I'd never denied that individuals or even companies could be assholes (even in the Amazon case), I just thought that companies would, in the very long term, be punished by the invisible hand, through higher costs or lower quality workers.

Amazon has a reputation for treating its programmers pretty poorly too. Not that poorly, but possibly the same relative amount of bad compared to programmers' other options.

Can you comment more on the classroom management stuff? It does sound frighteningly similar.