ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMS FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS
The nation’s immigration policies are built on a back-room corporatist bargain between Democrats and cheap-labor businesses, says an op-ed published in the New York Times.
Amazon Promises 1 Million New Jobs in India by 2025
2:48
E-commerce giant Amazon has attempted to address the Indian government’s issues with the company’s plans to set up shop in the country by promising to create 1 million new jobs in India by 2025.
Reuters reports that e-commerce giant Amazon has now promised to create 1 million jobs in India by 2025 just days after criticism from the country’s trade minister. The trade minister was reportedly not impressed with Amazon’s plans to invest $1 billion in the country’s small businesses.
Indian trade minister Piyush Goyal told a security conference in New Delhi on Thursday: “They may have put in a billion dollars but then if they make a loss of a billion dollars every year then they jolly well have to finance that billion dollars. So it’s not as if they are doing a great favor to India when they invest a billion dollars.”
Both Amazon and Walmart’s FlipKart have faced growing criticism from India’s brick-and-mortar retailers which have accused the firms of racking up billions of dollars in losses to fund deep discounts and discriminating against small sellers. Amazon has denied these allegations and company CEO Jeff Bezos has promised to create more jobs in the country stating: “We are investing to create a million new jobs here in India over the next five years.”
This week, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) launched an antitrust probe of the companies to investigate these allegations. Amazon plans to set up digital centers across 100 Indian cities and villages to help local businesses get online to sell their goods and plans to offer support in terms of marketing and logistics.
Amazon claims its $1 billion investment will bring more than 10 million Indian businesses online and will enable the export of goods manufactured in India worth $10 billion by 2025. Amazon described the initiative at a company event at a New Delhi stadium stating that it was “a first-of-its-kind mega summit” that would bring together more than 3,000 small businesses.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who appeared wearing a blue-colored traditional Indian jacket, stated: “The dynamism, the energy … the growth. This country has something special,” which was met with cheers from the audience. India’s e-commerce market revenues are expected to reach $120 billion in 2020, having grown 51% annually from 2017 to 2020 according to a study by the CCI. Amazon’s $1 billion investment will add to the company’s $5.5 billion of investments in India announced by the company since 2014.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
Amazon Is Becoming
the Government
"You can't trust
anybody or anything anymore."
I don't know how many
times I've cited journeyman Johnny Whitmire's inelegant
lament. America's receding trust in
institutions is well trod territory. Our political distemper, with a
reality TV star leading the nation, reflects the depleted reservoir of faith
the public has in great, long-lasting public bodies.
Grizzling over
institutional irreverence is now commonplace in journalism. But fear
not! For there is one organization that the people still put their
hopes and dreams into. And no, it's not our cinque-sided,
ultra-fortified military headquarters in Arlington, Va.
What is this outsized
institution in American life? The bookstore cum everything store,
Amazon.com. Much like the sprawling rainforest itself, Amazon's
limbs ramify over an impressive amount of territory, affecting nearly everyone.
And here's the most
surprising part: Amazon is trusted. Despite the immeasurable power
its bald-pated founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, wields, Amazon is seen as one of
the few big outfits in America that can deliver, figuratively and
literally. "In contrast to the dysfunction and cynicism that
define the times, Amazon is the embodiment of competence, the rare institution
that routinely works," Franklin Foer writes in a recent profile
of Bezos for The Atlantic.
Foer's piece, which is
critical of Bezos's Hank Rearden–like stature, was published on nearly the same
day as another long-form profile in The New Yorker. Both
write-ups expatiate on Amazon's growing command of commerce and the
internet. The company's portfolio is impressive, if unwieldy:
second-biggest private U.S. employer; conduit for 40% of all e-commerce
transactions, including almost half of all paperback book sales; a high-quality
grocery chain; superintends nearly
half the cloud-computing industry through Amazon Web Services, whose servers
host Netflix, General Electric, and the CIA. Bezos is also the owner
of the Washington Post, which, for almost anyone else on Earth, would mean
unexampled influence but is only a garnish on the CEO's sumptuary stock of cultural
control.
Two major profiles in the
country's most well-read magazines isn't coincidental. Bezos, along
with his Silicon Valley tech cousins, increasingly finds himself subject to
unfriendly scrutiny. In spite of all the trust reflective in its no-analog
market share, Amazon is treated like a catawampus by both sides of the
political class. Elizabeth Warren regularly puts the screws into the
retail giant, inveighing at the recent Democrat presidential debate against its
stringent requirements for small businesses within its
marketplace. President Trump has contemned its
creeping political influence and lack of tax payments into the public
till. Bernie Sanders, who curates inside dirt on the
company from aggrieved employees, has introduced the Stop BEZOS Act to fleece Amazon for every
dollar its employees receive in public assistance.
Trashing Amazon is easy
politics. But avoiding its convenience isn't so
simple. Sanders's presidential campaign spent over $130,000 on
Amazon merchandise during the second quarter of this year. Warren's
spent $80,000; the Trump campaign dropped $45,000 on the
commercial giant.
Swearing off Amazon is no
easier than ditching the grid entirely, so far-reaching is Bezos's
arm. Not that the company's fief-like area of control is an
accident. Amazon's pervasiveness is the result of a number of forces
coinciding with an elite vision of the future. Yes, Bezos had the
foresight to get ahead of the internet revolution, commodifying digital
connectedness to profit off our insatiable consumerist
appetites. But his technocratic approach aligns with the latest
iteration of what James Burnham called the
"managerial revolution," where accountants and middle men opaquely
run society behind walls of big data.
Amazon bills itself as a
"process company"; it oversees transactions rather than conducting
them. By forcing tens of thousands of smaller companies to abide by
its standards to gain marketplace access, Amazon operates like its own
nation-state, with Bezos as its suzerain.
This is where
Washington's invidiousness stems from. Pols like Sanders and Warren
take a publicly hostile approach to Amazon, but the aggression is only an act,
politicians playing at guardians of the common good. What Bezos's
behemoth represents isn't just nervy business practice, but a competitor in
legitimacy.
Amazon isn't just trusted
more than the federal government; it's trusted enough to become part of the
government. The company is rumored to be the favorite for the Department
of Defense's massive $10-billion cloud-computing contract. It's
already establishing its second headquarters next door to the
Pentagon. Bezos is moving into D.C.'s toniest
neighborhood. It’s only a matter of time before school children read
the Pledge of Allegiance off of Amazon-produced, Amazon-shipped,
Amazon-approved palm cards.
Bezos built a better mousetrap by beating a path
to every American's door. Now Uncle Sam is inviting him
in. Foer closes his critical profile by asking: "Jeff Bezos has
won capitalism. The question for the democracy is, are we okay with
that?"
I think most Americans
would respond with a reluctant "yes," as long as it comes with
free two-day shipping. And we still get to see John Krasinksi
reprise his role of Jack Ryan in season
2. Dialectical materialism marches on.
Jeff
Bezos’ WaPo: ICE Raids Are ‘Cruel,’ Businesses Need
Illegal
Alien Workers
12 Aug 2019496
4:15
The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, who is
also the CEO of Amazon, released an editorial this week blasting the
enforcement of national immigration law as “cruel” and said U.S. businesses
should not be deprived of employing illegal alien workers.
In an editorial in the Washington Post, the editors wrote
that the recent raids on seven Mississippi food processing plants by
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were “cruel” and “pointless”
despite arresting and identifying 680 illegal workers,
including more than 200 who had previous criminal records. About 300 of the illegalworkers arrested
were released that same day on “humanitarian grounds.”
The Washington Post editors wrote:
The deportation sweep Wednesday by
hundreds of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at several food
processing plants in Mississippi left a trail of tears, business jitters and
widespread anxiety in places where undocumented
immigrants are so tightly woven into communities that the towns would struggle
to exist without them. The raids inflicted predictable suffering —
especially among children whose parents were suddenly carted off — to
such a degree that just 24 hours afterward, ICE had released some 300 of the
680 migrants it had arrested, including those who had no criminal records.
[Emphasis added]
…
First, the raids underline
American agriculture’s deep dependency on undocumented workers, who in 2014
accounted for 17 percent of employees in the sector — and considerably
more than that on farms and in many food processing plants. Little wonder
that plant managers and local residents in towns targeted by ICE last
week worried that the raids would sap their businesses and vitality.
[Emphasis added]
Pro-reform advocates have long
demanded a nationwide mandatory E-Verify system that would ban employers from
hiring illegal aliens over American workers — thus shoring up millions of U.S.
jobs for Americans, driving up wages, and preventing businesses from relying on
cheap, foreign, exploitable labor.
The Washington Post editors, though, write that
businesses need illegal workers because low wages and awful working conditions
at these food processing plants make them unappealing to American workers.
“The fact is that relatively few
Americans want dirty, dangerous jobs that pay $12 per hour, while requiring
some employees to report to work at 3 a.m.,” the editors wrote.
Not mentioned by the Washington Post editors
is the fact that the food processing plants raided in Mississippi had
employed 18 juvenile illegal workers,
including one as young as 14-years-old.
As Breitbart News has analyzed, ICE raids have
proven to be hugely beneficial for American workers in terms of increasing
wages and bettering workplace conditions. Last year, for instance, 600 jobs
that were previously held by illegal workers went to black Americans after an
ICE raid ,and wages for the jobs rose 25 cents.
An
evergreen piece: Last year, I analyzed the benefits of ICE raids to American
workers who are forced to compete against cheap, exploitable foreign labor. https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/09/03/labor-day-evaluating-the-benefits-of-ice-raids-for-american-workers/ …
Labor Day: Evaluating the Benefits of ICE Raids for
American Workers
Research has revealed that in the
long-run, deportation of illegal aliens saves American taxpayers billions in tax dollars. The cost of illegal aliens to
American taxpayers over a lifetime is about $746.3 billion, for example. Compare
this to the cost of a single deportation, which is about $10,854 per illegal
alien based on Fiscal Year 2016 totals.
Overall, deporting all 11 to 22
million illegal aliens in the country would amount to a cost savings of about
$622 billion over the course of a lifetime. This indicates that deporting
illegal aliens is six times less costly than what it costs American taxpayers
to currently subsidize the millions of illegal aliens living in the U.S.
The unprecedented illegal population
in the U.S. is primarily concentrated in California, New York, Florida, and
Texas. Today, there are at least about eight million illegal aliens
18-years-old and older who are employed in American jobs that would have
otherwise gone to legal immigrants and citizens. The illegal workforce is
particularly high in the construction industry, where 24 percent are illegal
aliens, and the farming industry, where 15 percent of the workforce are
illegal.
John Binder is
a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Amazon
Opens Biggest Campus Yet – in India
E-commerce giant Amazon has opened its
largest campus yet, but it is not its American HQ2, it is located in Hyderabad,
India, as the firm prepares for aggressive expansion in the country.
Bloomberg reports that Amazon
has opened its largest campus building ever in the south Indian city of
Hyderabad in preparation for aggressive expansion in an attempt to compete with
retail giant Walmart in India. Amazon is making a huge push in India where the
majority of commerce is still done through small brick and mortar family-owned
shops.
Amazon’s country manager for India,
Amit Agarwal, commented on the Indian retail market stating: “E-commerce
is so small in India relative to the total consumption, less than 3%.” Last
year, Walmart spent $16 billion to purchase India’s biggest startup, Flipkart
Online Services Pvt. in an effort to expand within the country. Amazon CEO Jeff
Bezos has stated that the firm will invest $5.5 billion as part of its India
expansion.
Amazon’s new campus is the first
building the company has owned outside of the United States and spans 1.8
million square feet of office space and will accommodate approximately 15,000
workers. John Schoettler, vice president of Amazon’s Global Real Estate and
Facilities, commented: “The largest buildings in Seattle house about 5,000
employees.”
Agarwal added: “This facility will
build services globally,” citing Amazon Web Servers, Kindle, Alexa, Amazon.in
and Amazon Home Services as services that could be expanded from the Hyderabad
offices. Agarwal noted that Amazon Home Services is “innovating on things
like doorstep pick-up and electronics repair.”
Amazon is also reportedly in
negotiations to purchase a 10 percent stake in one of the largest brick and
mortar retailers in India, Future Retail. Local media reported that Amazon is
aiming to add food delivery to its list of Indian services and is in
negotiations with multiple food companies to launch the service.
Lucas
Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and
online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WAGES WAR ON AMERICA!
"GOP estb. is using
the $5 billion border-wall fight to hide up to four blue/white-collar cheap-labor
programs in lame-duck DHS budget. Donors are worried that salaries are too
damn high, & estb. media does not want to know."
TOP EVIL CORPORATIONS LOOTING AMERICA
Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIES – CLINTON
CRONIES
JPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil
Halliburton BUSH CRIME FAMILY CRONIES
British American Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google CLINTON CRONIES
Facebook OBAMA CRONIES
Amazon
Walmart
Amazon’s 25th anniversary: A conglomerate based on parasitism and
exploitation
Last week, Amazon commemorated its 25th anniversary. From its beginnings in a garage in Seattle, Washington, Amazon has grown into a multinational technology conglomerate with a market capitalization of nearly one trillion dollars.
In 1994, future Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos left his job at hedge fund
D.E. Shaw to get out in front of the possibilities opened up by the
accelerating development of the internet, beginning with the modest idea of an
online bookstore. Bezos went on to become the wealthiest man on the planet, his
hoard by one estimate peaking at a record $157 billion before his assets were
divided in a divorce earlier this year.
Now considered one of the “Big Four” technology monopolies
alongside Apple, Google and Facebook, Amazon controls the largest marketplace
on the Internet: Amazon.com. The conglomerate’s reach extends from Whole Foods
Market, which Amazon purchased in 2017 for $13.4 billion, to consumer
electronics such as the Kindle reader and the voice-controlled Alexa. Amazon
subsidiary Kuiper Systems announced in April of this year that it will spend a
decade launching 3,236 satellites into space to provide broadband internet.
Traditional book publishers were decimated by the arrival of
Amazon, which aggressively pursued them, in the words of Bezos, “the way a
cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” Using its vast flows of cash, Amazon
ruthlessly undercut its rivals, from neighborhood stores to diaper
manufacturers, accepting losses in order to drive competitors out of its way.
Meanwhile, Amazon demanded and obtained free money from state and local
governments in the form of tax breaks and other concessions.
Amazon’s annual revenues reached $233 billion in 2018, on which
the conglomerate is expected to pay zero federal income tax. To put this figure
in perspective, these revenues are nearly at the level of the annual tax
revenue of Russia, which amounted to $253.9 billion in US dollars in 2017.
Amazon’s revenues are higher than the government revenues of Turkey ($173.9
billion), Austria ($197.8 billion), Poland ($90.8 billion) and Iran ($77.2
billion).
Nearly half of American households now have subscriptions to
Amazon Prime. The click of a mouse on a personal computer, or the tap of a
finger on a mobile device, now sets into motion the speedy delivery of
commodities from around the world, or the instantaneous electronic transmission
of a film, song or book. Behind these deceptively simple transactions lies
Amazon’s vast and complex commercial, logistics, distribution and computing
empire.
Promising advances have indeed been made in automation and
artificial intelligence. These technological advances carry with them
tremendous liberating potential for human civilization as a whole. Heavy and
repetitive toil by humans can increasingly be mitigated by robots, and
possibilities appear on the horizon for advanced levels of coordination and
integration around the world, assisted by artificial intelligence.
But under capitalism, new advances in technology have made
possible new techniques of exploitation. Amazon has become a watchword for a
new kind of despotism in the workplace.
In Amazon “fulfillment centers,” workers are forbidden to carry
cellphones or to talk to each other. They are searched coming in and out, and
minute details of their activity throughout the workday are tracked. Amazon
specializes in putting constant pressure on workers to move as fast as
possible, with electronic devices constantly prompting and prodding them to
complete the next task.
Workers are instructed to compete with each other to surpass
each other’s rates, which they are admonished constitutes “fun.” Arbitrarily
high rates are demanded, and then raised, and then raised again. A worker who
takes a moment to rest, to drink water, or to go to the bathroom can be
criticized for a diminished rate. The workers who are deemed too slow, or who
simply tire out, are replaced.
Amazon is now the second-largest employer in the United States,
and there are around 647,000 Amazon workers worldwide. Journalist John Cassidy,
writing about Amazon in the New Yorker in 2015, commented: “Behind all the
technological advances and product innovation, there is a good deal of
old-fashioned labor discipline, wage repression, and exertion of management
power.”
Over the past week, the World
Socialist Web Site published an articleexposing the injury of 567 workers over a two-year period at
Amazon’s DFW-7 fulfillment center near Fort Worth, Texas. In December of last
year, the WSWS reported how Amazon
had hired a private detective to spy on 27-year-old worker Michelle Quinones in
an effort to block compensation for her injury.
Amazon has appeared in the “Dirty Dozen” list maintained by the
National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) for two
years in a row. The 2019 report highlights six worker deaths in seven months,
13 deaths since 2013, “a high incidence of suicide attempts, workers urinating
in bottles and workers left without resources or income after on-the-job
injuries.”
Amazon’s techniques are merely a refined expression of
conditions being imposed on workers around the world. In March of this year,
Ford Motor Company announced the hiring of its new chief financial officer, Tim
Stone, who previously served as Amazon’s vice president of finance and the
leader of the Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods. Stone was hired as Ford
carries out brutal cost-cutting in the US, Europe and around the world.
There is no shortage of opposition among Amazon workers. On
social media, current and former Amazon workers are contacting each other,
looking for ways to fight back. In Poland, where Amazon workers make around $5
per hour, Amazon walked out of negotiations on July 2 with two unions over
working conditions, setting the stage for a strike.
To fight for their interests, Amazon workers cannot allow their
struggles to be corralled and smothered by the pro-capitalist trade unions,
which are doing everything they can to block a fight against inequality and
exploitation. The WSWS fights for the building of independent, rank-and-file
workplace committees to unite Amazon workers throughout the world with all
workers in a common counteroffensive.
The key to the struggle of Amazon workers is an understanding
that the fight against Amazon is a fight against the capitalist system itself.
In 25 years, Amazon produced the biggest individual fortune in history, and it
did so on the backs of hundreds of thousands of workers. In the words of Karl
Marx, Amazon’s trajectory represents an “accumulation of misery, corresponding
with accumulation of capital.”
Not just Bezos, but many others have enriched themselves or
stand to enrich themselves from Amazon’s rise. Wall Street has its fingers in
the pie. The Vanguard Group currently owns $55 billion of Amazon stock,
BlackRock owns $45 billion and FMR owns $30 billion.
The parasitic activities of Amazon, through which it has sought
to appropriate for itself the surplus value accumulated by other companies,
have been integrated with the financial parasitism of the American economy.
Amazon’s own stock has been buoyed ever higher as part of the speculative mania
on Wall Street.
Amazon is entangled not only with Wall Street, but also with the
US military and intelligence apparatus. Amazon was awarded a $600 million
contract with the CIA in 2013, followed by a $10 billion contract with the
Department of Defense last year to move government data onto the cloud.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s facial-identification software “Rekognition” is being
marketed to federal and local police.
In 2013, Bezos personally purchased, and now operates, the Washington Post, which has
been a main media voice for the Democratic Party’s anti-Russia campaign and the
overall interests of American imperialism.
The increasing integration of Amazon with the repressive apparatus
of the state, while its tentacles stretch into every corner of society,
confirms the Marxist understanding of the relationship between capitalism and
democracy in the modern epoch. “Finance capital does not want liberty, it wants
domination,” wrote Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding, in a passage quoted by
Lenin in Imperialism: The
Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Amazon must be placed under public ownership and democratic
control. It must be taken out of the hands of the financial oligarchy and
transformed into a public utility. The technology and infrastructure behind
Amazon’s meteoric trajectory and the biggest individual fortune in modern
history must be turned towards the needs and aspirations of the world’s
population as a whole.
This program can only be achieved through the mobilization of
the working class on an international scale on the basis of a fight to
overthrow the capitalist system and establish a democratically-controlled
socialist economy, run on the basis of social need, not private profit.
Amazon’s
Plans for World Domination Slowed Down by UK Government
Alex Wong/Getty
LUCAS NOLAN
6 Jul 2019133
2:00
Amazon’s investment in British food delivery startup Deliveroo has been
halted by Britain’s competition regulator in a rare loss for the Masters of the
Universe.
Business Insider reports that Amazon’s $575 million investment in British food
delivery startup Deliveroo has been put on hold by the U.K.’s antitrust
regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The CMA has stepped in
to pause the deal and prevent any integration attempts between the two
companies as it considers launching a full investigation. The CMA said that the
initial enforcement orders were served to the companies on June 24.
The CMA referred to Amazon’s
investment as “a minority shareholding,” and stated that it had reasonable
grounds for suspecting that Amazon and Deliveroo “have ceased to be distinct,”
or were considering business arrangements that would result in the companies
“ceasing to be distinct.” The current halt of the investment gives the CMA time
to decide whether or not to launch a “Phase 1” competition probe.
A Deliveroo spokesperson commented
on the issue stating: “There are a number of major companies within the
restaurant food delivery sector and this investment will enable Deliveroo to
expand, innovate and, we believe, will enhance competition.” Amazon commented
on the issue stating: “We believe this minority investment will enable
Deliveroo to expand its services, benefiting consumers through increased choice
and creating new jobs as more restaurants gain access to the service.”
If the CMA decides to open an
investigation, the companies could suggest ways to address issues raised by the
CMA. If the companies had already merged financially, this process would be
much harder.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for
Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him
on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
Europe
Considering Massive Tax Hikes on Amazon, Facebook, Google
TOM CICCOTTA
6 Jul 201911
1:38
European countries including France are making a push for massive tax
increases on technology giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
This
week, legislators in France approved a bill
that will ensure that Internet technology companies like Amazon, Facebook, and
Google cannot operate in Europe without paying taxes. Until now,
Silicon Valley companies have avoided paying taxes in companies like France by
exploiting a loophole that allowed them to reroute their sales through
countries with lower corporate tax rates like Ireland.
The
bill includes a three percent tax on Internet technology companies that have
global revenues of more than $847 million. French officials estimate that the
tax will bring in $566 million in its first year.
The
bill, which was adopted by France’s National Assembly, now needs approval from
the French Senate.
Lawmakers
in the United Kingdom are considering a
similar tax on Internet technology companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google
on all revenues that are generated by British citizens.
Boris
Johnson, who is likely to be the next prime minister, expressed approval for
the new tax. “It’s deeply unfair that high street businesses are paying tax
through the nose … whereas the internet giants, the FAANGs — Facebook, Amazon,
Netflix and Google — are paying virtually nothing,” Johnson said in a comment.
Stay
tuned to Breitbart News for more technology updates.
Andrew Yang: Amazon Is ‘Closing America’s Stores and Malls’
Justin Sullivan/Getty, Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty
Entrepreneur Andrew Yang took aim at Amazon during
Wednesday’s Democratic primary debate on CNN, blaming the
online retail giant
for mass closures of America’s stores and malls.
“Raise your hand in the
crowd if you’ve seen stores closing where you live,” Yang said during the
debate in Detroit. “It is not just you. Amazon is closing 30% of America’s
stores and malls.”
He added that Amazon was
“paying zero in taxes while doing it.”
The Democratic candidate
then reiterated a common refrain from his campaign, saying that the “opposite
of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math.” He said that if he wins the
presidency, he would promise every American adult $1,000 a month.
Yang’s attack on the
company — whose founder, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Washington Post —
was met with enthusiastic applause from the audience at the Fox Theatre.
But CNN fact checkers noted
that Yang’s claims was not entirely true. “Yang is right that up to 30% of
malls may close in the next few years, but that’s not all because of Amazon,”
the network noted.
Brick-and-mortar retailers have suffered from overcapacity and a number of
big-box retailers, like Toys ‘R’ Us, have gone under.
Amazon paid no federal
income tax in 2018 on profits of more than $11 billion.
President Donald Trump has
repeatedly criticized Amazon and Bezos, calling the billionaire “Jeff Bozo.”
The president has also dubbed The Washington Post as “Amazon
Washington Post.”
During Wednesday’s debate,
Yang also warned that increased automation is a
leading factor in the loss of manufacturing jobs.
“If you go to a factory
here in Michigan, you will not find wall-to-wall immigrants, you will find
wall-to-wall robots and machines,” the candidate said.
Amazon’s
Plan to Take Over India
1 Aug 201921
2:47
E-commerce giant Amazon is reportedly in talks to acquire a 26 percent
stake in a massive Indian retailer allowing the company to dominate a $200
billion market.
Business
Insider reports that
e-commerce giant Amazon is in negotiations to acquire 26 percent of India’s
largest retailer which would give the company access to a vast network of
physical stores, something which would be hugely beneficial to the firm for its
fulfillment of online grocery orders in the country.
Two
senior executives told the Indian newspaper, the Economic Times, that
Amazon is looking to purchase a stake in Reliance Retail which is the retail
division of Reliance Industries and is controlled by one of the richest men in
India, Mukesh Ambani. Reliance serves approximately 5 million customers a week
and was previously in discussion with China’s Alibaba Group to strike a
partnership, a deal which fell through due to differences in valuation.
Reliance
Retail has approximately 10,415 retail stores in India and runs a telecoms
platform called Jio which could be extremely valuable for Amazon projects such
as its online grocery fulfillment service. Being connected to Reliance Retail
could also help to put Amazon in a better position when it comes to lobbying
the Indian government.
Arvind
Singhal, chairman of retail consultant Technopak Advisors told Reuters: “There
could be synergies which are beyond retail. Whenever there is any kind of
policy intervention needed, to be a partner with Reliance certainly will be a
big asset.” Neither Amazon or Reliance Retail have commented on the deal, with
Reliance simply telling Business Insider “As a policy, we do not comment
on media speculation and rumors.”
Reliance
will also benefit from having access to Amazon’s huge e-commerce platform and
use of Amazon’s technology, supply chain, and logistics platform as Reliance
aims to connect its stores digitally through its telecoms network. The Indian
e-commerce market is expected to be worth $200 billion by 2026 up from $35.8
billion in 2017 according to the India Brand Equity Foundation.
While
Amazon has been dominating e-commerce for some time with sales of $8.8 billion
in 2018, competition in the sector is beginning to increase. A recent report from
Edge by Ascential claims that Walmart-owned Flipkart could overtake Amazon for
the position of top e-commerce retailer by 2023.
Lucas
Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and
online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
NYT Op-Ed: ‘I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted’
10:00
The nation’s immigration policies are built on a back-room corporatist bargain between Democrats and cheap-labor businesses, says an op-ed published in the New York Times.
The op-ed is headlined, “I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted.” The January 16 article was authored by Jerry Kammer, a former journalist who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies:
In 2001, when I was the new Washington correspondent for The Arizona Republic, I attended the annual awards dinner of the National Immigration Forum. The forum is a left-right coalition that lobbies for unauthorized immigrants and expansive immigration policies. Its board has included officials of the National Council of La Raza, the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, as well as the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Restaurant Association and the American Nursery and Landscape Association.After dinner, the group’s executive director, Frank Sharry, made a pitch to business allies who wanted Congress to allow them unfettered access to foreign workers. “You guys in business get all the workers you want, whenever you want them,” he proposed. “No bureaucracy.”“Sold!” yelled John Gay, a lobbyist for the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Mr. Sharry quickly added that the deal must include advocacy for “three little, tiny pieces of paper: a green card, a union card and a voter registration card” for unauthorized immigrants.
The hotel industry is eager to use much imported cheap labor, partly because wages and salaries add up to roughly 50 percent of the sector’s annual costs. Any increase in labor supply and any reduction in workers’ wages helps the shareholders boost their stock values.
Sharry is now the head of America’s Voice, a pro-immigration group that works with the Democratic Party. In 2013 and 2014, he worked closely with business groups as well as ethnic and racial lobbies in a failed effort to pass the wage-cutting amnesty and cheap-labor bill. The “Gang of Eight” bill was strongly backed by the New York Times, which repeatedly described it as “comprehensive immigration reform.”
Business groups are denouncing the New York Time‘s decision to publish Kammer’s op-ed.
David Bier, a pro-migration advocate at the business-funded Cato Institute chimed in by tweet: “We must restrict immigration because it’s causing social division.” But no, “immigration” isn’t causing social division. It’s you, sir–Mr. Jerry Kramer of the org that thinks V-DARE is the same as the NY Times–who is causing social division.”
The op-ed was also denounced by Todd Schulte, the director of the FWD.us advocacy group created by billionaire investors, including Mark Zuckerberg. He used Twitter to stigmatize Americans who are worried about the impact of imported labor on their wages, housing, and children, tweeting:
Coming off Bret Stephens race-science column, The New York Times Opinion Section gives a massive amount of real estate too… The Center for Immigration Studies, funded and founded by John Tanton. John Tanton who wrote “The Case for Passive Eugenics.”
Coming off Bret Stephens race-science column, The New York Times Opinion Section gives a massive amount of real estate too...
The Center for Immigration Studies, funded and founded by John Tanton.
John Tanton who wrote "The Case for Passive Eugenics."nytimes.com/2020/01/16/opi…
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The elite effort to stigmatize criticism “works – it works like a charm,” says Kevin Lynn, the founder of Progressives for Immigration Reform. He continued:
It is thrown out as a red herring when they really don’t want to discuss the pros and cons of immigration … as a way to shut down the debate.[The impact of migration] is self-evident when you look at California. If unbridled immigration is somehow a plus for the productive class [and] is a boon to the environment, then California should be paradise right now. But California has the highest level of inequality … The jobs that once paid a good middle-class living now don’t. You’re scraping by in your construction job.
The impact of the racism charge may even reach the editorial board at the New York Times, which has interviewed most of the Democrats’ 2020 competitors.
In interviews with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Tom Steyer, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the board members denied a connection between labor supply and wages. In a back-and-forth conversation about exploitation and immigration with Sanders, for example, board member Binyamin Applebaum said:
You said that the exploitation of undocumented workers results in lower wages for domestic workers … I think that there’s a lot of research suggesting that that’s not actually the case.
That claim that supply does not affect wages is often made by investors’ lobbyists and business-tied consultants.
But the vast majority of people who deal with the issue plainly say that worker shortages spur wage raises.
That responses come from independent academics, the National Academies of Science, the Congressional Budget Office, executives, more academics, New York Times reporters, state officials, unions, more business executives, lobbyists, employees, the Wall Street Journal, federal economists, Goldman Sachs, oil drillers, Wall Street analysts, fired professionals, legislators, construction workers, NYT subscribers, plus Robert Rubin, the Bank of Ireland. and 2015 Bernie Sanders:
But the NYT‘s board trusts that immigration does not affect wages. In the interview with Warren, board member Kathleen Kingsbury asked: “Throughout America, many jobs that were once held by American union members have been replaced and are now held by undocumented immigrants. Does that drive down wages in the United States? … But do you know of any specific evidence that immigrants drive down wages?”
The NYT posted Kingsbury’s question with an italicized note denouncing the supply-effects-wage connection:
The NYT‘s links go to a 2017 article that tries to contradict the 2016 National Academy of Sciences report on immigration.
Kingsbury seems to support the claim that immigration does not affect wages — even though she won a prize for writing about low wages in a sector flooded by migrant workers: “She was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing for a series on low wages and the mistreatment of workers in the restaurant industry.”
She wrote in February 2014:
meet Hope Shaw, the 38-year-old single mother of three who is assistant manager at Dunkin’ Donuts on Boston Street. She, too, likes to serve. But her life is one of unrequited toil. She lives paycheck to paycheck. Her heating gas was shut off last winter for failure to pay; the electric bill for her Dorchester apartment is consistently three months overdue. She’s gone without health insurance for more than a year. “My rent is $1,100 a month,” she says. “Every month I feel like I’m choosing between paying that or putting food on the table.”Yet, six days a week, Shaw leaves her home before 4 a.m. to work a nine-hour shift overseeing the sale of donuts, bagels, and flat-bread sandwiches, while coping with customers who expect their coffee to be prepared exactly as they please and only sometimes drop a penny in the tip can. She’s been promoted twice in the five years she’s worked at the store, and her hourly pay has gone from $8 to $10. She made slightly less than $24,000 last year.
In Trump’s economy, where CEOs cannot easily import extra workers, Dunkin’ Donuts now pays its assistant managers almost $14.00 in Salisbury, MA. Admittedly, the crush of low-skill migrants and high-tech money moving into major cities has pushed up housing costs for assistant managers, so the rent for two-bedroom apartments in Dorchester now exceeds $2,000 per month.
But elites have always been reluctant to admit the economic and civic distortions caused by government-imported labor, said Lynn. “They never will,” he said, citing a quote by union leader Samuel Gompers in 1924:
Every effort to enact immigration legislation must expect to meet a number of hostile forces and, in particular, two hostile forces of considerable strength. One of these is composed of corporation employers who desire to employ physical strength at the lowest possible wage and who prefer a rapidly revolving labor supply at low wages to a regular supply of American wage-earners at fair wages. The other is composed of racial groups in the United States who oppose all restrictive legislation because they want the doors left open for an influx of their countrymen
That year, Gompers won his battle when Congress drastically cut the inflow of immigrants into the United States. By 1950, American wage-earners earned roughly 65 percent of each year’s economy. But that share declined after 1980 in an increasingly high-immigration, high-tech economy.
McKinsey.com
In the great recession, wage-earners’ share of new wealth fell below 57 percent as cheap labor and spreading technology flushed Americans’ money towards the stock market and the coastal cities.
The New York Times‘ editorial board denies immigration’s role in that incoming tide of wealth.
NYT's Tom Edsall says Trump's immigration-reform voters are 'snakes and vermin.'
Edsall usually tries to understand ordinary Americans' concerns. But he & his elite peers live in a bubble & just don't see immigration's huge economic damage to Americans.bit.ly/2YQO7Aq
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