Thursday, April 16, 2020

THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS LOOTERS - AMAZON'S JEFF BEZOS MAKES $24 BILLION OFF CORONAVIRUS

YOU CAN'T SEPARATE THE EVILS ON THE WORLD FROM THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS!



Amazon’s Jeff Bezos cashes in on coronavirus pandemic, adding $24 billion to his fortune

The COVID-19 pandemic has sent millions of workers and their families, already scraping to survive, into a financial tailspin from which many will never recover. However, for the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, the pandemic has been a financial bonanza, sending Amazon shares, and Bezos’ personal net worth, soaring.
At the close of the trading day on the stock market Wednesday, shares of the online retail giant were trading at $2,307, up from a year-to-date low of $1,676 on March 12, just over a month ago.
While Amazon workers are risking their lives in contaminated factories and protesting against the lack of basic safety equipment (at least 74 Amazon facilities have reported workers infected with the virus), and workers are being fired for speaking out, the market value of Amazon has climbed above $1.1 trillion, slightly below the $1.22 trillion 2019 gross domestic product of Mexico.
Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool, File)
For Bezos, this translates into a year-to-date jump of $23.6 billion in his personal net wealth, bringing his fortune to more than $138.5 billion. His ex-wife MacKenzie, with her 4 percent stake in the company, has seen her net worth more than quintuple, from $8.2 billion to $45.3 billion according to Bloomberg.
Bezos is not an aberration. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has added over $10 billion to his personal fortune in the first four months of the year, while Alice, Jim and Rob Walton, owners of mega-retailer Walmart, have profited fabulously from the pandemic, increasing their personal wealth by $2.9 billion, $2.36 billion and $2.42 billion respectively, without stocking a single shelf or retrieving a cart.
The American financial aristocracy is gorging itself in the midst of scenes of mile-long food lines and mass graves. With the passage of Trump’s multi-trillion-dollar corporate bailout last month, which had the virtually unanimous support of Democratic lawmakers, airline industry executives and private equity, hedge fund and real estate investors (such as Donald Trump) are receiving billions of dollars worth of tax breaks, grants and low-interest loans, at taxpayer expense.
The Joint Committee on Taxation (JTC) of the US Congress issued a report this week revealing that tax provisions were included in the corporate bailout legislation (the CARES Act) allowing millionaires and billionaires who own so-called pass-through companies, including hedge funds and real estate investment firms, to offset losses not just from 2020, but from 2019 and 2018 as well. The owners of pass through companies pay income taxes at the individual rather than the corporate tax rate.
The JTC estimated that the total cost in public funds for this boondoggle for the very wealthy will be $170 billion this year. It said that 82 percent of the tax benefit will go to roughly 43,000 taxpayers who make more than $1 million a year. Only three percent will go to taxpayers who earn less than $100,000.
The $170 billion price tag for this handout to the super-rich compares to a measly $100 billion allocated in the legislation for hospitals and $150 billion for state and local governments. Many hospitals are being financially devastated by the impact of the pandemic and an estimated 2,100 cities across the country are facing huge budget deficits due to lost revenues. The result will be a new wave of hospital closures, layoffs and wage cuts, along with brutal cuts in social services and public employee jobs by state and local governments.
The JTC concluded that the average millionaire filer will receive $1.6 million in tax relief this year alone. The Trump Organization includes hundreds of pass-through entities, as do the businesses controlled by Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, allowing the president and his brood to take in millions of dollars by writing off risky investments from up to two years ago.
What these gifts to the oligarchy have to do with the coronavirus pandemic is a mystery no politician or media pundit has sought to explain.
On Tuesday, the government announced it had reached an agreement with the major airlines under which they will receive $25 billion in grants, again at taxpayer expense. The companies will have to pay back only 30 percent of the money. An additional $25 billion in low-cost loans will be provided to the airlines under a separate program. This looting of the US Treasury for the benefit of airline executives and major investors is being cynically presented as a defense of airline employees.

Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, hailed the bailout. He said, “Even though the process was neither easy nor perfect, it is critically important that in the end there are agreements in place that put workers and families first by keeping hundreds of thousands of airline employees … on the payroll during this extremely tumultuous period for the US economy.”
This is a lie. None of the money in the $50 billion bailout of the airlines will go to the workers. It will be used by the airlines to buy time while they prepare a brutal restructuring of their operations to slash jobs, wages and pensions. Already tens of thousands of airline workers have been furloughed, and the bailout deal allows the airlines to consolidate routes.
The only restrictions on the companies that receive the handouts—at this point a total of 10, including the four giants, American, Delta, United and Southwest—is that they put off layoffs until the end of September and refrain from paying out dividends or buying back their own stock until the end of 2021. But even these minor restraints can be waived by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a multi-millionaire former investment banker.
DeFazio went on to say, “I strongly believe what Congress laid out in this provision of the CARES Act—to put workers first—should be the model for any industry-specific relief going forward.” This is nothing less than a call for the bailout of more industries.
The airline bailout was strongly promoted by the airline unions, working in lockstep with the companies. Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, attacked the agreement between the Trump administration and the airlines from the right, denouncing the requirement that the companies pay back 30 percent of the handouts.
Between 2014 and 2019, the four largest US airlines—United, American, Southwest and Delta—spent a combined $45 billion buying back their own stock in order to drive up the share price and enrich the top executives and major investors.

Amazon cracks down on rebellious workers as first COVID-19 fatality is reported

By Tom Carter
16 April 2020
On Tuesday, Business Insider reported that the coronavirus claimed the life of an Amazon employee in California. This is first reported death of an Amazon employee from COVID-19.
Over the past week, Amazon has fired three workers who challenged the company’s failure to ensure safe working conditions during the pandemic.
The deceased employee was an operations manager at an Amazon facility in Hawthorne, California. Amazon has revealed few details about the circumstances of his death. He was last at the facility on March 6, falling ill after a vacation that lasted from March 7 to 20. It is unclear how the disease was contracted. While the death occurred on March 31, it was not reported until April 14.
Breana Avelar, a processing assistant, holds a sign outside the Amazon DTW1 fulfillment center in Romulus, Michigan April 1, 2020 (AP Photo slash Paul Sancya)
While management claims that workers at the Hawthorne facility were promptly notified, Amazon workers around the country received no notice of the death. There is little doubt that Amazon was concerned the release of the information would encourage further walkouts and job actions by workers.
Around the world, Amazon workers have walked out and protested the company’s reckless indifference to their health in the midst of the pandemic. Workers risking their lives to ship essential goods to people sheltering in their homes have been compelled to work without adequate personal protective equipment and other measures necessary to ensure their safety.
Striking workers have demanding the closure of unsafe facilities, full protective gear and an end to the company’s practice of deliberately concealing from workers information about the infection of their fellow workers.
So far, Amazon workers have fallen ill with the virus at more than 130 warehouses in the US, with some warehouses having over 30 confirmed cases.
Walkouts of Amazon workers have taken place in Detroit, in the New York City boroughs of Staten Island and Queens, at a facility in Chicago, and elsewhere. In addition, strikes have taken place in Italy and Spain.
Workers at the Amazon-owned Whole Foods, along with Instacart, recently walked out in the US to demand protective equipment, hazard pay, and sick pay. Parallel walkouts, strikes, and rebellions have taken place across many of the industries and services designated as “essential” during the pandemic, including meatpacking and public transit and sanitation.
Amazon’s response to the growing insurrection has included providing cosmetic, cheap safety measures that are utterly inadequate in light of the scale of the danger. A worker at the BWI2 warehouse in Baltimore, for example, told the International Amazon Workers’ Voice that one of the new safety measures consists of providing “safety sanitation” wipes, which workers are admonished to use sparingly.
A label on the side of the container reads: “Please use a wipe to sanitize your station at the start of your shift and when changing stations only. We want to ensure that we have enough for all shifts. DO NOT remove these wipes from their designated station.”
In addition to these low-cost, minimal safety measures, Amazon has responded to the growing insurrection by stepping up the already-tyrannical regime in its warehouses. Workers report in particular that the new six-foot “social distancing” rule is being used to bully and harass workers who speak out and break up efforts to organize or hold discussions.
On Friday, April 10, Amazon fired UX (user experience) designers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, both of whom had garnered public attention for criticizing the company in relation to climate change and had recently circulated a petition for safer conditions for workers during the pandemic. They had also attempted to set up meetings between tech workers and warehouse workers. The firing took place by telephone.


On Tuesday, Cunningham wrote on twitter: “Amazon fired me and @marencosta. As Mary Oliver wrote, ‘oh! how rich it is to love the world.’ It's a gift to be able to fight for something you love so deeply.”
“Warehouse workers are under real threat right now,” she added. “I’m proud of all the ways they’re standing up for themselves and each other (and the public!). That takes real courage and integrity. If we don’t fight for each other now, when do we?”
The same day, Costa wrote: “@emahlee and I were fired on Good Friday by Amazon for fighting for our colleagues' safety in the time of COVID.”
“Basically, we were fired for trying to make Amazon a better place—for trying to make the world a better place,” she continued.
Both Cunningham and Costa are leaders of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, which was involved before the pandemic in walkouts of Amazon employees in open defiance of corporate directives, protesting the company’s ties to the US military and ICE terror squads, discrimination, conditions at the warehouses, and complicity in climate change.
Cunningham had worked at Amazon for five years, Costa for 15 years. In January, both Costa and Cunningham appeared in a two-minute video featured on Bernie Sanders’ Senate twitter account. They are scheduled to appear today in an online event with Naomi Klein, a Sanders supporter.
Management claimed: “We terminated these employees for repeatedly violating internal policies.”
The firing of Cunningham and Costa is aimed at intimidating all workers. Despite our differences with their political outlook, the International Amazon Workers Voice unequivocally defends these victimized workers and demands their immediate reinstatement.
Workers should also demand the reinstatement of Bashir Mohamed who was also fired for attempting to organize workers at his warehouse in Minnesota, where he had been demanding more effective safety measures. Amazon’s justification was that Mohamed was “terminated as a result of progressive disciplinary action for inappropriate language, behavior, and violating social distancing guidelines.”
The alleged violation of “social distancing guidelines” was also recently used to target and fire Chris Smalls, who led a walkout at a Staten Island warehouse in New York to protest inadequate safety measures.
Amazon is a trillion-dollar global conglomerate best known for its online shopping and distribution service. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world, has kept the company’s 750,000 workers at their stations during the global pandemic without adequate safety precautions. He told workers that they would have to wait for their “turn” for masks, while of course he did not wait for his “turn” to exploit the opportunity presented by the pandemic to secure an enormous profit for himself. Over the last month, an additional 80,000 warehouse workers were hired.

With millions of people sheltering in their homes during the pandemic, Amazon is experiencing a spike in sales through its online marketplace. Bezos saw an increase in his fortune, which he has previously described as his “Amazon winnings,” by around $24 billion since the start of the year, including $6.8 billion over the last week alone. His personal wealth is now estimated at around $138 billion.

“Production costs do not equal the cost of a human life”

Outrage grows as Amazon workers die for Bezos’ profits

By Nick Barrickman
16 April 2020
Amazon workers across the United States are outraged at news that an Amazon employee working in Hawthorne, California died last month from COVID-19 and that workers only now were being informed of it.
The lives of Amazon, United Parcel Service, United States Postal Service, FedEx and other essential logistics workers are being sacrificed for corporate profit. Nothing demonstrates this more than the news that the personal fortune of Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos grew by $24 billion during the first three months of 2020, primarily due to the rush of business the company saw as millions were forced to shelter in place as a pandemic swept the planet.
“This is not surprising, he is capitalizing off of this crisis, INSANE!!,” wrote an Amazon worker to the International Amazon Workers Voice. “To add to this, we are ‘essential’ and that means we are less like trash [to the company]. [Bezos] should be arrested along with his cronies for conspiracy to commit murder... CRIMINAL!!”
The news of Bezos profiting while workers die exposes the lie in his open letter last month when the multi-billionaire boss told his poorly paid workers, “We are in this together.”
“I heard about [the death] but didn’t realize that this had happened so many weeks ago,” said an Amazon worker in Baltimore’s BWI-2 facility. “This corporation benefits its stockholders. It’s not designed for safety. It’s all about product, product, product! Numbers, numbers, numbers!
“The company is adding a third and fourth tier [to its employee pay scale],” the worker added, saying this was a “carrot” to entice workers to believe “it’s not so bad, I’m sweating blood, sweat and tears but it’s alright.”
“Production costs and operation costs do not equal the cost of a human life,” they concluded.
The company informed its BWI-2 employees on Wednesday of a COVID-19 case at the facility. Speaking of previous incidents, the worker said, “About two weeks ago, I came in to work and there was a news crew reporting on site about a suspected case at the facility. Management told us it was a mistake.” A few days later, however, the company admitted that a case had occurred and that workers would be fired for speaking to the press about it.
The company was fearful of more rank-and-file opposition forming at its facilities, because “at this point, the protests on Staten Island were going on,” the worker noted. In New York, these protests against unsafe job conditions resulted in the victimization of Chris Smalls who led a walkout.
Last month, the Amazon CEO caught public backlash after news coverage revealed that the company had set up a coronavirus relief fund for its employees. Bezos, with personal wealth now of $138 billion, donated $25 million, asking the public to donate the rest to meet the healthcare needs of the company’s nearly 800,000 employees.
“How is your company worth over a TRILLION dollars and you want the public to donate to an employee relief fund?! As if Amazon can’t pay their employees themselves,” wrote one poster on Twitter in response to Amazon’s request that the public “make a voluntary donation to the fund.”
Another worker at the CLT4 facility in South Carolina told the International Amazon Workers Voice that three workers tested positive there. Despite that, the worker said, the distribution plant was staying open. Summing up the position of the company, the worker told IAWV that management said, “We know we know we have folks that have tested positive [for the coronavirus] here, but we have asked them and those they worked closely with to stay home. The temperature checks and masks we hand out upon entrance to the facility ensure we’re doing everything to keep our workers safe during this time,” she reported.
Another worker, speaking under the condition of anonymity, explained the miserable state of safety protocols at their facility. “At my location, they have temperature checks, they’ve ended the staff meetings and now they allow cell phones” so workers can check up on their family members and respond to emergencies. “But hand sanitizer, which is difficult to find in large buildings, is just for show. The self-serve dispensers they set up ran out in one day and haven’t been refilled since.”
As for hand washing, “in my building, which has four floors, you have a full-service bathroom on only two of them, while the other two floors have portable hand washing stations set up in different corners.” All of this might sound very convenient and efficient, she said, but there is a catch, “The portable stations have soap and hand towels, but no water.”
“I’ve seen people using their own bottled water to rinse themselves off. Some people bring their soapy hands over to the [drinking] water area, and wash their hands there, with the soap and germs splashing the area” where workers fill up their drinking cups.
In addition to the hand-rinsing going on at drinking fountains, the worker said there was no such thing as social distancing at the two-person portable sinks. “Amazon tells us they’ll fire us if we break social distancing. They break it all the time. We’ve lost some soldiers due to this,” they said.
Last week, CNBC reported that Amazon was informing its employees that if they broke “social distancing rules, they could face disciplinary action,” including termination.
“I spoke Human Resources today and there are no protocols in place for the ‘social distancing patrols’” Amazon now uses to keep workers from congregating too close. “They’re picking and choosing who to write up [so they can] kick out people that rock the boat. They’re now working with their legal department to get something on paper,” because the company is firing people due to infractions, the worker said.
Another worker from Baltimore told the IAWV that they see management “breaking social distancing all the time. The only time it is really enforced is when you are walking through the main area” of the building lobby. “In back, it’s not being enforced,” they said.
“We have a system where workers are being relied on to push out goods to the American people, yet these same workers are risking their lives to do this work with minimal hazard pay, minimum [personal protective gear], etc.” another worker from New Jersey told the IAWV. “Most of [us] have little choice to go in or not because Amazon will not pay for time off unless you are sick with the virus. If that happens you will not have enough money to deal with the costs that come with this virus.”

“This while Bezos, who continues to be praised for donating an extremely small percentage of his wealth to charities helping with this pandemic. He is making record profits, along with his shareholders. Systemic change is required to change the system to benefit workers and not punish them,” the worker concluded.

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