Sure-fire winner Obrador calls mass immigration to the United States a “human right” and says migrants “must leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” This razaista wants his lebensraum and he wants it right now.
If Obrador wins, President Trump might get him up to speed on America’s experience with regimes like that. And he might broach the subject of the $26.1 billion in remittances, an amount impossible without the bilking of American taxpayers on a massive scale.
“The Biden Immigration Agenda sacrifices the interests of the American People in order to serve the interests of foreign citizens, criminal cartels, and ultra-wealthy multinational corporations,” says the April 12 memo from Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN).
GOP Memo: Joe Biden Has Opened Borders to Help Donors and CEOs
The Republican Study Committee has posted talking points for GOP legislators to help them focus public opposition against the mass migration caused by pro-migration zealots in President Joe Biden’s administration.
“The Biden Immigration Agenda sacrifices the interests of the American People in order to serve the interests of foreign citizens, criminal cartels, and ultra-wealthy multinational corporations,” says the April 12 memo from Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN). The memo continued:
Biden’s agenda rejects responsible limits and controls on the number of people entering the country.
It’s as if the Biden Administration recognizes no borders at all.
President Biden’s policy is not liberal, or even merely left-wing — it is radical, extreme and beyond the bounds of rational thought.
…
While Biden reshapes our immigration system to serve rich donors and giant corporations, we believe it must serve the interests of American citizens, families and workers.
“Trump FIXED it, Biden BROKE it. It’s just that simple,” the memo says.
The memo would help GOP legislators reframe the debate around Americans’ concerns, and away from the focus on migrants’ desires that pro-migration groups and most of the nation’s media tout.
For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group funded a polling memo which warned pro-amnesty legislators to avoid talking about jobs and wages and to instead focus their pitch on the worries and concerns of foreign migrants:
It is better to focus on all of the aforementioned sympathetic details of those affected [by an amnesty] than to make economic arguments, including arguments about wages or demand for labor. As we have seen in the past, talking about immigrants doing jobs Americans won’t do is not a helpful frame, and other economic arguments are less effective than what is recommended above.
The migrant-first framing is pushed by establishment media outlets — such as The Washington Post — and by politicians who have decided to support an amnesty. “This is basically for the children,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said April 1 after endorsing a 2021 amnesty that would reward investors and CEOs to hire foreign migrants instead of recruiting West Virginia’s adults and graduates.
The new GOP memo also shifts the Party’s message towards pro-American solutions and away from vague, donor-approved complaints about socialism, welfare, and security. A polling memo released March 24 by the billionaire-funded, pro-migration Immigration Hub group spotlighted the weakness of GOP messaging that avoids positive proposals:
In message-testing, Republicans’ greatest vulnerability on immigration is their refusal to work with Biden on solutions to the problem — instead opting to score political points. When presented with a range of criticisms of Republicans’ approach to the southern border, the following item is most concerning:
That Republicans in Congress refuse to work with President Biden on solutions to address what’s happening at the border, instead opting to block everything Biden is doing on immigration to score political points.
Banks wrote his memo after leading a delegation of GOP representatives to the border:
In the matter of mere weeks, the Biden Administration has transformed President Trump’s secured Southern Border into the sprawling site of an unmitigated and rapidly worsening disaster.
As we could clearly see with our own eyes what the Biden Administration desperately wants to hide from the American public: the situation is devolving and deteriorating by the day. When we met with local sheriffs, mayors and judges at the border, they told us in no uncertain terms that this is an indisputable crisis. They also told us they don’t have time for Congress to drag its feet and pass laws — they need help now. And they need it fast.
President Biden must not be allowed to hide behind the liberal media’s smoke screen. We must urge he and Vice President Harris to visit the border and see the crisis they created firsthand. It is incumbent upon all of us to ensure that he is held accountable to the American public for his massive failure.
Sen. Mike Crapo steps back from his support for the House farm amnesty.
The deal would hammer rural towns in Idaho & elsewhere by replacing Americans with low-wage visa workers who take their wages home each year.
Local GOPers know where the votes are. https://t.co/zsEF4BLTfM— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) March 24, 2021
Banks’ memo suggests four ways for GOP legislators to talk about Biden’s cheap-labor economic policy at the border:
1. National Security: Immigration policy should protect our national security by protecting the American people from terrorism, cartels, and other threats to their safety;
2. America First: Immigration policy should prioritize American workers first, help grow our middle class, raise wages, and enhance economic opportunity for all lawful residents well;
3. Rule of Law: Immigration policy should respect the rule of law, along with immigrants that honor our legal immigration processes, rather than incentivize law breaking;
4. Patriotic Assimilation: Immigration policy should aim to assimilate legal immigrants into the American family so they too can take pride in our values, history, and heritage.
Biden is also far from the mainstream, the memo says:
Americans regardless of party recognize the need to afford basic protections to U.S. workers in the job market. And voters throughout America recognize that we must first consider the social, economic and financial well-being of all American citizens and lawful residents here today. Biden has rejected this mainstream consensus and, with virtually no announcement or discussion, is sailing the United States deep into uncharted waters.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, rational, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.
The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly progressives — embrace the many skewed polls and articles that push the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families. It moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, from Red states to Blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.
Pro-amnesty groups recruit prestigious academics to pretend migrant labor doesn't hurt Americans' wages.
Yet the academics carefully bury the wage-loss issue under piles of related & obvious claims.
That tactic helps keep journos from following the $$.https://t.co/NYktbysOrh— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) April 8, 2021
Today, there are at least 8 million illegals holding U.S. jobs (THE NUMBER IS PROBABLY TEN TIMES THAT). The mass employment of illegals by hundreds of businesses, though, continues to go largely ignored by the law, as only 11 employers and no businesses were federally prosecuted for hiring illegal aliens from 2018 to 2019. The number of federal prosecutions of employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens rarely exceeds 15 per year. JOHN BINDER
Recently the Democrat party has become the party of open borders and amnesty as well as ultimate citizenship for upwards of 22 million illegal immigrants and with open borders at least another 2-4 million more every year. The vast majority of these illegal immigrants are functionally illiterate and lacking in employable skills. STEVE McCANN
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
LA RAZA ‘The Race’ A TAX-PAYER FUNDED OPEN BORDERS PARTY NOW CALLING ITSELF UNIDOus.
Razaists rip off America.
Lloyd Billingsley“More than one million immigrants have been deported since President Obama took office,” the 2011 PBS “Frontline” Lost in Detention contended. “Under his administration, deportations and detentions have reached record levels. The get-tough policy has brought complaints of abuse and harsh treatment, including charges that families have been unfairly separated after being caught in the nationwide dragnet.”
BLOG EDITOR: CECILIA MUNOZ SERVED ON BIDEN TRANSTION TEAM TO ORCHESTRATE BIDEN’S PREMEDITATED INVASION OF FOREIGN PEOPLES.
As Cecilia Muñoz, White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs explained, “Even if the immigration law is executed with perfection, there will be parents separated from their children.” As it turns out, that separation policy was intentional, and the Obama administration deployed it to enrich cronies.
“Texas-based Southwest Key Programs has taken in roughly $1 billion in federal contracts since the Obama administration,” Fox News reports, “and is expected to receive about $500 million this year to house and provide services for immigrant children.” Southwest Key holds a total of “more than 5,000 immigrant children, about 10 percent of whom are said to have been separated from their families since May, when the new policy was announced. Its shelters for immigrants minors are in Texas, Arizona and California.”
Southwest Key Programs also operates “the largest licensed shelter for immigrant children in the United States. A 250,000-square-foot facility at a former WalMart superstore in Brownsville, Texas, today houses some 1,500 boys between the ages of 10 and 17 who illegally entered the U.S.”
According to a report by Drew Griffin of CNN, Southwest Key operates 83 detention centers across the country and has pulled in $1.5 billion in federal contracts. Southwest Key boss Juan Sanchez bags a cool $1.47 million a year “which makes him one of the highest paid charity CEOs in the country.” Mark Owen of the IRS told CNN Sanchez’s salary “extraordinarily high” and Sanchez’s wife grabs a salary of $262,000. The Southwest Key website does not feature management salary information.
KXAN of Austin reports that Southwest Key has received $995 million in federal funds since 2015. Over a three-year period, Southwest Key had “more than 200 violations at its facilities,” including a resident failing to receive proper care for a sexually transmitted disease (STD).
BLOG: CECILIA MUNOZ OPERATED LA RAZA OUT OF THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE!
“La Raza was at the forefront of fighting for many issues of importance to Hispanics,” Fox News explains. “But it was also long criticized by those who charge that it is racist, and sympathetic to separatist ideology. The group rebranded, and changed its name in 2017 to UnidosUS.” Despite the name change, racism remains.
Southwest Key boss Juan Sanchez served on the board of National Council of La Raza (NCLR), where Cecilia Muñoz served as senior vice president and immigration analyst before POTUS 44 tapped her for the White House job. Southwest Key board member Anselmo Villarreal was also on the National Council of La Raza board from 2006 to 2012.
He now runs La Casa de Esperanza, which provides services to immigrants at locations nationwide. As Fox reports, “Villarreal has taken high-profile positions against Trump immigration policies, and last month participated in a march against a Wisconsin county’s plans to work with federal immigration officials.”
“La Raza was at the forefront of fighting for many issues of importance to Hispanics,” Fox News explains. “But it was also long criticized by those who charge that it is racist, and sympathetic to separatist ideology. The group rebranded, and changed its name in 2017 to UnidosUS.” Despite the name change, racism remains.
The primary source is La Raza Cosmica, by Mexican education minister and presidential candidate Jose Vasconcelos, republished in 1979 by the “Chicano Studies” department at Cal State LA. According to Vasconcelos, students from English, Dutch and Scandinavian backgrounds are “slower, almost dull,” compared to “mestizo children and youths from the south.” No scores but it’s something “any teacher can corroborate.”
Blacks are “uglier stocks” and part of the “inferior races.” Halle Berry and Ben Carson might want to call their office. The Mongol, “with the mystery of his slanted eyes,” is part of an “exhausted people” that lacks the “boldness for new enterprises.” Apparently Xi Jinping and Shinzo Abe never got the memo.
On the other hand, according to La Raza Cosmica, the fusion of Spaniards and Indians is a new race “infinitely superior to all that have previously existed.” That is the raza replacing those awful Yankee “Anglo-Saxons,” code for all non-raza peoples who speak English. The non-raza Yankees “are gradually becoming more a part of yesterday.”
Mexican American communist Bert Corona found The Cosmic Race similar to “the kind of German racial superiority theory supported by Hitler.” Even so, razaismo is the driving force of current efforts to violate the border and colonize the United States.
Consider, for example, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, former mayor of Mexico City and candidate for president in Mexico’s July 1 election. As the New York Times, explains, “Manuel López Obrador’s victory seems inevitable.” The only question is “the size of his victory.”
Sure-fire winner Obrador calls mass immigration to the United States a “human right” and says migrants “must leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” This razaista wants his lebensraum and he wants it right now.
If Obrador wins, President Trump might get him up to speed on America’s experience with regimes like that. And he might broach the subject of the $26.1 billion in remittances, an amount impossible without the bilking of American taxpayers on a massive scale.
Whoever wins, the migrants will be coming in force and the Mexican colonialists will find many collaborators among leftist Democrats, the establishment media, and the crony razaists ripping off kids and American taxpayers alike.
Biden Continues to Mishandle His Own Border Crisis
How to make the illegal immigration surge even worse.
12 commentsThe Biden administration is increasingly desperate in the face of the migration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border that Biden’s progressive open-door policies have created. Illegal unaccompanied minors are flooding into this country, overwhelming available government resources to shelter and care for them. The Biden administration is already reportedly spending more than $60 million a week to house these minors now in federally run shelters. Many more are illegally crossing the border every day and are being added to the thousands allowed to remain in the United States.
What “creative” solutions has the Biden administration come up with to deal with this surge, aside from scrambling to increase shelter capacity beyond the hovels the kids are already being crammed into? One idea is to offer extended paid leave to government employees, who are likely to have no relevant training and experience, to step in and take care of some minors. Another idea is to offer cash payments to Central Americans to keep them home rather than emigrate to the United States. Offering what amounts to bribes for Central Americans to stay put instead of attempting to reach the United States is likely to backfire.
The New York Times reported last week that employees in federal government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and NASA had received e-mails asking them whether they would be willing to take four-month paid leaves from their jobs “to help care for migrant children in government-run shelters.” Nearly three thousand federal employees answered the call as of April 9th, leaving behind the duties they were actually hired to perform.
As for the cash transfers to Central Americans to keep them at home, Roberta Jacobson, the outgoing White House southern border coordinator, told Reuters recently that such payments were an option under review by the Biden administration to address “the economic reasons people may be migrating.” It has apparently not occurred to the Biden administration “geniuses” that desperate people will do desperate things. The smugglers will be the winners as many of the cash payment recipients use their windfalls to pay for being smuggled into the United States. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy expressed what many Americans must be thinking when he said, “It’s insulting to the millions of Americans who are out of work or facing despair in our country.”
The cash payments would be on top of the $4 billion in development aid that Biden wants to send to Central American countries over four years. This bounty is intended to help alleviate the so-called “root causes” that lead so many Central Americans to take the dangerous trek north to the United States. Based on their records, it is likely that the corrupt leaders in the Northern Triangle of Central America will line their own pockets with a good chunk of that money.
Vice President Kamala Harris is Biden’s choice to work on stemming the flow of migrants from Central America. Presumably, Harris, who lacks any experience in diplomacy or immigration issues, will oversee handing out American taxpayers’ money like candy in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to deal with the “root causes” of the migrant surge. It has been three weeks since Biden appointed Harris to take on these responsibilities. To date, she has neither visited the U.S.-Mexico border nor gone down to the Central American countries to study for herself the situation on the ground and speak with government, business, and community leaders.
On April 14th, Harris delivered some remarks at what was billed as a Virtual Roundtable of Experts on the Northern Triangle. She pointed out the obvious – that the Central Americans leaving their homes are “fleeing some harm, or to remain home is to remain in a position where there is no opportunity to meet essential needs that include feeding their children, keeping a roof over their head, and engaging in productive work.”
Then, as an example of how superficial Harris is in dealing with the “root cause” problem she was assigned to help resolve, Harris recommended focusing on “an important four-letter word, which I hope always inspires us to do the work we do, and that word is ‘hope.’ And in this regard, in — in our focus on the Northern Triangle, looking at the fact that we have an opportunity — as the United States of America, with the resources and with the will that we have — to provide the people of the Northern Triangle with some hope that if they stay at home, help is on the way and they can have some hope that the opportunities and the needs that they have will be met in some way.”
Harris spent time during the roundtable discussing the need to deal with the impact of climate change in the Northern Triangle. She briefly acknowledged that there was a corruption problem in the Central American countries. However, Harris offered no suggestions on how this problem should be addressed as a condition for the U.S. spending more money on economic development in those countries.
Harris did suggest internationalizing the effort to encourage economic development. “That includes reaching out to our allies, through the U.N.,” she said. The United Nations is the wrong organization to rely upon, given its own corruption problems and its encouragement of more open borders.
When Harris was asked if she was planning a visit to the southern border, she replied that her job was to “lead the issue of dealing with root causes in the Northern Triangle.” Harris mentioned that a trip to Guatemala was in the works, with a stop in Mexico, without offering any details or timetable.
Harris has spoken by phone with Guatemalan President Alejando Giammattei and with Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “They agreed to continue to work together to address the root causes of migration from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras – including poverty, violence, and lack of economic opportunity,” the White House said about Harris’s call with Obrador. “They also discussed deepening the U.S.-Mexico relationship to target human smuggling and human trafficking.”
Former President Donald Trump had already contained the human smugglers during his term in office by putting in place an array of disincentives to discourage would-be migrants from making the journey north. The “root cause” of today’s crisis is Harris’s boss, whom Obrador has called the “migrant president.” Biden removed many of the Trump administration’s disincentives and suspended the construction of the border wall.
Harris hails from the sanctuary state of California. She has previously expressed her own opposition to deportations of illegal immigrants. Harris should discuss mass immigration incentives and disincentives with Obrador the next time she speaks with him. To educate herself, Harris may want to ask Obrador to elaborate on the observations he expressed last month: "Expectations were created that with the Government of President Biden there would be a better treatment of migrants. And this has caused Central American migrants, and also from our country, wanting to cross the border thinking that it is easier to do so."
Meanwhile, New York State has found its own way to subsidize illegal aliens while raising taxes to help pay for it. The far left progressive New York State Legislature has established, with beleaguered Governor Andrew Cuomo’s signoff, a $2.1 billion “Excluded Workers Fund” under which nearly 300,000 illegal aliens living in New York will be eligible to receive money they are not otherwise entitled to under federal programs.
An illegal alien who qualifies “will be able to receive up to $15,600 (minus $780 for taxes),” according to an article in The City. Even those who cannot fulfill all the criteria could get $3,200 (minus $160 removed for taxes). To put this in some perspective, the amount of money allotted in this year’s New York State budget to the Excluded Workers Fund is double what is included in relief for small businesses that are suffering badly as a result of the coronavirus and Cuomo’s lockdown orders. In short, New York is rewarding those in New York State illegally with windfalls they don’t deserve at legal residents’ expense.
The New York Times described the Excluded Workers Fund as “by far the biggest of its kind in the country and a sign of the state’s shift toward policies championed by progressive Democrats.” It makes even the sanctuary state of California look stingy by comparison with its $500 one-time cash benefit per adult up to a cap of $1,000 per household. New York has also surpassed California as the state imposing the highest overall tax burden in the United States.
Biden has caved to his progressive base in opening the door wide to illegal immigrants and is now trying to clean up his mess with ideas that will only make matters worse. Far left progressives in charge at the federal and state level are encouraging mass migration to this country on the way to achieving their utopian vision of “No borders. No nations.” In the process, they are destroying piece by piece the rule of law that undergirds America’s constitutional republic.
"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
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.
BIDEN CRONY JEFF BEZOS OF AMAZON SAYS HE CAN’T AFFORD TO PAY LIVING WAGES!
HERE’S WHY:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTYfJwTuP4A
Inside Jeff Bezos' $175 Million Mansion
THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WAGES WAR ON AMERICA AND
WSJ: Amazon ‘Strong-Arms’ Smaller Partners Using Monopoly Power
In a recent article, the Wall Street Journal outlines how tech giant Amazon uses its immense monopoly power to convince vendors in one market to interact with Amazon services in others.
In an article titled “How Amazon Strong-Arms Partners Using Its Power Across Multiple Businesses,” the Wall Street Journal details how tech giant Amazon uses its power in various industries to convince vendors to work with them in other categories by threatening to crush the smaller partner’s entire existence.
The Wall Street Journal provides an example of this, writing:
Amazon.com Inc. last year told smart-thermostat maker Ecobee it had to give the tech giant data from its voice-enabled devices even when customers weren’t using them. The Canadian company said no.
The smaller company feared that complying with the demand would violate customer privacy, said a person familiar with the episode. Ecobee’s devices work with Alexa, Amazon’s voice-powered assistant, and it already shared some data with Amazon, the person said. Moreover, the company worried Amazon would glean insights from Ecobee’s users that it could use in competing products.
Amazon responded that if Ecobee didn’t serve up its data, the refusal could affect Ecobee’s ability to sell on Amazon’s retail platform, the person said.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Bezos’ company regularly uses leveraging tactics such as this to compel partners to accept terms from another part of the Bezos empire.
According to Amazon executives and officials at the companies on the receiving end of their tactics, Amazon goes much further than typical product bundling and tough negotiating largely due to the fact that the company can threaten punitive action on vital services it offers, such as its massive e-commerce platform.
Partners often give in to Amazon’s demands due to the power the company holds in a range of market sectors, according to executives.
David Barnett, the CEO of PopSockets, a cellphone accessory manufacturer, stated that Amazon employees can make threats like this as Amazon is so powerful. “Their employees are going to try to hit their goals by whatever means they can, including these asymmetric relationships,” he said.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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.”
In an article titled “How Amazon Wins: By Steamrolling Rivals and Partners,” the Wall Street Journal outlines how the e-commerce giant Amazon uses its vast influence to push out competitors and rivals.
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
"Amazon is a massive wrecking machine consuming American retail. It's looting the economy and leaving behind rubble. " --- DANIEL GREENFIELD FRONTPAGE MAG
"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.”
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JEFF BEZOS of AMAZON DECLARES THAT AMERICAN-BORN SLAVES ARE NOT CHEAP ENOUGH. CHINA MUST DELIVER THE REAL SLAVE LABOR!
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 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!
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
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Can Amazon Be Stopped?
The story of the e-commerce giant is the story of America’s economic unraveling.
by Daniel Block
About two and a half years ago, as media speculation about where Amazon would locate its second headquarters reached a fever pitch, The Onion, a satirical website, decided to make its own projection. “‘You Are All Inside Amazon’s Second Headquarters,’ Jeff Bezos Announces to Horrified Americans as Massive Dome Envelops Nation,” the site declared. The story described a world in which Amazon divided the United States into segments of its supply chain. “The entire state of Texas will be replaced with a 269,000-square-mile facility used exclusively to house cardboard boxes, tape, and inflatable packaging materials,” the authors wrote. “A large swath of the Midwest will soon be razed to make way for a single enormous Amazon Fulfillment Center.”
It was, of course, a joke. But based on reporting from the veteran ProPublica journalist Alec MacGillis, it’s a joke with more than just a ring of truth. In Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One–Click America, MacGillis argues that Amazon’s dramatic expansion is Exhibit A for America’s economic unraveling. Armed with stark statistics and moving anecdotes, MacGillis illustrates how the retail giant pushes regional stores out of business. He shows how the company extracts tax incentives from desperate local governments in exchange for poor-paying warehouse jobs. Amazon has “segmented the country into different sorts of places, each with their assigned rank, income, and purpose,” he writes. It has altered “the landscape of opportunity in America—the options that lay before people, what they could aspire to do with their lives.”
It is a damning and powerful assessment. But Amazon isn’t MacGillis’s only, or even most fundamental, subject. Instead, he treats the company as both a cause and a symptom of a bigger problem: skyrocketing regional inequality in the United States.
Over the past 40 years, certain parts of America—mostly along the coasts—have become far more prosperous than others. This trend has not received as much attention as rising income disparities, but its political consequences have been similarly grave. Regional inequality has fueled authoritarian nationalism in the U.S. It has concentrated well-educated liberals in economically vibrant, overwhelmingly Democratic states. It has left white working-class voters elsewhere embittered and detached from mainstream politics. After decades of job losses and wage stagnation, it’s not surprising that some people in struggling counties embraced a candidate who promised to restore a halcyon era (“Make America great again”) and blamed their challenges on groups many were already prejudiced against (minorities). Donald Trump’s path to the presidency was paved in part by declining economic opportunity in the Midwest.
MacGillis provides readers with a useful primer on how this happened. Beginning in the late 1970s, politicians gradually stopped enforcing fair competition policies: the many laws designed to create an even economic playing field for different businesses and different parts of the country. Regulators started neglecting antitrust statutes, allowing a few companies in each sector to expand rapidly by purchasing or crushing their competitors. They loosened restrictions that had prevented chain stores, like CVS and Walmart, from dramatically underselling smaller rivals. And they eliminated regulations that made it equally easy to transport goods to and from all parts of America. “Profits and growth opportunities once spread across the country,” MacGillis writes. Now, they cluster in places where the dominant companies are based.
These trends are all bigger than any one business. But it’s easy to see why MacGillis chose to focus on Amazon specifically. The company owns a third of the country’s data storage market. It controls somewhere between roughly 40 and 50 percent of America’s e-commerce market, more than five times the share of its nearest rival. That makes Amazon both singularly powerful among U.S. businesses and representative of winner-takes-all corporate America at large. Together, Facebook and Google control more than 50 percent of the online advertising market. Like Amazon and its neighboring company Microsoft, they are headquartered only a few towns apart. Comcast and Charter, both located along the Acela corridor, collectively own a majority of the U.S. cable market.
These companies haven’t just survived the current recession. They’ve thrived. While the employment rate has gone down since COVID-19 arrived in America, the S&P 500 has gone up by more than 15 percent. All but one of the five richest companies have seen their value grow, including Amazon. Indeed, Amazon’s stock has increased by an astonishing 80 percent over the past 12 months. MacGillis writes that the company is reporting record profits.
The distribution of Amazon’s newfound wealth, however, has been deeply uneven. The company is hiring warehouse workers across America, but these low-paying jobs require famously long shifts, involve strenuous and monotonous work, and offer little autonomy. Meanwhile, Amazon is also expanding its Seattle and Washington, D.C., offices—adding well-paid, white-collar jobs in elaborately sculpted buildings with rooftop dog parks, onsite botanical gardens, and discounted child care.
Geographically, the United States was once an equitable place. Between the 1930s and the late 1970s, per capita earnings in almost every part of the country gradually converged. In 1933, the average income in the southwestern United States was roughly 60 percent of the national average. By 1979, it was approximately the same. During the same period, New England fell from being 1.4 times richer than the rest of the country to just above average. In 1978, the average income in the Detroit metro area was on par with that of New York City and its suburbs. Drawing on findings from this magazine, MacGillis notes that the 25 richest metropolitan areas in 1980 included Milwaukee, Des Moines, and Cleveland.
This equality was hard won. Starting at the turn of the twentieth century and accelerating during the New Deal, the federal government enacted antimonopoly laws to prevent extreme regional inequality. Throughout the middle of the twentieth century, it blocked mergers that today wouldn’t draw any attention—including one between two shoe companies that, together, controlled just over 2 percent of the nation’s footwear market—in order to keep chain stores from colonizing the country. It prohibited wholesalers and manufacturers from giving bulk discounts to these chains, which would put community retailers at a serious disadvantage. When national politicians spoke about the need to help small businesses, they meant it.
But like anything achieved through vigilant enforcement, this parity was easily erased. Beginning under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and continuing under Ronald Reagan, the federal government started ignoring or outright repealing fair competition regulations. As a result, the fortunes of America’s regions diverged. The St. Louis metro area, for example, had 23 Fortune 500 companies in 1980, but in recent decades most have been acquired by larger corporations or otherwise pushed off the list. Today, it has only eight. By contrast, New York’s per capita income in 1980 was 80 percent higher than the national average. By 2013, after years of mergers in banking and finance, that figure was 172 percent. In 2018, 20 of the top 25 wealthiest cities were on the coasts.
As businesses departed from large swaths of the interior, many Americans were left without good economic options. Fewer businesses meant less competition among employers to drive up pay. The main employers that have moved in as most companies moved out—retailers like Walmart, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, and Dollar General—are notorious for their low-wage business models. The bulk of the money each store makes flows out of the local community and into the company’s headquarters, almost always located far away.
But perhaps no growing employer is as notorious as Amazon. According to MacGillis, the company has hired hundreds of thousands of new warehouse workers in the past five years. It has added more than 175,000 during the pandemic alone, even as thousands of small retailers have shut down. The indignity of life in the company’s warehouses is well documented, but MacGillis makes space to describe the dangers. He recounts how one worker was killed after being crushed by a forklift, and how another was killed by a tractor. He covers various attempts by warehouse workers, some with past union experience, to organize for safer conditions. None of those attempts go well. (Hopefully, the ongoing union drive in Alabama will end with more success.)
Massive retailers with low prices, like Amazon, are not just a poor replacement for local employers. They are part of why local employers shut down. Inexpensive products are nice for customers, but they drive community stores straight out of business. And Amazon has tools beyond low pricing that it uses to squeeze competitors. The company is the main, and for many small businesses the only, way to sell products online. It capitalizes on this by forcing vendors on its platform to hand over a hefty percentage of their profits—usually 15 percent—for every sale, a transaction fee that MacGillis compares to a tax. Amazon also manufactures goods itself, often copying its vendors’ most popular products based on its privileged look at their sales data. Free of the same fee (the company doesn’t tax itself), Amazon sells these knockoffs at a lower price than the originals, driving the real creators into insolvency. As a result, money that would have gone to small businesses instead winds up with Amazon.
While consolidation has devastated most of America, it has been a boon for Amazon’s hometown. Once a manufacturing city as distressed as present-day Detroit, Seattle has become a rich tech mecca. The metro area has a median household income of $94,000, making it the ninth wealthiest in the country. Its population has roughly doubled since 1970. Not all of this can be attributed to Amazon; Boeing drew engineers to the area, and the city’s growth began in earnest when Bill Gates and Paul Allen set up shop to build Microsoft. But there’s no doubt that Amazon is now the city’s crowning jewel. It has accounted for 30 percent of all new jobs in Seattle over the past decade, most of which are well paid.
For Seattle’s boosters, this growth is a testament to the city’s inherent virtues. “From its beginning, Seattle showed a do-whatever-it-takes resilience,” the Seattle Times columnist Ron Judd wrote in 2016. He acknowledged that there was “a little bit of dumb luck” involved in the city’s success, but ultimately praised its location, lifestyle, and innovative spirit for attracting people like Jeff Bezos. The success of Seattle, Judd wrote, is heavily tied to “history, geography, education and, yes, some creative capitalizing on all the gifts the place was given.”
MacGillis implicitly rebuts such arguments. Baltimore’s Atlantic waterfront, he points out, could not save it from postindustrial economic erosion, nor could St. Louis’s central location. The author outlines the careers of retailer entrepreneurs from overlooked metros—like El Paso, Texas—who clearly possess the enterprising talents that libertarians believe made Bezos a billionaire. They were eventually brought to heel, in no small part because of Amazon.
The truth is that Seattle has prospered because Gates and Allen, both Seattle natives, set up their company in the area during the late 1970s, when it was still possible to build a successful corporation in most American cities. And once Seattle had Microsoft, it became easier to attract other tech companies. But now, without fair competition rules, other cities don’t have the same opportunities Seattle once had. It’s hard for new retailers to grow when they have to contend with Amazon.
Yet even Seattle is suffering. Its housing and living costs have skyrocketed, pushing many middle-class and working-class residents out. Soaring rents have pushed some of them onto the street. By the end of 2017, Seattle had the third-largest homeless population in the country, after Los Angeles and New York City. The changes have disproportionately harmed Black residents, whose median income has fallen since 2000 even without accounting for inflation. Seattle, MacGillis writes, is “proof that extreme regional inequality was unhealthy not only for places that were losing out in the winner-take-all economy, but also for those who were the runaway victors.”
The author chronicles the city’s hapless attempts to fix the nasty side effects of its hyper-prosperity. It passed a tiny income tax followed by a tiny tax on large businesses in order to address housing shortages and improve public transportation. The first was successfully challenged in court by coalitions representing the city’s rich. The latter was attacked by a collection of big companies, including Amazon, which threatened to cancel a planned Seattle building expansion if the law wasn’t repealed. Amazon also helped bankroll an expensive ballot initiative to eliminate the tax. Ultimately, the city council repealed it first.
The tax exemptions that less prosperous cities offer Amazon in exchange for becoming the site of a new fulfillment center are even more degrading. While local authorities view the subsidies as the price of keeping their economies alive, MacGillis suggests that the tax cuts may ultimately cost cities more than the new jobs are worth. Emergency service departments in two Ohio counties, for example, have had to contend with a steady stream of 911 calls for warehouse injuries, an expense that Amazon creates but does not pay for, because it is exempt from each county’s property taxes. The company’s distribution centers build up truck traffic on nearby highways, but Amazon is excused from paying the taxes that fund roadway maintenance.
That so many local governments kowtow to Amazon is a depressing statement about political power in America. But even if these places—be they Seattle or Dayton—could muster the political will to take on the company, they simply don’t have the tools to win. The affordability crisis threatening rich metros and the hollowing out of poor ones are both by-products of concentrating economic power in a handful of cities. And that’s something that only the federal government can fix.
The good news is that there are national policies that could rebalance our economy. By reviving underused competition policies, the Biden administration has the power to distribute wealth much more fairly. There’s no shortage of consolidation in the American economy, from gigantic agribusinesses to hospital chains. But for any would-be trustbuster, Amazon must be at the top of the list. At a minimum, the administration should fight to prohibit the company from both owning America’s dominant online marketplace and selling its own products in it. Better yet, it could spin off Amazon’s data storage business, its smart home business, and its many other non-search components into independent companies. Better still, it could break up Amazon’s marketplace outright.
The government has many other tools it can use to better distribute opportunity. It could bring back regulations that made it impossible for big businesses to get better deals from suppliers than small ones could. It could reconstruct the dismantled Civil Aeronautics Board, an institution that kept airfare prices roughly the same on a per-mile basis wherever one went and made sure small and midsize cities received adequate service. It can re-create the Interstate Commerce Commission, which did the same thing for passenger trains and freight transportation. Those transit regulations enabled new small businesses to thrive in midsize heartland cities rather than just existing economic hubs.
Some of these steps require new legislation. But many are possible through executive action under existing, if currently unenforced, competition statutes. Either way, there’s hope. Democrats have unified control of the government, and progressives are increasingly concerned about concentrated economic power. The U.S. House of Representatives, multiple state attorneys general, and the Department of Justice are all investigating anticompetitive practices by Amazon. The latter two are already suing Facebook and Google.
But the Democratic Party does not have the best recent track record when it comes to curbing corporate power. Democrats dominate Seattle’s government, and they ultimately killed a law that mildly inconvenienced Amazon. The Obama administration did virtually nothing to stop the mergers, acquisitions, and other actions that fueled retail consolidation and helped give rise to Big Tech. As MacGillis points out, many of Obama’s officials went on to prominent, powerful roles in major tech companies. Jay Carney, one of the former president’s press secretaries, now heads public policy for Amazon.
It is still too soon to say whether Joe Biden will take the aggressive antitrust positions favored by progressive activists or the lenient approach of the president he served beside. His first Federal Trade Commission nominee, Lina Khan, is an antitrust expert who advocates for curbing the power of large corporations. Her selection was a promising sign. So was choosing the Big Tech critic Tim Wu to work on technology and competition policy at the National Economic Council.
But the most important positions are yet to be filled, and progressives are worried that his early choices will soon be counterbalanced by monopoly-friendly personnel. Should Biden ultimately opt to follow Obama’s path, it might be because he simply does not recognize the economic damage oligopolistic companies have caused. If so, he would do well to read MacGillis’s book. But it is also possible that Biden and his team are aware, but their interest in fighting back will be tempered by fund-raising concerns, a belief that challenging monopolists would be too risky for the economy, or simply a desire to tackle other priorities.
If that is the case, the administration should consider the political consequences of continuing on our current path. The steady draining of wealth and opportunity from large parts of America is part of why many onetime Democratic strongholds, like Michigan, are now swing states, and why many onetime swing states, like Missouri, are now Republican strongholds. Well-educated liberals will not move to these places unless there are economic opportunities. The remaining white, non-college-educated residents will continue to feel economically embittered.
With thin congressional majorities, competition policy may be one of the few tools Biden can really wield to restructure America’s political economy. He must use it.
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