Human civilization is being engineered in myriad ways by an unfathomably wealthy class who are so emotionally and psychologically stunted that they refuse to end world hunger despite having the ability to easily do so.

The United Nations has estimated that world hunger could be ended for an additional expenditure of $30 billion a year, with other estimates considerably lower. The other day Elon Musk became the first person ever to attain a net worth of over $300 billion. A year ago his net worth was $115 billion. According to Inequality.org, America’s billionaires have a combined net worth of $5.1 trillion, which is a 70 percent increase from their combined net worth of under $3 trillion at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

So we’re talking about a class which could easily put a complete halt to human beings dying of starvation on this planet by simply putting some of their vast fortunes toward making sure everyone gets enough to eat. But they don’t. This same class influences the policies, laws, and large-scale behavior of our species more than any other.

To get a sense of how insane this is, imagine if you had seen a video clip of me calmly watching a child drown to death in a swimming pool and doing nothing to help. After watching such footage, would it ever in a million years occur to you that I am someone who should be in charge of the entire world?

I’m going to guess no. I’m going to guess that, in the unlikely event that you ever decided anyone should rule the world, after watching me let a child drown I’d rank somewhere near the very bottom of possible candidates.

Now imagine if instead of letting one child drown, it was millions.

That’s how absolutely insane it is that we allow this class to shape our civilization.

David Beasley, the Director of the United Nations’ World Food Program believes billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could feed 42 million hungry people with $6 Billion, roughly 2% of Musk’s estimated wealth. pic.twitter.com/GWmqZkYz34

— IGN (@IGN) October 29, 2021

And we most certainly do allow them to shape our civilization.

Take Bill Gates. He spends a fortune on narrative control ranging from immense contributions to The Guardian to tens of billions of dollars in grants, and he’s committed hundreds of millions of dollars to shady political influence groups as well. He’s been influencing Covid policies around the world, from intervening against the waiving of vaccine patent restrictions to facilitating the worldwide rollout of digital vaccine passports; he’s been giving countless media interviews about Covid-19 and vaccines despite having no medical degree or indeed any qualifications at all apart from a net worth of $136 billion. This is after falsely pledging to give his immense fortune away over a decade ago; his net worth has more than doubled in that time.

Jeff Bezos has been a contractor with the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, and experts have claimed that Amazon is trying to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy. As sole owner of The Washington Post he ensures that a hugely influential news outlet will always be staffed by people who will help manufacture consent for the status quo upon which his empire is built, and his grand vision for humanity involves shipping us offworld to breed in giant rotating space cylinders.

Billionaires Reid Hoffman and George Soros have teamed up on a narrative control operation called Good Information Inc. with the stated goal of countering misinformation and disinformation in the news media, and the unstated goal of elevating empire-authorized narratives about what’s happening in the world and undermining unauthorized narratives.

The World Economic Forum has laid out an agenda for giant corporations to move beyond their unofficial and unacknowledged role as unelected rulers of our world and become open partners in the governance of world affairs alongside our official elected governments, with more power than ever before.

There are almost infinite examples I could highlight, but I think my point is clear. Billionaires and billionaire corporations own our media, influence our thinking, manipulate our economies, interfere in our politics, determine the fate of our ecosystem, and shape our world. And they are the very least qualified among us to be doing so.

Nobody who makes the decision day after day to let millions of people die of starvation has any business making decisions which affect other people, much less decisions which affect everyone. The fact that the billionaire class and its lackeys make this depraved decision day in and day out permanently disqualifies them from any legitimate claim to having the empathy and compassion that would be required for such a job. They are too narcissistic and dysfunctional to be permitted to have any power or influence whatsoever, much less the ungodly amount they wield today.

Billionaires should not exist. They should have their power and wealth taken from them, and the steering wheel of humanity should be given to the ordinary people who are infinitely more qualified to navigate us through the rough waters ahead for our species.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

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

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

The world’s two wealthiest people are fighting over the moon, which just says so much about where our species is at right now.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in a dispute with NASA over whose private spaace exploration corporation will get the $2.9 billion US government contract to return to the moon. I gleaned this annoying piece of information by way of an obnoxiously sycophantic Atlantic puff piece titled “Elon Musk Is Maybe, Actually, Strangely, Going to Do This Mars Thing”, subtitled “From his private Cape Canaveral, the billionaire is manifesting his own interplanetary reality — whatever the cost.”

The mainstream press cannot get enough of these two unfathomably wealthy plutocrats and their outspoken ambition to colonize space, with Musk advocating Mars colonization and Bezos preferring to ship us all offworld to live in giant Amazon space tubes. They love it for the same reason they love war and status quo politicians: it fits in beautifully with the capitalist world order.

Space colonization is largely a capitalist perception management op promoted by the likes of Musk and Bezos to strengthen the narrative that it’s okay to continue the world-raping global capitalist principle of infinite growth on a finite world because we can escape the catastrophic ecological consequences of that paradigm by fleeing to space.

“Ecocidal capitalism is fine, we’ll just go to space before it kills us!” is the message we’re all meant to absorb. And too many do. A large obstacle to waking people up to the existential crises we are facing as a species is the blind faith that technology will save us from the consequences of our mass-scale behavior, and therefore we don’t need to change. Which suits the world’s richest men perfectly.

But it’s a lie. Humanity will never colonize space. We are not separate or separable from this planet in that way.

Boca Chica, Texas, has changed so much since I visited in 2019. One big difference: Elon Musk has started calling it Starbase. https://t.co/HwGfs84J2U

— Marina Koren (@marinakoren) May 6, 2021

People believe we can just snip humans out of their ecosystemic context to colonize space for the same reason they believe in rugged individualism: they don’t grasp how inseparably interconnected each human is. With our ecosystem, and with our society. Separation is an illusion.

We are not separable from our ecosystem. We are our ecosystem. We’re so inseparably one with our ecosystem that we need to send astronauts into space with a little box full of it or they’ll die. Thinking a human can be snipped out of its ecosystemic context and permanently transported across the desert of space is like thinking you can snip a ripple out of a pond and place that ripple in a teacup on the other side of the world. The ripple is the pond. It’s not separate.

We know how to build rockets, and how to keep a human alive in space for a short time as long as they bring part of their ecosystem with them, but there’s no scientific evidence that we can live separately from our ecosystem, and we’ve barely begun exploring our ignorance here.

Many imagine we’ll have people living independently of Earth’s ecosystem within the next century or two, but there’s literally no basis for this assumption; we essentially know as much about how to keep a human being alive apart from Earth’s ecosystem as we knew ten thousand years ago. Our Biosphere attempts to create a closed-Earth system were as clueless and silly as monkeys poking around at a supercomputer, and that was right here on our home planet.

The myriad ways in which we are connected with the ecosystemic context in which we evolved boggle the mind. Science is barely even beginning to explore those connections. There are tons we know about, but that’s just scratching the surface. We don’t know how much we don’t know. We’re only barely beginning to understand our own gut bacteria, and how those mini-ecosystems relate to our health. Those mini-ecosystems have their own relationships with our greater ecosystem. We know next to nothing about any of this. Most of the picture is missing.

And Elon says he’s going to ship humans to live on Mars?? What, because we have the technology to get there? Our bodies might get there, sure, but the whole staying alive part is a riddle that science is not even the tiniest fraction of a percentile close to solving.

Musk likes to argue that we must become a “multi-planetary species” because if an asteroid strikes Earth or we wipe ourselves out in a nuclear war, that’s it for our species. Our survival as a species, he argues, depends on colonizing other planets.

This is false and toxic thinking, because it will not happen. Our survival does not depend on our becoming a multi-planetary species, our survival depends on collectively waking up and learning to collaborate with each other and with our ecosystem. We’ve got an infinitely better chance of developing the technology to deal with an asteroid than we do of developing technology that will allow us to colonize space, and if we can transcend our self-destructive patterning the threat of nuclear war will be neutralized by our no longer being crazy enough to keep weapons around that make it a possibility.

Some argue for the possibility of terraforming planets like Mars to give them Earth-like ecosystems, but terraforming runs into the same problem: not just humans but all organisms are dependent on Earth’s ecosystem for survival. You couldn’t begin creating an Earth-like ecosystem without snipping out all the organisms which give rise to it. This can’t be done. A tree can’t be snipped out of its unfathomably interconnected ecosystemic context any more than a human can. To terraform you need trees and a near-infinity of other ecosystemic building blocks, none of which are separable from their terrestrial ecosystemic context.

We’re just going to have to make this Earth thing work. People assume space colonization is part of our future primarily because science fiction takes this as a given. But science fiction is just that: fiction, written to entertain and appeal to the same ego which imagines it is separate from the rest of the world. It’s an illusory premise.

People think Capitalism is the best we can do, but I can’t think of any other form of society that would intentionally destroy the planet because it was more profitable to do so.

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) December 16, 2017

We’re not going to rocket ship our way out of this mess. We’re not going to be able to keep doing things the way we are doing them. The “growth for its own sake” ideology that Musk and Bezos have dedicated their lives to embodying is, as Edward Abbey put it, the ideology of a cancer cell. Such an ideology is unsustainable. We’re going to have to change.

“I must change” is always the first possibility that an ego rules out when evaluating a dilemma, and it’s the same ego which says we are separate individuals, and it’s the same ego which created our dilemma in the first place. But we must change. We must transcend the ego.

That’s always the last thing anyone wants to hear, that we need to change, but it’s true. We’ll either collectively change our minds in a way that enables us to drastically shift the way we operate on this planet, or we’ll go extinct. It is evolve or die time. We’ll either make it or we won’t.

Space will not save us, and we will never colonize it. We can explore space, but it will be done via satellites and other tech, not by living organisms. Our astronauts have up until this point been nothing more than glorified scuba divers, entirely dependent on boxes of Earth’s ecosystem, no more independent from that ecosystem than someone holding their breath. This will remain the case.

Hell, forget colonizing space, try colonizing part of the Sahara Desert. Get everything you need, then seal yourselves in a bubble completely separate from the rest of the ecosystem. Even on Earth, with many of the terrestrial connection factors still intact, you will fail relatively quickly.

Such a project isn’t even on Musk’s radar, which shows his pet space project is really about making money and justifying an economic/political paradigm which will necessarily destroy our ecosystem. It’s justifying his cancer cell ideology, proving Robert Heinlein correct when he said, “Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.”

They work to make it appear that we’ve got some other option than to end our ecocidal trajectory and all the systems which feed into it, because otherwise it just looks like they’re a bunch of psychopaths burning an entire world and throwing its ashes into a gaping hole their hearts that can never be filled. If space colonization isn’t possible, then the people who are destroying our environment for money are just deranged lunatics who must be stopped at all cost.

But they are. And we must.

This is our home. It is our only home. I really, really wish we could stop treating it like a womb we plan on leaving or our parents’ house we plan on moving out of. There is nowhere else to go. This is it.

The earth is not some temporary transit station. We – the earth. We are inseparable from it. We are all indigenous terrestrials. We need to stop trying to move out, and start moving in.

It’s so, so beautiful here. We should be willing to change to keep it alive, like we would if a loved one’s life depended on our changing our behavior. Because that really is the case. I hope we see this before it’s too late.

caityjohnstone.medium.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

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

The only exception to this condemnation of censorship is highly top-secret information during an outright military war in which one’s own country is authentically being invaded by an authentic enemy — not like Iraq ‘endangered’ America in 2003 (that invasion was based purely on propaganda), but instead endangers for real. Only if there is already authentically and demonstrably an invasion against one’s own country can censorship be justifiable, because the invader must be defeated. (In fact, the invasion of Iraq resulted from censoring out the proofs — such as this — that George W. Bush was lying. So: that’s what happens when censorship is being applied when the nation hasn’t been invaded — the public becomes fooled into supporting the invasion of a country that never even threatened to invade us.)

Polling shows that Americans want censorship, but that they think this should be done by the private sector, not by the government. For example, on 15 August 2018, Gallup headlined “Americans’ Views on News Content From Internet Companies” and reported that on the question “Would you favor or oppose internet companies excluding items from their news feeds for each of the following reasons,” the reason “Suspect a news item contains misinformation” got 80% who “Favor” and only 16% — only one-fifth as many — marking “Oppose.” And that’s to a question where the billionaires’ ‘news’-medium merely “suspects,” and not allegedly “knows,” that it’s “misinformation.” The trust that Americans place in their 600 billionaires is like a religion — it’s a secular theocracy, in which the aristocrats constitute the imams, rabbis, or College of Cardinals.

That same Gallup survey also found that by an overwhelming 88%, “users aren’t comfortable with major internet companies playing the role of news editor.” “Eighty-eight percent say that companies should disclose their methods for selecting items.” 88% trust what the editors say about what they are doing. Those editors are agents of billionaires. Why should the public trust them, at all? But, they do, by 88%. (However, the actual study, in its detailed presentation, showed — on page 16 — only that 88% believed that the editors should “disclose their methods” of excluding content, as opposed to “should be able to keep secret” those methods. But this amounts basically to the same thing: trust that the editors will be honest about that. The survey should therefore have included a third option: “I don’t trust the editors, at all.” Then, this 88% finding would have been more clearly meaningful. However, the 80% finding already showed that the American public do overwhelmingly trust the editors of the ‘news’-sites they use. That finding was clearly meaningful.)

The government-versus-private-sector concept is largely the product of many decades of propaganda. The private sector is overwhelmingly controlled by billionaires, who own and control (hire and fire, and promote and demote, at) the ‘news’-media, and whose corporations’ products and services advertise in them and thus fund them. Having America’s 600 billionaires control the information and viewpoints that the U.S. public get to see and hear is handing control of the Government over to billionaires, because it affects voters’ beliefs in precisely the ways that billionaires (both Republican ones and Democratic ones) want — which is always for the government to be more of the same and not for anything that would challenge or threaten the continuation of the existing profoundly unjust reality (which produced and ‘justifies’ their obscenely large wealth). Some billionaires fund the Democratic Party, and others of them fund the Republican Party, but on the many issues where the interests of billionaires are opposite to the interests of the public — and these are the most important issues in all of politics — the interests of the billionaires will become governmental policy, regardless of whether the Administration is Democratic or Republican. This has been proven to be so for the United States. The Government of the U.S.A. is a dictatorship, not a democracy. That’s proven: the idea that the U.S. Government is a democracy instead of an aristocracy is a lie, but for billionaires the myth that America is a democracy needs constantly to be propagandized to be true, so that the pubic will believe it and vote for their candidates. For example, America’s billionaires in 2016 chose the nominees of both political Parties — chose Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to “duke it out” in the final U.S. Presidential contest for that year. This is just a two-Party, one aristocracy, dictatorship, that’s all, no democracy, at all. It’s easy to achieve when the billionaires’ employees (and their other agents) — regardless whether in the public or the private sector — are censoring-out what no billionaire wants the public to know. Censorship has been the essential tool for every dictatorship throughout history, and so it is in the U.S.-and-allied countries today.

On June 10th, The Gray Zone, which is one of the most reliable news-reporting organizations, headlined “Wikipedia formally censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing”, and reported that Wikipedia is controlled by proponents of the U.S. military-industrial complex, basically Wikipedia is controlled by agents of the 100 largest U.S. military contractors, the firms that make their sales to the U.S. Government and depend heavily (if not exclusively) upon sales to the U.S. military and to the militaries of America’s allied nations (whose governments are likewise markets for their weapons). That’s the core, it is the directorship of America’s military-industrial complex or “MIC.” It’s actually the controlling owners of those contractors. Wikipedia now has an official blacklist of prohibited sources, banned to link to — they are banned news-sites, and those banned sites especially include all newsmedia (especially online) that critically examine U.S. foreign policy and especially the Pentagon, the CIA, etcetera. However, unfortunately, that lengthy article at The Gray Zone didn’t get into who actually provides the bulk of the funding which supplies Wikipedia’s $100 million+ annual expenditures, but those donors are the philanthropies by U.S.-and-allied billionaires and multi-millionaires, mainly the beneficiaries of, and investors in, U.S.-based international corporations (whose interests are advanced by America’s MIC). Consequently, their blacklisting of anti-imperialistic and anti-MIC newsmedia such as The Gray Zone makes sense, though not sense for Wikipedia’s readers who are trusting that ‘internet encyclopedia’ to be truthful instead of heavily prejudiced in favor of U.S.-and-allied billionaires who want to take over the world even more than they’ve yet managed to do.

The mainstream ‘news’-media are increasingly into blacklisting, censoring out what they want the public not to know or understand — and the public want to be victimized this way, because they trust the victimizers. Censorship is the name of this game, and it is practiced by all of the billionaires’ media. Now the censorship-rules are being published, and the lists of approved and disapproved news-sites are being published; but often the sites that are on the banned list are far more accurate, and far more careful to report only truth, than are the sites that are approved by the mainstream censoring ‘authority’. It’s all, really, about policing the propaganda, not about real journalism, which never is very profitable, and which encounters huge opposition, because it is true, and because very wealthy and powerful individuals don’t want the public to know that it is true.

As far as the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia is concerned, its blacklist is similar to the ones that have been published by, for example, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post. Bezos makes most of his money from selling, to the Pentagon and CIA, Amazon Web Services, not from selling to consumers; so, his mere $250 million purchase of that newspaper gives him clout where it’s the most needed in order for his broader business-plan to succeed — which it is doing.

Censorship is the way that any dictatorship, and no democracy, functions. Censorship is the death of democracy. Censorship makes sense only for billionaires (because it serves their aims), and for members of the public who want some ‘authority’ to tell them what to believe, and what not to believe. Censorship is a con-game. Billionaires control it, and it is a game that the public always loses. Yet the public want it. Such a public are mental slaves — controlled not by the whip, but by the propaganda. Their bodies aren’t being controlled; their minds are.

One of the great truth-tellers and investigative journalists is Sibel Edmonds, whose headline on 3 December 2011 was classic because it said everything: “US Media: Distorters of Reality & Gravediggers of Truth”. They’re in business for themselves and their bosses. Anybody who thinks that newsmedia get their money from reporting the truth doesn’t know anything about truth regarding politics or government. In a dictatorship like this, that’s not how things actually work. Things work by filtering out the truths that the billionaires don’t want the public to know. Things work by censorship. That’s the truth, but you won’t see it published in places such as the Washington Post or the New York Times. I submit all of my articles to all of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, and not only to the few (and far smaller) news-media that are honest, but only the honest few ever publishes any of them. The mainstream media have me on their blacklist. For example, here’s how Google threatened just one of my courageous publishers, who refused to buckle and was therefore forced to virtually end his site. Other sites that published me have had to shut down altogether, or else they buckled in order to continue receiving at least a little income. We have it easy — just think of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, etc. They are the real heroes. Of course, if you are reading this, you are reading American samizdat — and samizdat is never published in mainstream media, but only in blacklisted media.

However, none of this is to assert that mainstream media should never be cited by an honest journalist. For example, one of the commonest reader-comments I get is attacks because I don’t exclude mainstream media (such as Wikipedia, and such as the Washington Post) altogether, ban them from my sources. No source should ever be banned. An honest journalist will cite any statement that the journalist, on his or her own, has sound reason to believe to be exactly as it was represented as being. Occasionally, I cite a source and simultaneously take exception to it because the interpretation was slanted. I trust no source. When I find an accurate statement in places such as Wikipedia or the Washington Post, I may quote that, if the given passage isn’t part of an unacceptably false context. The idea that one should automatically believe or disbelieve any source is stupid. But it is common. It is prejudice. Dictators thrive upon the widespread prevalence of that.

Also, none of this is to assert that online search-engines shouldn’t customize search-findings to the searcher’s interests, what that person is interested in instead of uninterested in. Irrelevant search-findings are bad, not good. But when, for example, an Internet firm such as Google and Twitter excludes certain writers or sites, or removes the access that an ‘offender’ has to advertising-income, that Internet firm should itself be banned, by law, just as if an electical utility were to disconnect an address because that utility’s owners don’t like what that address’s occupants are doing. Laws should treat the Internet like public utilities. Although the billionaires-controlled U.S. Government excludes taking ownership of the firm (without compensating its stockholders) as being a possible penalty for regulatory violations, that penalty should be automatic in severe cases. But the U.S. Government is a dictatorship by the richest, so, that doesn’t happen. (Even in cases where there has clearly been theft from the public by a regulated utility, there has been no seizure of that utility, but, at most, attempts by the harmed consumers to purchase part of the crooked utility, which attempts become blocked in the courts, because that utility can always outspend those consumers to buy better and more lawyers for a longer time-period; so, there can’t be any effective accountability at all.) If the public didn’t stand for this, there would be a revolution. The public stands for it because they are fooled. So, there’s a vicious circle here. And that’s the problem.

The bottom line is that censorship is essential in order for the super-rich to be able to control the public.

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.

The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing is this year, and it’s worth recalling the memo that then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson wrote to President John F. Kennedy: “If we do not make the strong effort now, the time will soon be reached when the margin of control over space and over men’s minds through space accomplishments will have swung so far on the Russian side that we will not be able to catch up, let alone assume leadership.”

That sense of urgency has shifted over the decades from government to the private sector, where billionaires like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, among others, are displaying profound enthusiasm in regard to the notion of exploiting space. Their interest appears to go well beyond space tourism for the thrill-seeking one-percenters, even though that’s what gets most of the media attention. As Cathal O’Connell reports for Cosmos Magazine, “Already companies are sending up 3D printers to produce replacement tools in space. Next we could see orbiting factories making products for sale on Earth or automated robots constructing satellites the size of a football field.”

If this all seems as exotic as those old 1930s “Flash Gordon” films did to the audiences of the day, recall that the experience of the Apollo 11 moon landing showed that reality has a way of catching up quickly to Hollywood fantasy (it also shows that when sufficient government resources are harnessed to a higher common purpose, good results can happen surprisingly quickly and efficiently). Once the likes of Bezos, Branson, Musk, and others find a way to economically hoist heavy machinery into space (and it is becoming more economic), permanent “off-Earth” manufacturing could become a reality. But this raises an interesting issue: who chooses the technological alternatives that set out our future? Should this decision solely be left in the domain of the private sector? Should space be privatized in this matter? What about NASA? Consider the future: Forget about the threat of moving a Midwestern plant from, say, Ohio, to Mexico or China. Next time, it could be a robot-filled factory in space that takes your job.

To be clear, nobody is suggesting a return to medieval-style craft guilds. At the same time, it is worth noting certain salient aspects about technology: rather than acting in the service of mankind, technology has often been used in a way that creates a momentum of its own that establishes limits or controls what becomes socially possible. It is wrapped in an aura of linear progress and scientific inevitability, conveniently ignoring that its benefits are often skewed most heavily to the power brokers who initiate and champion its use. This is a principle danger of subcontracting space to billionaire plutocrats, whose ambitions and interests might be inconsistent with society’s broader public purpose. This is to say nothing of the increasing de-skilling of labor that could follow, if they are not integrated into this process somehow.

As the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip notes, the government-sponsored race to the moon spurred considerable “advances in computers, miniaturization and software, and found its way into scratch-resistant lenses, heat-reflective emergency blankets and cordless appliances,” all of which had tremendous benefits for society as a whole. But today, the government has largely lost its “moonshot mindset” and space, in turn, has increasingly become the focus of the oligarch class, seeking to enhance profit opportunities as well as exploiting the increasing trend of displacing human labor with machines. This is despite the fact that Professor Seymour Melman’s own research illustrated that if you give workers decision-making power on the shop floor, productivity tends to increase substantially.

Without a doubt, there are many benefits to be derived from the work being done in the cosmos. For example, the microgravity conditions pertaining in space are considered ideal for developing materials, such as protein and virus crystals, observes Sarah Lewin, in a piece discussing the incipient development of “off-Earth manufacturing.” The insights developed by these crystals could enhance drug research and provide useful new therapies and medical treatments for infections and diseases (such as heart disease and organ transplants). Space also enhances the scope for producing high-tech materials, whose production is otherwise adversely affected by the Earth’s gravity, one example being a “fiber-optic cable called ZBLAN, … [which, w]hen manufactured in microgravity… is less likely to develop tiny crystals that increase signal loss. When built without those flaws, the cable can be orders of magnitude better at transmitting light over long distances, such as for telecommunications, lasers and high-speed internet,” according to Lewin.

We shouldn’t be oblivious to the considerable human costs associated with work in the government’s space program—“Microgravity sets our fluids wandering and weakens muscles, radiation tears through DNA and the harsh vacuum outside is an ever-present threat” (to quote Lewin), to say nothing of the risk of death itself—which are mitigated considerably when you can do things with machines alone. At the same time, left unchallenged or unmonitored, these billionaires could use space to quietly initiate further radical changes to our social structures.

It starts with ownership models. There’s an interesting paradox of futuristic 24th-century economic visions in space being built on the 12-to-13th–century ownership models that make up Silicon Valley. Wealth sharing ownership models should be conceived as part of the futuristic vision if we don’t want to be saddled with human wealth disparities reaching factors of 12 or 15 zeros. Ideally, NASA (or some other space agency) should take a leading national developmental role in the production of goods in space, and then subcontract to manufacturers to do the actual production processes, rather than the other way around.

Of course, if the government does ultimately decide that space privatization is not a great thing, no doubt Silicon Valley and its market fundamentalist champions will trot out the line about the inefficient government fighting “technological inevitability”—a typical playbook from the Silicon Valley oligarchs (i.e., you can’t fight technological progress, so let’s just set up something like a Universal Basic Income—UBI—that acts like a painkiller, but masks the symptoms of economic injustice and fails to address the underlying causes of exploitation and inequality). That’s one major risk of “off-Earth” production when it becomes a plaything of the rich alone. That’s to say nothing of the fact that the billionaire class is already benefiting from a long series of government-funded innovations undertaken in the past, as Professor Marianna Mazzucato has illustrated in her work, “The Entrepreneurial State.”

One of which was the government-led (and funded) space program: at its funding peak, the lunar space program employed over 400,000 Americans. The management, national commitment and personal motivation of the participants were just as important as the technology itself in terms of ensuring the program’s success. It’s hard to see that sort of coalescing of interests in the absence of an overriding government stake when it comes to the production of manufactured goods in an environment outside a planetary atmosphere.

There is another unhealthy aspect to uncritically acceding to a paradigm in which supposedly superhuman entrepreneurs are selflessly taking up the baton from a tapped-out public sector. It becomes self-serving for the billionaires, and implicitly justifies and entrenches the economic status quo. As journalist Amanda Schaffer has argued: “If tech leaders are seen primarily as singular, lone achievers, it is easier for them to extract disproportionate wealth. It is also harder to get their companies to accept that they should return some of their profits to agencies like NASA and the National Science Foundation through higher taxes or simply less tax dodging.” That self-entitlement also manifests itself in other ways. Just look at the way that Elon Musk treats his own employees to get a better sense of this. Or Jeff Bezos’s labor practices at Amazon.com.

It’s undoubted that orbital manufacturing will yield innovations in technology, medicine and material science in the next few decades. But we should recall that technology doesn’t simply have an autonomous momentum and direction that inexorably leads to social progress. Likewise, it bears recalling (as Professor Seymour Melman once observed) that technology “is applied in accordance with specific social criteria wielded by those with economic decision power in the society.” Melman’s implicit argument is that technology can be used to enhance worker control or to create more yet alienation. The government, therefore, shouldn’t be reduced to the role of passive minority shareholder collecting dividends or royalties from a privately run space enterprise. That’s the old market fundamentalist model that has failed pretty badly on this planet, let alone replicating it in space. So before we get too wrapped up in all of the exciting new goodies that Jeff Bezos and his fellow space enthusiasts can create for us, let’s also ensure that this move to “the final frontier” doesn’t simply become a new form of technological control and enslavement, in which the benefits continue to be distributed in a profoundly illiberal direction as they are here on planet Earth.

Economy for All via truthdig.com