Voicing the oft-silenced rage of the victims of late-stage capitalism, a whole lotta brutally honest earthlings are uniting to urge that “evil overlord hellbent on global domination” Jeff Bezos be banned from returning to the planet once he blasts off next month on the first human space flight by his new company Blue Origin. With enough money to end world hunger or curb climate change or house the homeless but evidently little will to do so, the founder of the dystopian empire of Amazon and the world’s second-richest man with an estimated $186 billion is instead taking an insouciant  space ride with his bro – “the greatest adventure with my best friend” – and some other fat cat who paid $28 million in an auction for the lofty privilege, truly, of joining them. On July 20, they and an unnamed fourth crew member will take off on the New Shepherd for an obscenely pricey, 11-minute mini-flight 62 miles above Earth. Thus will Bezos be obeying Blue Origin’s pithy if wildly egotistical Latin dictum of “Gradatim Ferociter,” which translates into “step by step, ferociously” or, according to online wiseacres, “being finally, ironically compelled by circumstance, somewhat like his ill-paid, downtrodden workers, to learn to piss in a bottle.”

Alas, Bezos’ “adventure” peeves some who argue a dude who made $70 billion off the pandemic and offers a lame three paid sick days a year should maybe stop exploiting his workers instead of colonizing space, and oh yeah he can afford to pay some fucking taxes. “Billionaire’s (sic) should not exist…on earth or in space,” argues a Change.org petition with the forthright title, “Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth.” It’s addressed to “the proletariat” by Ric G. in Michigan, who quotes MLK: “Life’s most urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?'” – a query Bezos likely hasn’t pondered much. Over 95,000 people have signed it, with the numbers going up fast. “Fuck Jeff Bezos,” reads one bitter comment. “He has siphoned an immoral, damaging amount of money out of the world’s economic system (and) still can’t pay his workers anything close to a living wage…Let him go. And then, let him stay there. The earth will be a better place.” Others suggest “there are loads of alien species he could subjugate now that he’s done doing that to us,” and, in another petition to ban his re-entry, Bezos “is actually Lex Luthor,” working with the Epsteins, Free Masons and flat-earth deniers “to gain control over the whole world.” On Prime Day, the “greatest and most terrifying invention” of Bezos’ Amazon, a sinister “beast we’ve never seen before,” we’re thinking they may be right. Sure, let him stay there.