have a monopoly on labor. It's a simple function of supply and demand. No amount of cherry picked anti-Amazon narratives is going to change that. Increased government spending would, as it does for the Nordic countries. However, nobody cares to detangle the web of perverse incentives baked in, so Americans will always view taxes as a waste of money.

[teachrdan]

You're right that the work of civil rights organizers is misrepresented today. It's described as "They spoke truth to power, and power listened."

Of course that was never the case. They risked their lives and struggled for years to make progress. But that risk and struggle is minimized; to describe the people who undermined and attacked and killed them would be to indict the same groups of business people, police officers and law makers who perpetuate the same anti-civil rights agenda today. This is how Martin Luther King ends up being described as a Black Santa Claus rather than a radical organizer who was building a cross-racial, class-based movement for civil and economic rights. It's how schools across the country teach whole lessons about MLK for every grade, every year, and never talk about how the FBI harassed and targeted him and other civil rights leaders.