PARTY, THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY
MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY, U.S. CHAMBER
OF COMMERCE and MEXICO DO NOT WANT
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO KNOW HOW
MANY TENS OF MILLIONS OF MEXICANS
HAVE JUMPED U.S. BORDERS ALONG WITH
THEIR DRUG CARTELS!
Why Do We Need More People In This Country, Anyway?
By Michael Anton
The Washington Post, June 21, 2018
No matter, because the Democrats are no longer the party of labor. Back when they were — in the prelapsarian Clinton years — they sought tight labor markets precisely for their efficacy in boosting lower-end wages. But today’s Democrats are the party of high class, high tech and high capital.
This glamour coalition is not big enough by itself to win elections. So the left has hoodwinked some (but, as the 2016 election shows, by no means all) low-income voters into thinking that their interests align with those of Wall Street and Silicon Valley oligarchs.
. . .
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/why-do-we-need-more-people-in-this-country-anyway/2018/06/21/4ee8b620-7565-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html
Jeff Bezos’s WaPo: Wilbur Ross ‘Should Eliminate’ Citizenship Question from 2020 Census
Billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post is requesting Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross “eliminate” the citizenship question that has been added to the 2020 Census.
Since 1950, the citizenship question has not been asked on the full Census, leaving the nation without an exact estimate of how many citizens are in the country and how many noncitizens and illegal aliens are in the country.
In a historic move, President Trump’s administration announced the citizenship question would be put back on the census for 2020, Breitbart News noted.
Immediately following the announcement, attorney generals across the U.S. announced they would sue the administration for putting the citizenship question on the 2020 Census.
Now, the editorial board of Bezos’s Washington Post is jumping on board the calls from left-wing politicians to try to stop the 2020 Census from asking the citizenship question:
The real answer is probably that seemingly small changes to the census form can have massive effects on government spending and congressional representation. A lot of federal funding is distributed based on states’ total population. So are congressional seats. Adding a citizenship question on a form sent by an administration explicitly hostile to migrants is highly likely to depress response ratesamong immigrants, even those who have naturalized. This would make urban centers in blue states look less populous and, therefore, less deserving of money and representation. [Emphasis added]Instead of continuing to contest the lawsuit, Mr. Ross should eliminate the new question. [Emphasis added]
The Washington Post editor’s assumption that asking U.S. residents if they are citizens will “depress” response rates is not backed by research. In fact, a study by the Center for Immigration Studies has found the opposite as Breitbart News reported.
Previously, Kansas Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach explained to Breitbart News the necessity of knowing the number of citizens living in the country.
One of the most significant reasons is to end the current system of vote dilution where states like California have more representation in Congress because the state is home to the largest foreign-born population.
“Right now, congressional districts are drawn up simply based on the number of warm bodies in each district. Not only are legal aliens counted, but illegal aliens are counted too,” Kobach previously explained. “As a result, citizens in a district with lots of illegal aliens have more voting power than citizens in districts with few illegal aliens.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
July 23, 2018
Losing America
Not too long ago we as a people could generally agree upon a certain set of core values. Today a smaller majority of the American people still believe in the US Constitution and many people are starting to lose focus on the things that really matter the most.
When did certain members of our society all of sudden become selective regarding the laws they wished to be enforced ?
When exactly did some US citizens lose their basic instinct for survival ?
Sadly, we now have a substantial force within the Democratic Party who currently advocate and even believe in wide open borders and illegal immigration. When did the acceptance of such a lawlessness become a norm ? When did the people who actually make it a point to stand up for the rule of law and who believe in securing our borders suddenly become the enemy ? Can a sovereign nation without a secure border, without a common language, and soon without a common culture survive?
The Democratic Party's leadership not too long ago believed illegal immigration was wrong (video). Why have their minds now suddenly shifted ? Has importing a new Democrat voter base into this nation become just too appealing an idea for them not to take advantage of? A voter base which would be beholden to big government from cradle to grave. A voting bloc of people that would cast their votes depending upon what government could provide them.
Most rational citizens understand that unfettered and unchecked illegal immigration is a recipe for disaster. Yet huge factions of the new radical leftist Democrats currently believe illegal immigration is some kind of noble cause involving social justice. Many within the current party leadership have become all too willing to completely toss away the former US immigration melting pot model and happily replace it with a new "salad bowl" model.
Reality and history have proven to all of us that a nation simply we cannot safely absorb relentless waves of unassimilated immigration and expect to survive. Illegal immigrants bring with them so many different languages and cultures, and many of rgen have no desire to assimilate or learn the English language. Diversity is not always necessarily a strength. Change is not always a positive thing. Illegal immigrants who refuse to assimilate and learn our language are placing a heavy burden upon us.
Illegal aliens who are willing to work for extremely low wages are helping to eliminate the US blue collar middle class. These illegal aliens currently flooding the US labor force are driving down the wages of American workers. I am sick of hearing the line, "Americans are not willing to do those jobs." In reality Americans would be willing to do those jobs, but obviously not for slave wages.
Illegal immigration is placing an enormous financial burden upon our health care system. It has become common place for illegal aliens to use the emergency rooms of US hospitals as their personal doctors. This inevitably drives up the cost of healthcare for all of us.
A decade-and-a-half ago, a former liberal Democrat named Dick Lamm gave a prophetic five minute speech on how a nation like America could easily self-destruct. The former governor of Colorado was issuing a warning to all of us in the United States who were willing to listen. Lamm unveiled a chilling point by point hypothetical plan on how to destroy America through the immigration process. Every citizen within this country should consider listening to this five minute audio clip and hear the chilling prophetic words of Lamm ring out so loud and true today.
A nation that makes allowances for illegal immigration, especially without any significant time for assimilation, eventually becomes a nation under invasion, something which then eventually results in colonization.
The rule of law becomes a moot point when corrupt agenda-driven politicians within the government get to pick and choose the laws they wish to be enforced. When this type of selective law enforcement is facilitated, our country becomes nothing more than a banana republic.
The many remaining law-abiding citizens, along with Republican politicians, need to start adamantly calling out the Democrats for their irrational supportive stance regarding illegal immigration. We all need to confront the radical Democrats head on. They are the party whose senior members have the audacity to lecture and virtue signal conservatives on how evil and uncaring we have all become. Constantly painting those of us on the right as the bad guys. Simply because we conservatives dare to hold our American sovereignty sacred and know our borders need to become more safe and secure. All the rational people within this country are demanding the immigration process be a legal and closely monitored one.
Immigration could be a winning issue for Republicans in November. But they need to hammer this issue home with courage and fortitude, not backing down for fear of being called a racist or xenophobe. If the Republicans expect to win in November, they need to highlight all the negatives of uninterrupted waves of illegal immigration. A non-stop flow of illegal immigration being shoved down our throats by the Democrats and their puppet media.
We conservatives all need to stand as one with President Trump and affirm his policies regarding immigration. Trump's immigration plan adheres to basic common sense. Trump is putting individual American citizen's lives above political correctness, and this is making us all safer.
Illegal immigration has become the catalyst for big changes in this country. Changes within a nation which inevitably become irreversible if we fail to act. Change for the sake of change is a most dangerous thing.
An America that ignores the problems that come attached to open borders and illegal immigration is doomed for destruction. A citizenry which no longer believes in the rule of law and which pays lip service to our US Constitution is no longer free. A people who are no longer willing to hold their leaders accountable in regard to enforcing the rule of law, eventually become enslaved within a tyranny.
Photo credit: Markistos via Wikimedia Commons
PATRICK BUCHANAN:
What ever happened to America?
Obama’s war on legals in Arizona.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/01/obama-vows-to-mexico-arizonas-total.html
The LA RAZA SUPREMACY Democrat party surrendered our borders, laws and jobs to Mexico to keep wages depressed and buy their votes! CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
“Mexico prefers to export its poor, not uplift them.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0330/p09s02-coop.html
“The following is a partial list of politicians that are La Raza members working for open borders, amnesty (illegal Mexicans are not interested in citizenship) and no wall. The ultimate goal of Mexico is to continue successfully using the United States as their welfare system, cut a deal whereby the illegals can hop the border, give birth, pillage, make their pesos and then return home.” DAVID SIROTA.com
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
What will America stand for in 2050?
The US should think long and hard about the high number of Latino immigrants.
By Lawrence Harrison
It's not just a short-run issue of immigrants competing with citizens for jobs as unemployment approaches 10 percent or the number of uninsured straining the quality of healthcare. Heavy immigration from Latin America threatens our cohesiveness as a nation.
The political realities of the rapidly growing Latino population are such that Mr. Obama may be the last president who can avert the permanent, vast underclass implied by the current Census Bureau projection for 2050.
ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER…. Amazon’s JEFF BEZOS PLAN FOR A NEW AMERICAN SLAVERY
"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
MODERN SLAVER JEFF BEZOS
AMAZON’S ASSAULT ON AMERICA CONTINUES
Amazon, the multinational online retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
"Today, each of the top 5 billionaires owns as much as 750 million people, more than the total population of Latin America and double the population of the US."
“A comprehensive new report released Sunday by the New York-based labor rights watchdog China Labor Watch (CLW) has shed new light on the barbaric and illegal practices that Amazon employs to boost its profits by driving down production costs on the backs of factory workers at the company’s electronics assembly plants in China.”
JEFF BEZOS of AMAZON DECLARES THAT AMERICAN-BORN SLAVES ARE NOT CHEAP ENOUGH. CHINA MUST DELIVER THE REAL SLAVE LABOR!
“A comprehensive new report released Sunday by the New York-based labor rights watchdog China Labor Watch (CLW) has shed new light on the barbaric and illegal practices that Amazon employs to boost its profits by driving down production costs on the backs of factory workers at the company’s electronics assembly plants in China.”
Amazon, the multinational online retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
AMAZON’S JEFF BEZOS IS THE FACE OF MODERN SLAVERY!
The gains for employees are a novel pain for the investors and employers who have been able to hold down wages for decades because the federal government is trying to grow the economy via cheap-labor legal immigration.
“INVESTORS” HAVE AND WILL DESTROY THIS NATION IF IT WOULD IMPACT THE NEXT QUARTER’S EARNINGS!
Amazon, the multinational online retail conglomerate, is importing more foreign workers to the United States to take coveted tech industry jobs than Facebook and Google combined. JOHN BINDER
"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
$3,000 per second for Bezos, poverty wages for Amazon workers
18 July 2018
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ net worth surpassed $150 billion on Monday, making him the richest person in modern world history.
The magnitude of such a sum is difficult to comprehend. Its real meaning emerges when juxtaposed with the social position of Amazon’s 500,000 workers.
* Jeff Bezos has made $50 billion in 2018. The $255 million he has made each day of the year equals the annual salaries of over 10,000 Amazon workers in the US.
* The amount Bezos has made per second in 2018, $2,950, is more than the annual salary of an Amazon worker in India, $2,796.
* In five days of 2018, Bezos made as much money as the combined income of every Amazon fulfillment center worker in the world in 2017.
* If Bezos’ wealth were divided equally among Amazon’s employees, each would get a check for $300,000.
* In the time it will take the average reader to read these five bullet points, Jeff Bezos will have made another $70,000, seven times the global annual average income of $10,000.
The existence of such fortunes exposes the oligarchic character of American and global society. Under capitalism, Bezos and billionaires like him dominate the political parties, select who is elected to public office, determine the policies of the world’s governments, and dictate “public opinion” through their control over academic institutions and the media. Here too, Bezos is a prime example. He purchased the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million—less than what he now makes in a day.
Behind great wealth there are great social crimes. Bezos has made his billions through the ruthless exploitation of the Amazon workforce, which has more than doubled in size since 2015, when Bezos’s wealth was $60 billion. Amazon has hired roughly 300,000 new workers since 2015, allowing Bezos to pocket the surplus value generated by the labor of a veritable army of the exploited.
Amazon has gained a competitive edge by introducing 21st century methods to squeeze every last drop of sweat from its workers, who wear monitoring devices that measure how hard they are working and who are forced to walk or run up to 14 miles per day. Injuries are common, and deaths and suicides also take place with regularity. The National Council for Occupational Safety found Amazon among the most dangerous workplaces in the US.
Amazon is deeply implicated in the crimes of the US government, both in its imperialist wars abroad and in its Gestapo-like attack on democratic rights at home.
The company hosts the web servers for the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and it sells its cloud service to Palantir, a data analytics firm that provides software used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to conduct raids and detain immigrants. In May, the ACLU reported that Amazon also sells Orwellian facial recognition software to police departments and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Opposition to this corporate giant is emerging, including from within the company itself.
In June, an undisclosed number of Amazon employees published a letter demanding the company halt its involvement in mass deportation and police surveillance. “This will be another powerful tool for the surveillance state, and ultimately serve to harm the most marginalized,” the letter reads, citing IBM’s involvement in providing Hitler with the infrastructure used to murder millions in concentration camps.
This year has also seen the development of a series of strikes at Amazon facilities worldwide. In Spain, Poland and Germany, workers’ anger over low wages, “permanent temporary” work and brutal working conditions is near universal, forcing the trade unions to call limited protest strikes to coincide with “Prime Day”—a 36-hour sale period from July 16 to 17.
The trade unions’ goal in calling the Prime Day protest strikes is the exact opposite of the aspirations of the workers participating in them.
In Spain, the union has kept the strike to a single fulfillment center. In Germany, the bulk of workers chose not to participate in a one-day strike called by the Verdi union, knowing that Verdi regularly calls isolated strikes that will not impact corporate profits. In Poland, the union has called only a partial slow-down of work in order to block a broader strike.
While the workers want to shut down Amazon’s supply chains and achieve massive increases in wages and significant improvements in working conditions, the unions have admitted from the outset that they are organizing the strikes as limited protests that will have no impact on Amazon’s supply chains.
And while the workers aspire to unite in a common international struggle with their co-workers across national boundaries, the unions by their nature keep workers tied to “their own” nation-states and governments.
At Amazon and across all workplaces worldwide, the trade unions serve as an obstacle, not a conduit, for the development of the class struggle. Their leaderships, both in terms of political function and social composition, are hostile to the working class members whose dues help pay their salaries. The trade unions, through the relentless suppression of the class struggle at Amazon and elsewhere, are responsible for making Jeff Bezos’ fortune possible.
In their struggles against the transnational corporations, workers must throw off the shackles of the trade unions and construct new, rank-and-file factory organizations.
These factory committees must fight to establish lines of communication between workers at different workplaces, not to isolate workers at each plant. They must be based on the principle that the interests of workers and capitalists are incompatible, not on “cooperation” between workers and management. They must foster the highest degree of democratic discussion, planning, and debate among the workers themselves. They must be based on an understanding that the working class is an international social force and that workers are powerless when divided based on nationality.
The suppression of the class struggle has produced unprecedented levels of social inequality. In the United States, three people own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the population—160 million people. Worldwide, the five wealthiest own as much as the poorest half—3.6 billion people. Outside of the wealthiest 5 to 10 percent of the world’s population, the masses of people face levels of economic hardship that vary only in degrees of extremity.
The existence of such extreme levels of inequality raises the urgent need for socialist revolution. Society cannot afford the capitalist system. The trillions of dollars that sit in corporate bank vaults and in the trust funds of the super wealthy must be expropriated and spent on massive international programs to provide water, food, education, culture, housing and infrastructure to every corner of the world.
The international integration of the world economy that under capitalism serves as a source of conflict, war and competition will become, under socialism, a mechanism for distributing resources from each region of the world according to its ability to each region according to the needs of its population. Amazon, with its complex logistical web spanning every continent and dozens of countries, will be transformed into a public utility to ship medicine, building material, food and disaster relief across the world.
Neither Bezos nor the capitalist class will give up their wealth without a fight. The working class must prepare for the coming class battles by joining the fight for socialism.
Police beat up Amazon strikers in Spain
By James Lerner and Paul Mitchell
18 July 2018
Police charged a picket line and beat Amazon workers during the second day of a three-day strike at the company’s largest logistics centre in Spain at San Fernando de Henares, Madrid.
The strike was timed to coincide with Amazon’s “Prime Day,” and took place as thousands of workers in Germany and Poland also struck the company.
Until the police attack, the Amazon workers and their supporters had been peacefully picketing, under the broiling sun at the main entrance to “MAD4,” as police escorted trucks and scabs into the centre. According to strikers, the police “without apparent reason,” beat them up with truncheons, which led to one suffering “an open wound on the face caused by a blow from a policeman.” Three others were arrested and taken away to police stations.
Ana told the World Socialist Web Site that she had come to the assistance of a fellow worker who had been corralled by the police but found herself being “clubbed three of four times” resulting in “contusions on her arm and backside.”
The Amazon workers have been involved in a long running dispute, since 2016. For nearly two years, Amazon has been negotiating with the trade unions—CGT, CCOO, UGT and CSIT—to impose the Provincial Collective Agreement of Logistics and Packing of the Madrid Region, which would replace the previous warehouse agreement and drastically reduce workers’ rights.
In March, they went on a 48-hour strike supported by 75 percent of the workforce that followed similar action by Amazon workers in Italy, Germany and France during November’s Black Friday sales. However, the company, buoyed by the collaboration of the unions, unilaterally imposed new terms and conditions that meant:
· Lower wage increases, with wages falling below the inflation rate
· No more pay increases based on seniority
· A 25 percent reduction in sick pay
· A two-tier wage system, with new hires earning €3,000-5,000 less than current inventory workers
· Cuts to overtime for working “extraordinary hours,” including holiday and night shifts
Another worker in her fifties, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, told the WSWS that Amazon has gone further, paying new hires on the 18th day of employment instead of the usual fourth day. She believes that Amazon could “very well close up the San Fernando facility and go elsewhere.” She criticised the unions, saying they each sought to defend their own “brand” and that the struggle was being undermined by the lack of unity. She had previously supported the Communist Party aligned CCOO (Comisiones Obreras), but now backed the anarcho-syndicalist CGT.
The CGT poses as a radical alternative to the discredited CCOO and PSOE-aligned UGT.
Amazon’s onslaught is based on a European-wide and global strategy of offering cut-price goods delivered through sweatshop conditions involving relentless speed-ups, total surveillance, back-breaking quotas, and minimal toilet and meal breaks. The CGT has no perspective to defeat it.
CGT member José, who is a member of the Company Committee, complained, “We are suffering from police repression, they are preventing us from reporting, we have been denounced. ... Once again we see how the powerful are backed up with the laws and the forces of the state.”
Another CGT official complained that “the company wants to negotiate on the current agreement and not on what we already had, that we recognize as lawful.”
In contrast to the unions, the company has long prepared for this week’s strike. Fred Padje, operations director of Amazon Spain and Italy, warned before the March strike, ”We work with a network of 46 centres throughout the continent and with that we can cover the demand throughout Europe.” He boasted how they had managed to deactivate the protest at one of the company’s facilities in northern Italy during last year’s last Black Friday sale in what is popularly called ‘logistical plumbing”—by increasing the workload at the company’s plant in Barcelona.
The same has been happening during this week’s strike, with Amazon workers continuing to work at the distribution centre in Alcobendas, just half an hour’s drive north-west from San Fernando de Henares and at Getafe, half an hour to the south-west. Reports suggest that in the four weeks before the strike, the company took on up to 350 new temporary hires.
In a sign that the strikes are being wound down, union officials admitted to the media that they are putting the issue of the scab labour in the hands of their lawyers, claiming it contravenes section 6.5 of Royal Decree Labor Relations which states that “during the course of the strike, the employer cannot replace strikers by workers who did not belong to the company when it was announced.”
Many workers mentioned that the police were more aggressive in clearing the entrance to the Amazon site and that in the previous strike in March they allowed people to come closer. It is an indication that Amazon asked for and got closer cooperation from the Spanish government and police.
The police violence was also a sign of pressure from higher-ups to crack down on the pickets and tilt the media narrative against the workers.
This takes place under a new Socialist Party (PSOE) government installed in June with the help of the pseudo-left Podemos party and regional nationalists. It is inconceivable that the police action in such a high-profile dispute involving a company that dominates the country’s e-commerce market, worth an estimated €22 billion annually, was not closely coordinated with the Interior Ministry under Fernando Grande-Marlaska. It was the government delegate in the Community of Madrid, the PSOE’s José Manuel RodrÃguez Uribes, who sent them in.
The attack on the Amazon workers is a warning to Spanish workers and youth that the PSOE will attempt to stamp out any opposition to the austerity and militarist policies it is intent on imposing.
To cover up Podemos’ complicity, two Unidos Podemos deputies, Alberto Rodriguez and Ana Marcello, were dispatched to the Coslada Police Station to show their support for those detained and demand their release. The Parliamentary Group of Podemos in the Assembly of Madrid pleaded with the PSOE government on Tuesday to intervene, so that the detainees are released “immediately.”
Workers from San Fernando de Henares, or any other Amazon warehouse, cannot defeat transnational corporations like Amazon without a unified international fight. If Padje can boast of the company’s strike-breaking preparations, this is due to the role of the unions who act as facilitators for the exploitation imposed by Amazon. During months of negotiations with the company, they have refused to coordinate actions with Amazon strikes down the road, let alone in the rest of Europe.
The role being played by the anarcho-syndicalist CGT is further proof that workers need new organisations—rank-and-file workplace committees, independent of the unions, that they control democratically. The CGT, the third-largest union and promoted by various pseudo-left groups as a radical alternative to the social-democratic UGT and Stalinist CCOO unions, supports the same nationalist divisions as its counterparts and capitulate as quickly as their competitors.
$3,000 per second for Bezos, poverty wages for Amazon workers
18 July 2018
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ net worth surpassed $150 billion on Monday, making him the richest person in modern world history.
The magnitude of such a sum is difficult to comprehend. Its real meaning emerges when juxtaposed with the social position of Amazon’s 500,000 workers.
* Jeff Bezos has made $50 billion in 2018. The $255 million he has made each day of the year equals the annual salaries of over 10,000 Amazon workers in the US.
* The amount Bezos has made per second in 2018, $2,950, is more than the annual salary of an Amazon worker in India, $2,796.
* In five days of 2018, Bezos made as much money as the combined income of every Amazon fulfillment center worker in the world in 2017.
* If Bezos’ wealth were divided equally among Amazon’s employees, each would get a check for $300,000.
* In the time it will take the average reader to read these five bullet points, Jeff Bezos will have made another $70,000, seven times the global annual average income of $10,000.
The existence of such fortunes exposes the oligarchic character of American and global society. Under capitalism, Bezos and billionaires like him dominate the political parties, select who is elected to public office, determine the policies of the world’s governments, and dictate “public opinion” through their control over academic institutions and the media. Here too, Bezos is a prime example. He purchased the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million—less than what he now makes in a day.
Behind great wealth there are great social crimes. Bezos has made his billions through the ruthless exploitation of the Amazon workforce, which has more than doubled in size since 2015, when Bezos’s wealth was $60 billion. Amazon has hired roughly 300,000 new workers since 2015, allowing Bezos to pocket the surplus value generated by the labor of a veritable army of the exploited.
Amazon has gained a competitive edge by introducing 21st century methods to squeeze every last drop of sweat from its workers, who wear monitoring devices that measure how hard they are working and who are forced to walk or run up to 14 miles per day. Injuries are common, and deaths and suicides also take place with regularity. The National Council for Occupational Safety found Amazon among the most dangerous workplaces in the US.
Amazon is deeply implicated in the crimes of the US government, both in its imperialist wars abroad and in its Gestapo-like attack on democratic rights at home.
The company hosts the web servers for the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and it sells its cloud service to Palantir, a data analytics firm that provides software used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to conduct raids and detain immigrants. In May, the ACLU reported that Amazon also sells Orwellian facial recognition software to police departments and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Opposition to this corporate giant is emerging, including from within the company itself.
In June, an undisclosed number of Amazon employees published a letter demanding the company halt its involvement in mass deportation and police surveillance. “This will be another powerful tool for the surveillance state, and ultimately serve to harm the most marginalized,” the letter reads, citing IBM’s involvement in providing Hitler with the infrastructure used to murder millions in concentration camps.
This year has also seen the development of a series of strikes at Amazon facilities worldwide. In Spain, Poland and Germany, workers’ anger over low wages, “permanent temporary” work and brutal working conditions is near universal, forcing the trade unions to call limited protest strikes to coincide with “Prime Day”—a 36-hour sale period from July 16 to 17.
The trade unions’ goal in calling the Prime Day protest strikes is the exact opposite of the aspirations of the workers participating in them.
In Spain, the union has kept the strike to a single fulfillment center. In Germany, the bulk of workers chose not to participate in a one-day strike called by the Verdi union, knowing that Verdi regularly calls isolated strikes that will not impact corporate profits. In Poland, the union has called only a partial slow-down of work in order to block a broader strike.
While the workers want to shut down Amazon’s supply chains and achieve massive increases in wages and significant improvements in working conditions, the unions have admitted from the outset that they are organizing the strikes as limited protests that will have no impact on Amazon’s supply chains.
And while the workers aspire to unite in a common international struggle with their co-workers across national boundaries, the unions by their nature keep workers tied to “their own” nation-states and governments.
At Amazon and across all workplaces worldwide, the trade unions serve as an obstacle, not a conduit, for the development of the class struggle. Their leaderships, both in terms of political function and social composition, are hostile to the working class members whose dues help pay their salaries. The trade unions, through the relentless suppression of the class struggle at Amazon and elsewhere, are responsible for making Jeff Bezos’ fortune possible.
In their struggles against the transnational corporations, workers must throw off the shackles of the trade unions and construct new, rank-and-file factory organizations.
These factory committees must fight to establish lines of communication between workers at different workplaces, not to isolate workers at each plant. They must be based on the principle that the interests of workers and capitalists are incompatible, not on “cooperation” between workers and management. They must foster the highest degree of democratic discussion, planning, and debate among the workers themselves. They must be based on an understanding that the working class is an international social force and that workers are powerless when divided based on nationality.
The suppression of the class struggle has produced unprecedented levels of social inequality. In the United States, three people own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the population—160 million people. Worldwide, the five wealthiest own as much as the poorest half—3.6 billion people. Outside of the wealthiest 5 to 10 percent of the world’s population, the masses of people face levels of economic hardship that vary only in degrees of extremity.
The existence of such extreme levels of inequality raises the urgent need for socialist revolution. Society cannot afford the capitalist system. The trillions of dollars that sit in corporate bank vaults and in the trust funds of the super wealthy must be expropriated and spent on massive international programs to provide water, food, education, culture, housing and infrastructure to every corner of the world.
The international integration of the world economy that under capitalism serves as a source of conflict, war and competition will become, under socialism, a mechanism for distributing resources from each region of the world according to its ability to each region according to the needs of its population. Amazon, with its complex logistical web spanning every continent and dozens of countries, will be transformed into a public utility to ship medicine, building material, food and disaster relief across the world.
Neither Bezos nor the capitalist class will give up their wealth without a fight. The working class must prepare for the coming class battles by joining the fight for socialism.
THE ATLANTIC
WHAT AMAZON DOES TO POOR CITIES
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif.—This community was still reeling from the
recession in 2012 when it got a piece of what seemed like good news. Amazon,
the global internet retailer, was opening a massive 950,000-square-foot
distribution center, one of its first in California, and hiring more than 1,000
people here. “This opportunity is a rare and wonderful thing,” San Bernardino
Mayor Pat Morris told a local newspaper at the time.
In the months and
years that followed, Amazon dramatically expanded its footprint in and around
San Bernardino, a city 60 miles east of Los Angeles. The company now employs
more than 15,000 full-time workers in eight fulfillment centers (where goods are stored and
then packed for shipment) and
one sortation center (where packages are organized by delivery area) in the
Inland Empire, the desert region bordering Los Angeles that encompasses
Riverside and San Bernardino counties. This expansion provided a lifeline to
the struggling region, creating jobs and contributing tax revenue to an area
sorely in need of both. In San Bernardino, the unemployment rate that was as
high as 15 percent in 2012 is now 5 percent.
San Bernardino is
just one of the many communities across the country grappling with the same
question: Is any new job a good job? These places, often located in the
outskirts of major cities, have lost retail and manufacturing jobs and, in many
cases, are still recovering from the recession and
desperate to attract economic activity. This often means battling each other to
lure companies like Amazon, which is rapidly expanding its distribution centers
across the country. But as the experience of San Bernardino shows, Amazon can
exacerbate the economic problems that city leaders had hoped it would solve.
The share of people living in poverty in San Bernardino was at 28.1 percent in
2016, the most recent year for which census data is available, compared to 23.4
in 2011, the year before Amazon arrived. The median household income in
2016, at $38,456, is 4 percent lower than it was in 2011. This poverty near
Amazon facilities is not just an inland California phenomenon—according to a report by the left-leaning group Policy
Matters Ohio, one in 10 Amazon employees in Ohio are on food stamps.
The arrival of Amazon
has been bittersweet for people like Gabriel Alvarado, 35. He started working
at Amazon’s San Bernardino distribution center in 2013, making $12 an hour,
hoping that the job would help him support his new wife and two stepdaughters.
Amazon proved a stressful place to work, with managers chewing out employees
for not moving fast enough, he told me, which was tough to put up with for
meager pay. (An Amazon spokeswoman, Nina Lindsey, told me that, like most
companies, Amazon has performance expectations, but that it supports people not
performing with dedicated coaches to help them improve.)
Though Gabriel was
doing the same type of work at Amazon, he had to shell out more money for
health care, and made a lot less money. “I saw my brother doing the same type
of work, but moneywise, he had better credit, he could afford more, while I was
barely getting by,” Gabriel told me. He has tried to get a job with Stater
Brothers to no avail, and says there are few other local options but at Amazon
or at companies that work for Amazon. In 2016, he used Amazon’s tuition
reimbursement to get his commercial driving license, attending school on the
weekends while working during the week. But the best job he could find was
working for a third-party contractor, driving a truck for Amazon. “It’s either
Amazon or nothing,” he told me.
Morris, the former
mayor of San Bernardino, told me that in 2012, Amazon seemed like a lifesaver.
San Bernardino’s unemployment rate was at 15 percent, home values had fallen 57
percent since 2007, and the city, facing a $45 million budget shortfall, would
file for bankruptcy in August of that year. “At the point they came in, any job
is a good job,” he said. But the jobs the company is offering are indicative of
how the economy has changed in San Bernardino in the past few decades. “To a
certain extent, based on the history, it’s a step down for families,” he said.
The jobs that used to dominate San Bernardino were unionized ones with good
benefits, at the Kaiser steel mill, the Santa Fe railroad maintenance yard, and
the Norton Air Force Base. Now, jobs like the ones Amazon creates pay less and
aren’t unionized, and require multiple members of a household to work, often
more than one job.
Amazon allows
visitors to tour one of its warehouses in San
Bernardino, and I went late last year to try and understand how distribution
centers work. The warehouse, called ONT2 internally, is a vast complex, where
clean concrete floors stretch out in all directions covering the distance of
about 16 football fields. Bright yellow posts divide the different sections of
the building, where people unpack shipments, load shelves, unload shelves, and
pack everything from puzzles to lightbulbs into Amazon’s ubiquitous brown
boxes. Conveyor belts covering several miles whir throughout the facility,
moving goods among floors.
Many people who start
out at Amazon warehouses begin as “pickers.” These are the people who walk
through the vast aisles in the Amazon warehouses where goods are stored, and,
reading information from a handheld scanner, put items that have been ordered
online into yellow bins, called totes. The scanner gives pickers an amount of
time to “pick” an item based on where it is stored, and blue bars on the
scanner count down the amount of time they have left to complete the task.
Slightly more desirable than picking is stowing. “Stowers” take bins of items
that have been shipped to Amazon and store them on the shelves for the pickers
to grab when ordered. Other employees work as “packers.” They take items from
yellow totes, scan them, grab a box and packing tape, the size of which is
recommended by a computer, and pack individual customers’ orders, putting the
finished boxes on a fast-moving conveyor belt.
The workers I talked
to said that the problem with these jobs is not just that they’re physical or
monotonous—which they are—but, rather, that Amazon puts an incredible amount of
pressure on people to continue to work faster and faster. Many of the employees
mentioned the fear of being “written up” and losing their jobs, which will
thrust them into other low-paid jobs with fewer benefits. If pickers don’t grab
an item in a certain amount of time, they get written up. If they take too long
a bathroom break, they get written up. If they’re not walking as fast or
performing as well as the majority of employees, they get written up. “You
constantly feel like, ‘I’m not doing enough, I need to do a little more,’ and
that’s their business model,” Burgett said. “The constant trying to chase your
rate, trying to stay ahead of being written up—it affects you psychologically.”
This pressure is not limited to warehouse workers; a 2015 New York Times storydetailed a corporate culture where
white-collar workers were pushed psychologically as well.
Another Moreno Valley
employee, who has been a picker at Amazon for two-and-a-half years, says the
company constantly sends messages to workers’ scanners telling them to work
faster. They’ll run competitions such as a “Power Hour” in which workers are
encouraged to work as hard as they can for a prize. One recent prize was a
cookie. Another time, the winner of Power Hour would be entered into a raffle
to win a gift card. “I don’t want a cookie or a gift card. I’ll take it, but
I’d rather a living wage. Or not being timed when you’re sitting on the
toilet,” said the man, who lives with his father because he and his girlfriend
can’t afford their own place, and
didn’t want his name used because he hopes to get promoted at Amazon.
One woman I talked to
in Moreno Valley, who didn’t want her name used because she is in the process
of suing Amazon, said that working at the company strained her heart and caused
her psychological problems that she’s still dealing with. She was written up
for not working enough hours after she went to the emergency room because of
her heart problem, she says. On the other hand, she says, she made enough money
at Amazon to buy her first new car. “That’s what makes people not want to
quit—the pay,” she said. “People say, ‘You can treat me any type of way, since
this is the best money we can get out here in Moreno Valley.’”
Amazon says that many
employees have similar experience to Koneck. At one Kentucky facility,
according to Lindsey, the Amazon spokeswoman, there are more than 100 employees
who have been with Amazon for more than 15 years. But the workers I talked to
say few employees make it more than a year. Their theory was that Amazon begins
to cull employees when they are reaching the two-year mark, at which point
their stock options would vest. (Lindsey says it is “strongly” in Amazon’s
interest to retain employees to provide them with opportunities to develop,
because the company is growing so quickly.) The former carpenter says employees
call workers approaching the two-year mark “the walking dead” because they are
working hard not to get fired, but many of them will be. “Very few Tier One
employees ever make it to two years of continuous service,” Burgett writes.
Anecdotally, he estimates that about 5 percent of new hires receive vested
stock shares. “There are only two options,” Gabriel Alvarado told me. “You get
tired—tired of trying to make rate every week, tired of the write-ups—or you
get fired because you didn’t make quota or run out of unpaid time off.”
Associates receive 10 hours of paid time off when they begin, Lindsey told me,
which is essentially one day off. Most associates work four 10-hour shifts a
week and only accrue a small amount of paid time off every pay period, workers
said, which means it can take months to get another day off.
“When we’re thinking
about Amazon coming in and creating a huge number of jobs, what’s the quality
of jobs? We should also be really examining that,” said Beth Gutelius, a
researcher at the Great Cities Institute at University of Illinois at Chicago
who wrote her dissertation about the warehouse industry in the Chicago suburbs.
“Sometimes these more exurban areas are really desperate for jobs, and you
can’t deny that, but places do have to really think hard about it.”
The arrival of Amazon
may have been good for other businesses in the Inland Empire, but its effects
on individual residents seem less positive. While warehousing and storage was
one of the fastest-growing sectors in the Inland Empire over the past decade,
adding 35,800 jobs, the area also has the lowestannual private-sector average wage
out of the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas. A report from the Institute for Local
Self-Reliance found that Amazon paid 11 percent less than the average warehouse
in the Inland Empire; a similar analysis by The Economist found that
workers earn about 10 percent less in areas where Amazon operates than similar
workers employed elsewhere.
There is potential
for Amazon to be the shining knight that city officials hope it will be when it
opens in their cities. Amazon could become more like Stater Brothers—paying
workers more, incentivizing efficiency rather than punishing workers who fall behind,
supporting efforts to form a union. It could treat workers like Jose Alvarado
is treated. After 11 years at Stater Brothers, Alvarado, who also plays on the
company softball team, has no plans to leave. “I’m able to support my whole
family and live a really good life,” he told me, a stark contrast to his
brother.
Efforts to get Amazon
to change its labor practices have been unsuccessful thus far. Randy Korgan,
the business representative and director of the Teamsters Local 63, which
represents the Stater Brothers employees, told me that his office frequently
gets calls from Amazon employees wanting to organize. But organizing is
difficult because there’s so much turnover at Amazon facilities and because
people fear losing their jobs if they speak up. Burgett, the Indiana Amazon
worker, repeatedly tried to organize his facility, he told me. The turnover was
so high that it was difficult to get people to commit to a union campaign. The
temps at Amazon are too focused on getting a full-time job to join a union, he
said, and the full-time employees don’t stick around long enough to join. He
worked with both the local SEIU and then the Teamsters to start an organizing
drive, but could never get any traction. He told me that whenever Amazon hears
rumors of a union drive, the company calls a special “all hands” meeting to
explain why a union wouldn’t be good for the facility. (Lindsey said that
Amazon has an open-door policy that encourages associates to bring concerns
directly to the management team. “We firmly believe this direct connection is
the most effective way to understand and respond to the needs of our
workforce,” she wrote, in an email.)
There are many other reasons communities
might pause before welcoming an Amazon warehouse. But many still welcome the
company, believing that it’s better to have some jobs in the new Amazon economy
than no jobs at all. Fresno, another economically depressed city in California, offered Amazon $15.3 million in property
tax rebates and $750,000 in sales tax rebates to locate a facility there, an
offer Amazon was happy to take up. Amazon won $23 million in local tax
incentives over two years to open distribution
centers in three Texas cities. The company has received $48 million in state,
county, and city financial incentives to build facilities in Florida.
This race to the
bottom may be preventing cities from holding Amazon—or other logistics
companies—accountable. After all, most communities aren’t in a position to
negotiate with Amazon to ensure that workers will be treated well. Last year, I
interviewed Michael Tubbs, the mayor of Stockton, California, shortly after
Amazon announced in August that it was locating a
distribution center and 1,000 jobs in the inland city in Northern California.
Tubbs is young and progressive, but still told me that Stockton had little
power over Amazon. “I don’t think the city of Stockton currently, with an
unemployment rate double the state average, is in a position to make a ton of
demands on companies who can go anywhere,” he told me. San Bernardino had tried
to negotiate that it would get a portion of the sales tax of all the goods that
came through its distribution center, but ultimately spent money to build roads
and provide police and fire protection to the warehouse and does not get any
sales tax revenues from the warehouse, Morris said. (The state of California,
not Amazon, quashed the deal.)
As the race for
Amazon’s HQ2 shows, other cities competing for Amazon jobs offer up all sorts
of concessions, and worry that in passing any wage and hour mandates, they’ll
lose the jobs. “I think often, local policymakers are really eager to get
companies in, they want employment, but they don’t necessarily give a lot of
stipulations about how many of these workers are temps, how many are paid a
living wage,” Ellen Reese, chair of the labor-studies program at the University
of California, Riverside, told me.
It’s true that cities
desperate for jobs may find it difficult to attract companies if they pass
minimum-wage mandates or other labor laws. But the alternative, it seems, is
jobs that don’t create a middle-class lifestyle for residents, which in turn
affects local spending, the housing market, the tax base, and leads to a poor
standard of living. Many cities, San Bernardino included, are calculating that
any job creation is good news. They may soon find that with Amazon, that
calculation does not apply.
Trump Hits Amazon Again, Raising Possibility of Antitrust Case
President Donald Trump took aim at Amazon Monday morning, raising the possibility that the company could face antitrust legal problems and accusing it of using the U.S. Post Office as a “delivery boy.”
Shares of Amazon initially dropped by 2 percent but quickly made up about half those losses. The broader stock market was close to flat in morning trading.
The Amazon Washington Post has gone crazy against me ever since they lost the Internet Tax Case in the U.S. Supreme Court two months ago. Next up is the U.S. Post Office which they use, at a fraction of real cost, as their “delivery boy” for a BIG percentage of their packages....
....In my opinion the Washington Post is nothing more than an expensive (the paper loses a fortune) lobbyist for Amazon. Is it used as protection against antitrust claims which many feel should be brought?
While Trump has complained before about Amazon paying less than it should to the Post Office, the possibility of an antitrust claim is likely the more serious threat to Amazon. Amazon could easily afford to pay more for shipping but a successful antitrust case against the company could force it to be broken up.
Under currently dominant U.S. legal interpretations of antitrust law, however, it would be very hard to prove Amazon had breached the law. Ever since conservative legal scholar Robert Bork revolutionized antitrust law in the late 1970s and early 1980s, antitrust has focussed on whether a company’s actions have done “harm to consumer,” which mostly means resulted in higher prices. For the most part, Amazon’s acquisition and expansions push down prices, making that line of inquiry a dead-end.
But the idea of using antitrust to rein in tech companies in general, and Amazon in particular, is still being discussed by legal scholars. Progressive legal scholars, long critical of the Bork interpretation of antitrust, have been the leaders in this area, creating an unusual overlap with Trump’s animus toward Amazon. But lately the idea is getting attention from Trumpian and conservative outlets as well, with American Affairs running a major piece about the problems raised by tech behemoths.
Frank Pasquale, professor of law at the University of Maryland, described what he calls the Antitrust Jeffersonians:
The guiding spirit of Jeffersonians is the original intent of U.S. antitrust law—that immense corporations are so capable of dominating their customers, employees, and communities that they need to be broken apart. Dividing a large corporation into smaller parts is a “structural remedy,” because it addresses fundamental ownership stakes and control in society. This populist demand to break up the largest corporations has inspired antitrust attacks on firms ranging from Standard Oil to Brown Shoe to Microsoft.
A more successful approach by the Jeffersonians, however, may be to avoid antitrust altogether and start from first principles. If these tech companies are a threat to America’s economic dynamism and political liberty, their size can be dealt with directly. The U.S. in the 1930s broke up the big financial companies by passing laws that mandated the securities, insurance, and banking businesses be separated. In the late 1950s, faced with the rise of conglomerates that housed insurance companies with commercial businesses such as airlines and movie studios, Congress passed a law cleaving commerce from banking.
Today that could mean separating communications from commerce. Amazon would be divided between its cloud services business, on the one hand, and its retail and media busineses on the other. AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner would be reversed on the grounds that Time Warner falls on the commerce side and AT&T on the communications. Google’s ad sales and search would be divorced from its cloud server and Android phone business.
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