Amazon
CEO Jeff Bezos, who is rescinding a $2-an-hour hazard pay increase for his
warehouse workers at the end of the month, led the pack, increasing his
personal wealth by $34.6 billion since the onset of the pandemic. Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg was close behind, adding $25 billion to his fortune. Tesla CEO Elon
Musk, who reopened his California auto plant in defiance of state regulators
and with the support of President Trump, saw a 48 percent increase in his
wealth to $36 billion in just eight weeks as the stock market rebounded from
its collapse. All told, the nation’s 620 billionaires now control $3.382
trillion, a 15 percent increase in two months.
Amazon ‘Stands in Solidarity with the Black Community’ in ‘Fight Against Systemic Racism’
2:52
E-commerce giant Amazon published a statement on Sunday stating that the company is “standing in solidarity with the Black community” in the “fight against systemic racism and injustice.”
Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce and tech giiant Amazon posted a statement recently in which the firm states: “The inequitable and brutal treatment of Black people in our country must stop.” The statement further goes on to say that the company stands with the Black community in the fight against “systemic racism and injustice,” as protests over the death of George Floyd rage across the United States.
However, despite claiming to stand with protesters, Amazon has a long history of working with law enforcement, specifically in the development of facial recognition technology. Breitbart News reported in July of 2019 after 15 months, a pilot test aiming to bring Amazon’s facial recognition system, called Rekognition, to the Orlando Police Department had ended. City police reportedly ended the test after multiple technical issues resulting in the technology failing to work correctly and a lack of resources on the police department’s part.
The software system is designed to utilize facial recognition algorithms to search for and track suspects in real-time. Amazon has previously claimed that the software was used to identify and rescue victims of human trafficking. Orlando police were meant to utilize the system by uploading photos of suspects to it, Rekognition would then search CCTV cameras for the suspect’s face.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) welcomed the announcement of the end of the project telling the Verge: “Congratulations to the Orlando Police Department for finally figuring out what we long warned — Amazon’s surveillance technology doesn’t work and is a threat to our privacy and civil liberties.” The ACLU found in a study conducted last July that Amazon’s facial recognition software incorrectly identified 28 members of Congress with images of people who had been arrested.
Breitbart News reported in February of 2019 that a study by MIT found that Amazon’s software has an error rate of approximately 31 percent when identifying the gender of images of women with dark skin while rival software developed by Kairos had an error rate of 22.5 percent and IBM’s software boasted a rate of just 17 percent. However, software from Amazon, Microsoft, and Kairos successfully identified images of light-skinned men 100 percent of the time.
Amazon is one of many companies that has expressed its support of protesters, including Twitter, Nike, Netflix, and Spotify.
Follow Breitbart News’ coverage of protests at our live feed here.
US unemployment claims approach 40 million
since March
US billionaires
increase wealth by $280 billion since March, as millions are unable to get
unemployment benefits
US unemployment claims approach 40 million
since March
22 May 2020
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is rescinding a $2-an-hour hazard pay
increase for his warehouse workers at the end of the month, led the pack,
increasing his personal wealth by $34.6 billion since the onset of the
pandemic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was close behind, adding $25 billion to
his fortune. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reopened his California auto plant in
defiance of state regulators and with the support of President Trump, saw a 48
percent increase in his wealth to $36 billion in just eight weeks as the stock
market rebounded from its collapse. All told, the nation’s 620 billionaires now
control $3.382 trillion, a 15 percent increase in two months.
US billionaires
increase wealth by $280 billion since March, as millions are unable to get
unemployment benefits
“Never allow a crisis
to go to waste,” said Rahm Emanuel, former investment banker, Chicago mayor and
White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama, in response to the 2008
financial crisis. Emanuel and Obama led the reorganization of class relations
in the United States, cutting social services, education, health and pensions,
and accelerating a shift to temporary and low-paid work. As a result they
created the largest stock market boom in history.
Today, this catchphrase
is once again on the lips of the ruling
class. The largest financial
and corporate
powerholders are
seeking to use the global
health emergency to
expand their wealth and
increase the
exploitation of the working class.
The billionaires in the
United States have increased their wealth by $282 billion since the mid-March
stock decline, according to a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies.
While more than one fifth of the American population is now unemployed, and
millions are deprived of basic needs and confront an uncertain future, the
fortunes of the ultra-rich have not only recovered, they are improving
substantially.
Jeff Bezos and his
girlfriend (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool, File)
Jeff Bezos’s fortune
increased by $25 billion
between January 1 and
April 15. Never in
history has any
individual made so much
wealth so quickly. As
the report noted, “this is
larger than the Gross
Domestic Product of
Honduras, which was
$23.9 billion in 2018.”
Eight billionaires,
so-called “pandemic profiteers,” have increased their wealth, each, by over $1
billion during this time: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), MacKenzie Bezos (Amazon), Eric
Yuan (Zoom), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), John Albert Sobrato (Silicon Valley
real estate), Elon Musk, Joshua Harris (Apollo, financial asset management) and
Rocco Comisso (Mediacom, cable and internet).
Why, when 200,000 have
died around the world and millions more lives are in jeopardy, are the
ultra-rich profiting so fabulously?
First, the bailout
package crafted and voted on unanimously by Republicans and Democrats has
funneled wealth to the richest banks and corporations, while leaving peanuts
for the working population.
The $2.2 trillion CARES
Act gives only $550 billion to direct payments and extended unemployment, which
most people have yet to receive. Of the remaining more than $1.7 trillion, $500
billion goes directly to bailing out major corporations. While $377 billion
ostensibly goes to small businesses, most have not seen a penny, as the banks
pocketed $10 billion in fees and larger companies largely consumed the
available funds.
The CARES Act also
contains within it an additional $173 billion in tax breaks to super-wealthy
individuals and companies. For example, it allows households earning at least
$500,000 a year to reduce their taxes by substantially increasing deductions
from business losses and applying them to taxable money earned on the stock
market.
All of this is on top
of trillions being funneled
into the financial
markets and corporate
coffers by the Federal
Reserve.
Meanwhile, a study from
the Pew Research Center finds that while over 10 million people applied for
unemployment in March, only 29 percent of jobless Americans received any
benefits that month. The report says that unemployed workers “face a hodgepodge
of different state rules governing how they can qualify for benefits, how much
they’ll get and how long they can collect them.”
Real unemployment has
grown past 20 percent of the population. Over 26.5 million jobs have been lost,
adding to the 7.1 million people who were already unemployed prior to the
crisis.
Even when workers
receive these benefits, they come, ultimately, at the expense of state and
federal debt. Like in 2008, when state after state and city after city faced a
budget crisis, so too, with COVID-19, will fiscal problems emerge. Who will pay
when budgets are exceeded? As in Detroit, Michigan and Stockton, California in
the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the ruling class will once again
say, “There is no money” for basic social services such as education and clean
water. Meanwhile, trillions are funneled to the ultra-wealthy.
A second reason the
pandemic has been a bonanza for the ultra-rich is that it has intensified
corporate consolidation, part-time and temporary work, and digital and physical
automation.
Bloomberg writes: “Big
Business Has All the Advantages in the Pandemic.” While most small businesses
are on the rocks--deprived by larger firms of the small funding that was
theoretically given to them in the CARES Act--many large corporations, such as
Amazon, are carrying out a massive hiring spree. Walmart plans to hire 150,000
people by May; Amazon, 100,000; and Dollar Store, 25,000.
Because larger firms
are more likely to have the capital not only to weather the crisis, but to dominate
internet-based commerce, they will come out of the crisis with even greater
domination of their market. In particularly hard-hit industries, such as the
oil and gas sector, the giant companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil see the
crisis as an opportunity to purchase their smaller competitors.
The Financial Times likewise writes
that “Covid-19 will only increase automation anxiety” as companies
“pandemic-proof their operations.” Capitalism has a natural tendency toward
automation, which in the long term breeds economic crises and joblessness. Mark
Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says COVID-19 will spur a
“surge of labour-replacing technology,” as automated cashiers, cars, logistic
robots and automated assembly lines replace workers. Again, the largest
companies will emerge on top because they are the ones that can afford this
automated overhaul.
Capitalism’s
fundamental trajectory—toward increasing automation, temporary and part-time
work, corporate consolidation, ever increasing inequality and financial
bubbles—will intensify. The result, in turn, will be an ever more staggering
concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.
The socialist response
to the COVID-19 crisis demands that this mass of wealth be confiscated. The
major companies which dominate our lives cannot be run for the private profit
of a handful of billionaires who seek to squeeze the working class, literally,
to death. They must be placed under the social and democratic control of the
working class.
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