At a hotly anticipated remote keynote presentation on Friday, billionaire Jeff Bezos revealed the details of an exciting new virtual reality experience which he says will allow consumers to log on to an artificial fantasy world completely unlike our existing reality.

“We’re calling it Mainstream Media, or MSM for short,” Bezos told viewers. “MSM will allow users to interface with an alternate world of the imagination where capitalism is working fine for everyone, constant military expansionism is normal and desirable, Washington’s enemies are all bloodthirsty monsters, and billionaires are just harmless job creators. Let’s check it out.”

Bezos explained that his 2013 purchase of The Washington Post ensured that consumers will remain psychologically plugged in to a virtual reality in which the sociopolitical status quo upon which his Amazon empire is built looks totally fine and not at all insane or dystopian.

“Unlike the virtual reality enterprises of certain other billionaires, the Mainstream Media universe operates continually and without the need for fancy headsets or equipment,” Bezos said. “In fact, the psychological technology is so immersive that users aren’t generally even aware that they’re not experiencing actual reality.”

Bezos was soon joined in his presentation by fellow billionaires Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim Helú.

“Warren! Mike! Carlos! Rupert! What are you guys doing here?” Bezos recited in scripted surprise.

“We wanted in on the Mainstream Media universe too,” Bloomberg answered. “Can’t let you have all the fun, Jeff.”

“With my vast media empire I’ve been able alter the outcomes of elections, shape policies and political agendas, start wars and kill social progress in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres,” Murdoch boasted.

“My position as chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway has given me control over dozens of daily newspapers throughout the United States,” Buffett added.

“My holdings in the New York Times give me leverage over the hiring and publishing practices of the most influential paper in the most powerful nation on earth,” said Slim.

“By buying up media influence and controlling the public’s perception of reality, we ensure that all the systems which have been funnelling wealth and power toward us remain intact,” explained Bloomberg.

“And it keeps the guillotine blades away from our necks!” Slim interjected.

“That’s right Carlos,” Bezos said. “By psychologically helping the public to perceive a different reality than the one that actually exists, we can prevent prevent social uprisings which might prove hazardous to our wealth and vital organs.”

“So we give the riff raff a virtual reality to live in,” said Murdoch. “Because actual reality belongs to us.”

caityjohnstone.medium.com

By Sarah ANDERSON

During the pandemic, low-wage workers have lost income, jobs, and lives. And yet many of the nation’s top-tier corporations have been fixated on protecting their wealthy CEOs, even bending their own rules to pump up executive paychecks.

A new Institute for Policy Studies report finds that 51 of the country’s 100 largest low-wage employers moved bonus goalposts or made other rule changes in 2020 to give their CEOs 29 percent average raises while their frontline employees made 2 percent less.

Among these 51 rule-rigging companies, average CEO compensation was $15.3 million in 2020, while median worker pay was $28,187 on average. The average CEO- worker pay ratio: 830 to 1.

How exactly did these companies rig their CEO pay rules? Let’s look at a few examples.

Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta had the largest paycheck among the rule-rigging companies. After he failed to meet the goals associated with his multi-year stock awards, the board “modified” the awards by disregarding poor 2020 financial results and changing the performance metrics. Those maneuvers inflated his total compensation to $56 million — 1,953 times as much as the company’s median worker pay of $28,608 in 2020.

At YUM Brands, the owner of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, CEO David Gibbs garnered positive media coverage by donating $900,000 of his salary to pay for $1,000 bonuses for restaurant general managers. But the board changed its bonus metrics to give Gibbs a special cash bonus and stock grant worth more than 2.5 times his voluntary salary cut. This largesse boosted Gibbs’s total compensation to $14.6 million — 1,286 times as much as median worker pay of $11,377. The fast food giant did not offer hazard pay to these frontline employees, whose average wages are just $9.75 per hour, according to Payscale.

At Coca-Cola, none of the top executives met their bonus targets last year either, but the company board used “discretion” to give them all bonuses anyway. For CEO James Quincey, that $960,000 bonus, combined with new stock-based awards, drove his total compensation package above $18 million, over 1,600 times as much as the company’s typical worker pay. In December 2020, Coca-Cola announced plans to cut about 2,200 jobs, or 17 percent of its workforce. About 1,200 of the layoffs will hit U.S. workers.

How did corporations justify such extreme disparity in a year of extraordinary hardship for workers?

The most common defense was the “talent retention” argument. In a report filed with the SEC, for example, Hilton explained that the “projected zero payouts” on the CEO’s performance stock awards would’ve “impaired the awards’ ability to retain key talent.”

This is the Great Man Theory: one heroic individual in the corner office almost single-handedly creates company value, so pay him whatever it takes to prevent him from abandoning ship.

The notion that one CEO is worth hundreds — if not thousands — of times more than their workers has always been absurd. But in the middle of a pandemic crisis, when frontlines employees are demonstrating just how essential they are to our economy and health, it’s even more preposterous.

So what can we do about it?

One bill pending in Congress, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, would use tax policy to incentivize corporations to narrow their pay divides by reining in executive compensation and lifting up worker wages.

Under this proposal, companies with pay gaps between their highest-paid executive and median worker of less than 50 to 1 would not owe an extra dime. Corporations that refuse to narrow their gaps below this threshold would face graduated rate increases starting at 0.5 percentage points on ratios of more than 50 to 1 and topping out at 5.0 percentage points for companies with gaps above 500 to 1.

The Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act would generate an estimated $150 billion over 10 years that could be used to create good jobs and meet human needs. If the bill had been in place in 2020, Walmart, with a pay gap of 1,078 to 1, would have owed an extra $1 billion in federal taxes — enough to fund 13,502 clean energy jobs for a year.

Amazon, with a 1,596-to-1 pay ratio, also would have owed an extra $1 billion, enough to underwrite 115,089 public housing units for a year. (Amazon’s highest-paid exec last year was Worldwide Consumer CEO David Clark, with $46.3 million.)

Home Depot, with a 511-to-1 gap, would have owed an extra $800 million, enough to create 18,329 jobs that pay $15 per hour with benefits for a year.

It’s time for public policy to shift corporate America away from a business model that creates obscene wealth for a few at the top and economic insecurity for so many of the rest of us. By inflating executive compensation while their workers struggled during a pandemic, corporate boards have just strengthened the case for tax penalties on huge CEO-worker pay gaps.

inequality.org

Amazon used to empower small American entrepreneurs, then they sold them out.

By Helen ANDREWS

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, by Brad Stone, Simon and Schuster: 2021, 496 pages

The $218,385 that a judge in March ordered Michael Sanchez to pay Jeff Bezos must have been one of the sweetest checks the Amazon founder ever cashed. Sanchez had sued Bezos for defamation for spreading “the false narrative” that Sanchez had given his sister Lauren Sanchez’s sexts with Bezos from their extramarital affair to the National Enquirer in exchange for $200,000—which is exactly what happened. A judge threw out the defamation suit and awarded Bezos six figures in legal fees.

Author Brad Stone describes Michael Sanchez in Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire as “a handsome, gay Trump supporter and skilled amateur tennis player with a predilection for double-bridged Gucci eyeglasses.” Given that description, which does not exactly inspire trust, one wonders why Lauren was sharing her sexts with him in the first place. Even more amazingly, when the Enquirer approached the couple for comment as it prepared to run its exposé, a frantic Lauren hired her brother on a $25,000-a-month contract to advise her and to use his tabloid contacts to work the Enquirer. That was the last time she trusted him. The two siblings have since ceased all contact.

But the real story of Amazon Unbound is not Michael Sanchez’s abuse of trust. It is Jeff Bezos’s.

Stone is the author of The Everything Store, published in 2013, a mostly admiring chronicle of the rise of Amazon from its founding in 1994 through 2012. This sequel takes the story up to the present day, including the coronavirus pandemic and President Joe Biden’s nomination to the Federal Trade Commission of Lina Khan, a longtime Amazon foe. But the most pivotal moment comes early in that time span.

The year 2015 marked the first time that third-party sellers on Amazon’s marketplace had higher sales than Amazon’s own retail side. Amazon had gone to great effort to woo these third-party sellers, who in the early 2010s were mostly concentrated on eBay. Bezos’s philosophy was quantity over quality: recruit as many sellers as you can and then let the customer decide whether or not their low-priced goods are too crappy. When their recruitment of third-party sellers paid off, Amazon doubled down on that business model and made a fateful choice: to recruit sellers in China.

By 2016, thousands of Chinese sellers were registering on Amazon every day. The company had courted them with its initiative code-named “Marco Polo,” where Amazon translated its seller handbook into Mandarin and hired recruiters in Beijing, and another called “Dragon Boat,” which streamlined shipping out of Shenzhen and Shanghai to lower costs. The site was inundated with Chinese goods practically overnight.

This alienated the very independent sellers who had previously been Amazon’s biggest defenders. It used to be that every time politicians railed against Amazon for putting mom-and-pop stores out of business, Bezos could point to the small business owners he had empowered. Yoga mat maker Wendell Morris told Bezos in 2014, “The beauty of Amazon is that someone can say, ‘I want to start a business,’ and they can go on Amazon and really start a business. You don’t have to get a lease on a building.” Bezos put the quote in a shareholder letter.

But Morris has since soured on Amazon. He and other third-party sellers interviewed by Stone say that 2016 and the rise of Chinese sellers was the moment when things began to go bad. Stolen designs, fake reviews, counterfeit goods, and other forms of fraud became rife. There were lots of things Amazon could have done to crack down: requiring a security deposit that sellers would forfeit if caught breaking the rules or tracking violators so they didn’t just register under a new name the next day. But it did not.

Some Amazon executives were positively enthusiastic about the company’s headfirst dive into globalization. Sebastian Gunningham, senior vice president of Amazon Marketplace, “started wearing a gaudy 80-cent stainless steel necklace with a dangling owl pendant” that was selling in the tens of thousands per month to send the message that Amazon “should not dismiss such low-priced items,” Stone relates. “Everybody thought that lots of trash was coming onto the site, but trash is in the eye of the beholder,” Gunningham explained. “Lots of it was very fashionable to many.” (Gunningham later left Amazon for WeWork.)

One observer who did not approve of Amazon’s new business model was Donald Trump. “Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers,” he tweeted in 2017. “Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt—many jobs being lost!” On another occasion he claimed: “If @Amazon ever had to pay fair taxes, its stock would crash and it would crumble like a paper bag. The @washingtonpost scam is saving it!”

Bezos did not take Trump’s criticism’s seriously. He put endless energy into combatting the president’s putdowns via Amazon’s P.R. shop and the Washington Post, but he never considered that maybe Trump had a point. Jay Carney, the former Obama White House press secretary who joined Amazon in 2015, reassured Bezos in an email that Trump was merely “playing to his base of disaffected voters.”

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Bezos and his colleagues did not have much sympathy for the populist case. When Amazon was researching Whole Foods in preparation for its acquisition in 2017, it discovered that Whole Foods locations “neatly aligned with the geographic distribution of Prime members.” That could be a shorthand for an entire class: the people who live where Whole Foods locations are. The social costs of the one-click economy have not been borne by these people.

The Covid-19 pandemic supercharged Amazon and also supercharged its particular way of managing its employees. Amazon workers were already subject to various forms of “biosurveillance,” tracking the movements and even the facial expressions of its drivers and packers. Now the cameras at fulfillment centers are equipped to monitor social distancing. “The robotics group built a system called ‘Proxemics’,” Stone writes. “If workers were walking too close together, their images on the screen were overlaid with red circles.”

It used to be that the worst thing America had to worry about was turning into a Third World country. Amazon shows that we could end up becoming worse than Third World. Actual Third World countries are insulated from the kind of surveillance and monitoring that Amazon has perfected by “low internet usage, balky wireless networks, and low credit card penetration,” the three factors that Stone says stymied Amazon’s expansion into India and Mexico. Hyperconnected American consumers have no such immunity. Our very technological sophistication gives Amazon enormous power. Judging from the portrait presented in Amazon Unbound, it is not a power they can be trusted with.

theamericanconservative.com

From “kill-zones” to “waterbeds,” the giants of the digital marketplace have ways of making you squirm.

By Napoleon LINARTHATOS

If we manage not to descend into some kind of tech dystopia, then the generations that come after us will have the opportunity to wonder how on earth we had been duped for so long and so pathetically by a few Big Tech monopolists, how it was possible to have such a grand accumulation of power and wealth preserved by a system so bluntly corrupt in its modus operandi. Were we so transfixed by the shiny digital objects as to be oblivious to what was going on around us? Were we so keen on bludgeoning each other online as to allow the man behind the curtain to carry on?

The 2020 House report on competition in digital markets was damning in its content but feeble in its consequences, and the reason may be found within the report. At some point a particularly abusive tactic of Amazon is noted. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon oligarch, is shocked, as Captain Renault in the movie Casablanca, that such an abusive practice has been deployed by his company. “That is unacceptable” Bezos declares, “and I will look into that, and we’ll get back to your office with that.” Then the congressional report indicates that “to date, however, Amazon has not followed up with the Subcommittee to provide additional information.” Pooh-poohing Congress is possible when you know that your monopoly is relatively safe, and that the investigation will more likely end up as a performative political dance around the issue.

This, by the way, was not an isolated incident. The subcommittee had found that, in general, Amazon used the counterfeit products on its platform as leverage in order to force businesses to sell on its platform. Internally, those businesses were classified as “holdouts.” Even a large corporation like Nike had to cave in. Wall Street Journal reported that “Nike agreed to start selling some products directly to Amazon in exchange for stricter policing of counterfeits and restrictions on unsanctioned sales, according to a person familiar with the deal.”

Of course, leveraging its sales of counterfeits is only one of the ways that Amazon forces businesses across America to bend to its will. Amazon uses the data from the sales made by those businesses in order to discover opportunities and consumer trends for its private label, Amazon Basics. A former Amazon employee testified that his peers “were pulling private data on Amazon seller activity, so they could figure out market opportunity, etc. Totally not legitimate, but no one monitored or seemed to care.” Besides, a lot of data from third party sellers could be used in accordance with Amazon policies because significant loopholes exist in those policies.

Lina Khan, recently appointed to the Federal Trade Commission, has documented the case of Quidsi, once “one of the world’s fastest growing e-commerce companies.” Quidsi was very successful selling many different products through its subsidiaries, like Diapers.com. Amazon wanted to buy Quidsi back in 2009 but the founders of the company declined. It was then that Amazon used its size, reach, and financial heft to start a price war against Quidsi.

Quidsi executives saw that Amazon’s pricing bots—software “that carefully monitors other companies’ prices and adjusts Amazon’s to match”—were tracking Diapers.com and would immediately slash Amazon’s prices in response to Quidsi’s changes. In September 2010, Amazon rolled out Amazon Mom, a new service that offered a year’s worth of free two-day Prime shipping (which usually cost $79 a year). Customers could also secure an additional 30% discount on diapers by signing up for monthly deliveries as part of a service known as “Subscribe and Save.”

It was not long before Quidsi was sold to Amazon for $545 million.

According to the congressional report, Amazon had identified Quidsi as its “#1 short term competitor” and “was willing to bleed over $200 million in losses in diapers in one month.” Since the acquisition of Quidsi, Amazon has significantly reduced the discounts and the benefits of the Amazon Mom service.

There are the network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different. It’s possible someone beats Instagram by building something that is better to the point that they get network migration, but this is harder as long as Instagram keeps running as a product.

In a recent cover story of Barron’s, Instagram was presented as “the most important component of Facebook” from the investor’s point of view. “Its growth would surely get a higher multiple than the core Facebook platform business.” In a similar fashion, Instagram could achieve for Facebook what the YouTube acquisition had done for Google. “Even amid the pandemic, YouTube ad sales jumped 31% in 2020, easily outpacing the 6% growth from Google Search ads. Alphabet’s stock has returned 40% since the first YouTube disclosure, versus 24% for the S&P 500.” It is a pretty reasonable development when you realize that the giants of Big Tech contain within themselves so many of their would-be competitors.

Instagram for Facebook, Waze and YouTube for Google, Quidsi for Amazon, these are acquisitions in which at least the acquired party got to survive. Nowadays, it is more likely for a startup to be destroyed either by being cloned by the Big Tech, crashed by its predatory pricing, or just being bought in order to be shut down. “American tech giants are making life tough for startups” the Economist reported. “Big, rich and paranoid, they have reams of data to help them spot and buy young firms that might challenge them.” Startups like the giants are beginning to look like a bad investment. “Anything having to do with the consumer internet is perceived as dangerous, because of the dominance of Amazon, Facebook and Google (owned by Alphabet). Venture capitalists are wary of backing startups in online search, social media, mobile and e-commerce.” There is a weariness in the startups world, according to the Economist, about entering what is called a kill-zone—a military term meaning an area of engagement with a concentration of fatalities: “Snap is the most prominent example; after Snap rebuffed Facebook’s attempts to buy the firm in 2013, for $3bn, Facebook cloned many of its successful features and has put a damper on its growth.”

A paper by economists Ufuk Akcigit and Sina Ates argued that “the US economy has witnessed a number of striking trends that indicate rising market concentration and a slowdown in business dynamism in recent decades.” Presenting “new evidence on higher concentration of patenting in the hands of firms with the largest stock that corroborates declining knowledge diffusion in the economy.” In the year 2017, Facebook and Google captured “an astounding 99% of revenue growth from digital advertising in the US.” Thus, though astonishing, it is no surprise that, “due to Google and Facebook’s dominance, ‘the average growth rate for every other company in the sector was close to 0’.”

This month it was the turn of Tile, a company that produces tracking devices, to feel the kill-zone heat from the Big Tech giants. Apple introduced its own tracking device, the AirTag. There was a lot of fanboy-journalism coverage about the new product. On Bloomberg, the CEO of Tile, C.J. Prober, said

If you look at the history between Tile and Apple, we had a very symbiotic relationship. They sold Tile in their stores, we were highlighted at WWDC 2019, and then they launched ‌Find My‌ in 2019, and right when they launched their ‌Find My‌ app, which is effectively a competitor of Tile, they made a number of changes to their OS that made it very difficult for our customers to enable Tile. And then once they got it enabled, they started showing notifications that basically made it seem like Tile was broken.

The Tile devices are not broken. But in the Apple ecosystem the Tile devices need to be broken because that is what Apple decided. Competition and free markets are kind of broken, though, as the increasingly grim record of the adjacent tech monopolies is demonstrating. Previously, as Amazon was a big client of delivery companies like UPS, it was estimated that it was able to get discounts up to 70 percent “over regular delivery prices. Delivery companies sought to make up for the discounts they gave to Amazon by raising the prices they charged to independent sellers, a phenomenon recently termed the ‘waterbed effect.’” Big Tech has been getting huge discounts—economic, social and political—from America for some time now. The waterbed, having been subjected to extreme point pressures, is about to pop.

theamericanconservative.com

Though they claim to champion privacy, companies like Google and Amazon are making a fortune contracting with the government.

By Ivan ELAND

The “de-platforming” of Donald Trump by Twitter, Facebook, and Google-owned YouTube—that is, Big Tech—recently garnered big headlines. Trump’s change in status has raised cries among some conservatives of “censorship.” Yet a more libertarian view holds that these are private companies that have a right to control their own content, just as private broadcast and print media do. The word “censorship” has been traditionally and more appropriately applied to government violations of the Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of free speech.

More disturbing might be Big Tech’s aiding of law enforcement’s violations of the rights of individuals at home and contributions to the military’s violation of human rights abroad. Despite its reputation for independence, it has recently been revealed that Big Tech’s relationship with the American national security establishment may be stronger than was previously thought. At some tech firms, workforce opposition has arisen over company contracts with the military and law enforcement. Yet these employee objections have usually led the companies to hide such government business through the use of mundane and nondescript subcontractors.

Big Tech has had a long-standing relationship with the U.S. government and military. During World War II, the government used IBM’s punch card technology to keep track of prisoners at unconstitutional domestic internment camps housing Japanese Americans, who even government reports admitted posed no threat to the American war effort. (At the same time, Nazi Germany was using similar IBM technology.) The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense (DoD) funded research on computing in the 1960s that led to the Internet and later to Siri. Such spinoffs are beneficial, but it is more efficient for the private sector to invest in them directly. Less positively, Honeywell Aerospace manufactured fragmentation bombs, which killed many civilians during the Vietnam War. Silicon Valley was no stranger to military contracts, with Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin), builder of military aircraft, missiles, satellites, and other defense systems, being the biggest player there during the 1980s.

Nowadays, Big Tech companies have loads of contracts with the military and law enforcement. Tech Inquiry, a non-profit organization promoting tech accountability, has reported that DoD, ICE, FBI, DEA, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have thousands of contracts with Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Dell, IBM, and Hewlett Packard. Microsoft is by far the contract champion, with 5,000. Amazon and Google trail with 350 and 250, respectively.

For example, Amazon’s facial Rekognition software could easily be misused by the government, yet the company is still marketing it to government agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Furthermore, Amazon’s cloud services are employed by Palantir, a company that creates databases for ICE. Microsoft even admits that its software allows ICE to “utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification” of immigrants. Dell also licenses software to ICE.

Google was involved in Project Maven to provide artificial intelligence for U.S. drone warfare in foreign nations. American presidents have used drones to illegally kill people, including Barack Obama’s assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Awlaki was an American citizen, killed by his own government without charges, a trial, or sentencing. Almost 4,000 Google employees demanded the company end the contract and some resigned over it. Yet Google is now providing off-the-shelf technology for drones.

Big Tech is even helping foreign governments conduct what can be legitimately called “censorship.” For example, Google, in a project called Dragonfly, sold the oppressive Chinese government a censored version of its search engine. Microsoft beat out Amazon for a whopping $10 billion JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract to provide cloud computing for DoD.

Big Tech should be leery of working with both the U.S. and foreign governments—and not only because many of their employees object to contracts that can result in deaths or the violation of human rights. Government money never comes without strings attached. Contracting with the government will bring a slew of regulations that can change the commercial nature of any business, rendering it less creative and innovative.

Nonetheless this admonition may fall on deaf ears—because the government is so big and spends so much money in the private sector that it is hard for tech companies to avoid being tempted by its pot of gold. Although it pretends differently, Big Tech has a long and lucrative relationship with government contracting and, unfortunately, that business will probably continue to grow in the future.

theamericanconservative.com

The world is entering an era of undeniable change that will be defined by our collective response to the human and economic devastation left by the pandemic. As Covid-19 continues to spread across the globe, Amazon´s rise to the top of the winner-take-all economy is a call to action to progressive forces who still believe in the politics of the common good and are willing to fight for the affirmation of the dignity of work.

As a result of the shutdown of non-essential brick and mortar stores,  Amazon has nearly doubled its market valuation to over the USD 1.5 trillion and its third-quarter profits are up 200 per cent year-on-year. In the United States alone, Amazon is expected to cash in a whopping 42 cents of every dollar spent over the holiday period. Jeff Bezos, already the richest man in the world, has become even richer and is expanding his Amazon empire at an unprecedented rate.

The pace of work in an Amazon warehouse has for long been brutal and unforgiving, with work-related injuries far surpassing other similar businesses. But once Covid-19 hit and customers turned to e-commerce, the conditions became even worse. As the volume of orders exploded, social distancing and hand hygiene became incompatible with production goals. Union actions prompted changes to Amazon’s behavior in some European countries, while in others, like the US, workers spoke out about safety only to be dismissed, consistent with Amazon’s anti-union playbook. The biggest pandemic profiteer would fire workers or silence critics rather than fix problems and negotiate with social partners.

Amazon’s empire expands

Just this week, the US federal government issued a complaint against Amazon for firing Courtney Bowden, an Amazon warehouse worker who advocated for better working conditions. In April, the company fired two tech workers after they called on the company to take urgent climate action. The US news site Vice recently uncovered Amazon’s extensive scheme using private investigators to spy on workers, environmentalists and other social leaders who dare to criticisethe company.

These efforts to rein in Amazon and other tech corporations in Europe, the US, and India are a sign that workers, progressive elected officials and civil society can find ways to partner to hold corporations accountable.

The tech giant is not only now an e-commerce force but also a leader in cloud computing, video streaming, virtual assistance, media, physical grocery retail, pharmacy and it has shown ambitions to expand into wireless networks, healthcare and internet service provision. Amazon is not just a threat to workers but also to those who believe in privacy, civil liberties and fair markets. And the company’s increasing size makes it easier to steamroll opposing, civil society voices.

The good news is that we are waking up to the danger posed by Amazon. Anti-monopoly regulators and progressive politicians are beginning to take notice of Amazon’s growing market dominance and the unfair competition that results for both the sellers on the platform and others in retail. Amazon both manages and makes the rules for its platform and sells its products there, giving it an unfair advantage over every other seller and more influence over our pocketbooks and data every day.

Politicians are ready to act

The European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation arguing that the company is misusing the data of sellers on the platform to its own advantage. The US House Judiciary Committee on Competition in Digital Markets confirmed what many had already said: ‘Amazon’s pattern of exploiting sellers, enabled by its market dominance, raises serious competition concerns.‘ In India, the Competition Commission has ordered a probe for alleged violations of competition law, while US lawyers have filed complaints against Amazon’s dominant position in e-commerce in several states.

These efforts to rein in Amazon and other tech corporations in Europe, the US, and India are a sign that workers, progressive elected officials and civil society can find ways to partner to hold corporations accountable.

In the early 20th century, a broad coalition of civil society took on the monopolistic industrialists that controlled the world’s economy, and they won.

Just last week, UNI Global Union, Progressive International, Oxfam, Greenpeace, and over 50 civil society organizations, environmentalists, and tax watchdogs joined forces on Black Friday to launch #MakeAmazonPay, an electrifying global campaign to hold Amazon accountable for its debts to workers, societies and the planet. Workers and allies from 15 countries demonstrated in a massive day of action, with unified demands, that has been backed by over 400 lawmakers from 34 countries.

Reining in Amazon is the test of our time

We are hopefully approaching an end to the pandemic, but we are at the beginning of making sure that the post-Covid-19 economy is just and sustainable.

We cannot let a digital giant control our commerce, the infrastructure of information and our data. We cannot let Amazon avoid paying its fair share of the costs of a much-needed recovery paid for by all taxpayers. And we cannot let Amazon refuse to negotiate with unions, impose inhumane production quotas on workers and push small businesses to the brink of collapse.

Our economies will increasingly benefit the rich, powerful and connected at the expense of the rest of us unless we make Amazon respect workers’ rights and fair markets, contribute its fair share of taxes and erase its enormous carbon footprint.

In the early 20th century, a broad coalition of civil society took on the monopolistic industrialists that controlled the world’s economy, and they won. Our society’s ability to rein in Amazon and other robber barons of our age will be the test of our time. A fight that will shape the future of work and our economies.

ips-journal.eu

We saw last week how Big Tech — Twitter and Facebook — tried to control the political Narrative by making it impossible, or at least difficult, to spread the New York Post‘s scoop about Hunter Biden’s hard drive. Notice that the Biden campaign has not denied that what’s reportedly on that hard drive is true. The media have been running interference for Team Biden by focusing on how the Post obtained that information.

Here’s another jaw-dropping move by the media controllers to restrict the Narrative. You might have heard that Amazon has refused to add a new documentary, What Killed Michael Brown?, to its streaming service. The documentary was written by and stars the conservative black scholar Shelby Steele, and was directed by his son Eli Steele. In it, the elder Steele examines the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson a few years back, and its place in the larger story of race in America.

Your title doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations. Why not? What could possibly be so offensive about this movie that Amazon Prime, which streams some real junk, won’t let it onto the platform? I e-mailed the film’s producers and asked for a press screener (which I encourage all media to do by clicking here).

After 15 minutes, it was perfectly obvious why Amazon wouldn’t let this movie show: they do not want any criticism of the progressive narrative about Michael Brown, and about race in America in general. There is only one acceptable narrative — and black men like Shelby and Eli Steele who challenge it must be silenced.

It’s hard to overstate the power of What Killed Michael Brown? It’s not a bombastic polemic, in the style of Michael Moore. Eli Steele is a cool, careful filmmaker. Its power is in its understatedness, its reasonableness — and, of course, in the truth bombs that Shelby Steele drops throughout the whole thing. This film is so dangerous that Amazon doesn’t want people to see it. Why is Amazon so afraid of a gentle 74-year-old black professor?

Here’s why.

He observes in the film’s opening minutes that in 2014, the year Michael Brown died in Ferguson, over 700 black men were shot and killed in Chicago, by other black men. Nobody in Black Lives Matter cared much about those black lives, nor did the national media. It’s only when a black life is taken by a white police officer that they care. Late in the movie, Steele observes that more and more black children are dying from drive-by shootings in their neighborhoods. Activists barely noticed. Observes Steele,  “There was no power for blacks, or innocence for whites, to be had from these innocent deaths.”

What explains this? “We human beings never use race except as a means to power,” Steele says. His thesis is that “racism” did not kill Michael Brown, but rather that Michael Brown became the sort of thuggish young man who threw his life away because of cultural forces of disintegration emerging from 1960s liberalism — and that is something we cannot bring ourselves to face.

Steele reflects on his 1960s past as a self-described “black militant” working in LBJ’s War on Poverty. He worked for three years with the black poor in East St. Louis. Young Steele was optimistic then about what the government could do for the black poor who had been held back for so long by racism. What he learned was that the antipoverty programs were not really about advancing black people in the name of social justice. Rather, he says, “Taking advantage of white guilt was the focus of justice.”

Steele explains the concept of “poetic truth.” It’s not the objective facts about a person or an event, but what others believe those facts to mean. Poetic truth is a synonym for “myth” — a story that may or may not have basis in fact, but which we use to explain what the world means, who we are, and how we are supposed to react. With poetic truth, says Steele, “you don’t think so much as step into that meaning.”

Poetic truth always distorts objective truth, and can be used to gain power. That, says Steele, is exactly how black activists and their allies have used and abused the Michael Brown narrative. He explains what is well established truth (according to the US Department of Justice’s investigation): that Michael Brown died after attacking Officer Wilson and trying to take his gun. Michael Brown was in no way an innocent victim of police brutality. But, says Steele, “poetic truth set the stage for a power grab.”

I had forgotten the role that Obama Attorney General Eric Holder played in this drama. Steele is quite harsh on him. The DOJ under Holder proved that the Michael Brown victim narrative was entirely false — but as Steele shows, Holder inserted himself into the Ferguson situation in a racialized, politicized way, and turned the town in which a bully was shot trying to assault a cop into a symbol of America’s 400 years of racist oppression. Says Steele, “Holder made Ferguson pay the price for a racist murder that was neither racist nor a murder.”

If Michael Brown is a victim, then he is the victim not of a racist cop, but of the toxic culture of 1960s liberalism, which, in Steele’s words, “focused far more on assuaging white guilt than on black development.” Steele talks about how federal social engineers destroyed working-class black homes, and the equity that was in them, to build massive housing projects that dispossessed and ghettoized black people in lawless hives. Moreover, this kind of liberalism conveyed to blacks that they didn’t have to take responsibility for their own lives and fate, but rather had to depend on how much they could extract from guilty white people. “The poetic truth of black victimization became their identity,” he says. Liberalism consigned blacks to “invisibilization,” to “permanent victimhood.”

“The faithlessness in black authority is what gave us the world that Michael Brown grew up in,” Steele says.

And further: “Modern liberalism does not like human complexity in its victims. It wants the lines of responsibility to be clear and simple, and always to point to the white world.” Liberalism wants blacks to give up before even trying, by convincing them that no matter how hard they work, they can never get ahead. Though Steele condemns the police killing of George Floyd as a “murder,” he casts a gimlet eye on the violent protests that followed, saying that Floyd’s murder was “less a tragedy and more an opportunity” for cynics seeking to advance their grip on power.

Steele profiles contemporary black neighborhood activists, including a pastor on Chicago’s poor and violent South Side, who are trying to return a sense of agency and responsibility to communities decimated by the moral collapse of institutions of black authority: the family, the school, and the community. Here are two of them you meet in the movie:

In these people, Steele sees a contemporary version of his late father, a black man raised in deep poverty and segregation, with only a third grade education, but who raised himself and his family up by virtue of his self-discipline and hard work. He calls the Black Lives Matter movement a “bad faith movement” that wants to dismantle America, by contrast to the Civil Rights Movement, which wanted blacks to be part of America.

Why is that message so threatening to Amazon? Maybe Shelby Steele has it wrong. Maybe he’s blind to things that others see. Fine — release the movie and let people make up their own minds. Stop this liberal paternalism that doesn’t trust people to think for themselves. The fact is, a lot of people, including black people, will watch What Killed Michael Brown? and hear an authentic American voice, the voice of common sense and bedrock American values. It won’t be good for the Victim Industrial Complex. Hence Amazon’s desire to control the narrative.

In 1989, the black critic Stanley Crouch — who died last month — published a searing essay in The Village Voice about Spike Lee and his new film Do The Right Thing. He denounced the film as “Afro-fascist chic.” Excerpt:

One must always face the razor’s edge of the fact that race as it applies to American identity has a complex relationship to the grace, grime, and gore of democracy, and that an essential aspect of democracy, of a free society’s exchange of ideas, is that we will inevitably be inspired, dismayed, and disgusted by the good, mediocre, and insipid ideas that freedom allows. The burden of democracy is that you will not only get a Thurgood Marshall but an Alton Maddox, a Martin Luther King and an Al Sharpton — the brilliant, the hysteric, the hustling. And in terms of film opening up to more and more black people, there is no doubt that most will follow trends and appeal to the spiritual peanut galleries of society as long as there is money to be made, while a few will say something of importance, not only to Amer­ican society but to the contemporary world. Few in this country have ever wanted to be artists, have wished to challenge or equal the best on a national and interna­tional basis. Most want no more than a good job and — ­in our time of the rock-and-roll elevation of the brutish, the superficial, and the adolescent — pop stardom. Those who believe that such American tendencies will fall before the revelations of the sword of the Negro soul are naïve.

That naïveté, like an intellectual jack-in-the-box bumpkin, periodically popped up through the Black Filmmaker Foundation’s ceremonies. There was much talk of “controlling our images,” a term suggestive of the worst political aspects of black nationalism, one far more dangerous if taken in certain directions than, say, expanding our images. Such “control” without attendant intelligence and moral courage of the sort we saw so little of during the Brawley farce or rarely hear when Louis Farrakhan is discussed, will make little difference, since the problems Afro-Americans presently face ex­tend far beyond the unarguable persistence of a declin­ing racism. Intellectual cowardice, opportunism, and the itch for riches by almost any means necessary define the demons within the black community. The demons are presently symbolized by those black college teachers so intimidated by career threats that they don’t protest students bringing Louis Farrakhan on campus, by men like Vernon Mason who sold out a good reputation in a cynical bid for political power by pimping real victims of racism in order to smoke-screen Tawana Brawley’s lies, by the crack dealers who have wrought unprecedented horrors, and by Afro-fascist race-baiters like Public Ene­my who perform on the soundtrack to Do the Right Thing.

In more than a few ways, Do the Right Thing fits the description Susan Sontag gave fascism in her discussion of Leni Riefenstahl, “Fascinating Fascism.” Sontag says fascist aesthetics “endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domi­nation and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-­powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force.”

In Do the Right Thing, the egomania and the servi­tude, the massing of people into things, and the irresist­ible force are all part of blackness. That blackness has the same purpose Sontag recognized in the work of Riefenstahl: it exists to overcome “the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community.” Lee’s vi­sion of blackness connects to what Sontag realized was “a romantic ideal… expressed in such diverse modes of cultural dissidence and propaganda for new forms of community as the youth/rock culture, primal therapy, anti-psychiatry, Third World camp following, and belief in the occult.”

Read it all. 

Notice the difference Crouch draws between controlling the images, and expanding them. That’s precisely what’s going on here with Amazon’s actions towards the Steeles’ film. And, the poetic truth that Shelby Steele so powerfully illuminates and dismantles in What Killed Michael Brown? is a baldfaced lie about race and America that promises to deliver its believers from alienation — both its black believers and its white believers (who are so desperate for absolution from racial guilt that they will accept anything). As I write in Live Not By Lies:

A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is. As Arendt has written, wherever totalitarianism has ruled, “[I]t has begun to destroy the essence of man.”

When Shelby Steele, in this extraordinarily important, even urgent film, exposes the lies of Michael Brown’s death, and of the left-wing race narrative, and concludes that “liberalism wants your very soul” — this is exactly what he is talking about. No wonder Amazon, as one of this culture’s controllers, will not permit any challenge to its monopoly on reality. Shelby and Eli Steele are two of the bravest men in America, and I mean that.

UPDATE: A reader points out that you can buy a DVD or Blu-ray version of What Killed Michael Brown? here. I hope you will. Not only will you support these filmmakers and their worthy project, but you will own a movie that you can show to your kids and to your friends, and talk about these issues. Shelby and Eli Steele put a lot on the line to tell this story; we should stand with them by buying their work and telling others about it. This really is a first-rate documentary.

theamericanconservative.com

In our piece on California secession, we showed how swiftly DNC allied media like Bloomberg News lined up to build support for an openly secessionist movement led by Governor Newsom.

Our series for SCF on the rising ‘National Labor Movement’ has proven extraordinarily prescient. Our first piece outlined some of the basics of America’s next great awakening, ‘Rage and Bloodshed Ahead: Democrat Betrayals and the Coming National Labor Movement’ . It was written surrounding the ‘betrayal’ of Bernie Sanders by the DNC, and showed how the denial of a legal movement to eliminate private health insurance and improve working conditions at this critical moment in history, would lead towards an organic, bottom-up, militant labor movement. It will transcend the traditional left-right paradigm, and view power as people vs. elites. It would only be realized by being one and the same as much of the Trump populist base. This means embracing many of their truths, such as Deep State discourse as well as WHO skepticism.

Components of the coup tactic – color revolution against Trump

Secession movements are a part of the Color Revolution tactic, not just nation-wide ‘uprisings’ which are generally hyped in media and produced for virtual consumption as much within the country as it is for international audiences. We saw secession used in the Yugoslavia case, in the Libya case, and in the Syria case.

Another component of the Color Revolution is the traditional use of coup tactics. That’s the use of law-fare, abuse of the legal, constitutional nature or powers of the various branches of governments, including the weaponization of the judicial system, and the internal use of the intelligence services against a target. We saw this used successfully in Brazil with the ousting of Dilma, and unsuccessfully (so far) with the failed coup of the National Assembly led by U.S backed Guaido, against Venezuelan President Maduro.

Remember when the Deep State in 2016, in dealing with a probable Trump victory (they were working with real numbers, not the MSM projected model), began to promote CIA officer David Evan McMullin, of the National Clandestine Service unit as the never-Trump Republican ‘Independent candidate’ that the electoral college could be urged to ‘elect’ instead of Trump?

Did this not set the stage for the candidacy of Pete Buttigieg? Isn’t it odd that Biden has announced his candidacy/presidency as merely a transition for CIA agent Pete Buttigieg? How good is Buttigieg’s SHADOW app team at hacking elections? This is an app team made of Google and Apple veterans.

Remember that that Clinton and Obama were able to get the CIA to give an illegal briefing to the electoral college electors that Trump was a Russian asset and reminded them of their oath to the constitution, and their right to confer their votes onto another candidate?

But the most telling feature of the Color Revolution is the mobilization of mass publics using opposition party structures, NGO’s, and labor unions. This is the primary factor that distinguishes the Color/Spring strategy from the traditional coup d’état – the spectacle of public support. When we see this factor included, we know we are dealing with a Color strategy.

And so now, with the inclusion of labor, we can say with high confidence that all tactics of the Color Revolution strategy are being used by some vectors of American power against the executive branch.

We must consistently emphasize the holographic nature of this campaign underway. It cannot create a genuine level of excitement to actually remove Trump by way of an election. But Soros (et al) type NGO’s and labor union staff (not members, but the paid staff) will play dress-up as Amazon workers, nurses etc., and simulate protests. MSNBC, CNN etc. will use carefully cropped footage to create the false sense of mass. Fake news will report that ‘strikes’ (staged protests) consisted of thousands of workers at times and places that had hundreds at most – and again, these would be NGO employees and union staff with some minimally acceptable ‘turnout’, not chiefly workers themselves.

Therefore, when Covid-19 is potentially used as a pretext,

Labor must resist being operationalized for a Google online election

The Color Revolution tactic is potent not because it manufactures discontent per se (though it can), but because it more often uses real existing mass grievances, and weaponizes them for regime change operations. In the case of the U.S in the emergent phase, it is in trying to use the genuine discontent of everyday Americans, and cynically manipulate this into an ‘electoral victory’ (we say in scare-quotes for reasons to be explained) in the fight for the White House come November.

It may indeed seem strange, even otherworldly, that the hitherto foreign deployed tactic of the Color Revolution would finally be used within the United States by one vector of power against another. This is so immense in its proportion and significance, because it solidifies the reality that there is an actual and open inter-elite conflict within the U.S, with tremendously destabilizing potential outcomes.

We believe this coming election, therefore, will be highly irregular – as it already has been. We have already seen the cancellation of the Democratic primary in the state of New York on the basis of coronavirus. This establishes yet another critical precedence towards coming election irregularities. We may expect ‘online voting’ and more – methods which will make electronic voting kiosks seem as good as traditional paper ballots in comparison. That means we’ll be asked to largely trust Google’s ‘Chrome’ app to provide ‘security’ on the results of that election. Americans must resist this next step in the privatization of the electoral process.

The weaponization of organized labor is fantastically evil for numerous reasons, not least because the DNC as a long-time enemy of working people, will deliver a failure on its promises to labor so absolute that it can only be realized as a betrayal – frustrating legitimate organizing attempts for many years to come.

But just as the high potential of a Deep-State orchestrated irregular election is the opposite of a reason to cancel the election all together, the manipulation of organized labor is not a reason to oppose organized labor. Rather it is a call to eliminate the DNC allied labor bureaucracy, and work towards the legitimate and independent realization of genuine militant labor unions free of that moribund institution rooted in the betrayal of the American worker.

Clinton, the Waltons, and Bezos

The tight relationship between the Waltons, Bezos, and Clinton  (or the DNC) should be known, as so much has been written about that subject that any reliable search engine will provide millions of hits.

But what is often under-reported was how the Clinton campaign in 2007 attempted to arrange a yellow union campaign to ‘mobilize’ Walmart workers into a ‘union’ based on the – indeed actual – unfair treatment that Walmart employees face. The aim was to use that organizing campaign to springboard into an issue-based campaign for the ‘fight for $15’, but not actually produce a union. Note – 13 years later, there is still no Walmart worker’s union.

Clinton’s strategy was more successfully used by Obama.

Again, we explain that in the swing states like Colorado, the Obama victory in 2008 was predicated on pseudo  labor organizing campaigns that started in the preceding year which, whether successful or not, created an SEIU army to do precinct walking and phone banking for Obama. The big promises made by Obama like EFCA, healthcare for all, and the ‘fight for $15’ were all abandoned as soon as Obama won.

As despicable as all that is, it was perfectly legal and ignoring the entire ugly history of labor’s relationship with the Democrat Party since Truman and Taft-Hartley, not a bad strategy provided that the Democrats would make good on their commitments. In truth, they rarely if ever have.

What we find today is indeed much worse. These organizing campaigns at Amazon and Walmart are being allowed by the directors of Amazon and Walmart themselves – and why? Because they will not produce real unions. The firing of Amazon employees for organizing was a publicity stunt aimed at disguising the ‘yellow union’ nature of these company union endeavors at Amazon and Walmart.

Another publicity stunt that is supposed to lend a sense of reality to the ridiculous, is the resignation of Amazon Vice President Tim Bray. Bray cited the ‘mistreatment of Amazon workers’ and the firing of worker safety and union organizing activists.

We know this is as fake as a three dollar bill because Bray was there all the while as Amazon systematically fired pro-union workers over the years. This is the same dystopic company that Bray helped run that RFID chipped employees as to track their bathroom visits and moments of being inert, so as to make sure that Amazon employees never took an unearned breather.

The inauthenticity of this ‘organizing campaign’ plan is clear as day when we consider the particular emphasis placed on the upcoming election. Yes, Amazon employees need a union, but not a fake yellow union co-sponsored by the DNC and Bezos himself.

Layers of color revolution holography

Why would a genuine militant labor movement be so heavily focused, and have its sense of urgency and immediacy, placed around an upcoming election and its immediate aftermath? That is not how labor campaigns are conceived when the goal is to create a union. Yet this is what we are hearing from corrupt labor union insiders like Jane McAlevey.

The reason is because the McAlevey promoted scheme is neither genuine nor militant. Their goal is not to create a real union, but to create a public simulacrum and issue-based campaign that seeks to condemn the Trump administration over health concerns of workers relating to the Coronavirus and ‘opening up’.

Their biggest problem is that Biden hasn’t actually said anything of substance, nor has he proposed anything to the left of what Trump has actually accomplished already. It’s Trump who delivered a moratorium on student loans, Medicare for all for coronavirus treatments, a freeze on certain types of evictions and foreclosures, stimulus payments directly to citizens (so-called ‘one time UBI’).

McAlevey et al view the workers as pawns in some larger scheme, based in some progressivist ideological imperative, far beyond the real needs and dreams of actual American workers. These think-tankers see organizing targets as ‘strategic’ if they mobilize black and women voters – precisely two demographics where either Obama was stronger or where Trump is stronger than Biden. In contrast, the real National Labor Movement will reflect the fact that 78% of the American labor force is white.

Just how connected is Jeff Bezos to the DNC? So much so that Andrew Yang’s proposal of UBI was based around a hard-sell to the US public on the inevitability of Amazon ultimately taking over a large majority of the whole retail market – the only issue at hand was whether Amazon would be taxed somehow to pay for a UBI. But in-fact, it was about directing other tax revenues, such as those from small and medium businesses, as well as remaining larger brick-and-mortar retailers, and re-funneling them back to a UBI model which Amazon can distinctly benefit from.

Incidentally, isn’t it odd that in the midst of this pandemic response in the US, businesses were shut-down but Amazon was considered essential? Bezos’ wealth increased by $25 bln during quarantine, and magically expedited the very same ‘forecast’ made by Andrew Yang’s pitch for UBI.

And this UBI would be entirely in line with Amazon’s strategy to date, who like McDonald’s, relies on their profits ultimately being subsidized by social-net policies, to maintain the semblance of sustainability to their model based on sub-sustenance wages. What we add now is a subsidization for Amazon salaries paid from the taxes on companies who do not require their paid salaries be subsidized.

This gives us yet another damning evidence as to the hyper-real, simulated nature of the present ‘organizing efforts’. They are merely election ploys that will ultimately undermine real worker’s power at the shop-floor level, and continue to erode public confidence in the aims of labor unions. When people today see SEIU and Teamster (CTW) unions as merely pawns of the DNC and its corporate donor class, they aren’t wrong.

Fifty-five percent of American workers have a favorable view of unions. Labor unions weren’t formed by Democrats nor did they rely on an abstract ‘power analysis’ performed at the level of ivory tower think tanks. Unions were forged in the face of illegality, forcing themselves onto the stage of history. They organized not where it was proscribed by intellectuals, not where it was tactical, and not where it was conveniently timed for a Democrat election. They were organized, christened by bloodshed, and at great human cost. Their militants were shot, hung, lynched by Pinkertons and corrupt police squads. They were not blessed by Amazon executives or schemed by Hillary Clinton, but by the martyrs of Haymarket. The Atlantic-Council/Deep-State press like The New York Times, MSNBC, Vice Magazine, and the Washington Post won’t give the rising National Labor Movement friendly treatment. Its leaders will be called terrorists, the rank-and-file will be called extremists. There will be kidnappings and car-bombings. They will never oppose or attempt to organize small and medium businesses. That’s how we’ll know the coming National Labor Movement has been born – and what we are seeing from the DNC is certainly not it. But those with an ear to the ground can nevertheless hear the real thing coming.

Flores can be reached at FindMeFlores@gmail.com

Some of America’s billionaires don’t care about international conquest as much as he does, but all of them at least accept neoconservatism; none of them, for example, establishes and donates large sums to, anti-imperialistic organizations; none of America’s billionaires is determined to end the reign of neoconservatism, nor even to help the fight to end it, or at least to end its grip over the US Government. None. Not even a single one of them does. But many of them establish, and donate large sums to, neoconservative organizations, or run neoconservative organs such as Bezos’s Washington Post, which is simultaneously a neoconservative and a neoliberal organ; i.e., it’s a Democratic Party type of neoconservative organ. That’s the way billionaires are, at least in the United States. All of them are imperialists. They sponsor it; they promote it and hire people who do, and demote or get rid of people who don’t. Expanding an empire is extremely profitable for its aristocrats, and always has been, even before the Roman Empire.

Bezos also wants to privatize everything around the world that can become privatized, such as education, highways, health care, and pensions. The more that billionaires control those, the less that everyone else does; and preventing control by the public helps to protect billionaires against democracy that would increase their taxes, and against governmental regulations that would reduce their profits by increasing their corporations’ expenses. So, billionaires control the government in order to increase their takings from the public.

He, through his Washington Post, is one of the world’s top personal sellers to the US military-industrial complex, because he controls and is the biggest investor in Amazon corporation, whose Web Services division supplies all cloud-computing services to the Pentagon, CIA and NSA. And in April there was a headline “CIA Considering Cloud Contract Worth ‘Tens of Billions’,” which contract could soar Bezos’s personal wealth even higher into the stratosphere, especially if he wins all of it (as he previously did).

He also globally dominates, and is constantly increasing his control over, the promotion and sale of books and films, because his Amazon is the world’s largest retailer (and now also one of the largest publishers, producers and distributors) of those. That, too, can be a huge impact upon politics and government, indirectly, through promoting the most neocon works, and thus helping to shape intellectual discourse (and voters’ votes) in the country.

He also is crushing millions of retailers, by his unmatched brilliance at controlling one market after another, and is retailing, either as Amazon or else as an essential middleman for — and often even as a controller of — Amazon’s retail competitors.

He is a strong believer in ‘the free market’, which he has mastered perhaps better than anyone. This means that he supports the unencumbered ability of billionaires, by means of their money, to control and eventually absorb all who are less powerful than themselves. That’s called “libertarianism” (or “neoliberalism”); and, because he is so enormously gifted himself at amassing wealth, he has thus-far been able to rise to the global top, as being one of the world’s most powerful individuals. The wealthiest of all is King Saud — the owner of Saudi Arabia, whose Aramco (the world’s largest oil company) is, alone, worth over a trillion dollars. (Forbes and Bloomberg exclude monarchs from their wealth-rankings. In fact, Bloomberg is even so fraudulent about it as to have headlined on 10 August 2019 “The 25 wealthiest dynasties on the planet control $1.4 trillion” and violated their tradition by including on their list one monarch, King Saud, whom they ranked at #4 as owning only $100 million, a ludicrously low ‘estimate’, which brazenly excluded not just Aramco but any of the net worth of Saudi Arabia; and they didn’t even try to justify their wacky methodology, but merely presumed the gullibility of their readers for its acceptance.) That King, therefore, is at least seven times as rich as Bezos is. He might possibly be as powerful as Bezos is. The supreme heir is lots wealthier even than the supreme self-made billionaire or “entrepreneur” is. Certainly, both men are among the giants who bestride the world in our era. And both men are libertarians — champions of the belief that property rights (of which, billionaires have so much) are the basis of all rights, and so they believe that the wealthiest people possess the most rights of all, and that the poorest people have the least, and that all persons whose net worths are negative (having more debts than assets) possess no rights except what richer people might donate to or otherwise grant to them, out of kindness or otherwise (such as familial connections). This — privatization of everything — is what libertarianism is: a person’s worth is his or her “net worth” — nothing else. That belief is pure libertarianism. It’s a belief that many if not most billionaires hold, and most who don’t are simply less pure in it: partial libertarians. Billionaires are imperialistic libertarians. They seek to maximize the freedom of the super-rich, regardless of whether this means increasing their takings from, or ultimately impoverishing, everyone who isn’t super-rich. They have a coherent ideology. It’s based on wealth. The public don’t, but instead believe in myths that billionaires enable to be published and otherwise promulgated, because those ideologies pose little or no threat to their continued control over society.

Like any billionaire, Bezos hires and retains only employees and other agents who do what he/she wants them to do; and this is their direct power, but also they possess enormous indirect power, by means of their interdependencies upon one-another, as each large corporation is contractually involved with other corporations, especially with large ones such as they; and, so, whatever power any particular billionaire possesses is actually a shared power, along with those others. (An example was the deal that Bezos made with Donald Graham.) Collectively, they network together, even with ones they might never even have met personally, but only through their representatives, and even with their own major economic competitors. This collective power which billionaires possess is in addition to their individual power as hirers of employees and other agents.

Whereas Winston Smith, in the prophetic allegorical novel 1984, asked his superior and torturer “Does Big Brother exist?” —

——

‘Next question,’ he [O’Brien] said. [And Smith replied] ‘Does Big Brother exist?’ ‘Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.’ ‘Does he exist in the same way as I exist?’ ‘You do not exist,’ said O’Brien.

——

— this power is a collective of the billionaires and associated super-rich, and Bezos “embodies” it, as well as anyone yet does. He fully and unquestionably exists, as being part of the actual (not merely the formal) power-structure. Perhaps a few other billionaires embody it as well, or as much, as he does — such as, for examples, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg, and Charles Koch, and Sergey Brin, and Michael Bloomberg, and George Soros, and Jack Dorsey — and they compete against each other, and therefore they have different priorities for the US Government to embody; but, all of them agree much more than they disagree, in regards to what the Government ’should’ do (especially that the US military should be expanded — at taxpayer’s expense, of course, not of their own). Basically, Big Brother, in the real world, is remarkably coherent and unified — far more so than the public are — and this is one of the reasons why they control the Government, whereas the public don’t.

Here is how all of this plays out, in terms of what Bezos’s agents have been doing to governments (other than, perhaps, taking them over):

His Amazon pays low to no federal taxes because the federal Government has written the tax-laws in order to encourage companies to do the types of things that Jeff Bezos has always wanted Amazon to do anyway. Amazon’s competitors can’t do those things — or at least not so much. So: the larger a corporation is, the more that it fits what the billionaires’ politicians have legislated. The US Government consequently encourages megacorporations such as this, and thereby helps them to crush the small firms, which therefore makes it much harder for the small ones to grow — and that, in its turn, somewhat locks-in the existing aristocracy, to become more hereditary and less self-made (as Bezos himself was, but his children won’t be). Elected politicians overwhelmingly support this, because most of their campaign funds were donated by super-rich individuals and their employees and other agents. It’s all a self-reinforcing system. Super-wealth controls the government, which (along with the super-wealthy and their corporations etc.) controls the public, which reduces economic opportunity for the public. The end-result is institutionally reinforced extreme wealth-inequality, becoming more extreme over the decades — the super-rich as constituting wealth-siphons from everyone else (taking their cut from everyone including their smaller competitors). That’s the real Big Brother.

Among the many unfavorable news stories about Amazon (none, of course, in the Washington Post), this one is typical:

https://www.newsweek.com

AMAZON WORKING CONDITIONS: URINATING IN TRASH CANS, SHAMED TO WORK INJURED, LIST OF EMPLOYEE COMPLAINTS

BY NINA GODLEWSKI ON 9 December 2018 9/12/18 AT 4:42 PM

Rumors about the working conditions at Amazon warehouses and on the delivery routes have circulated for years. Time off around the holidays, adequate breaks on shift and appropriate wages are all reportedly missing from the lives of some Amazon employees.

Some workers for the company are allegedly on food stamps and receive other federal assistance, but Amazon, like other large companies, doesn’t cover the cost of that assistance, and Senator Bernie Sanders wants that to change.

Sanders introduced a bill on September 5 that would tax employers, like Amazon, when their employees need federal benefits, like Medicaid and food stamps, to help cover the cost of those services. The bill is called the “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act” or the “Stop BEZOS Act,” just like the Amazon CEO’s last name.

The lack of a living wage—the multibillion-dollar company pays some employees as little as $11 an hour Sanders said—is just one of the working conditions employees have revealed about the company. …

However, for consumers, Amazon is terrific: low prices and unexcelled customer service.

So: what does Bezos aspire to do with his soon-to-be hundreds of billions of dollars? Does he intend to fund a way to avoid global burnout (euphemistically called ‘global warming’)? Does he intend to fund a way to make this a better planet, with a brighter future for the people and other animals to whom it is and will be home? Does he intend to alleviate suffering, and to promote lowered wealth-inequality? Does he intend to reduce, instead of to increase, wealth-inequality? None of the above, and nothing like it. They all (regardless of what they say) represent the opposite of that.

He is so much of an imperialist so that he wants to become the founder of an interplanetary empire, bigger than just the Earth can support (even if global burnout — or else nuclear war — wouldn’t destroy the Earth). On 2 May 2018, Axel Springer’s US subsidiary, Business Insider, headlined “Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world, thinks it’s possible to blow through his entire $131 billion fortune — and he has one big purchase he plans to spend it on”, and reported:

“The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” Bezos said. “I am going to use my financial lottery winnings from Amazon to fund that.”

Bezos plans to spend his fortune — the largest wealth in the world — on space travel through Blue Origin, which he called his most important project.

“I get increasing conviction with every passing year, that Blue Origin, the space company, is the most important work that I’m doing. And so there is a whole plan for Blue Origin,” Bezos said in Berlin after winning the Axel Springer Award 2018.

While it may be unfathomable to spend over $100 billion on any venture, Bezos is confident that space travel can lighten his purse.

“That is basically it. Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune. …

“The solar system can easily support a trillion humans. And if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power unlimited for all practical purposes.” Bezos said “that’s the world that I want my great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren to live in.”

It is clear what Bezos thinks is the next step for Blue Origin and space travel. “We may put humans in it at the end of this year or at the beginning of next year. We are very close,” to human flight on Blue Origin shuttles, according to Bezos.

The company is also working on a large orbital vehicle that “will fly for the first time in 2020.” He plans on “having millions of people and then billions of people and then finally a trillion people in space.”

The 14 November 2017 youtube, “Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and brother Mark give a rare interview about growing up and secrets to success”, presents Jeff Bezos, at 33:30-34:50, saying, “Our children and grandchildren will live in a much better world if they can continue to advance and develop and use more energy. … I don’t even think that liberty is consistent with [restrictions] … all kinds of things that just aren’t consistent with liberty and freedom. So, in space, you have, for all practical purposes, unlimited resources. You could have trillions of humans in the solar system, and still it wouldn’t be crowded. …The most important work that I am doing is Blue Origin, and, you know, getting humanity established in the solar system.”

Jeff Bezos is the archetypal billionaire — they “have been of immense value to the rest of us,” according to their agents. Billionaires actually believe that they should be our rulers. Not a single billionaire supports Bernie Sanders for President — that’s the ONLY American Presidential candidate whom NO billionaire supports. And isn’t this what any knowledgeable and rational person would expect? It’s what would happen to any US Presidential candidate who is sincerely committed to transforming the American system more into line with the democratic socialism that exists in the Scandinavian countries, and terminating the quest to produce an all-encompassing US empire. Such a candidate as Sanders threatens the system that America’s billionaires have created — threatens the real Big Brother — and will therefore not be supported by any of them. People such as billionaires, and their supporters, don’t support candidates who oppose the billionaires’ system, which is supremacism, contempt against the public and against rule by the public — against democracy itself. Where wealth rules, the public do not — cannot. It’s either the one, or else the other, that will rule, in any country. Either there will be more of Big Brother; or else there will be ending it, and establishing and expanding democracy — rule “of the people, by the people, for the people”, instead of rule of the people, by the billionaires, for the billionaires (which latter is Big Brother’s system). Any granting of more freedom to the public, will reduce the freedom of the billionaires — and billionaires are united in opposing that. This is the basic fact, about politics.

Facebook and Amazon’s insanity only seems to continue with no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Now, the two big conglomerate giants want to move into the uncharted territory of reading human emotions, both in their own ways.

Facebook wants a robot that has five senses which can read human emotions. Facebook wants “emotionally sensitive” robots that can explore the world, identify objects and people and enable its users to make more friends, .

The robots would be fitted with wheels or tank-like caterpillar treads that would allow them to trundle about their environment.

Alternatively, such robots could be fitted out with drive systems that would allow them to move around underwater, fly through the air or float in space, Facebook suggest in their patent.

I am not sure why anyone would trust Facebook with data ever again, let alone biometric data, after all the numerous scandals Activist Post has documented including data mining. But to each their own I guess.

Amazon is also looking into reading human emotions in a completely different way by utilizing a voice-activated wearable device, that will sense its wearer’s state of mind by the tone of voice, Bloomberg reported.

It’s worth noting that both companies have a smart home device, and after reading this you should fear what information is being gathered by the cameras and microphones attached to those electronics … besides the typically targeted advertising to turn consumers into the product.

On the Amazon front, it seems more than likely the company will want to use this technology in a variety of different digital gadgets, ranging from personal assistants such as Alexa to new technologies that the retail giant is currently developing. Amazon has announced it’s developing a personal assistance robot, so the new emotional technology could easily be integrated into this at-home robot as a means to “serve the consumer better.” A horrifically terrifying thought indeed.

Amazon and Facebook aren’t the only companies looking into utilizing human emotions. Previously, Activist Post reported that Walmart was also looking into to monitoring your biometric data, pulse, and location from the sensors on a shopping cart handle.

This news comes as hundreds of retail stores — and soon thousands — are investigating using biometric facial recognition software FaceFirst to build a database of shoplifters to aid in the fight against theft,  Activist Postreported.

FaceFirst is designed to scan faces as far as 50 to 100 feet away. As customers walk through a store entrance, the video camera captures repetitious images of each shopper and chooses the clearest one to store. The software then analyzes that image and compares it to a database of “bad customers” that the retailer has compiled; if there is a match, the software sends an alert to store employees that a “high risk” customer has entered the door.

The future of shopping seems to allude to having biometric scanners written all over it, a worrying prospect for privacy enthusiasts.

Several privacy advocate groups, attorneys, and even recently Microsoft, which also markets its own facial recognition system, have all raised concerns over the technology, pointing to issues of consent, racial profiling, and the potential to use images gathered through facial recognition cameras as evidence of criminal guilt by law enforcement.

“We don’t want to live in a world where government bureaucrats can enter in your name into a database and get a record of where you’ve been and what your financial, political, sexual, and medical associations and activities are,” Jay Stanley, an attorney with ACLU, told BuzzFeed News about the use of facial recognition cameras in retail stores. “And we don’t want a world in which people are being stopped and hassled by authorities because they bear resemblance to some scary character.

However, facial recognition technology currently has a lot of problems. Activist Post has also reported how Amazon’s own facial “Rekognition” software erroneously and hilariously identified 28 members of Congress as people who have been arrested for crimes.

Activist Post previously reported on another test of facial recognition technology in Britain which resulted in 35 false matches and 1 erroneous arrest. We have further reported recently on a watchdog observing UK Metropolitan Police trials. Big Brother Watch stated the technology has misidentified members of the public, including a 14-year-old black child in a school uniform who was stopped and fingerprinted by police, as potential criminals in as much as 96 percent of scans.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond in the U.S, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has stated the facial recognition technology the FBI is using for the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System failed privacy and accuracy tests, as Activist Post reported.

In 2018 it was reported that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies were using this same Amazon Facial Rekognition technology to sift through surveillance data.

Defense One reports that “AI-Enabled Cameras That Detect Crime Before it Occurs Will Soon Invade the Physical World” are in the works and on display at ISC West, a recent security technology conference in Las Vegas.