This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
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.
“Amazon is a massive wrecking machine
consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble.”
DANIEL GREENFIELD
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.”
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 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.
THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WAGES WAR ON AMERICA!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/09/bill-gates-zuckerberg-jeff-bezos.html
"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, BIDEN CRONIES
Amazon WORKS
FOR BIDEN, OR DOES HE WORK FOR JEFF BEZOS?
Walmart
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned
an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility
to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy
alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the
statesmanship of today.” THEODORE
ROOSEVELT
Graph from the Economic Policy Institute
Decades
of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the
rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits
have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the
population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that
fell to only 61 percent.
Millionaires
projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019...watch those
numbers go up with Bidenomics!
While the wealth of the rich is growing at a
breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy,
skewed towards the very top.
At the end of 2014, millionaire households owned
about 41 percent of global private wealth, according to BCG. This means that
collectively these 17 million households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in
liquid assets, or about $4 million per household.
By Gabriel Black
The massive increase in the value of the
stock market, which only a small segment of the population
participates in, means that the top 10 percent of the population controls
73 percent of all wealth in the United States. Just three men—Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Bill
Gates—had more wealth than the bottom half of America combined last
year.
The father of US
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin just completed the most
expensive purchase of a living artist’s work in
US history, spending over $91 million on a three-foot-tall metallic
sculpture. Ken Griffin, the founder of hedge fund Citadel, recently dropped
$238 million on a penthouse in New York City, the most expensive US home
ever purchased. And Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has
invested $42 million in a 10,000-year clock (BEZOS OWNS ABOUT $300 IN RESIDENTIAL PROPERTIES HE CONSIDERS HIS
HOMES THESE INCLUDE $135 MILLION MANSION IN BEVERLY HILLS, A $40 MILLION DOLLAR
TOWNHOUSE IN D.C. AND $100 MILLION IN CONDOS IN NYC).
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.
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, we published an article exposing 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.
In 25 years, Amazon produced the biggest individual fortune in history, and it did so on the backs of hundreds of thousands of workers. 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.
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.
ASSAULT
ON THE AMERICAN WORKER…. Amazon’s JEFF BEZOS PLAN FOR A NEW AMERICAN SLAVERY
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/11/amazon-billionaire-jeff-bezos-says-fuck.html
"Amazon is a
massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy
and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
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.”
AMAZON’S
ASSAULT ON AMERICA CONTINUES
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/05/modern-slaver-jeff-bezos-of-amazon.html
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.”
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/06/hundreds-of-miserably-paid-employees-at.html
“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’S JEFF BEZOS IS THE FACE OF MODERN SLAVERY!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-face-of-evil-jeff-bezos-assault-on.html
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
Hunger and evictions surge in the US
The
worst social catastrophe to befall the US working class since the Great
Depression of the 1930s continues to leave millions of people hungry, jobless
and facing eviction.
Feeding
America, the second-largest food charity in the US, estimates that upwards of
54 million people, including one in four children in the US are facing food
insecurity.
People line up
and check-in for a food giveaway at Harlem's Food Bank For New York City, a
community kitchen and food pantry, Monday, Nov. 16, 2020, in New York. Over
five hundred turkeys and produce food boxes were given away by lottery to needy
families for Thanksgiving. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
The growing
need for food among millions of workers and their families is coinciding with
record levels of COVID-19 infections reported in states across the country. In
Texas, over 1 million have contracted the coronavirus, with over 20,000
perishing, the second highest tolls in the country behind New York. The
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation forecasts roughly another 190,000
deaths by March 1, 2021 if current trends continue.
On top of
food insecurity, between 11 and 13 million renter households across the country
are at risk of eviction, according to research by Stout, an investment bank and
global advisory firm.
The Eviction
Lab at Princeton University reports that eviction filings increased in several
major metro areas following the expiration of CARES Act provisions at the end
of July and before the CDC eviction moratorium was implemented on September 4.
However, even with the moratorium, Princeton researchers note that evictions
have continued across the country, and Stout estimates that with its expiration
at the end of the year, this could lead to up to 6.4 million eviction filings.
The Eviction
Lab data shows that two weeks after the CDC moratorium was implemented, evictions
still continued to be processed, with 508 in Fort Worth and 1,053 in Houston,
Texas. Filings also increased on a month-to-month basis in several cities,
including Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and in the Florida cities of Tampa,
Jacksonville and Gainesville.
In North
Carolina, almost 25,000 eviction cases were filed between July and September,
according to data from the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts,
with almost 15,000 completed. Overall, Stout estimates that between 300,000 and
410,000 North Carolina households are unable to pay rent, with 240,000 expected
eviction filings by January 2021.
In an
interview with CNN, attorney Michael Trujillo commented on the bind that
renters will find themselves in come January 1, 2021. “The pandemic is not
going away before the end of the year,” he said, adding that without additional
protections, “a huge wave of evictions” is on the horizon.
In a
Hill-HarrisX poll taken between November 10 and November 13, 77 percent of US
voters were in favor of passing a coronavirus relief package “as soon as
possible.” Yet despite massive popular support for more stimulus, no relief is
coming.
After the House and Senate passed the $2.2
trillion CARES Act at the end of March, which provided billions to Wall Street,
large corporations and the well-connected, ensuring their financial stability
for a lifetime, workers were left with limited protections and only temporary
unemployment relief. Congress has yet to pass another bill long after the $1,200 stimulus
checks have been sent out and enhanced unemployment benefits have expired.
Months of inaction have left millions of workers and their families without
additional stimulus, eviction protection, health care, food or medicine,
exacerbating mental health issues and stress.
Included in
the CARES Act was an eviction moratorium that expired, along with the federal
$600-a-week unemployment supplement, at the end of July. After Congress failed
to come to terms on another bill at the end of July, the Centers for Disease Control,
on September 4, implemented a federal eviction moratorium, which required
tenants to sign a declaration and provide a copy to their landlord. This, along
with additional federal unemployment assistance distributed under the Pandemic
Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation
(PEUC) programs, are set to expire the final week of December, leaving millions
of people who have yet to find jobs or come up with the monies needed to pay
back rent facing eviction in less than 50 days.
As of
October, some 13 million people were receiving benefits through the PUA or PEUC
program, more than from state unemployment insurance, which has also expired
for millions of workers.
While the
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates that over 11.1 million people are
unemployed, thousands of workers, primarily low-wage workers, continue to be
laid off. Last week, the BLS recorded over 700,000 first-time unemployment
filings for the 34th week in a row, with first-time unemployment claims exceeding
any week throughout the 2008-09 Great Recession.
A Washington
Post analysis found that among higher education workers, low-wage and
administrative staff have seen ongoing monthly job losses or have not been
called back to campus, while higher paid instructors have been hired back.
The Post found that while colleges hired 180,000 workers during the
fall semester last year, only 20,000 jobs were added this year.
Mass
unemployment has led workers to apply for state unemployment benefits, but
hundreds of thousands have yet to receive anything nearly eight months into the
pandemic. In Wisconsin, reporters working with Wisconsin Watch found that
nationally only 56 percent of unemployment claims were paid from March through
August, while in Wisconsin the level was only 42.5 percent. As of November 10,
more than 94,000 people in the state were still waiting for either state or
federal unemployment benefits.
For those
who were fortunate enough to receive benefits, their expiration and the
inability to find safe well-paying work have left them unable to afford basic
necessities.
The
out-of-control spread of the virus coupled with overcrowded hospitals prompted
a flurry of public health declarations over the past 72 hours from Republican
and Democratic governors, such as Iowa Republican Kim Reynolds and Michigan
Democrat Gretchen Whitmer. These included curfews, mask mandates and calls to
limit social gatherings to 10 people or less. However, not one politician in
either party is advancing the necessary demand to resume lockdowns of all
non-essential businesses, with guaranteed pay for jobless workers and small
business owners.
As
Democratic President-elect Joe Biden made clear in his speech yesterday after
meeting with corporate executives, the number one concern of the ruling class
is “to get the economy back on track,” not to stop the spread of the virus,
feed the hungry, provide relief or house the homeless. All policy is focused on
ensuing the flow of profits to the corporations and Wall Street.
Not once in
Biden’s speech did he call for resuming the unemployment benefits in the CARES
Act or extending eviction moratoriums.
This is because despite all its declarations,
the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team
attests, is a party of Wall Street, big
banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial
complex.
In the
latest round of political theater on Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell appealing, “for the sake of the country,” to “come to the table
and work with us to produce an agreement that meets America’s needs in this
critical time.”
The letter
noted that the negotiations should begin from the previous failed starting
offer of $2.2 trillion, which McConnell and the Republicans have dismissed, a
position from which they have not budged for the last six months. Despite the
intransigence on the part of the Republicans, the fact is that the Democrats
and Republicans in the Senate have found time to advance several of President
Trump’s federal judges past committee hearings, including Supreme Court Justice
Amy Coney Barrett, allowing them to be approved.
Ultimately,
both parties see the provision of even the most meager benefits as a
“disincentive” for their real aim: getting workers back on the job in factories
and other workplaces amid a raging pandemic.
No comments:
Post a Comment