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      in US Politics

      Warren Buffett, Amazon, Starbucks and others condemn voting restrictions in letter

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      Amazon, BlackRock, Google, Starbucks, billionaire investor Warren Buffett and hundreds of other companies published a letter on Wednesday condemning “discriminatory legislation” designed to hinder voting rights in the US.The letter – the biggest statement yet from corporate America – follows weeks of heated debate over corporate opposition to a series of Republican-sponsored bills that critics charge will restrict voting rights in states across the US.“We Stand for Democracy,” the double-page, centrefold advertisement published in the New York Times and Washington Post, begins. “Voting is the lifeblood of our democracy and we call upon all Americans to take a nonpartisan stand for this basic and most fundamental right of all Americans,” the statement reads.The statement was organized by two of the US’s most prominent Black executives, Kenneth Chenault, former chief executive of American Express, and Kenneth Frazier, the chief executive of Merck. Both executives have been prominent in opposition to restrictive voting laws and in leading a response from the business community.The statement does not address specific election legislation in states but it is the clearest indication yet that US corporations are looking to present a united front despite calls from several senior Republicans, including the former president Donald Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, to stay out of politics.In an interview with the Times, Chenault said: “It should be clear that there is overwhelming support in corporate America for the principle of voting rights.” Frazier added that the statement was intended to be non-partisan.“These are not political issues,” he said. “These are the issues that we were taught in civics.”The effort to rise above partisan politics comes after several companies, including Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines, found themselves at the center of a dispute over voting rights legislation passed in Georgia. Lawmakers in the state threatened to withdraw tax breaks after the companies spoke out against the measures and others, including Trump, called for boycotts.The new statement comes after Chenault and Frazier convened a Zoom call of 100 CEOs over the weekend and is notable also for several companies that did not add their names, including Coca-Cola, Delta, Home Depot and JP Morgan.Coca-Cola and Delta declined to comment, according to the Times, while Home Depot said in a statement on Tuesday that “the most appropriate approach for us to take is to continue to underscore our belief that all elections should be accessible, fair and secure.”The JPMorgan Chase chief executive, Jamie Dimon, made a statement on voting rights before many other companies, saying: “We believe voting must be accessible and equitable.”Some signatories, including Buffett, chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, elected to sign personally rather than on behalf of their companies. Buffett has previously stated that businesses should not be involved in politics but he did not put his personal political views “in a blind trust at all when I took the job”.The statement follows a declaration on Tuesday by automakers ahead of voting legislation hearings in Michigan that they oppose election laws that would inhibit voting.In a separate statement, GM posted on Twitter: “We are calling on Michigan lawmakers and state legislatures across the nation to ensure that any changes to voting laws result in protecting and enhancing the most precious element of democracy.“Anything less falls short of our inclusion and social justice goals,” the company said. More

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      in US Politics

      Amazon won the Alabama union fight. But don’t mourn – organize | Indigo Olivier

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      Nearly a week after Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, cast their ballots to determine whether or not to form a union, a final tally shows workers lost their campaign by a more than two-to-one margin. The results are being contested by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which claims Amazon coerced and intimidated workers with their belligerent anti-union campaign. Even if the results are thrown out and another election is held, the outcome is likely to remain unchanged.During the agonizing week-long vote count, all you could do was wait and hope. Little snippets of information trickled in, followed by more waiting. The loss, while not surprising, is a disappointment to not only the workers and supporters who threw so much into this campaign but to the labor movement as a whole.Postmortems abound about the warning signs of defeat, the tactical errors made by organizers, the urgent need for labor law reform, and the demoralizing effect this outcome might have on other workers. In any case, the final takeaway should always be: don’t mourn. Organize.While there is much to learn from the strategy deployed in Bessemer, the defeat is not so much an indictment of the specifics of this one union drive as it is of the balance of power between labor and capital as a whole.Amazon started off with the upper hand and used every tool it could to not only defeat Bessemer workers but to send a clear message to others who might try to organize at other fulfillment centers: you don’t stand a chance.For weeks, Amazon sent a barrage of anti-union messaging to its employees, posted “vote no” flyers in bathroom stalls, texted workers on a regular basis, waged a social media campaign linking back to the “Do It Without Dues” website, changed traffic lights outside the facility, held “captive audience” meetings with workers to dissuade them from voting “yes,” and spent nearly $10,000 a day on union-busting consulting firms.The company followed a familiar anti-union playbook; in fact, they went even further, pressuring USPS officials to install a private ballot box on company property all while denying the reality of their workers peeing in bottles and defecating in bags to meet merciless delivery quotas – a reality that was quickly confirmed by reporters.With all eyes on Amazon, the entire country has just seen the lengths corporations will go to prevent workers from organizing.While the legality of some of these tactics is being challenged by the RWDSU, the reality is that most of them are commonplace and, in the eyes of America’s lopsided and mostly toothless labor laws, fair game. Even if Amazon is found to have violated workers’ rights in Bessemer, it is unlikely that the company will face any serious consequences.More than anything, this defeat stressed the immediate importance of passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (Pro Act) which would ban captive audience meetings, severely limit corporate interference, invalidate right-to-work legislation and strengthen collective bargaining as a whole.The Pro Act, which would represent the most significant federal labor legislation in decades, passed the House in early May and is all but certain to be voted down in the evenly split Senate.President Biden has spoken strongly in favor of the legislation, but its passage is unlikely without eliminating the filibuster – an action for which Biden has withheld full commitment.The Pro Act would allow labor to move from the defensive to the offensive which is crucial when workers – especially at giant corporations like Amazon – already have the deck stacked against them.A battle has been lost but an advance was made in the war to shift the focus of power from politicians to workersBiden has so far proven to be both the most pro-labor president in modern history and not nearly where we need him to be to deliver the goods. He sent a message of support to workers organizing in Alabama and around the country but stopped short of calling Amazon out by name. He’s encouraged Congress to pass the Pro Act without forging a viable path to follow through. Simply put, he lacks the courage to do what is needed to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen”.Unions and other pro-labor groups have taken it upon themselves to move things forward. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has shifted the national organizing infrastructure used for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign to make hundreds of thousands of calls convincing people of the urgent necessity of the Pro Act.While the Bessemer vote is devastating, the public attention and enthusiasm that was shown to the organizers there is exactly what is needed to make any significant strides in the labor movement, especially if the Senate is going to stall for as long as it can with Green Eggs and Ham.Bessemer was the most high-profile union election in recent memory and it started a national conversation about organized labor and poor working conditions. This election saturated social media (when was the last time you saw a viral TikTok about the importance of union dues?) and has even prompted talk of organizing other Amazon facilities.A battle has been lost but an advance was made in the slow ideological war to shift the public focus of power from politicians to workers. Amazon may have been successful in temporarily exorcising any attempt to organize from within, but the specter still haunts them. More

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      in US Politics

      The rich-poor gap in America is obscene. So let's fix it – here's how | Bernie Sanders

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      The United States cannot prosper and remain a vigorous democracy when so few have so much and so many have so little. While many of my congressional colleagues choose to ignore it, the issue of income and wealth inequality is one of the great moral, economic and political crises that we face – and it must be dealt with.The unfortunate reality is that we are moving rapidly toward an oligarchic form of society, where a handful of billionaires have enormous wealth and power while working families have been struggling in a way we have not seen since the Great Depression. This situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic.Today, half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, 500,000 of the very poorest among us are homeless, millions are worried about evictions, 92 million are uninsured or underinsured, and families all across the country are worried about how they are going to feed their kids. Today, an entire generation of young people carry an outrageous level of student debt and face the reality that their standard of living will be lower than their parents’. And, most obscenely, low-income Americans now have a life expectancy that is about 15 years lower than the wealthy. Poverty in America has become a death sentence.Meanwhile, the people on top have never had it so good. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 92%, and the 50 wealthiest Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 165 million people. While millions of Americans have lost their jobs and incomes during the pandemic, over the past year 650 billionaires have seen their wealth increase by $1.3tn.The growing gap between the very rich and everyone else is nothing new.Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America.In 1978, the top 0.1% owned about 7% of the nation’s wealth. In 2019, the latest year of data available, they own nearly 20%.Unbelievably, the two richest people in America, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, now own more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans combined.If income inequality had not skyrocketed over the past four decades and had simply stayed static, the average worker in America would be earning $42,000 more in income each year. Instead, as corporate chief executives now make over 300 times more than their average employees, the average American worker now earns $32 a week less than he or she did 48 years ago – after adjusting for inflation. In other words, despite huge increases in technology and productivity, ordinary workers are actually losing ground.Addressing income and wealth and inequality will not be easy, because we will be taking on some of the most powerful and well-financed entities in the country, including Wall Street, the health insurance industry, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial-complex. But it must be done. Here is some of what Congress and the president can do in the very near future.We must raise the minimum wage from the current starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to a living wage of at least $15 an hour. A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in it.We need to make it easier, not harder, for workers to join unions. The massive increase in wealth and income inequality can be directly linked to the decline in union membership in America.A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in itWe need to create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure – our roads, bridges, wastewater plants, sewers, culverts, dams, schools and affordable housing.We need to combat climate change by fundamentally transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels towards energy efficiency and renewable energy which will also create millions of good paying jobs.We need to do what virtually every other major country does by guaranteeing healthcare to all people as a human right. Passing a Medicare for All program would end the absurdity of us paying twice as much per capita for healthcare as do the people of other countries, while tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or under-insured.We need to make certain that all of our young people, regardless of income, have the right to high quality education – including college. And that means making public colleges and universities tuition free and substantially reducing student debt for working families.And yes. We need to make the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations in America start paying their fair share of taxes.Growing income and wealth inequality is not just an economic issue. It touches the very foundation of American democracy. If the very rich become much richer while millions of working people see their standard of living continue to decline, faith in government and our democratic institutions will wither and support for authoritarianism will increase. We cannot let that happen. More

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      in US Politics

      Amazon's denial of workers urinating in bottles puts the pee in PR fiasco

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      To paraphrase one of the most iconic tweets of the past 10 years, Amazon’s recent denial about employees not being forced to urinate in bottles at work has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the denial.

      In a tweet sent last night, the official Amazon News account for the behemoth corporation, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, saw his personal net worth increase by $70bn during the pandemic, wrote: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.”
      In under 12 hours the tweet has been quote-tweeted 9,000 times. (For those unversed in the dark Twitter metric arts that’s … not good.)

      Molly Jong-Fast🏡
      (@MollyJongFast)
      This tweet has absolutely completely convinced that the peeing in bottles thing happened and probably worse. https://t.co/mnjYAOkwbe

      March 25, 2021

      The thousands of gleeful and mocking rejoinders to Amazon’s post came with good reason. The company is currently in the midst of a public relations battle with a group of workers in Alabama attempting to unionize. In an attempt to forestall such a historic move, Amazon has been on a campaign to illustrate just how well, in fact, they treat their workers. It doesn’t seem to be working! Numerous high-profile labor organizers, celebrities and politicians like Bernie Sanders have joined the side of the striking workers. The Vermont senator is set to travel to Alabama on Friday to meet with them.
      The botched PR response in question in this case came as a reply to a tweet from another lawmaker, the Wisconsin congressman Mark Pocan, who himself was responding to jabs thrown by another Amazon executive, Dave Clark. Clark had attempted to draw a snarky analogy between his company and the success record of Sanders in his home state, saying: “I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace.”
      So far, so utterly not convincing – as was picked up on swiftly. “I was the person who found the pee in the bottle. Trust me, it happened,” tweeted author James Bloodworth, who worked undercover at Amazon for his book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain.

      James Bloodworth
      (@J_Bloodworth)
      I was the person who found the pee in the bottle. Trust me, it happened. https://t.co/U76UlDRWSO

      March 25, 2021

      Some likened the tweet to a form of corporate gaslighting akin to an abusive relationship – while others mocked pity for the person who sent it out. “Sending thoughts and prayers to the Amazon News account manager being forced to swallow Jeff Bezos’ entire boot with every tweet,” one person chipped in.
      While the $15 an hour paid by Amazon in the US is better than some other companies, workers have long spoken out about brutal conditions, a dangerous, high-paced job, and, in fact, having to urinate into bottles for fear of being seen as wasting too much time on the clock.

      Wagatwe Wanjuki 🇰🇪 🇧🇸
      (@wagatwe)
      “if I were REALLY abusive, she wouldn’t stay.” https://t.co/ZxBbb7rjyt

      March 25, 2021

      “We broke this news,” tweeted the Business Insider editor-in-chief, Nicholas Carlson – pointing out that Amazon’s excuse, that it was contractors (rather than employees) forced to pee in bottles made the story even worse than it looked.
      But why believe them – or the many outlets that reported on this story? – others joked, after all, who wouldn’t trust information about Amazon’s work practices to be impartial when written by … Amazon News?
      Some have pointed out the irony of the tweet falling so close to the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

      Dan Olson
      (@FoldableHuman)
      You don’t really believe that people burn to death in textile factories, do you? If that were true then no one would work for The Triangle Waist Company! The truth is we have over a million incredible workers who are proud of what they do. https://t.co/p6gzShSnDJ

      March 25, 2021

      Perhaps all is not lost here for Amazon, though. There may end up being an upside when the fracas has subsided.

      Jeet Heer
      (@HeerJeet)
      Amazon corporate bosses are reading this tweet and torn between 1) we gotta fire this social media person and 2) We need to make sure we’ve cornered the market on cheap pee bottles, that’s a lucrative market. https://t.co/vIJK0OOfVy

      March 25, 2021

      Bezos’s Washington DC mansion has been reported to have 25 bathrooms for his own use. More

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      in World Politics

      The Other Side of the Indian Farmers’ Protests

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      In November 2020, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation published an article by Paul Nemitz and Matthias Pfeffer on the threat to digital sovereignty in Europe. They called attention to the need in Europe for “decentralised digital technologies” to combat a trend they see as essential for preserving “a flourishing medium-sized business sector, growing tax revenues, rising prosperity, a functioning democracy and rule of law.” 

      The authors felt encouraged by the fact that the European Council was at last looking at challenging the US tech platforms that dominate global cyberspace: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. Europe appears ready to draft laws that would impose targeted regulation strategies different from those that apply to “small and medium-sized actors, or sectoral actors generally.”

      Indian Farmer Protests Explained

      READ MORE

      There are multiple reasons for such a move, which will inevitably be attacked by the corporations as violating the sacrosanct principle of free trade. Nemitz and Pfeffer recognize the complexity of the implicit goal, to ensure “strategic autonomy while preserving an open economy.” Besides the threat to traditional businesses incapable of competing with the platforms, they cite the fact that “unregulated digitalisation of the public sphere has already endangered the systemic role of the media in two respects” to the extent that 80% of “online advertising revenues today flow to just two corporations: Google and Facebook.” This threatens the viability of “costly professional journalism that is vital for democracy.”

      Europe is struggling to find a solution. In the context of the farmers’ protests in India, the Joint Action Committee Against Foreign Retail and E-commerce (JACAFRE) recently took an emphatic stand on the same subject by publishing an open letter addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In this case, the designated culprits are the US powerhouses of retail commerce, Amazon and Walmart, but the authors include what they see as a Quisling Indian company: the mega-corporation, Reliance Industries.

      The giant conglomerate claims to be “committed to innovation-led, exponential growth in the areas of hydrocarbon exploration and production, petroleum refining and marketing, petrochemicals, retail and telecommunications.” JACAFRE suspects it may also be committed to the idea of monopolistic control. It complains that Reliance’s propensity for establishing partnerships with Facebook and Google is akin to letting the fox in the henhouse. This has less to do with the platforms’ direct action than the coercive power their ever-increasingly possession and control of data represents. “If the new farm laws are closely examined,” the JACAFE’s authors claim, “it will be evident that unregulated digitalisation is a very important aspect of them.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Unregulated digitalization:

      A pandemic that grew slowly in the first two decades of the 21st century with the effect of undermining most human economic activities, personal relationships and even mental equilibrium

      Contextual Note

      Three years ago, Walmart purchased the Indian retailer Flipkart. Interviewed at the time, Parminder Jeet Singh, the executive director of IT for Change, complained that the data controlled by e-commerce companies is no longer limited to patterns of consumption but also extends to production and logistics. “They know everything, who needs it, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it, when it should be moved, the complete control of the data of the whole system,” he said. That capacity is more than invasive. It is tantamount to omniscient and undetectable industrial spying combined with forms of social control that are potentially as powerful as China’s much decried social credit system.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In 2018, Singh appeared to worry more about Walmart than Facebook or Amazon, because it represents the physical economy. The day US companies dominate both the data and the physical resources of the Indian economy, Singh believes it would “game over” for Indian economic independence. He framed it in these terms: “If these two companies become a duopoly in the e-commerce sector, it’s actually a duopoly over the whole economy.” 

      On the positive side, he insisted that, contrary to many other countries, India has the “digitally industrialized” culture that would allow it not only to resist the domination of a US-based global company, but also permit it to succeed in building a native equivalent. He viewed Flipkart before Walmart’s takeover as a successful Indian company that had no need of a monopolistic US company to ensure its future growth. 

      Historical Note

      Fair Observer’s founder, CEO and editor-in-chief, Atul Singh, recently collaborated with analyst Manu Sharma on an article debunking the simplistic view shared across international media that persists in painting India’s protesting farmers as a David challenging a globalized Goliath insidiously promoted by Narendra Modi’s government. The Western media’s narrative puts the farmers in the role of resistance heroes against a new form of market-based tyranny.

      But as Singh and Sharma point out, this requires ignoring history and refusing to recognize the pressing need to move away from a “Soviet-inspired model” that ended up creating pockets of privilege and artificial dependence. These relics of India’s post-independence past became obstacles not only to productivity but to justice as well, to the extent that the existing system favored those who had learned to successfully exploit it.

      Singh and Sharma highlight the incoherence of a system that risks provoking deeper crises. Does that mean that Modi’s proposed reform is viable and without risk? The two authors acknowledge the very real fear farmers feel “that big private players will offer good money to farmers in the beginning, kill off their competition and then pay little for agricultural produce.” They realistically concede that, once in place, “India’s agricultural reforms will have intended and unintended consequences, both positive and negative.”

      But there may be more to the story. From the JACAFE’s perspective, the farmers’ instincts are correct. Their fear of the big players leveraging their clout in the traditional marketplace by exercising discretionary control of production and distribution becomes exponentially greater when considering that, thanks to their mastery of data, their control is not limited to the commodities themselves. It extends to all the data associated not only with the modes and means of production, but also with the channels of distribution and even habits of consumption. That explains why the JACAFE sees the 2018 takeover of Flipkart by Walmart as particularly foreboding.

      This dimension of the issue should also help us to understand why Prime Minister Modi has recently been playing cat and mouse with both Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. At some point, the purely rhetorical game that even a mouse with a 56-inch chest can play while dodging the bite of a pair of voracious and muscular cats (Amazon and Walmart) has its limits. India is faced with a major quandary. It needs to accelerate its development of domestic resources in a manner that allows it to control the future economic consequences for its population but must, at the same time, look abroad for the investment that will fund such endeavors.

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      In a recent article on foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign portfolio investment (FPI) in India, Singh and Sharma noted that the recent flood of cash can be attributed to the fact that “corporations from the US and the Gulf have bought big stakes in Reliance Industries, India’s biggest conglomerate. They are also buying shares in Indian companies. In effect, they are betting on future growth.” The problem with all foreign investment is that while it is focused on growth, the growth that investors are targeting is the value of their own investment and its contribution to augmenting their global power. From the investors’ point of view, the growth of the Indian economy is at best only a side-effect. The case of Reliance in particular will need to be monitored.

      In December 2020, Reliance’s chairman, Mukesh Ambani, promised a “more equal India … with increased incomes, increased employment, and improved quality of life for 1 billion Indians at the middle and bottom of the economic pyramid” thanks to the achievement of a $5-trillion economy by 2025. While reminding readers that “Facebook and Google are already partnered with Reliance and own stakes in Jio Platforms,” the Deccan Herald reports that the three companies have joined hands again to “to set up a national digital payment network.” The question some may be asking is this: When three partners occupy a central place in expanding Asia’s second-largest economy, who are the foxes and who are the hens?

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Win the Amazon union fight and we can usher in a new Progressive Era | Robert Reich

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      The most dramatic change in American capitalism over the last half-century has been the emergence of corporate behemoths like Amazon and the shrinkage of labor unions. The resulting imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money and the abandonment of the working class.All this is coming to a head in several ways.Over the next eight days, Amazon faces a union vote at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. If successful, it would be Amazon’s first US-based union in its nearly 27-year history.Conditions in Amazon warehouses would please Kim Jong-un – strict production quotas, 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks, unsafe procedures, arbitrary firings “and they track our every move”, Jennifer Bates, a worker at Bessemer, told the Senate budget committee on Wednesday.To thwart the union drive, Amazon has required Bessemer workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned workers they’d have to pay union dues (wrong – Alabama is a “right-to-work” state that bars mandatory dues), and intimidated and harassed organizers.Why is Amazon abusing its workers?The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals and a commitment to antitrustThe company isn’t exactly hard-up. It’s the most profitable firm in America. Its executive chairman and largest shareholder, Jeff Bezos, is the richest man in the world, holding more wealth than the bottom 39% of Americans put together.Amazon is abusing workers because it can.Fifty years ago, General Motors was the largest employer in America. The typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars and had a major say over working conditions. Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying about $15 an hour and treating workers like cattle.The typical GM worker wasn’t “worth” more than twice today’s Amazon or Walmart worker and didn’t have more valuable insights about how work should be organized. The difference is GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union, summoning the collective bargaining power of more than a third of the entire American workforce.By contrast, today’s Amazon and Walmart workers are on their own. And because only 6.4% of America’s private-sector workers are unionized, there’s little collective pressure on Amazon or Walmart to treat their workers any better.Fifty years ago, “big labor” had enough political clout to ensure labor laws were enforced and that the government pushed giant firms like GM to sustain the middle class.Today, organized labor’s political clout is minuscule by comparison. The biggest political players are giant corporations like Amazon. And what have they done with their muscle? Encouraged “right-to-work” laws, diluted federal labor protections and kept the National Labor Relations Board understaffed and overburdened.They’ve also impelled government to lower their taxes (Amazon paid zero federal taxes in 2018); extorted states to provide them tax breaks as condition for locating facilities there (Amazon is a champion at this game); bullied cities where they’re headquartered (Amazon forced Seattle to back down on a plan to tax big corporations to pay for homeless shelters); and wangled trade treaties allowing them to outsource so many jobs that blue-collar workers in America have little choice but to take low-paying, high-stress warehouse and delivery gigs.Oh, and they’ve neutered antitrust laws, which in an earlier era would have had companies like Amazon in their crosshairs.This decades-long power shift – the emergence of corporate leviathans and the demise of labor unions – has resulted in a massive upward redistribution of income and wealth. The richest 0.1% of Americans now has almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% together.Corporate profits account for a growing share of the total economy and wages a declining share, with multi-billionaire executives and investors like Bezos taking home the lion’s share.The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws, tougher trade deals and a renewed commitment to antitrust.The Biden administration and congressional Democrats appear willing. The House has just passed the toughest labor reforms in more than a generation. Biden’s new trade representative, Katherine Tai, promises trade deals will protect American workers rather than exporters. And Biden is putting trustbusters in critical positions at the Federal Trade Commission and in the White House.I’d like to think America is at a tipping point similar to where it was some 120 years ago, when the ravages and excesses of the Gilded Age precipitated what became known as the Progressive Era. Then, reformers reversed the course of American capitalism for the next 70 years, making it work for the many rather than the few.Today’s progressive activists – in Washington, at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse and elsewhere around the nation – may be on the verge of doing the same. More

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      in US Politics

      Amazon to stop selling books that frame LGBTQ+ identities as mental illness

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      Amazon will no longer sell books that frame gay, lesbian, transgender and other sexual identities as a mental illness.
      The company made the announcement public in a letter sent to Republican senators who had asked why Amazon had stopped selling When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, a book by the conservative academic Ryan Anderson, best known for his opposition to same-sex marriage.
      In the letter, first obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Amazon writes: “As a bookseller, we provide our customers with access to a variety of viewpoints, including books that some customers may find objectionable.
      “That said, we reserve the right not to sell certain content. All retailers make decisions about what selection they choose to offer, as do we. As to your specific question about When Harry Became Sally, we have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.”
      The letter came in response to criticism from the rightwing senators Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Mike Braun and Josh Hawley who wrote to the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, criticizing the book’s removal and calling it a signal “to conservative Americans that their views are not welcome on its platforms”.
      The move will have a significant impact on books that frame LGTBQ+ identities as mental illnesses. Amazon accounts for 53% of all books sold in the US and 80% of all ebooks, according to Codex Group, a book audience research firm.
      The decision comes at a moment when Republicans and the conservative movement are increasingly focused on so-called “cancel culture”. Republicans have recently criticized the decision by Dr Seuss publisher to stop publishing six of his books because they portrayed people of color “in ways that are hurtful and wrong”.
      “Everyone agrees that gender dysphoria is a serious condition that causes great suffering,” Anderson and Roger Kimball, publisher of Encounter Books, which published the book, said in a statement given to the Journal.
      “There is a debate, however, which Amazon is seeking to shut down, about how best to treat patients who experience gender dysphoria,” they added. “Amazon is using its massive power to distort the marketplace of ideas and is deceiving its own customers in the process,” they said.
      A spokesperson for LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD said: “There’s an antiquated and shameful history of equating LGBTQ identity to mental illness, and Amazon’s decision to stop selling books that falsely equate the two is a positive step in ending the misinformation campaign against LGBTQ people, especially trans youth, meant only to cause harm.
      “This book is dangerous and harmful to trans kids, and those who are looking for information about trans identity should not look to resources written by someone who has made their livelihood by publishing screeds against the trans community.” More

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      in US Politics

      What if the most important election of the year is happening right now in Alabama? | Indigo Olivier

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      This month, 5,800 Amazon warehouse employees in Bessemer, Alabama, will be voting on whether or not to unionize with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in what could turn out to be the most important election of the year.While the Bessemer fulfillment center itself is a drop in the bucket when compared to Amazon’s roughly 500 facilities around the country, this could be the ballot heard around the world. If successful, this election would mark the first unionized Amazon facility in the US.Over the past 26 years, Jeff Bezos has built himself a private empire. Amazon is now the second largest employer in the US, after Walmart, and the fifth largest in the world. The more than 800,000 Amazon employees across the country represent a population between the size of Maine and Montana. Globally, the company employs more than 1 million workers.Amazon is also the largest online retailer in the world, with a market cap (or value of the company’s shares) at $1.5tn – larger than the GDPs of most countries. The power this company yields is unrivaled.Yet Amazon’s success has been made possible by the labor of the underpaid and overworked employees who keep operations running; by weakened anti-trust laws; by a larger US economic shift from manufacturing to the service and logistics sectors; and, of course, by generous government subsidies, which have seen the company get away with paying no taxes in recent years.Unions alone will not bring Amazon to heel – but without them, all bets are off.The message this election will send to workers is: if we can do it in the anti-labor, “right-to-work” south against one of the most powerful companies in the world – one with no scruples with regards to its anti-union tactics – then workers can unionize anywhere.It would be a marked shift since Ronald Reagan’s mass firing of striking air traffic control workers, which caused a chilling effect on organized labor and ushered in a new pro-business, anti-worker era. Labor organizers are hoping that a victory in Bessemer might turn this tide.The labor movement recognizes the significance of this election. Members of the AFL-CIO and nurses from a recently unionized hospital in North Carolina have been phone banking to speak with Bessemer workers directly about the importance of voting yes on a union. Supporters have also made it clear that the fight at the Bessemer facility, where about 85% of workers are Black, is also a fight for racial justice.Biden’s recent statement in support of workers organizing in Alabama suggests that under this administration significant gains for labor can be won, but only if workers are willing to fight for them.One of the biggest lies sold to the American public has been to convince the vast majority of people that “politics” means showing up to the polls every few years to elect representative officials who will take it from there. Like many aspects of our lives, politics has become something to consume passively. It’s cable news networks, the punditry class, bumper stickers, lawn signs, campaign donations. It’s horse-race journalism and partisan tabloids.A union victory for one workplace is a victory for all workersIt has narrowed the spectrum of the “political” to red and blue, kids in cages or “migrant overflow facilities”, dog whistles over bull horns, an open disdain for working people or a veneer of compassion. Far fewer see the actions they take day-to-day, in the workplaces where we spend the majority of our waking lives, as something worthy of being political.The Bessemer election has the potential to topple this frame in favor of a new horizon. The difference between electoral politics and labor organizing is the difference between voting in a president who says he will phase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next four years – yet surrenders before the battle begins – and taking direct action to ensure that higher wages are guaranteed in your contract immediately.Amazon prides itself on paying its workers $15 an hour – more than double the federal minimum wage – plus benefits. But rather than being a product of the benevolence of an enlightened CEO, we should all understand this to be a Machiavellian tactic used to preempt the serfs from storming the castle.More importantly, workers organizing towards a union must recognize that in the long run, without labor protections, every employee lives under the dictates of an unforgiving and despotic market. These “tides” will only turn when workers see themselves as a unified force and recognize that a union victory for one workplace is a victory for all workers. It favors a rising tide that will lift all boats to the trickle-down economics that have left us in perpetual drought.The Bessemer election is not one in which fulfillment center employees will cast their ballots and abdicate all further responsibilities. Rather, this vote would open the floodgates. More