After Charlie Kirk’s murder, two Muslim men in Utah were arrested for planting an incendiary device under a FOX affiliate’s news van. The most striking thing about their house, as Front Page Magazine had reported, was that it appeared to be covered in anti-Trump signage.
Including a black flag reading, “Is He Dead Yet?”
“Is He Dead Yet” merchandise also made a recent appearance when a New York City public school teacher posted a photo of himself wearing that t-shirt and celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death.
In a famously sensitive era, where do you go to buy a “Is he dead yet?” t-shirt or flag? Anywhere as it turns out. Especially from those retailers that have relentlessly censored conservatives.
Amazon had censored everything from books against transgenderism and BLM to banning the sale of the Confederate flag (and even at one point pulling episodes of the Dukes of Hazzard) but you can get a “Is He Dead Yet” flag which the Amazon description openly bills as “an anti-Trump flag” making it clear that it’s not a reference to any other memes with that line.
(The actual Amazon seller is in Eastern Europe, so Amazon is helping a foreign national sell materials to Americans calling for the death of the President of the United States. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post which spent a lot of time warning about foreign interference and foreign disinformation, but its owner actually profits nicely from it.)
Amazon also stocks mugs, t-shirts, stickers and bumper stickers with that phrase that specifically refer to Trump. One ‘Is He Dead Yet’ mug features various possible tombstones for President Trump including “Psycho”, “8647”, “Epstein’s Bestie” and “Rapist”. The same seller also sells Newsom memes including ‘Newsom Was Right About Everything’ merchandise.
Another seller features an orange toupee over the “He”. Others are mock MAGA hats. Some of the Chinese sellers pushing merchandise calling for Trump’s death also responded to Charlie Kirk’s murder by pushing merchandise commemorating his killing to conservatives. Nothing else could or should be expected from China, but it’s Amazon that bears the responsibility here.
So much so that Amazon appears to have paid for Google ads for “Is He Dead Yet”.
Amazon allowed all of this to proliferate on its platform even after two assassination attempts against President Trump and has taken no action to remove it and enforce its terms of service.
Etsy, which had relentlessly censored not only conservatives, but anything un-woke including Dr. Seuss merchandise (after he was deemed racist) and the slogan “I Love JK Rowling”, and recently once again rewrote its TOS to prohibit “degrading language” towards illegal aliens, is awash in every possible variety of Trump death merchandise including mock wine labels and a mug reading “Is He Dead Yet” with Trump’s signature as an EKG line from the ‘resistance’.
“RIP Trump postcards” feature a dead Trump with X’s over his eyes in clown makeup. “It won’t solve everything when he exits this mortal stage, but it will feel f*cking great,” the description reads. An ‘Anti-Trump’ wine label features a skull and the motto “open drink, dance on grave.” There are stickers with an orange toupee on a skull, a “we’ll be grateful when he’s dead” sticker of dancing skeletons, and a scented soy wax candle titled “Smells like his funeral”.
Unlike Amazon, which is dominated by Chinese third party seller spam, Etsy’s sellers are usually authentic American leftists and their products a genuine expression of partisan hatred.
Etsy knowingly allowed this climate of hate to proliferate on its platform in violation of its terms of service which ban “violent language” even while it was cracking down on anything that was in the slightest politically incorrect.
It’s not just Amazon and Etsy. “Is He Dead Yet” merchandise is commonplace on other giant online retail platforms like eBay, and across smaller merchandising sites.
While some of the “Is He Dead Yet” merchandise claims to come from America, the vast majority is being produced in Communist China.
The People’s Republic of China does not actually turn a blind eye toward what it mass produces. Merchandise critical of Xi or the PRC being produced in China is unthinkable and writers trying to get books critical of Communism printed in China have run into problems.
China’s mass production of merchandise calling for President Trump’s death or murder is a decision that would have been made at some point within the Communist Party bureaucracy which maintains extensive censorship over any kind of speech in the giant dictatorship.
And Chinese companies not only produce products celebrating Trump’s death for third parties, but Chinese companies are deeply immersed in the business of marketing these products on their largest retail platforms.
Temu, a Chinese Communist company, has a large selection of “Is He Dead Yet” merchandise specifically targeting Trump. Critics have pointed out that Temu “maintains documented connections to the Chinese Communist Party” meaning that the slogan is being promoted to Americans by a company linked to an enemy regime.
So this is not simply a decision by one Chinese retail platform to stock Trump death gear.
Shein, the second largest Chinese retail ‘fast fashion’ platform used by Americans, also lists “Is He Dead Yet” t-shirts explicitly referencing Trump. Alibaba, one of the world’s largest retailers, has “Is He Dead Yet” t-shirts listed on its AliExpress direct sales platform. “Is He Dead Yet” is not a Chinese information op, but China’s Communist system is happy to promote it.
As are Amazon, Etsy, eBay and other major retail giants that censor conservatives, but empower leftists to celebrate and call for the deaths of Trump and other conservatives.
Charlie Kirk’s murder was marinated in internet memes. These memes are promoted and enabled by a Big Tech system that practices two-tier content policing. The “Is He Dead Yet” merchandise is an example of the kinds of popular leftist memes that make the murder of conservatives into a knowingly hip joke that eventually leads to an assassin’s bullet.
The Left has traded debate and democracy for fantasizing about the deaths of its enemies.
And some leftists do more than fantasize. That is how a bullet clipped President Trump’s ear. It’s why Charlie Kirk is dead. Woke corporations pretend that they had nothing to do with it, but the moment you search their platforms, you find that they were actually profiting from the death cult.
Before everything got disrupted by the attempt on President Trump’s life, I had written a post last week titled “Big Tech On The Path To Net Zero.” That post looked at the most recently issued “sustainability” reports from Google, Microsoft and Meta, and noted that all three admit to going rapidly in the opposite direction from “net zero.” As their businesses grow in the direction of power-hungry data centers and AI, they inevitably require large incremental amounts of always-available electricity — the kind of electricity that wind and sun cannot provide. Lacking viable alternatives to fossil fuels, their “emissions” rise.
But, you might ask, how about Amazon and Apple? They too put out annual “sustainability” reports. Here is the “2023 Amazon Sustainability Report” (that appears to have just been issued); and here is the “Apple Environmental Report covering fiscal year 2023,” that came out in April. Unlike the similar Reports issued by Google, Microsoft and Meta, these Amazon and Apple Reports do not admit to lack of progress (let alone negative progress) on the “net zero” goal. Are they being honest?
The answer is that these Reports from Amazon and Apple are substantially less honest than the efforts of Google, Microsoft and Meta. Amazon’s Report follows the general pattern of the Google, Facebook and Meta Reports, with happy talk in the introduction and summaries and then some potentially real information buried deep in the interior. Apple’s Report is the worst of the lot, and can best be described as an effort at deception and misdirection. Let’s take a look.
From Amazon’s Report, the introductory letter from Chief Sustainability Officer Kara Hurst:
On renewable energy, we set an ambitious goal to match 100% of the electricity consumed by our global operations with renewable energy by 2030, and we reached that goal in 2023—seven years early. As we look to the future, we are steadfast in our Climate Pledge commitment to be net-zero carbon across our operations by 2040. We will continue to lead and invest in creating carbon-free energy around the world at scale, including through solar, wind, nuclear, and other emerging energy technologies.
What does it mean to “match 100% of electricity consumed . . . with renewable energy”? It sounds like it has something to do with actually using wind and solar electricity for operations, but does it? You won’t find any real answer in this Report. What you know is that Amazon demands and uses electricity at all hours of the day and night, and expects the power to be available when they need it. Wind and solar don’t and can’t deliver that. Clearly, they are drawing electricity from the grid at times of overcast days and calm nights. Are they paying some fee to utilities to get the utilities to say that they have allocated some solar power from a sunny afternoon to “match” the power that Amazon bought on a calm night? That would be my inference. If that’s what they are doing, I would call it a pure scam.
If you should make it as far as page 11 in the body of the Report, you will come to a chart headed “Amazon’s Carbon Footprint”:
They claim that this “carbon footprint” thing is down 3% since last year. But do the comparison since 2019, and you will see that the overall “footprint” has gone up from 51.17 MMT CO2e to 68.82 MMT CO2e in 2023. That’s an increase of more than 25%. The 3% reduction in 2023 over 2022 largely flows from the line headed “Emissions from Purchased Electricity (Scope 2).” Although they don’t say it here, that likely relates to the widely proclaimed Amazon program to build their own massive wind and solar farms. Is this 3% the puny reduction that they can get from this program?
Over at Apple, here’s the key quote from the introductory letter:
Apple 2030 is our commitment to be carbon neutral for our entire footprint by the end of the decade. We’ll get there by innovating at every stage of the product lifecycle — from how they’re made, to what they’re made from. That starts with bringing new clean energy online across our supply chain. Today, more than 320 suppliers have committed to using renewable electricity for Apple production. With over 16 gigawatts already online, they’re avoiding more than 18 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
The letter comes from Lisa Jackson, Apple’s VP of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives. Do you recognize the name? Jackson was EPA Administrator back in the Obama Administration.
But where is the real information on “emissions”? I can’t find it. The closest I can find is an incomprehensible chart on page 14, accompanied by this text:
In 2023, we estimate that our environmental programs avoided 31 million metric tons of emissions across all scopes. Initiatives that we’ve been growing for years continue to yield clear results, including sourcing 100 percent renewable energy for our facilities, transitioning suppliers to renewable energy, and using low-carbon materials in products. While our revenue has grown by more than 64 percent since 2015, our gross emissions have decreased by more than 55 percent.
There is no clue as to the methodology of how they came up with that line that emissions “decreased by more than 55%.” Sure they may have found some efficiencies, or maybe they are using some lighter materials. But the only way they could come up with a number as large as a 55% decrease is by buying supposed carbon offsets and credits. In other words, scams. And they provide no information sufficient to evaluate the legitimacy of how they derive this figure.
There is no real possibility that any of Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon or Apple can operate its business without large-scale carbon emissions, at least until there has been a massive build-out of nuclear power that as of now has not even gotten started. Likely these Reports pledging adherence to the carbon neutrality creed are just so many words intended to buy time until the whole climate change mania blows over. When that happens, all these programs will be quietly scrapped. Along the same lines, note this piece from the New York Post today, reporting that Microsoft has just quietly scrapped its DEI program.
You no longer control your home. Amazon does. “Hey kids, be careful. If Alexa hears you say the wrong thing, nothing in the house will work anymore.” They
say that a fool and his cloud are easily parted. We talk a lot about
deplatforming, but when a single corporation
doesn’t just control a site you use, but controls most of your life,
everything from your doorbell to your vacuum, your music and your
lightbulbs, and it decides that your politics are bad, you’ve got
problems. That’s exactly the situation that people put themselves in
when they
rely on Amazon or Google Home to control their smart home only to
realize that they no longer control their home. A touchy corporation
that celebrates Pride Month and BLM all year round does. Beware of offending it..................
As I read this I couldn't help but think of the infamous
Pavlik Morozov: Soviet Boy Hero, who denounced his father to the Soviet authorities, who eventually killed him. If you research this story you will find there's a lot of confusion as to what really went on, but, let's go with it because this we know for sure. He was used as a tool for Soviet propaganda as the example for all Soviet youth to rat out their friends and family. The only difference is now mechanical devices are listening on our conversations and reporting, to of all things, a corporation. One that's taken on the mantel of judge, jury and executioner.
I've tried to properly categorize his pieces by subject. Please enjoy Daniel Greenfield's "More From the Point" for this week.
A totalitarian state doesn’t have to be a place with a whole bunch of
new laws aimed at suppressing the political opposition. All that’s
really needed is the politically selective enforcement of existing laws.
ANTISEMITISM
Special Envoy for Antisemitism Explains Need to Get Into Bed With Antisemites -
“I know CAIR is problematic. It’s always awkward when you have to
explain how, as part of the price of fighting antisemitism, you have to ally with antisemites.
And the price of fighting antisemitism is limiting it to antisemites of
the right political persuasion............Actually, the main criticism
was giving the Nexus, a definition of
antisemitism coined by anti-Israel activists, side billing with the IHRA
definition. But certainly including CAIR was the toothpick on the ham
sandwich..........
BIDEN CONSEQUENCE
Did the $10M Bribes to the Bidens Really Come From Russia?-
“Obama was briefed on it. Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland were briefed as
well.” Russia and Ukraine, like sizable parts of the region, are an
extended
‘game of thrones’ of oligarchs and apparatchiks carving up the
resources of the ex-Soviet states, using bribes, corruption, and
force.The two countries are economically intertwined in complex and
messy ways. At RedState, Jennifer Van Laar makes the important point
that the recent revelations about Biden’s bribes were not just coming
through Burisma, a Ukrainian firm, but through an alleged Russian asset.............
Biden’s Suspicious Silence on Trump Indictment - He’s
laying low because he’s not the innocent bystander, he’s the criminal.
Let’s suppose for a moment that you are running for president and your
chief rival just got indicted. What should your response be?
A series of viral ads
A taunting press conference
Silence
Normally presidential candidates cash in on the missteps of their
opponents. Some of Trump’s GOP rivals may be nervous about going that
route, but there isn’t a single reason in the world for Biden not to.
He’s certainly not worried that Trump supporters won’t vote for him. And
yet there’s a suspicious silence..............
Biden’s DOJ Turned Trump’s Secret Service Detail Into Informants The bond of trust between presidents and Secret Service agents is being violated. The Obama strategy was to weaponize every
element of the federal government. The Biden administration, run by many
of the same people, are taking that strategy to the next level. Previously, I discussed how Jack Smith, the Clinton allied Special Counsel, had violated the attorney-client privilege of 3 Trump lawyers so far, bringing the total number of Trump attorney-client privilege violations to 5 so far. Even Trump’s Secret Service detail has been weaponized and transformed into informants................
DOJ Covers Up $5M Biden Bribe From Burisma While Indicting Trump
- “$5 million for one Biden, $5 million for the other Biden.” The
Biden Justice Department and its various arms were fighting to
keep a document alleging that Biden had accepted a $5 million bribe
hidden from the public. That’s the same DOJ that is ordinarily more than
happy to leak materials involving Trump and conservative targets to the
media. The DOJ and the FBI ignored a congressional subpoena and only
contempt charges provided limited access to the Biden bribe document.
The FBI claimed that it was following DOJ policy to protect
confidential sources. Except that the supposed concern for the
confidential source would suggest that Biden is not only guilty, but
that the money trail leads to some dangerous people. And yet little
follow-up work appears to have been done on the investigation. The apparent contents of the bribe document leaked once members of Congress were given access to it.........
CALIFORNIA IS AN ASYLUM BEING RUN BY THE INMATES
California Incentivizes ‘Transgendering’ Kids to Win Custody Disputes
- A steady flow of child cannon fodder for the woke culture war. Are
you in the middle of a bitter custody dispute? Just take your
kids to an activist therapist, declare them transgender, and then use
that as a weapon against your ex-husband or wife. This exciting new
development in destroying the lives of children comes to us from California.
Where else? A newly revised California bill would treat parents’
refusal to “affirm” their child’s gender identity as a violation of
health, safety, and welfare in the context of custody
disputes..............That’s just part of it. Baking this into custody
battles all but ensures a steady flow of
child cannon fodder for the woke culture war as parents prove how little
they care about the health, safety, and welfare of their children by
fast-tracking them to castration, mastectomies, higher risks of suicide
and all sorts of diseases to win a custody battle............
California’s Imaginary High-Speed Rail to be Powered by Solar - When your train is imaginary, it probably doesn’t matter what
fictional power source it runs on. Unicorns, happy thoughts, or solar
power. California’s high-speed rail, which started out costing $9
billion back in the 90s and is now set to cost $128 billion if it were
ever to be built, despite not actually being built, could just as easily
run on love or small children clapping. But solar is more popular now so they’re going with that...........
DEEP STATE CORRUPTION
The IRS Allows Eco-Terrorists to Crowdsource Harassment of Senators - Give them $1,000 and they’ll shut down an event while the IRS shuts its eyes...........‘Climate Defiance’ which is running a fundraiser to ‘Make Complicit Climate Cowards’ Lives F____g Miserable’. The ecoterrorist group which boasts of having
“fully shut down Joe Manchin’s keynote” and “made pipeline lover Amy
Klobuchar flee the stage at her own book launch party” is also pretty clear about what donors can buy by funding the environmentalist group...........
But Climate Defiance’s operations also share a funding platform with the DNC.............The Action Network, like Climate Defiance and Declare Emergency, is a
501(c)(4) and it shows the entanglement of the Democrat establishment
with the far Left even when its extremists are targeting Senate
Democrats and the White House for not adopting their full radical
agenda..............
.Its support for eco terrorism has never been subtle and the Freedom Center had previously exposed its funding of attacks
on paintings in Europe by Just Stop Oil. Like Climate Defiance and
Declare Emergency, Just Stop Oil engages in ‘direct action’ and made
headlines by splashing tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting in
London’s National Gallery..........
The real Complicit Climate Cowards are in the IRS. Those complicit
climate cowards are the reason why art is under siege and events are
closed down. The IRS has ignored the law, allowed eco terrorists to
abuse the tax code, to destroy culture and intimidate elected officials...........The IRS............the same organization that sends
chills down the spines of ordinary taxpayers is terrified of using its
nearly limitless power to hold even the worst leftist nonprofit abusers
accountable...........
GREEN INSANITY
15-Year-Old Sues Montana Because State Has Too Many Trees - "Mica, aged 15, learned about climate change at the young age of four," Greta Thunberg has gotten old, literally (she’s 20) and politically
(she’s tiresome), time to bring on a fresh crop of victims to serve as
the fresh faces for the green litigation to destroy the economy and tax
us to death. Here’s the most sympathetic case that they’ve got in their lawsuit against Montana… for having trees. Mica, aged 15, learned about climate change at the young age of four, when his parents showed him the documentary Chasing Ice. This is what’s known as environmental child abuse. And political indoctrination of child soldiers..............
EDUCATION
Teachers to be Paid $150K in City Where Less Than Half of Students Are Good at Reading - New York City educators will get fat pay hikes and bonuses of up to 20%. Only money can fix education. Lots and lots of money. Dump trucks of
it dumped right in a giant hole in Randi Weingarten’s backyard where it
travels through the sewers into the coffers of top Democrats. When we pay our teachers like we pay NBA players, only then will
children get to the halfway mark at reading. Instead, we pay them like
WNBA players. For now, New York City schoolteachers must somehow survive on a miserly $150,000 a year..............
ISLAM
First Muslim Majority City in U.S. Bans Gay Pride Flags- “You can’t stop that.” Awkward, but running a rainbow coalition is
challenging. Black people initially dissented from the LGBTQ movement.
Lefties ignored the problem and waited for them to come around. They
figure Muslims are the same way and they can just outwait them. But that
won’t work. Islam is not just a set of cultural attitudes. And while
Islamists post-9/11 played the damsel in distress, the rainbow coalition
is now getting a dose of reality. After hours of debate and hearing from residents,
Hamtramck City Council has passed the resolution to ban LGBTQ+ Pride
flags unanimously. Hamtramck is the first majority-Muslim city in America. And the LGBTQ movement clashes with Islam..........Bad news for diversity.........How is a majority Muslim city diverse? It’s the opposite of diverse.............
Biden May Let Iran Collect Billions for Release of U.S. Hostages - “Iran
also expects the United States to unfreeze billions of dollars in
Iranian assets.” What’s worse than a formal deal with Iran? An informal
deal with the Islamic terror state. The enforcement elements on the
formal deal were mostly worthless and
put Iran on a track to nukes. You can only imagine how truly
spectacularly reliable they’ll be on the informal deal.................Islam does allow cease fires with infidels. But the cease fire only
lasts until the Islamic cause is in a position to annihilate the
infidels it reached a cease fire agreement with. The upshot of the deal is that Iran promises not to enrich uranium
beyond a certain point, will stop trying to kill Americans in Iraq, and
won’t aid Russia too much. In return, sanctions relief, as per usual. Also cash for hostages....................
UK Cops “Open-Minded” To All Explanations for Nottingham Rampage That Don’t Involve Islam - Mental illness. Obviously. Everyone is sad because a terrible thing happened in the UK. It’s one
of those terrible things that keeps happening ever since the UK decided
that its borders should be open… and there is no explanation for it................The attack is characteristic of Islamic terrorism in that it involved
a combination car attack and stabbing rampage. And that the killer’s
identity is being kept more closely than the crown jewels and Prince
Andrew’s romps with Jeffrey Epstein. The police however are keeping an open mind.............. JUSTICE
Unabomber, Linked to Biden Appointee’s Terror Group, Dies in Prison -Maybe Ted Kaczynski could have been in the Biden administrationTed Kaczynski, an eco-terrorist who waged a bombing campaign that
killed 3 people and injured many more, who studied at Harvard and taught
at Berkeley, is finally dead. The Unabomber may be gone but his legacy lives on. Ecoterrorists like
him have gone mainstream vandalizing art and terrorizing individuals. They’ve gone so mainstream that Earth First has a Biden appointee. And Earth First was the Unabomber’s north star.......
MILITARY
Woke Military Now Recruiting Non-English Speaking Migrants
- “The immigrants are not immediately put in jobs that require top
secret clearance.” After transforming the military from a force
defending the nation to a
woke culture war operation, recruiting dropped through the floor. But,
no worries, the Biden administration will fill out the ranks in the usual, “there’s always jobs at the Post Office” way by turning it into one giant useless welfare state.........
RACE
A Museum Pays the Price for ‘Blackwashing’ a Pharaoh - Americans cheer blackwashing history, other cultures don’t. Westerners line up to cheer the blackwashing of history, other peoples
are less enthusiastic. Netflix’s black nationalist depiction of
Cleopatra, a Greek ruler wrongly depicted as African, led to a major backlash in Egypt. But it was the decision by a Dutch museum with a prominent Egyptology collection to display this garbage that has come with serious consequences.......
TRUMP INDICTMENT, AND MORE
Getting Trump Once Again Required Killing Attorney-Client Privilege
- That is how prosecutors work in China and Russia. And now in
America. Attorney-client privilege went from a sacred trust furiously
defended
by lefty lawyers to just another “common misconception” when it came to
getting Trump. After targeting Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani, it’s no
surprise what the Clinton non-independent special counsel’s strategy was...........
Trump Prosecution Violates Attorney-Client Confidentiality by Targeting 3 Trump LawyersFive lawyers have had attorney-client privilege violated to get Trump. As I wrote earlier this week…It wasn’t all that long ago that the liberal legal
establishment was attacking the FBI for listening in on chats between
terrorists and their lawyers. Defenders of Lynne Stewart, who was
passing messages to terrorists on behalf of the Blind Sheikh, claimed
that the government had violated attorney-client privilege and the Fifth
Amendment by catching her in the act. Stewart’s indictment was
described as the ‘death knell’ for the right
to counsel. Meanwhile, Democrats repeatedly violating attorney-client
privilege to go after a sitting and former president is no big deal.
This began with Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani. Clinton Special Counsel
Jack Smith is now escalating by going after 3 Trump lawyers.................I don’t believe that there’s a single case where five attorneys for the
same defendant had attorney-client privilege violated. This is likely
unprecedented in American history...........Not satisfied with setting fire to the first and second amendments, the
leftist coup against the republic has decided to also burn down the
fifth amendment..........
Why Trump’s Espionage Act Indictment is A Manufactured Process Crime
- The difference between the Clinton emails and Trump’s papers is in
the investigation. The FBI’s warrant for its Mar-a-Lago raid invoked
the Espionage Act
which meant that we were always going to end up here. The focus on
Clinton ally Jack Smith’s indictment has been the Espionage Act despite
its obvious inappropriateness when it comes to a former president. The
Wall Street Journal spells out the problem............
Trump is Charged Under a Law Meant to Suppress Political Opposition - Democrats have used the ‘Espionage Act’ to silence opponents for over 100 years. A year after the start of WWI, President Woodrow Wilson addressed his
message to Congress and warned that the “gravest threats against our
national peace and safety” did not come from “other governments”, but
from “within our own borders”. “Citizens of the United States,” Wilson continued, “born under other
flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full
freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of
disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.” Wilson, a notorious racist and a supporter of the KKK who had
contempt for a wide variety of other peoples, likely had German
immigrants, but not just them, in mind when he called for what would become the Espionage Act so that “we may be purged of their corrupt distempers.”................And whether it’s Wilson’s affair with a married woman, Hunter Biden’s
harem of Uber prostitutes, or Joe Biden’s money from China, the
Espionage Act is a red flag for presidential corruption..............
Yesterday I came across two articles on the same subject. Amazon decided to shut down a man's "smart home" because his door bell is racist. A racist door bell, imagine that. Well, you know all things great and small are racist now. Right?
In today’s world of politically correct insanity, it’s truly baffling
that a significant number of Americans willingly invite in their homes
these advanced devices that constantly eavesdrop on their conversations
and actions. Yet, that’s become the norm with gadgets like Echo and
Alexa, which feel like creepy spies sitting in the corner, recording
every noise you make. Well, one guy learned the hard way just how risky
that idea can be when his doorbell accused him of being “racist” and
Amazon completely shut down his entire “smart home.” The guy’s name is
Brandon Jackson, and he gave a detailed account of what went down that
fateful day...........
The article goes on to explain how this happened, Amazon's lack of response, and when corrected, their lack of communication or apology for the fact they never notified this man they were going to do it, nor did they bother to investigate what actually happened.
You no longer control your home. Amazon does...........when a single corporation
doesn’t just control a site you use, but controls most of your life,
everything from your doorbell to your vacuum, your music and your
lightbulbs, and it decides that your politics are bad, you’ve got
problems. That’s exactly the situation that people put themselves in
when they
rely on Amazon or Google Home to control their smart home only to
realize that they no longer control their home. A touchy corporation
that celebrates Pride Month and BLM all year round does. Beware of offending it..............Offend Amazon and your Kindle won’t work, your books, music and
movies will be inaccessible and you may even have trouble getting in and
out of your house..........
Daniel goes on to let us know what this homeowner thinks about this, and it's hard to believe:
“due to this experience, I am seriously considering
discontinuing my use of Amazon Echo devices and will caution others
about this incident.” Seriously considering. This is a dystopia but we’re also doing it to ourselves. Amazon
didn’t force us to hook up our entire lives to it. It just seemed
convenient. But those who can give you convenience can also take it away
in a nanosecond.
Seriously considering? Ya just gotta be kidden me? Deciding to end this folly should be an automatic.
Admittedly, no one forced people to buy these devices and hook their homes up to them, yet, it seems to me this may be laying the ground work for far worse. As it turns out Nearly A Third Of Young People Support Government Cameras In Every Home. Why? this is the result of a contaminated system of education, indoctrination and leftist propaganda fed to these young and impressionable minds. They're coming out of school incapable of the fundamentals, and their knowledge of history is abysmal, and they're the future. That's scary.
In the meanwhile, it all still comes down to this. Who made Amazon the
Inquisitor General? Who determined it was Amazon that was going
adjudicate social issues on an individual basis? Who gave Amazon the
authority to be our 1984 "Word Police"?
No one!
Like all things
on the left they're tyrants and usurpers of individual rights, and they
need to be sued and prosecuted, before it's too late and we're forced to have such devices installed in our homes and businesses.
If you own a business, the leftists in Congress are coming after you.
The only thing standing in their way is the U.S. Constitution. Whether you own a mom-and-pop diner, an auto repair shop or shares in a multinational corporation, your property is at risk.
So is your freedom. This is as dangerous time as has ever existed in America.
The front page of today’s New York Times features a big article clearly intended to get the readers riled up about the latest environmental horror that must be stopped. The headline is “The Illegal Airstrips Bringing Toxic Mining to Brazil’s Indigenous Land.” Subheadline: “The Times identified hundreds of airstrips that bring criminal mining operations to the most remote corners of the Amazon.”
Wow, this is bad. The airstrips are “illegal.” The mining is “toxic,” and not only toxic but also “criminal.” And it’s all happening in the most pristine place left in the whole world, the “remote corners of the Amazon,” much of it inhabited by the most innocent of all innocent indigenous people, the Yanomami.
So what is driving this big rush of miners into these remote regions? Could so-called “green energy” — with its vast demands for raw materials like nickel, manganese, aluminum and iron — have anything to do with it? If so, you won’t learn anything about that from the Times.
The obvious purpose of this lengthy Times piece is to get you outraged about the criminal mining wildcatters now said to be swarming the Amazon jungle. The piece starts with research conducted by the Times, using satellite photographs, that has identified a large number of airstrips — close to 1300 of them — that have been carved into the Amazon jungle, and that are now being used to bring in supplies to support the development of new mines.
Hundreds of airstrips have been secretly built on protected lands in Brazil to fuel the illegal mining industry, a Times investigation found, including 61 in this Yanomami Indigenous territory. The Times identified more than 1,200 other unregistered airstrips across the Brazilian Amazon — many of them part of criminal networks that are destroying Indigenous lands and threatening their people. . . . Carved into the dense, lush landscape, [the clandestine airstrips] . . . operate largely unchecked. . . .
And you will not be surprised to learn that this outrageous and illegal activity is all being facilitated by the callous and uncaring right-wing government of current Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
Since taking office in 2019, Mr. Bolsonaro has championed industries driving the rainforest’s destruction, leading to record levels of deforestation. He has both loosened regulations to expand logging and mining in the Amazon and scaled back protections. He also slashed federal funds and staffing, weakening the agencies that enforce Indigenous and environmental laws.
The illegal mining is causing extensive harm to the indigenous people of the area, at least if you believe the Times:
A recent studyby Hutukara, a Yanomami nonprofit, estimated that more than half of the people living in Yanomami Brazilian territory have been hurt by illegal mining. The fallout, according to the report, includes malnourishment because of destroyed or abandoned crops, and malaria spread by the proliferation of mosquitoes in open mining pits and deforested areas.
OK, but why exactly this sudden rush of mining businesses into these remote areas? The Times offers little clue, basically just one line saying that the illegal airstrips are “pushing the illegal mining of gold and tin ore” into remote areas. But gold and tin are relatively small volume commodities on the world markets. Could these really be the main drivers?
As of November [2021], nine major mining companies considered key players in the extraction of rare metals for electric vehicle batteries had 225 active applications to expand operations into or near Indigenous territories in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest.
Aha! The “key players” in the mining rush into the Amazon are big companies looking for “rare metals for electric vehicle batteries.” Why am I not surprised?
So are the materials people are looking for mainly just gold and tin, or are there lots of other, higher-volume things to be found? From a publication called Mining Technology, February 12, 2018:
The Amazon rainforest in South America has large quantities of copper, tin, nickel, bauxite, manganese, iron ore and gold, making it attractive to mining companies all around the world.
Nickel and manganese — those are the big inputs to the electric vehicle batteries. Bauxite is ore for aluminum, the main material needed, along with copper, for the huge amounts of new electric transmission lines that need to be built to support wind and solar power. Iron ore? Vast amount of that will be needed for the coming onslaught of wind turbine bases.
Undark tells us that all the major American financial institutions — the same ones that are now boycotting the fossil fuel industries — are lining up to finance the big new mines in the Amazon:
U.S.-based financial institutions are among their top funders, according to a new report by Amazon Watch and the Association of Brazil’s Indigenous People, or APIB. . . . The report focuses on nine mining companies, including Vale, Anglo American, Belo Sun, and Glencore. . . . Capital Group, BlackRock, and Vanguard, which collectively invested $14.8 billion in the mining companies, are the top U.S. investors named in the report. The leading U.S.-based creditor is Bank of America, which provided $670 million in loans and underwriting services to the companies. Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were also named as top creditors.
Hey, this is for EV batteries, transmission lines, wind turbine bases, and all other kinds of good things to make the world “green.” Of course all the big financial institutions are behind it. It’s ESG investing!
And please don’t blame the people at the New York Times for undermining their own incessant and strident advocacy for green energy. They’re just following the essential principles of the official New York progressive orthodoxy as brilliantly distilled on the Manhattan Contrarian “About” page, first posted back in 2012 — particularly this part:
[U]sage of energy is a human right, but all actual known methods of producing energy are environmentally unacceptable. . . .
It’s way to much to expect them ever to concede that having a modern society requires that some trade-offs be made.
An open letter that appears to be signed by
hundreds of Amazon employees has called upon the company to cease
business in pro-life states among other demands. Shared
by Libs of TikTok, the letter appeared to call upon the tech giant to
take “immediate and decisive action against the threat to basic human
rights with the overturning of Roe v. Wade.”
“As part of Amazon’s wide-reaching efforts toward a more inclusive
and diverse workforce, we believe that Amazon cannot let this recent
decision go unanswered,” the shared letter said. “We ask Amazon, the
world’s best employer, to actively defend against this assault on our
liberty.”
The letter then went on to propose a list of (often hilarious) ideas
for how the company can better promote the cause of abortion, and though
signatories admit that “some ideas bear a larger business risk than
others,” they ultimately believed that these “unprecedented times”
require the company to “think big to change the world.”................To Read More.....
My Take - One of the comments was:
“Amazon Employees Allegedly Demand Business Cease in Pro-Life States and Allow ‘Time to Grieve’” Grieve for what? They obviously don’t grieve for dead babies, so they can go...... themselves - on their own time.
Another said:
"Amazon would save itself much heartache and frustration if they would
fire all malcontents that signed onto this letter... any serious HR
person would know that the people who signed this letter are the least
productive and the most trouble."
This is a Stakeholders Versus Stockholders issue, and Amazon needs to follow get it's head on right and realize that a good firing gets everyone else's head straight, and in this case, they need a lot of firings. It's true Amazon is owned by a left wing loon billionaire, but he's finding himself on the dirty end of the stick with his employees and their pay, conditions and benefits, and he's going to find out, if he already doesn't realize it, once you give in to them, there will be no end to the demands of these leftist misfits.
If
there’s one newspaper that could have had “disinformation” copyrighted
and then collected royalties from every Russian conspiracy theory, it
was the Washington Post.
The
Washington Post gained power and influence and its circulation and its
profits grew as the paper spread lies, smears, and conspiracy theories
that pandered to the prejudices and coup impulses of an angry base of
D.C. Democrat government bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, and
contractors who fancied themselves to be the “resistance” to the 2016
election.
The Post's opinion section filled up with headlines
like, "The Republicans have become the party of Russia", but its news
desk was no better with a false claim, later retracted, that Giuliani
had been warned by the FBI that he was the target of a “Russian
influence operation”.
Day after day, the paper built a case that
Republicans were a “threat to democracy” by “spreading Russian
disinformation”, and urgently needed to be deplatformed and censored.
Max
Boot, a Washington Post columnist, cheered Big Tech's censorship of a
New York Post story about Hunter Biden while insisting that it was
"Russian disinformation".
"Sorry, Republicans. Social media companies aren’t obligated to spread your lies," he gloated.
We
now know that there was no Russian disinformation, but that the
Washington Post’s Big Tech boss was actually the one profiting from
spreading Chinese disinformation to Americans.
The Washington Post had been purchased by Jeff Bezos while Amazon’s federal contracts and lobbying expenditures began to grow. One of Amazon's biggest federal paydays was a $600 million cloud contract with the CIA. Then the Big Tech giant set its sights
on a $10 billion military cloud contract known as JEDI. After the Trump
administration noted favoritism toward Amazon, the contract was instead
awarded to Microsoft, leading to an Amazon sore loser lawsuit. JEDI was
then canceled and Amazon got a profitable piece of a new JWCC military
cloud contract.
Meanwhile, Amazon was deep in bed with Communist
China. Amazon’s marketplace is dominated by third party sellers and most
of those third party sellers are based in China.
But a recently leaked
internal Amazon document also revealed that the Big Tech giant was
trading the Communist regime access to Americans in exchange for doing
business in China.
While Amazon wanted the right to sell books to
the Chinese, the Communist regime wanted to be able to push its
propaganda through Chinabooks on the Amazon platform.
Jay Carney, formerly Obama's press secretary, now heading up Amazon's lobbying operation, was told before he flew out to Beijing that the key to persuading the Communist regime to allow Amazon to continue doing business was "the Chinabooks project.”
The
China Books project is outwardly just another storefront, albeit
stocked with books on Xi. The design may be crude but the agenda shows
up at the beginning with a menu that highlights "Governance of China"
and "Books on China's Battle Against the Pandemic". While the former
category largely features Xi, the country’s Communist dictator, the
latter is where the action is.
The various texts, political,
personal, and even books on the pandemic for children, highlight the
efforts of the Communist party and treat the battle against the virus as
a vindication of the party.
The books often come through the
Foreign Languages Press, an arm of the Chinese Communist Party that is
used to spread disinformation and propaganda around the world. FLP is an
imitation of the Soviet Union's Foreign Languages Publishing House.
While the Soviet Union had shut down and freshened up its FLPH
propaganda operation in the sixties, China, which copied it in the
fifties, has kept FLP going with few changes to the operation.
Amazon
sells a lot of books, but with the Chinabooks project it had partnered
with an enemy nation’s propaganda campaign in order to be able to do
business with the Communists.
And much of that propaganda campaign was aimed at Americans.
Even while Amazon’s CEO was partnering his company with China’s state propaganda arm,
his newspaper was accusing Republicans of being in bed with Russia. The
Washington Post’s smear campaign was true, not of Republicans, but of
its owner and his Big Tech monopoly.
Even as Amazon swallows up
American retail, it’s become little more than a front for China. Its
products come from China, but so do the third party sellers who dominate
its platform.
And yet Amazon also wields enormous influence over American policy and politics.
Despite
its close relationship to Communist China and other enemies, Amazon
controls the CIA’s cloud and will have a chunk of the military cloud.
Some of our most sensitive information is in the hands of a corporation
that doesn’t think twice about collaborating with our enemies.
Amazon
did not hesitate to give China’s Communist party the key to spreading
their disinformation to American audiences. What other digital doors
might it help China open?
Beyond the sensitive role that Amazon
plays in our military and intelligence apparatus is the political role
that it enjoys courtesy of its chairman’s ownership of the Washington
Post.
The Post sets the policy agenda for the Democrats and
columnists like Jennifer Rubin function as mouthpieces for the Biden
administration. The partnership has been extremely profitable for the
paper as lefty audiences ate up its Russiagate disinformation campaign,
sending subscription rates sky high and making its articles trend on Big
Tech social media platforms.
Qatar’s biggest foreign influence
operation, involving the death of Jamal Khashoggi, a Qatari terror
operative embedded as a columnist in the Washington Post, was enormously
successful and quickly became part of the Democrat foreign policy
agenda. The transformation of an old friend of Osama bin Laden into a
political martyr would not have been possible without the unquestioning
acceptance that the Post’s disinformation campaigns have achieved among
the Democrats and even among some less sensible Republicans.
Even
after stepping down as CEO to become Amazon's executive chairman, Jeff
Bezos still commands $180 billion worth of Amazon stock. The
intertwining of the key media outlet of D.C. Democrats and one of the
most powerful Big Tech monopolies in the country still remains.
So does the disinformation threat posed by the combination of Amazon and the Post.
Leftists
most often accuse their enemies of their own sins. While the Washington
Post colluded to censor its conservative political opponents to protect
Biden’s electoral chances, Amazon stood to profit from Biden’s win,
renewed relations with China, and a military cloud deal.
And
while the Post claimed that Republicans were spreading Russian
disinformation, it was actually the money behind its machine that was
spreading Chinese disinformation.
The paper manufactured a threat by Republicans to cover up the threat that it poses to America.
As
long as China calls the shots at Amazon, and the Big Tech monopoly and
its paper call the shots in our retail sector and our nation’s capital,
America remains in the grip of China.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
Ever since Amazon created its own delivery service, the blue vests of
its drivers and the dark blue trucks with the monopolistic giant’s arrow
have become as ubiquitous as UPS brown or FedEx purple and orange on
every street and highway in America. And with good reason.
Amazon’s
package volume is expected to surpass UPS and FedEx as a host of men
and women in blue rush to deliver orders from Chinese third party
sellers and drop shippers.
But on the first Friday of June, a delivery in California instead ended in a violent assault.
Usually
Amazon rips off customers, companies, and entire countries, but it
doesn’t beat them. This time there was an exception as Itzel Ramirez, an
Amazon driver in her twenties, was caught on video violently assaulting a 67-year-old woman who had asked about her package.
While
Ramirez claimed self-defense, the video shows her assaulting the
elderly woman from behind, punching her in the back of the head, and
seemingly using a key ring in the assault. The beating caused the victim
to collide with the door and reportedly left her with a broken nose.
It
was not the first assault by an Amazon driver on an elderly person
caught on video. An Amazon driver had previously assaulted a 73-year-old
man in Miami Beach. But this time the Amazon delivery person had used a
politically correct slur thereby turning it into a hate crime.
Ramirez had accused her victim of “white privilege”.
Despite
that slur, she has not been charged with a hate crime. In a state where
critical race theory is being forced into schools and on employees of
major corporations, it’s not likely that a violent racist echoing an
official dogma that demonizes white people would be held accountable.
Amazon
claimed that the violent assault on one of its customers “does not
reflect the high standards we have for drivers" and assured everyone
that "this individual is no longer delivering Amazon packages.” But it
may be worth examining what Amazon’s standards really are.
Like every Silicon Valley company, Amazon has gone all in on critical race theory.
The
Amazon assault happened the same year that Jeff Bezos, the company's
founder and CEO, announced that he was stepping down. Bezos was
ruthless, cruel, and amoral, but beyond using the Washington Post to
become a D.C. power broker had less interest in conventional corporate
virtue signaling.
Andy Jassy, his right-hand man who will replace
him as CEO after being in charge of Amazon's cloud platform, is a more
traditional Big Tech wokester.
Jassy falsely accused
police departments of "murdering black people", supported illegal
aliens, and made the decision to shut down Parler. His wife is a Bernie
Sanders donor.
The incoming Big Tech CEO has vowed to focus the
company on “diversity and more inclusion.” If its employees weren't
feeling abused enough by having to pee into cups, Amazon mandated that
all employees complete a 90-minute "Strengthening Our Culture of
Inclusion" program.
Amazon had already banned non-inclusive
language like "blacklists" (which didn't stop it from blacklisting all
sorts of people), but now it was going further with identity politics
affinity groups and its Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE)
events featuring extremists and racists.
CORE events packed
thousands of Amazon employees into massive meetings to be accused of
racism by a series of racist and extreme leftist speakers.
The
Big Tech monopoly’s first CORE event had already featured Robin
DiAngelo, whose famous idea is that white people are all racist and
evil, as well as Carmen Perez, the Farrakhan supporter who served as one
of the leaders of the Women's March before being forced out.
Amazon
also invited Ijeoma Oluo, a self-described “internet yeller” who had
written a book arguing that “white male mediocrity” is a theme
throughout history. That’s exactly the message that a company of white
male engineers needed to hear. Oluo had berated her own mother, who
raised her after being abandoned by her Nigerian academic father, over
her “white privilege”.
Also at Amazon’s first CORE was Michael Welp whose White Men As Full Diversity Partners stirred a backlash when its training at Lockheed described white men as racists and privileged.
Welp was also present at the second CORE event while stigmatizing white people.
Alicia
Garza, a co-founder of the racist black nationalist hate group Black
Lives Matter, appeared on a CORE panel together with DiAngelo and Perez.
Also
there was Latasha Gillespie, the head of global diversity and inclusion
at Amazon Studios, who has claimed that police murder black people
while ranting about "white privilege".
The second CORE event also included rabid hatred for America with Edgar Villanueva showing a slide that described America as being based on colonization and genocide.
What impact did all of these racist and hateful ideas have on Amazon employees?
Amazon,
like many other major corporations, has submerged its employees in the
dogma of critical race theory. And while this is meant to lead to the
discrimination and mistreatment of white employees in the name of
equity, could it also lead to violence against white people?
The
Big Tech monopoly has relied on independent contractors to build its
delivery network. However Amazon also exercises a great deal of control
over these drivers. And as its statement after the “white privilege”
assault in California shows, it ultimately controls their employment.
Amazon
has embedded equity into its Delivery Service Partner push and
encouraged existing employees to become DSPs. Did any of its existing
racist CORE programming have an influence on the cultural ecosystem of
the DSP that employed Itzel Ramirez?
That is unfortunately a question that no one in the media appears to be asking.
The
rise of the DSP system paralleled the rise of critical race theory at
Amazon. Even while Amazon was finding new ways to virtue signal, it was
also finding new ways to exploit workers.
Amazon’s DSP program
evades accountability for delivery drivers like Ramirez who wear its
blue vests and drive its vans, but who are actually working for small
contractors, many of them minorities, who are being deliberately kept
small so they can never compete for a better deal.
The Big Tech
giant will insist that it had no responsibility for the assault on one
of its customers by a racist driver who had absorbed the critical race
theory slur of “white privilege” that Amazon had endorsed by featuring
racist figures and rhetoric at its CORE inclusion events.
Amazon’s
white leadership encourages racism against white people while remaining
insulated from minority workers who might want to lash out at the
nearest white person they can find.
When BLM and Antifa created
CHAZ in their Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone, the epicenter was
about a dozen blocks away from Andy Jassy's 1906 mansion on the
outskirts of Capitol Hill. But there's a world of differences between
the local small businesses that were terrorized by black nationalists
and anarchists in CHAZ and the sedate tree-lined street of multi-million
dollar Victorian homes where Jassy and his pro-Sanders designer wife
comfortably reside.
The incoming Amazon CEO may rant about the
police and his home may boast the ubiquitous "Black Lives Matter" "No
Human is Illegal", and "Science is Real" lawn sign prefered by wealthy
woke suburbanites, but his estate is protected by a spiked gate and high
walls disguised by massive hedges. Defunding the police is an
experience to be lived out by other, poorer people.
Some people
may be beaten by Amazon’s critical race theory drivers over their white
privilege, but Amazon executives have spiked gates to make certain
they’re not the ones being beaten.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. Thank you for reading.
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
The Internet giant has been a key driver
of job growth and productivity during the pandemic, but unionization
efforts could undermine its e-commerce model.
For decades, unions tried unsuccessfully to organize Walmart as it
expanded from a regional chain to America’s biggest store. Founder Sam
Walton fiercely resisted labor’s efforts because in a successful
company, he said, workers and management must pull together to serve
customers; in a unionized business, though, employees and management
were too often at odds. Walton offered generous stock options, profit
sharing, and a path to management for long-time employees as part of his
arsenal to fend off what was for years the most intense ongoing
union-organizing effort in America.
Now Amazon is inheriting Walmart’s mantle as the retailing company
most fiercely pursued by organized labor, even as the online store
experiences explosive growth. To keep unions at bay, Amazon offers
starting pay that’s often well above what workers can get at many other
retailers, as well as health benefits and a 401(k) plan. Moreover,
Amazon has been willing, even eager, to place the distribution centers
so crucial to its business strategy in declining regions that
desperately need jobs—like Bessemer, Alabama. It’s no small irony, then,
that the workers at that Bessemer facility are in the middle of an
election on whether to authorize a union. If the vote succeeds, it will
almost certainly prompt other unionization efforts at many of the
company’s more than 100 U.S. fulfillment centers.
Much is at stake. Though Amazon is popularly viewed as a giant tech
company that dominates its marketplace, the company’s e-commerce
business has low profit margins and only an erratic history of making
money. A successful wave of unionization drives could fundamentally
alter Amazon as we know it, threatening its e-commerce model.
Nearly 6,000 people now work at the Bessemer facility, up from the
1,500 that the company originally said it would employ when it announced
the project in June 2018. The Greater Birmingham area had originally
pitched itself somewhat optimistically as a site for Amazon’s so-called
HQ2. While it didn’t win that battle, nearby Bessemer won a commitment
for a $325 million investment in a fulfillment center. Until then,
greater Birmingham was the largest metro area in the nation without such
a facility. A former mining and steel-making region whose fortunes
faded with the decline of mining, Bessemer needed those jobs and the
income they would bring. Even today, median household income in the area is just $32,301, less than half the national median. The median hourly wage for a retailing job
is about $11, while packers and stockers, who do the kinds of jobs
needed in the company’s fulfillment warehouses, earn from $11.50 to
$12.50 on average. Amazon, by contrast, starts workers at $15.30 an
hour.
The Amazon facility is supercharging growth. The fulfillment center
stands on a site once owned by U.S. Steel. Studies initially estimated
that the area would gain some $200 million in new economic activity
based on the original 1,500 jobs. Amazon added jobs so quickly there,
however, that those original estimates became quickly outdated. Other
big firms have noticed Amazon’s move. FedEx, Lowe’s, and online used-car
retailer Carvana are now building similar distribution centers nearby.
The pandemic that has boosted Amazon’s growth—as millions of
Americans traded in-store shopping for online—also underlies the unrest
at Bessemer. The facility officially opened last April, just as Covid-19
was spreading rapidly throughout the country. Workers have complained
of long shifts, inadequate breaks, and lack of attention to Covid
protocols.
They’re looking for higher wages, news reports say. Amazon
says that it offers compensation packages well beyond those of similar
jobs, including vision and dental care and a 50 percent match on
employee contributions to their defined-contribution retirement plans.
The company also says that it has made extensive modifications
to provide worker protection from the coronavirus and is offering two
weeks off with pay for workers who contract it. Nonetheless, workers
have opted for a vote on whether to join the Retail Wholesale and
Department Store Union. That would be a big win for labor in an industry
where union membership has declined by 400,000, or 40 percent, over the
last 20 years.
As one of America’s largest employers and a giant technology company,
Amazon has more than its share of critics across the ideological
spectrum. Some 50 congressional representatives wrote
the company a letter recently urging it to use the Bessemer organizing
campaign as an opportunity “to chart a new course and break with your
history of disempowering workers.” The letter accused the company of “a
clear pattern of denying workers dignity on the job” and “strong-arm
tactics.” It made no mention of the wages and benefits that Amazon pays
workers compared with other, similar companies, but did note that the
company’s profits have recently risen robustly—as media stories have
also noted.
Yet, the profit story at Amazon is far more nuanced. Amazon has
attracted a lot of attention since its early days in the 1990s as a tech
innovator with a hot stock price that eventually helped make Chairman
Jeff Bezos the world’s richest person. But it took the firm nearly a
decade to earn a profit, and for years, the income it could squeeze out
of its growing sales was modest. By 2006, the company’s sales had soared
to $10 billion, but it made just $190 million in profits on that
enormous volume—a net profit margin of just 1.9 percent of sales. Things
have improved substantially since then, but much of Amazon’s current
earnings power has not come from those distribution centers and its
consumer website.
The real profit success of Amazon today is its web services—cloud
computing, network services, and data analytics, offered largely to
businesses and government. Though perhaps the least visible of all
Amazon’s enterprises, these provided nearly two-third of the company’s
operating profits last year: $13.5 billion on revenues of $45.5 billion.
By contrast, the North America retail business that the Bessemer
facility is part of recorded profits from operations of $8.6 billion,
but that from an enormous $236 billion in revenue—a margin of only 3.6
percent. The pandemic has helped fuel growth of the retail division, but
because it’s so labor intensive, the company has had to hire tens of
thousands of new workers and now employs an estimated 800,000 people in
the U.S., mostly in the retail division. Adding compensation of just a
few dollars an hour through some combination of higher wages and greater
benefits to that workforce would add billions of dollars annually to
Amazon’s costs, eroding its already-slim margins.
In the world inhabited by many of its critics, Amazon should be
sharing most of its profits with its workers, regardless of how much it
pays them now and what it offers them in terms of security and
opportunity in an otherwise struggling retail landscape. Among the many
factors that these critics ignore—probably because they can’t understand
them—is that innovative, efficient businesses like Amazon not only
produce unprecedented job opportunities but also drive productivity, and
hence standards of living, across the economy.
One way they do this is
by offering an intensely competitive selling landscape, where average
Americans can benefit from quality products delivered at low prices. If a
retailer becomes big enough, those gains can be enormous. In the 1990s,
as Walmart expanded across America, McKinsey estimated in a famous
study titled “The Wal-Mart Effect”
that the giant retailer’s gains had been responsible for one-sixth of
the U.S. economy’s productivity improvements in the decade. Warren
Buffett declared that it wasn’t Microsoft or any other tech giant but
Walmart that had done the most to spur the country’s economic growth in
that era. Nonetheless, many of labor’s political allies worked hard to
restrain Walmart’s growth, including in low-income areas in places like
New York City and Chicago that desperately needed its jobs and low
prices.
Amazon may be a virtual retailer, but it relies on those
brick-and-mortar fulfillment centers to make its model work. A string of
successful organizing campaigns might force it to accept even smaller
profit margins that bring it closer to being in the red again after the
pandemic ends, which might simply prompt layoffs. Or the company could
try raising prices, which would almost certainly be an invitation for
competitors to chip away at its fragile profitability. Given that only 4
percent of retail jobs in America are unionized, many of those
competitors would gain a distinct advantage over Amazon. So the company
has bluntly resisted unionization, which, to many of its critics, is
nothing short of immoral.
Amazon hasn’t helped its case among free-market types and cultural
conservatives. Apparently wanting to placate the Left, Amazon has
endorsed a $15 national minimum wage—a move that, not coincidentally,
would also force competitors to raise their salaries closer to Amazon’s.
And it was Amazon’s Web Services that de-platformed Parler, the
free-speech alternative to Twitter, in the wake of the January U.S.
Capitol protests that turned violent.
The one constituency that matters the most—American consumers—doesn’t
pay much attention to these kinds of internal corporate disputes.
Consumers just go on expecting quality products at good prices and
reasonable service. If Amazon stops delivering in any of those areas,
consumers will move on to the next big next thing. Amazon understands
that, and that’s why it’s fighting this battle.
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