Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos

Amazon’s ham-handed PR was among the reasons why it suffered one of the biggest defeats in recent labor history, as workers on Staten Island voted to join the newly created Amazon Labor Union, which was the brainchild of 30-year-old fired warehouse worker Chris Smalls.

“He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position,” wrote David Zapolsky, Amazon general counsel in a note that was leaked to Vice. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Amazon spent millions to defeat the ALU and hired the well-connected Democratic Global Strategy Group PA shop to torpedo the union drive.

GSG has some explaining to do, especially since it worked for the Biden campaign. Joe Biden is the most pro-union US president in years.

In a sharp contrast, GoFundMe donations funded Smalls’ grassroots PR campaign of texts, emails and meetings with the more than 8,000 Staten Island workers.

That effort also included volunteer support and guidance from the Communications Workers of America, UNITE HERE, United Food and Commercial Workers, Office and Professional Employees International Union, and Workers Assembly Against Racism.

Smalls told National Public Radio on April 6 that he’s been contacted by more than 50 Amazon facilities in the US, Canada, UK, South Africa and India about organizing their workplaces.

That should convince Amazon founder “Rocket Man” Jeff Bezos to spend more time dealing with his restless workforce, rather than on his space dreams.

Amazon on April 4 announced the largest deal in the commercial space industry as it signed an agreement with United Launch Alliance (Boeing/Lockheed Martin partnership), Europe’s Arianespace and Bezos’ Blue Origin for 83 launches for its Project Kuiper internet satellites.

There’s trouble brewing in Earth's biggest store, Jeff.

Though Donald Trump watches a heckuva lot of television, he’s been pretty quiet about the images of brutality, carnage, mangled bodies, corpses with hands tied behind their backs and wanton destruction transmitted from Ukraine to screens throughout the world.

The silence of the former president leads one to wonder whether he is angling for his own slot on “Antifake,” a new program on Russia’s most-watched TV network.

On April 5, Antifake featured a panel that dismissed scenes of dead civilians lying on the streets of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, as stunts staged by the non-existent Nazis of Ukraine and their allies in the west. Antifake drove home that propaganda point by running “FAKE” across the TV screen.

Since Trump is the guy who popularized the use of “fake news,” he would feel right at home at Antifake.

He could even have his buddy, Vladimir Putin, call in to rage at his perceived enemies, just like Trump does at Fox News.

Real Chemistry keeps on gobbling up acquisitions, though some signs of heartburn have started to appear.

The San Francisco-based healthcare PR firm, which prefers to call itself “a global innovation company committed to making the world a healthier place for all," announced the acquisition of ConversationHealth on April 5.

ConversationHealth is the 10th acquisition for Real Chemistry since the company unveiled its partnership with NewMountain Capital in 2019.

The deal comes as Real Chemistry trimmed its workforce by about 50 people due to redundancies and overlap partly due to its aggressive acquisition spree.

McKinsey & Co. alum Shankar Narayanan assumed the helm of Real Chemistry in January from founder Jim Weiss.

CPAC loves Putin-lite. The Conservative Political Action Conference will hold its May meeting in Budapest and feature Hungary’s right-wing nationalist leader Viktor Orban, who just won another term as prime minister, as a keynoter.

Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson is a big fan of Orban, a close ally of Putin.

Budapest’s Center for Fundamental Rights invited CPAC to stage its first Continental Europe conference in Hungary.

Founded in 2013, The Center says “preserving national identity, sovereignty and Christian social traditions" is its mission, especially amongst the 21st century’s heightened process of "globalization, integration, geopolitical and technological changes, affecting the field of law as well.”

In short, the Center wants to counter “today’s overgrown human rights fundamentalism and political correctness that have been affecting numerous aspects of our everyday life." It wants to turn back the hands of time to the Middle Ages.

CPAC might want to extend an invite to Putin to appear alongside his acolyte Orban. Tucker would be thrilled.