‘Deaths of despair’ soaring among Gen Z & millennials: ‘It’s the economy, stupid’

Posted on July 23, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Helen Buyniski

Young Americans are killing themselves in record numbers, the victims of a confluence of economic and sociological factors that have singled them out – even above a nationwide surge in so-called “deaths of despair.”

Suicide rates among teens and young adults aged 15 to 24 – the older end of “Generation Z” – spiked in 2017, reaching their highest point since 2000, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). They’ve risen 51 percent in the past 10 years, buoyed by rising rates of anxiety and depression along with social media and drug use, and the figures may be even higher, since some intentional overdoses are not counted as suicides.

Young men saw the steepest rise in deaths, according to the JAMA study, though women are catching up to them at an alarming pace. Teens and young adults report higher rates of anxiety and depression than previous generations, and multiple studies in recent years have shown that social media use exacerbates both conditions, creating a self-perpetuating feedback loop that can have tragic consequences.

But Generation Z is simply following in the footsteps of its predecessors. The much-maligned millennial generation, defined by the Census Bureau as those born between 1982 and 2000 (meaning some are included in the JAMA study), are also killing themselves in record numbers. Drug-related deaths among ages 18 to 34 have increased 108 percent since 2007, while alcohol-related deaths are up 69 percent and suicides are up 35 percent, according to a report published last week by Trust for America’s Health. While millennials have long been written off as entitled, spoiled snowflakes, the media and society are belatedly realizing that they aren’t just layabouts unmotivated to exit their parents’ basement – this “despair” has a cause, and it’s primarily economic.

The rise of millennial and Gen Z “deaths of despair” can be traced to the yawning gap between reality and expectations. Raised on the myths of the American Dream, these are the first Americans to experience a markedly lower standard of living than their parents, the Baby Boomers who grew prosperous on the fruits of the postwar economic boom. The national debt has ballooned, driven by two decades of an unwinnable war whose cost is poised to top $6 trillion, and the Pentagon’s budget has swollen to an unprecedented size even as cuts to social services have decimated what little social safety net Americans could once count on. Multiple rounds of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations destroyed the government’s revenue base, and perhaps unsurprisingly, economic inequality has grown to exceed even the rates seen during the Great Depression.

And even these concerns are beside the point for a generation that left college already shackled with student loan debt that can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and cannot be canceled even by declaring bankruptcy. Millennials who graduated in the aftermath of the 2008 crash entered the “real world” to find no jobs waiting for them. Lucky if they could find an unpaid internship or a waitressing gig, they were forced to retreat back into their parents’ basements, a crushing blow for anyone but particularly for a generation told since birth that they were special, that they could do anything they wanted, that the world was their oyster.

The US, perhaps uniquely in the developed world, views poverty as a sin, and many millennials suffer in silence, believing they are the only ones in their peer group to “flunk out” of the “real world.” Instead of finding support from friends and family, they take advantage of the ready availability of alcohol and opioids, a factor that has caused the number of “deaths of despair” to skyrocket. Some economically-depressed states, like West Virginia, have seen drug overdoses increase more than fivefold in the last 12 years, according to a report published earlier this month by the Commonwealth Fund, and many more have seen their number double and triple. That pharmaceutical companies flooded the market with opioids at the same time the rise of social media devastated the quality and complexity of human relationships is a particularly deadly coincidence.

Since 1996, the average net worth of “consumers” under 35 has declined 35 percent, according to management consultancy Deloitte. Advertisers are starting to realize that targeting this group, while it may seem like a savvy marketing decision – they constitute a quarter of the US population, after all – doesn’t make sense, since they can’t afford to buy anything. Student debt is up 160 percent since 2004 for the under-30 population, and the home-ownership rate for millennials is only 37 percent – fully eight percentage points lower than their parents. Fully 89 percent would like to own a home, according to a survey conducted last year, but nearly half have zero dollars in savings – let alone the 20 percent most mortgages require for a down payment.

Young people aren’t the only ones afflicted by the “deaths of despair” phenomenon. Life expectancy nationwide is down for the third year in a row, and a report from Trust for America’s Health published last year projects that this “epidemic” – which they define as drug and alcohol deaths plus suicide – is on track to kill more than 1.6 million people by 2025 if it continues to grow at its current rate. As the Baby Boomers start to retire only to find they cannot live on their meager savings – assuming they still have any – they, too, are killing themselves more often, with suicide rates up 40 percent from 2007 to 2015.

This is not only a young people’s problem, nor is it an easy one to solve, but acknowledging the systemic poverty afflicting the “richest country in the world” – where two-thirds of the population doesn’t have enough saved to cover a $500 crisis – is a good place to start.

How Evil Wins: The Hypocritical Double Standards of Political Outrage

Posted on July 21, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction.”—Kurt Vonnegut

Please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.

Anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to the Trump Administration has not been paying attention.

No matter what the team colors might be at any given moment, the playbook remains the same. The leopard has not changed its spots. Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that the American police state that is continuing to wreak havoc on the rights of the people under the Trump Administration is the same police state that wreaked havoc on the rights of the people under every previous administration.

Brace yourselves.

While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle, a tsunami approaches.

Case in point: in Charlottesville, Va.—home of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, champion of the Bill of Rights, and the nation’s third president—city councilors in a quest for so-called “equity” have proposed eliminating Jefferson’s birthday as a city holiday (which has been on the books since 1945) and replacing it with a day that commemorates the liberation of area slaves following the arrival of Union troops under Gen. Philip Sheridan.

In this way, while the populace wages war over past injustices, injustice in the here and now continues to trample innocent lives underfoot. In Charlottesville, as in the rest of the country, little is being done to stem the tide of the institutional racism that has resulted in disproportionate numbers of black Americans being stopped, frisked, shot at, arrested and jailed.

Just recently, in fact, Phoenix police drew their guns, shouted profanities, assaulted and threatened to shoot a black couple whose 4-year-old daughter allegedly stole a doll from a dollar store. The footage of the incident—in which the cops threaten to shoot the pregnant, young mother in the head in the presence of the couple’s 1- and 4-year-old daughters—is horrifying in every way.

Tell me again why it’s more important to spend valuable political capital debating the birthdays of dead presidents rather than proactively working to put a stop to a government mindset that teaches cops it’s okay to treat citizens of any color with brutality and a blatant disregard for their rights?

It doesn’t matter that Phoenix and Charlottesville are 2100 miles apart. The lethal practices of the American police state are the same all over.

No amount of dissembling can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America. As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.

So stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other. Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.

This is how evil wins.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

This is how good, generally decent people—having allowed themselves to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware. Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware. And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

The world has been down this road before.

As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free:

Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people‑—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies’, without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.

We are no longer living the American Dream. We’re living the American Lie.

Indeed, Americans have been lied to so sincerely, so incessantly, and for so long by politicians of all stripes—who lie compulsively and without any seeming remorse—that they’ve almost come to prefer the lies trotted out by those in government over less-palatable truths.

The American people have become compulsive believers: left-leaning Americans are determined to believe that the world has become a far more dangerous place under Trump, while right-leaning Americans are equally convinced that Trump has set us on a path to prosperity and security.

Nothing has changed.

The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.

In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House before him (Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).

Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip, shoot and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials are no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace. Indeed, they continue to keep the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies and slaves rather than citizens.

SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families. Nationwide, SWAT teams continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activities or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own heavily armed law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties continue to rise.

The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police. Police forces continue to be transformed into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. In training police to look and act like the military and use the weapons and tactics of war against American citizens, the government continues to turn the United States into a battlefield and “we the people” into enemy combatants.

Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners. School districts continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment for childish infractions: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court. In this way, the paradigm of abject compliance to the state continues to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior.

For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense. States continue to outsource prison management to private corporations out to make a profit at taxpayer expense. And how do you make a profit in the prison industry? Have the legislatures pass laws that impose harsh penalties for the slightest noncompliance in order keep the prison cells full and corporate investors happy.

Censorship hasn’t stopped. First Amendment activities continue to be pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state. The courts continue to be dominated by technicians and statists who are deferential to authority, whether government or business. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s decisions in recent years have most often been characterized by an abject deference to government authority, military and corporate interests.

Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to an overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal, while reinforcing the power of the police state and its corporate allies.

The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements. On any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether it’s your local police, a fusion center, the National Security Agency or one of the government’s many corporate partners, is still monitoring and tracking your every move.

The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers. Under the pretext of protecting the nation’s infrastructure (roads, mass transit systems, water and power supplies, telecommunications systems and so on) against criminal or terrorist attacks, TSA task forces (comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams) continue to do random security sweeps of nexuses of transportation, including ports, railway and bus stations, airports, ferries and subways, as well as political conventions, baseball games and music concerts. Sweep tactics include the use of x-ray technology, pat-downs and drug-sniffing dogs, among other things.

Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the NDAA. These laws—which completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional rights of American citizens, continue to re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of law, our U.S. Constitution, becomes the map by which we navigate life in the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.” Indeed, this is the agency that is notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.

The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad. America’s expanding military empire continues to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.

The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government continues to be the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our so-called representatives. It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.

And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep. In fact, many Americans have been so carried away by their blind rank-and-file partisan devotion to their respective political gods that they have lost sight of the one thing that has remained constant in recent years: our freedoms are steadily declining. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm, because the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government.

So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past 50 years, it will be just another lie.

The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. As historian Robert Gellately points out, “[A]nyone in Nazi Germany who wanted to find out about the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the campaigns of discrimination and persecutions need only read the newspapers.”

The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

“Still,” Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on. . . . [T]here is no getting away from the fact that at that moment, ‘the vast majority of the German people backed him.’”

Half a century later, the wife of a prominent German historian, neither of whom were members of the Nazi party, opined: “[O]n the whole, everyone felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. . . . We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”

In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor, life was good.

Life is good in America, too.

Life is good in America as long as you’re not one of the hundreds of migrant children (including infants, toddlers, preschoolers) being detained in unsanitary conditions by U.S. Border Patrol without proper access to food and water, made to sleep on concrete floors, go without a shower for weeks on end, and only allowed to brush your teeth once every 10 days.

Life is good in America as long as you don’t have to come face to face with a trigger-happy cop hyped up on the power of the badge, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and disposed to view people of color as a suspect class.

Life is good in America as long as you’re able to keep sleep-walking through life, cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, and distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.

Life is good in America as long as you’ve got enough money to spare that you don’t mind being made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the 99%.

Life is good in America for the privileged few, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.

Jeff Bezos’s Corporate Takeover of Our Lives

Posted on July 9, 2019 by Reid Mukai

Illustration by Mike Faille

How Amazon’s relentless pursuit of profit is squeezing us all—and what we can do about it

By David Dayen

Source: In These Times

AMAZON IS AN ONLINE RETAILER. It also runs a marketplace for other online retailers. It’s also a shipper for those sellers, and a lender to them, and a warehouse, an advertiser, a data manager and a search engine. It also runs brick-and-mortar bookstores. And grocery stores.

There are over 100 million Amazon Prime subscribers in the United States—more than half of all U.S. households. Amazon makes 45 percent of all e-commerce sales. Amazon is also a product manufacturer; its Alexa controls two-thirds of the digital assistant market, and the Kindle represents 84 percentof all e-readers. Amazon created its own holiday, Prime Day, and the surge in demand for Prime Day discounts, followed by a drop afterward, skewed the nation’s retail sales figures with a 1.8% bump in July 2017.

Oh, it’s also a major television and film studio. Its CEO owns a national newspaper. And it runs a streaming video game company called Twitch. And its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, runs an astonishing portion of the Internet and U.S. financial infrastructure. And it wants to be a logistics company. And a furniture seller. It’s angling to become one of the nation’s largest online fashion designers. It recently picked up an online pharmacy and partnered with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett to create a healthcare company. And at the same time, it’s competing with JPMorgan, pushing Amazon Pay as a digital-based alternative to credit cards and Amazon Lending as a source of capital for its small business marketplace partners.

To quote Liberty Media chair John Malone, himself a billionaire titan of industry, Amazon is a “Death Star” moving its super-laser “into striking range of every industry on the planet.” If you are engaging in any economic activity, Amazon wants in, and its position in the market can distort and shape you in vital ways.

Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to break up Amazon, along with the FTC’s new oversight and investigation, has spurred a conversation on the Left about its overwhelming power. No entity has held the potential for this kind of dominance since the railroad tycoons of the first Gilded Age were brought to heel. Whether you share concerns about Amazon’s economic and political power or you just like getting free shipping on cheap toilet paper, you should at least know the implications of living in Amazon’s world—so you can assess whether it’s the world you want, and how it could be different.

BOOKSELLERS WERE THE FIRST TO FIND THEMSELVES AT THE TIP OF AMAZON’S SPEAR, at the company’s founding in 1994. Years of Amazon peddling books below cost shuttered thousands of bookstores. Today, Amazon sells 42 percent of all books in America.

With such a large share of the market, Amazon determines what ideas reach readers. It ruthlessly squeezes publishers on wholesale costs; in 2014, it deliberately slowed down deliveries of books published by Hachette during a pricing dispute. By stocking best-sellers over independents and backlist copies, and giving publishers less money to work with, Amazon homogenizes the market. Publishers can’t afford to take a chance on a book that Amazon won’t keep in its inventory. “The core belief of bookselling is that we need to have the ideas out there so we can discuss them,” says Seattle independent bookseller Robert Sindelar. “You don’t want one company deciding, only based on profitability, what choice we have.”

These issues in just the book sector are a microcosm of Amazon’s effect on commerce.

The term “retail apocalypse” took hold in 2017 amid bankruptcies of established chains like The Limited, RadioShack, Payless ShoeSource and Toys “R” Us. According to frequent Amazon critic Stacy Mitchell, “more people lost jobs in general-merchandise stores than the total number of workers in the coal industry” in 2017.

Amazon isn’t the only cause; private equity looting must share much of the blame, and a shift to e-commerce was always going to hurt brick-and-mortar stores. But Amazon transformed a diverse collection of website sales into one mammoth business with the logistical power to perform rapid delivery of millions of products and a strategy to underprice everyone. That transformation accelerated a decline going back to the Great Recession (and much earlier for booksellers). Analysts at Swiss bank UBS estimate that every percentage point e-commerce takes from brick-and-mortar translates into 8,000 store closures, and right now e-commerce only has a 16 percent market share.

Take Harry Copeland (or, as he calls himself, “Crazy Harry”) of Harry’s Famous Flowers in Orlando, Fla., at one time a 40-employee retail/wholesale business. Revenue at his operation has shrunk by half since 2008, equal to millions of dollars in gross sales. “The internet … killed us,” Harry says. “I was in a Kroger, this guy walks up and says, ‘I want to apologize. It’s so easy to go on the internet.’ I said, ‘I did your wedding, I did flowers for your babies, and you’re buying [flowers] on the internet?’ ” Even Harry’s own employees receive Amazon packages at the shop every day. In January, tired of the fight, Harry sold his shop after 36 years in business.

Amazon was particularly deadly to the original “everything stores,” the department stores like Sears and J.C. Penney that anchor malls. When the anchor stores shut down, foot traffic slows and smaller shops struggle. Retailers are planning to close more than 4,000 stores in 2019; the 41,201 retail job losses in the first two months of this year were the highest since the Great Recession.

Dead malls trigger not only blight but also property tax losses. The broader shift to online shopping also transfers economic activity from local businesses to corporate coffers, like Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle.

Some of these failed retail spaces have been scooped up, ironically, by Amazon’s suite of physical stores, such as Whole Foods. Amazon also skillfully pits cities against one another and wins tax breaks for its warehouse and data center facilities, starving local budgets even more.

Amazon, of course, argues it is the best friend small business ever had. Jeff Bezos’ 2019 annual letter indicated that 58% of all sales on the website are made by over 2 million independent third-party sellers, who are mostly small in size. In this rendering, Amazon is just a mall, opening its doors for the little guy to access billions of potential customers. “Third-party sellers are kicking our first-party butt,” Bezos exclaimed.

It was a line I repeated to several merchants, mostly to snickers. Take Crazy Harry. In late 2017, Amazon reached out with the opportunity for Harry’s Famous Flowers to sell through its website. Sales representatives promised instant success. “We went live in November,” he says. “I made three transactions, [including] one on Valentine’s Day and one on Christmas.” The closest delivery to his shop was 34 miles away. By the time Harry paid his $39.99 monthly subscription fee for selling on Amazon and a 15% cut of sales, his check came to $6.92. “The gas was $50,” he says.

It wasn’t hard to find the source of the trouble: When Harry searched on Amazon under “flowers in Orlando,” his shop didn’t come up. Without including his name in the search, there was no way for customers to find him. Before long, Harry closed his Amazon account.

Crazy Harry’s troubles could be a function of Amazon running a platform that’s too big to manage. Two million Americans, close to 1% of the U.S. population, sell goods on Amazon. “There’s so much at stake for these sellers,” says Chris McCabe, a former Amazon employee who now runs the consulting site eCommerceChris.com. “They’ve left jobs [to sell on Amazon]. They are supporting themselves and their families.”

Third-party sellers have been a great deal for Amazon—unsurprisingly, since Amazon sets the terms. Sellers pay a flat subscription fee and a percentage of sales, and an extra fee for “Fulfillment by Amazon,” for which Amazon handles customer service, storage and shipping through its vast logistics network. Fee revenue grew to nearly $43 billion in 2018, equal to more than one out of every four dollars that third-party sellers earned.

In other words, Amazon is collecting rent on every sale on its website. This strategy increases selection and convenience for customers, but the sellers, who have nowhere else to go, can get squeezed in the process. Once on the website, sellers are at the mercy of Amazon’s algorithmic placement in search results. They must also navigate rivals’ dirty tricks (like fake one-star reviews that sink sellers in search results) and counterfeit products. And if you get past all that, you must fight the boss level: Amazon, which has 138 house brands. Armed with all the data on sellers’ businesses, Amazon can easily figure out what’s hot and what can be cheaply produced, and then out-compete its own sellers with lower prices and prioritized search results.

Any failure to follow Amazon’s always-changing rules of the road can get a seller suspended, and in that case, Amazon not only stops all future sales, but refuses to release funds from prior sales. And all sellers must sign mandatory arbitration agreements that prevent them from suing Amazon. Several consultants I interviewed talked of sellers crying on the phone, finding themselves trapped after upending their lives to sell on Amazon.

WHILE RETAIL WORKERS LOSE JOBS, AMAZON PICKS UP SOME OF THE UNEMPLOYMENT SLACK, hiring personnel to assemble its packages, make its electronics, and deliver its goods, with a U.S. workforce of more than 200,000, and another 100,000 seasonal workers—though 2018 research from the Conference Board confirmed the jobs created by e-commerce companies like Amazon do not make up for the loss of millions of retail jobs.

Plus, the experience of being a cog in Amazon’s great machine is, shall we say, unhealthy. We know much about the horrors of being an Amazon warehouse worker in the United States. These workplaces are aggressively anti-union. Amazon sets quotas for how many orders are fulfilled, monitoring a worker’s every move. Poor performers may be fired, typically over email. The daily monotony and pressure to perform has pushed workers to suicidal despair. A Daily Beast investigation found 189 instances between October 2013 and October 2018 of 911 calls summoning assistance to deal with suicide attempts or other mental-health emergencies at Amazon warehouses. And even these grunt jobs are insecure; Amazon had to reassure people this year that it wouldn’t turn over all warehouse jobs to robots, even as it rolled out machines that box orders.

Amazon’s other jobs, while less scrutinized than the warehouse workers, can be just as brutal. Thousands of delivery drivers wear Amazon uniforms, use Amazon equipment and work out of Amazon facilities. But they are not technically Amazon employees; they work for outside contractors called delivery service partners. These workers do not qualify for the guaranteed $15 minimum wage Bezos announced to much fanfare last year.

Contracting work out lets Amazon dodge liability for poor labor practices, a trick used by many corporations. At one such contractor in the mid-Atlantic, TL Transportation, one former employee (who requested anonymity) described the work as “running, running, running, rushing. There was no break time.” According to pay stubs, TL built two hours of overtime into its base rate, which is illegal under U.S. labor law. Other workers reported they always worked longer than the time on their pay stubs. Driver Tyhee Hickman of Pennsylvania testified to having to urinate into bottles to maintain the schedule.

Amazon runs plenty of air freight these days as well, through an “Amazon Air” fleet of planes branded with the Amazon logo—but these are also contracted out. At Atlas Air, one of three cargo carriers with Amazon business, pilots have been working without a new union contract since 2011. Atlas pays pilots 30% to 60% below the industry standard, according to Captain Daniel Wells, an Atlas Air pilot and president of the Airline Professionals Association Teamsters Local 1224. Planes are understaffed. “We’ve been critically short of crews,” Wells says. “Everyone is scrambling to keep operations going.”

The go-go-go schedule leaves little time for mechanics; planes go out with stickers indicating deferred maintenance. One Atlas Air flight carrying Amazon packages crashed in Texas in February, killing three workers.

EVEN WHILE DRIVING WORKERS AT A FRENETIC PACE, Amazon doesn’t always deliver on its promise of convenience and efficiency. Many products no longer arrive in 48 hours under Prime’s guaranteed two-day shipping. It’s so challenging to reach customer service that Amazon sells a book on its website about how to do that. Whole Foods shoppers who have groceries delivered get bizarre food substitutions without warning.

Even as two-day shipping is creaking, Amazon has announced a move to one-day shipping, which will strain its systems even further while forcing competitors to adjust. Amazon’s one-day shipping announcement alone caused retail stocks to plummet on April 26, before any changes were implemented.

This feedback effect reveals how Amazon is not merely riding the wave of online retail’s convenience; only a company with ambitions as vast as Amazon’s could influence Fortune 500 business models across America.

Some retailers have given in. Walmart quickly announced its own next-day shipping. Kohl’s sells Amazon Echo devices. Target has bought up competitors to compete with Amazon on a larger scale. Call it concentration creep; one giant business triggers the need for others to get big, too. Corporate America is at once terrified of Amazon and reshaping itself to imitate it.

Take Amazon’s ever more sophisticated ploys to modify consumer behavior. With “personalized pricing,” Amazon uses the data of what someone has paid in the past to test what that person is willing to pay. The price of an item featured in the “buy” box on Amazon’s website may change multiple times per day, and can be tailored to individual shoppers. Amazon has charged more for Kindles based on a buyer’s location, and has steered people to higher-priced products where it makes a greater profit, rather than cheaper versions from outside sellers.

Now, even big-box stores have electronic price tags that retailers can “surge price” when demand increases. Amazon’s Whole Foods stores have become a testing ground for advancing this technique. Prices shown on electronic tags are tested, combined with discounts for Prime members, and relentlessly tweaked.

The potential damage to society from personalized pricing is significant, notes Maurice Stucke, a professor at the University of Tennessee. “It’s not just price discrimination, but also behavioral discrimination,” he says. “Getting people to buy things they might not have otherwise purchased, at the highest price they’re willing to pay.”

Amazon has plenty of options for this behavioral nudging, from listing a fake higher price and crossing it out to make it look like the customer is getting a deal, to its work on a facial recognition system using phone or computer cameras to authenticate purchases. With this tool, Amazon could theoretically read faces and increase prices when someone shows excitement about a product. Amazon has already licensed facial recognition software to local police units for criminal investigations, to outcry from privacy groups.

Then there’s Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant, a powerful tool for manipulation. Alexa was designed to “be like the Star Trek computer,” said Paul Cutsinger, Amazon’s head of voice design education, at a developer conference earlier this year. Users can ask Alexa to play music and podcasts, answer questions, run health and wellness programs, set appointments, make purchases, even raise the temperature in the shower.

Psychologist Robert Epstein, who has pioneered research into search engine manipulation, has done preliminary studies on Alexa. “It looks like you can very easily impact the thinking and decision-making and purchases of people who are undecided,” Epstein says. “That unfortunately gives a small number of companies tremendous power to influence people without them being aware.” For example, Alexa can suggest a wine to go with the pizza you just ordered. It can also encourage you to set up a recurring purchase, the price of which may then go up based on Amazon’s list price.

The influence only increases as Alexa takes in more data. We know that Alexa is constantly watching and listening to users, transcribing what it hears and even transmitting some of that data back to a team of human listeners at Amazon, who “refine” the machine’s comprehension. The surveillance doesn’t only happen on Alexa, but in the smart home devices it integrates with, and on the website where Amazon tracks search and purchase activity. Amazon even has a Ring doorbell and in-home monitor, which sends information back to Amazon. There is no escape. “Devices all around us are watching everything we do, talking to each other, sharing data,” Epstein says. “We’re embedded in a surveillance network.”

EVEN AS IT’S INFLUENCING OUR BEHAVIOR, Amazon is transforming our physical world. José Holguín-Veras, a logistics and urban freight expert at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, estimates that in 2009, there was one daily internet-derived delivery for every 25 people. By 2017, he calculates, this had tripled. “The number of deliveries to households is now larger than the number of deliveries to commercial establishments,” Holguín-Veras says. “In skyscrapers in New York City where 5,000 people live, it’s 750 deliveries a day.”

Think of the difference between one trip to the grocery store for the week, and five or ten trips from the warehouse to your house. Our streets are too narrow and our traffic too plentiful to handle that additional traffic without crippling congestion. Plus, every idling car, and every extra delivery truck on the road, spews more carbon into the atmosphere. Our cities are not designed for the level of freight that instant delivery demands.

More deliveries also means more people staying indoors. “One thing I think about is how much we overlook the community and democracy value of running errands,” says Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “These exchanges—chatting with someone in line, bumping into a neighbor on the street, talking with the store owner—may not be all that significant personally. But this kind of interaction pays off for us collectively in ways we don’t think about or measure or account for in policy-making.”

In These Times asked Frank McAndrew of Knox College, who has researched social isolation, whether Amazon’s perfect efficiency could be alienating. He wasn’t ready to make a definitive statement but did see some red flags. “I do think we’re sort of wired to interact with real people in face-to-face situations,” McAndrew says. “When most of our interactions take place virtually, or with Alexa, it’s not going to be satisfying.”

FOR MOST OF OUR HISTORY, Americans didn’t require a personal digital assistant to answer our every whim. Why are we now reordering our social and economic lives, so one man can accumulate more money than anyone in the history of the planet?

One answer is that Amazon has paid as much attention to capturing government as it has to captivating customers. Amazon’s lobbying spending is among the highest of any company in America. After winning a nationwide procurement contract, over 1,500 cities and states can buy office items through the Amazon Business portal; a federal procurement platform is on the way. Amazon Web Services has the inside track on a $10 billion cloud contract to manage sensitive data for the Pentagon, something it already does for the CIA. That’s part of the reason why Amazon moved its second headquarters (after an absurd, game show-style bidding war that gave the company access to valuable data on hundreds of cities’ planning decisions) to a suburb of Washington, D.C., the seat of national power.

Making the directors of the regulatory state dependent on your services is a genius move. What political figure would dare crack down on the behavior of a trusted partner like Amazon?

In fact, Amazon has relied on government largesse since day one. No sales taxes for online purchases gave it a pricing advantage over other sellers (while a 2018 Supreme Court ruling changed that, the damage had been done). No carbon taxes helped Amazon build energy-intensive businesses dependent on fossil fuels for transportation and server farms. A lack of antitrust enforcement created a path for Amazon to super-size into an e-commerce monopoly. Weak federal labor rules let Amazon stamp out collective bargaining and rely on independent contractors. Mandatory arbitration locked third-party sellers inside Amazon’s private appeals process. Favorable tax law allowed Amazon to apply annual losses in previous years to its past two tax returns, paying no federal taxes on billions in income.

Of course, these rules helped all corporate giants and made executives filthy rich, often at the expense of workers. But Amazon tests the laissez-faire system in unique ways. In a future where Amazon broadens its control over our lives such that citizens have nowhere else to shop, businesses have nowhere else to sell, workers have nowhere else to toil, and governments have no other way to function, then who actually holds the power in our society? Avoiding that dark future requires leaders with the political will to stop it.

Elizabeth Warren’s plan to break up Amazon would rein in what she sees as unfair competition by preventing Amazon from selling products while hosting a website platform for other sellers. Warren also suggests splitting off Whole Foods and the online retailer Zappos, which Amazon bought in 2017 and 2009, respectively.

Fostering competition is a good start, but regulation must also prevent Amazon from bullying suppliers and partners. Lawmakers must force Amazon to pay for the externalities associated with its carbon-intensive delivery network. The company must pay a living wage to its workers, including its so-called independent contractors. It must be accountable to the legal system rather than a corporate-friendly arbitration process. It must not profit from spying on its customers.

If Amazon has caused this much upheaval today, when online shopping is still only 16 percent of retail sales, the future is limitless and grim. We have time to reverse this transfer of power and make it our world instead of Amazon’s. It’s an opportunity we cannot afford to squander.

Bezos Reveals His Ugly Vision For The World He’s Trying To Rule

Posted on June 9, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

“Guess what the best planet is in this solar system?” asked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at a recent media event on his Blue Origin space program.

“It’s easy to know the answer to that question,” he continued. “We’ve sent robotic probes like this one to all of the planets in our solar system. Now, some of them have been fly-bys, but we’ve examined them all. Earth is the best planet. It is not close. This one is really good.”

Bezos then went on to discuss his plan to ship humans off of the best planet in the solar system and send them to live in floating cylinders in space.

Bezos claimed that the growing human population and growing energy consumption will force us to make a choice between “stasis and rationing” and “dynamism and growth”, and claimed that the latter item in his dichotomy is possible only by moving humans off the planet.

“If we’re out in the solar system, we can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins,” Bezos said. “This would be an incredible civilization. What would this future look like? Where would a trillion humans live? Well it’s very interesting, someone named Gerry O’Neill, a physics professor, looked at this question very carefully and he asked a very precise question that nobody had ever asked before, and it was, ‘Is a planetary surface the best place for humans to expand into the solar system?’ And he and his students set to work on answering that question, and they came to a very surprising–for them–counterintuitive answer: No.”

Bezos went on to describe how the limited surface areas, distance, and gravitational forces of the other planets in our solar system make settling on those planets impractical and cost-prohibitive, while constructing giant space cylinders closer to Earth which can hold a million people is far more practical. These cylinders would spin to replicate Earth’s gravitational pull with centrifugal force.

Here are some illustrations Bezos used in his presentation to show us what these “O’Neill colonies” might look like:

“These are really pleasant places to live,” Bezos said. “Some of these O’Neill colonies might choose to replicate Earth cities. They might pick historical cities and mimic them in some way. There’d be whole new types of architecture. These are ideal climates. These are short-sleeve environments. This is Maui on its best day, no rain, no storms, no earthquakes.”

No rain? No weather? Just big, spinning cylinders floating monotonously in space? A trillion divided by a million is one million, which means that the best idea the richest man in the world can come up with for the future of our species is to fill our solar system with a million of these floating homogenized space malls.

“If we build this vision, these O’Neill colonies, where does it take us? What does it mean for Earth?” Bezos asked. “Earth ends up zoned, residential, and light industry. It’ll be a beautiful place to live, it’ll be a beautiful place to visit, it’ll be a beautiful place to go to college, and to do some light industry. But heavy industry, polluting industry, all the things that are damaging our planet, those will be done off Earth. We get to have both. We get to keep this unique gem of a planet, which is completely irreplaceable–there is no Plan B. We have to save this planet. And we shouldn’t give up a future of our grandchildren’s grandchildren of dynamism and growth. We can have both.”

Now, if you look at the behavior of Jeff Bezos, who exploits his employees and destroys his competitors, and who some experts say is trying to take over the underlying infrastructure of our entire economy, you can feel reasonably confident that this man has no intention of leaving “this unique gem of a planet”, nor of having the heirs to his empire leave either. When you see this Pentagon advisory board member and CIA contractor planning to ship humans off the Earth’s surface so the planet can thrive, you may be certain that he’s talking about other humans. The unworthy ones. The ones who weren’t sociopathic enough to climb the capitalist ladder by stepping on the backs of everyone else.

And make no mistake, when Bezos talks about saving the planet for “our grandchildren’s grandchildren”, he’s not just talking about his heirs, he’s talking about himself. Bezos has invested large amounts of wealth in biotech aimed at reversing the aging process and cracking the secret of immortality.

This is the sort of guiding wisdom that is controlling the fate of our species, everyone. The world’s most ambitious plutocrat envisions a world in which, rather than evolving beyond our destructive tendencies and learning to live in collaboration with each other and our environment, we are simply shipped off into space so that he can stretch out and enjoy our beautiful planet. That’s his best idea.

Our plutocratic overlords aren’t just sociopaths. They’re morons.

Bezos’ incredibly shallow vision for humanity reminds me of something Julian Assange said at a 2017 London festival via video link about the way Silicon Valley plutocrats are trying to become immortal by finding a way to upload their brains onto computers.

“I know from our sources deep inside those Silicon Valley institutions, they genuinely believe that they are going to produce artificial intelligences that are so powerful, relatively soon, that people will have their brains digitized, uploaded on these artificial intelligences, and live forever in a simulation, therefore will have eternal life,” Assange said. “It’s a religion for atheists. They’ll have eternal life, and given that you’re in a simulation, why not program the simulation to have endless drug and sex orgy parties all around you. It’s like the 72 virgins, but it’s like the Silicon Valley equivalent.”

I mean, damn. First of all, how stupid do you have to be to overlook the fact that science has virtually no understanding of consciousness and doesn’t even really know what it is? Even if these idiots find a way to upload their neurological patternings onto some AI’s virtual simulation, it’s not like they’d be there to experience it. It would just be a bunch of data running in a computer somewhere, mimicking the personality of a dead person and experienced by no one. People who believe that all there is to them is their dopey mental patterns have not spent any time whatsoever exploring what they are, and have no idea what it is to be human. The fact that anyone would think they could become immortal by digitizing their churning, repetitive personality patterns is crazy, and the fact that they’d want to is even crazier.

People who think this way should shut up and learn about life, not rule the world in a plutocratic system where money translates directly to political influence. People who think that humans can be happily unplugged from the ecosystemic context in which they evolved, the ecosystemic context of which they are an inseparable part, and people who think they can become immortal by uploading their wanky personalities onto a computer should shut the fuck up, spend some time alone with themselves, maybe try some psilocybin mushrooms, and learn a bit about what it means to be human. They certainly shouldn’t be calling the shots.

Earth is our home. It’s what we’re made for. The earth went through a lot to give you life. Sparks had to catch, oceans had to freeze, billions of cells had to survive endless disease, all of these amazing things had to happen just right to give you life. You belong here. You are as much a creation of the earth as the air you breathe. You may feel like a singular organism but you’re actually as much a singular organism as one of the many billions of organisms that make up your body. You and earth are one. And because you evolved on earth, you are perfectly adapted to earth and it is perfectly adapted to you. It yearns for your breath as you yearn for its breeze on your face.

We absolutely have the ability to transcend our unhealthy tendencies as a species which, when you really look at them, are merely creations of a mind that feels alone and separate and like it is in a constant fight for its life. If we just put down our mental swords for a hot second and learned to channel our creativity into the thriving of our society and our ecosystem instead of into killing and out-competing one another then we will be okay. The way out of this is the way towards health. For example, once women have been given back even the most basic rights of sexual sovereignty such as birth control and access to terminations as they have in most western countries, birth rates fall below replication levels. Women’s own internal bodily wisdom makes the problem of overpopulation moot if given half a chance just to make decisions on behalf of her own body.

Another example. People lament the lack of jobs due to AI and automation but we actually desperately need people to do less. We need a whole lot of people doing nothing, not using the roads every morning and evening, not producing widgets that no one needs and creating advertising campaigns to brainwash people into buying them anyway, just to have them end up in the ocean or leaching heavy metals into the earth. Having a whole lot of people doing nothing for more of their week would take the strain off of our health systems as the single biggest factor in disease is stress. Studies show that stress also shrinks your brain and lessens your creativity and innovation too, so all the punitive-minded libertarians out there who are worried that we won’t progress as a species if we start sharing resources around to people who aren’t doing things that traditionally made money because we’ll be too relaxed can chill too. We don’t need to crack the whip to get people to make beautiful innovations. Humans are at their best when feeling playful and relaxed. Nearly all the technological advances of the past came from people who had a lot of leisure time due to their privileged status. Releasing humans from 9 to 5 slavery would be the fastest way to slow our resource consumption and take pressure off of all our systems and would have the added benefit of making us smarter, funnier, more creative and more innovative too.

And for that matter, having every idea and innovation be required to make money is also killing us. We need the ability to fund things that will not make profit. How many times have you been in a conversation and someone’s come up with an idea that will solve a major environmental, energy or health problem and no one’s got excited because it will never get off the ground because it will never make money? Fully disappearing a problem never made anyone any money. Healthy people, for example, never spend a dime at the doctors. The way out of this is detaching human innovation from money and allowing solutions to flourish without the imposition of also having to turn a profit.

These are merely three things I can think of that will dramatically improve our collective ability to reverse this extinction event and all we have to do is get saner, stop punishing each other, start sharing and start collaborating. The only issue we have as humans is that a handful of highly competitive, highly sociopathic and yet incredibly mediocre people have all the power to build our future for us with virtually no input from anyone else. Because all the power in the form of all the money has been allowed to pool into the hands of those most willing to do whatever it takes to get it, we have just a few ruthless yet surprisingly dumb individuals calling the shots on the future of all living beings. The competitive mindset that gave rise to Jeff Bezos is the exact opposite of the kind of collaborative, harmonious mindset we’ll need if we’re going to overcome the challenges we face on the horizon.

1% Politics and the New Gilded Age

Posted on May 30, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Rajan Menon

Source: Intrepid Report

Despair about the state of our politics pervades the political spectrum, from left to right. One source of it, the narrative of fairness offered in basic civics textbooks — we all have an equal opportunity to succeed if we work hard and play by the rules; citizens can truly shape our politics — no longer rings true to most Americans. Recent surveys indicate that substantial numbers of them believe that the economy and political system are both rigged. They also think that money has an outsized influence on politics. Ninety percent of Democrats hold this view, but so do 80 percent of Republicans. And careful studies confirm what the public believes.

None of this should be surprising given the stark economic inequality that now marks our society. The richest 1 percent of American households currently account for 40 percent of the country’s wealth, more than the bottom 90 percent of families possess. Worse yet, the top 0.1 percent has cornered about 20percent of it, up from 7 percent in the mid-1970s. By contrast, the share of the bottom 90 percent has since then fallen from 35 percent to 25 percent. To put such figures in a personal light, in 2017, three men — Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates — possessed more wealth ($248.5 billion) than the bottom 50 percent of Americans.

Over the last four decades, economic disparities in the U.S. increased substantially and are now greater than those in other wealthy democracies. The political consequence has been that a tiny minority of extremely wealthy Americans wields disproportionate influence, leaving so many others feeling disempowered.

What Money Sounds Like

Two recent headline-producing scandals highlight money’s power in society and politics.

The first involved super-affluent parents who used their wealth to get their manifestly unqualified children into highly selective colleges and universities that previously had reputations (whatever the reality) for weighing the merits of applicants above their parents’ wealth or influence.

The second concerned Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s reported failure to reveal, as election laws require, more than $1 million in low-interest loans that he received for his 2012 Senate campaign. (For that lapse, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) fined Senator Cruz a modest $35,000.) The funds came from Citibank and Goldman Sachs, the latter his wife’s longtime employer. News of those undisclosed loans, which also cast doubt on Cruz’s claim that he had funded his campaign in part by liquidating the couple’s assets, only added to the sense that favoritism now suffuses the politics of a country that once prided itself on being the world’s model democracy. (Journalists covering the story couldn’t resist pointing out that the senator had often lambasted Wall Street’s “crony capitalism” and excessive political influence.)

The Cruz controversy is just one reflection of the coming of 1 percent politics and 1 percent elections to America at a moment when the first billionaire has been ensconced in the Oval Office for more than two years, posing as a populist no less.

Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, money has poured into politics as never before. That’s because the Court ruled that no limits could be placed on corporate and union spending aimed at boosting or attacking candidates running for political office. Doing so, the justices determined in a 5-4 vote, would be tantamount to restricting individuals’ right to free speech, protected by the First Amendment. Then came the Court’s 2014 McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission decision (again 5-4), which only increased money’s influence in politics by removing the aggregate limit on an individual’s contribution to candidates and to national party committees.

In an age when money drives politics, even ex-presidents are cashing in. Fifteen years after Bill Clinton departed the White House, he and Hillary had amassed a net worth of $75 million — a 6,150percent increase in their wealth. Barack and Michelle Obama’s similarly soared from $1.3 million in 2000 to $40 million last year — and they’re just warming up. Key sources of these staggering increases include sky-high speaking fees (often paid by large corporations), including $153 million for the Clintons between February 2001 and May 2016. George W. Bush also made tens of millions of dollars in this fashion and, in 2017, Obama received $400,000 for a single speech to a Wall Street firm.

No wonder average Americans believe that the political class is disconnected from their day-to-day lives and that ours is, in practice, a democracy of the rich in which money counts (and counts and counts).

Cash for College

Now let’s turn to what those two recent scandals tell us about the nexus between wealth and power in America.

First, the school scam. Parents have long hired pricey tutors to coach their children for the college admissions tests, sometimes paying them hundreds of dollars an hour, even $1,500 for 90 minutes of high-class prep. They’ve also long tapped their exclusive social and political connections to gin up razzle-dazzle internships to embellish those college applications. Anyone who has spent as much time in academia as I have knows that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time. So has the practice of“legacy admissions” — access to elite schools especially for the kids of alumni of substantial means who are, or might prove to be, donors. The same is true of privileged access to elite schools for the kids of mega-donors. Consider, for instance, that $2.5 million donation Charles Kushner made to Harvard in 1998, not long before his son Jared applied. Some of the folks who ran Jared’s high school noted that he wasn’t exactly a whiz-bang student or someone with sky-high SAT scores, but — surprise! — he was accepted anyway.

What’s new about the recent revelations is that they show the extent to which today’s deep-pocketed helicopter parents have gone into overdrive, using brazen schemes to corrupt the college admissions process yet more. One unnamed parent spent a cool $6.5 million to ensure the right college admitted his or her child. Others paid hefty amounts to get their kids’ college admissions test scores falsified or even hired proxies to take the tests for them. Famous actors and financial titans made huge payments to university sports coaches, who then lied to admissions officers, claiming that the young applicants were champions they had recruited in sports like water polo, crew, or tennis. (The kids may have known how to swim, row, or play tennis, but star athletes they were not.)

Of course, as figures on the growing economic inequality in this country since the 1970s indicate, the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the connections or the cash to stack the deck in such ways, even assuming they would do so. Hence, the public outrage, even though parents generally understand that not every aspirant can get into a top school — there aren’t enough spots — just as many know that their children’s future happiness and sense of fulfillment won’t depend on whether they attend a prestigious college or university.

Still, the unfairness and chicanery highlighted by the admissions scandal proved galling, the more so as the growing crew of fat cats corrupting the admissions process doubtless also preach the gospel of American meritocracy. Worse, most of their kids will undoubtedly present their fancy degrees as proof that quality wins out in our society, never mind that their starting blocks were placed so far ahead of the competition.

To add insult to injury, the same parents and children may even portray admissions policies designed to help students who lack wealth or come from underrepresented communities as violations of the principles of equal opportunity and fairness, democracy’s bedrock. In reality, students from low-income families, or even those of modest means, are startlingly less likely to be admitted to top private universities than those from households in the top 10 percent. In fact, applicants from families in the top 1 percent are now 77 times more likely than in the bottom 20 percent to land in an elite college, and 38 of those schools admit more kids from families in that top percentage than from the bottom 60 percent.

Buying Politics (and Politicians), American-Style

Now, let’s return to the political version of the same — the world in which Ted Cruz swims so comfortably. There, too, money talks, which means that those wealthy enough to gain access to, and the attention of, lawmakers have huge advantages over others. If you want political influence, whether as a person or a corporation, having the wealth needed to make big campaign contributions — to individuals or groups — and to hire top-drawer lobbyists makes a world of difference.

Official data on the distribution of family income in the United States show that the overwhelming majority of Americans can’t play that game, which remains the preserve of a tiny super-rich minority. In 2015, even with taxes and government-provided benefits included, households in the lowest 20 percent accounted for only about 5 percent of total income. Their average income — not counting taxes and government-provided assistance — was only $20,000. The share of the bottom 50 percent — families making $61,372 or less — dropped from 20 percent to 12 percent between 1978 and 2015. By contrast, families in the top 1 percent earned nearly 50 percent of total income, averaging $215,000 a year — and that’s only income, not wealth. The super-rich have plenty of the latter, those in the bottom 20 percent next to none.

Before we proceed, a couple of caveats about money and political clout. Money doesn’t always prevail. Candidates with more campaign funds aren’t guaranteed victory, though the time politicians spend raising cash leaves no doubt that they believe it makes a striking difference. In addition, money in politics doesn’t operate the way simple bribery does. The use of it in pursuit of political influence works more subtly, and often — in the new era opened by the Supreme Court — without the slightest need to violate the law.

Still, in Donald Trump’s America, who would claim that money doesn’t talk? If nothing else, from inaugural events — for Trump’s inaugural $107 million was raised from a host of wealthy donors with no limits on individual payments, 30 of which totaled $1 million or more — to gala fundraisers, big donors get numerous opportunities to schmooze with those whose campaigns they’ve helped bankroll. Yes, there’s a limit — currently $5,600 — on how much any individual can officially give to a single election campaign, but the ultra-wealthy can simply put their money into organizations formed solely to influence elections as well as into various party committees.

Individuals, companies, and organizations can, for instance, give money to political action committees (PACs) and Super PACs. Though bound by rules, both entities still have lots of leeway. PACs face no monetary limits on their independent efforts to shape elections, though they can’t accept corporate or union money or take more than $5,000 from individuals. They can provide up to $5,000 to individual election campaigns and $15,000 per party committee, but there’s no limit on what they can contribute in the aggregate. Super PACs have far more running room. They can rake in unlimited amounts from a variety of sources (as long as they’re not foreign) and, like PACs, can spend limitless sums to shape elections, providing they don’t give money directly to candidates’ campaigns.

Then there are the dark money groups, which can receive financial contributions from any source, American or foreign. Though their primary purpose is to push policies, not individual campaigns, they can engage in election-related work, provided that no more than half their funds are devoted to it. Though barred from donating to individual campaigns, they can pour unlimited money into Super PACs and, unlike PACs and Super PACs, don’t have to disclose who gave them the money or how much. Between 2008 and 2018, dark money groups spent $1 billion to influence elections.

In 2018, 2,395 Super PACs were working their magic in this country. They raised $1.6 billion and spent nearly $809 million. Nearly 78 percent of the money they received came from 100 donors. They, in turn, belonged to the wealthiest 1 percent, who provided 95 percent of what those Super PACs took in.

As the 2018 congressional elections kicked off, the four wealthiest Super PACs alone had $113.4 million on hand to support candidates they favored, thanks in substantial measure to business world donors. In that election cycle, 31 individuals ponied up more than $5 million apiece, while contributions from the top four among them ranged from almost $40 million to $123 million.

The upshot: if you’re running for office and advocate policies disliked by wealthy individuals or by companies and organizations with lots of cash to drop into politics, you know from the get-go that you now have a problem.

Wealth also influences political outcomes through the lobbying industry. Here again, there are rules, but even so, vast numbers of lobbyists and eye-popping amounts of lobbying money now are at the heart of the American political system. In 2018 alone, the 50 biggest lobbying outfits, largely representing big companies, business associations, and banks, spent $540 million, and the grand total for lobbying that year alone was $3.4 billion.

Nearly 350 of those lobbyists were former legislators from Congress. Officials departing from senior positions in the executive branch have also found artful ways to circumvent presidential directives that prohibit them from working as lobbyists for a certain number of years.

Do unions and public interest groups also lobby? Sure, but there’s no contest between them and corporations. Lee Drutman of the New America think tank notes that, for every dollar the former spent in 2015, corporate donors spent $34. Unsurprisingly, only one of the top 20 spenders on lobbying last year was a union or a public-interest organization.

The sums spent by individual companies to gain political influence can be breathtaking. Take now-embattled Boeing. It devoted $15 million to lobbying in 2018 — and that’s not counting its campaign contributions, using various channels. Those added another $8.4 million in the last two-and-a-half years. Yet Boeing only placed 11th among the top 20 corporate spenders on lobbying last year. Leading the pack: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at $94.8 million.

Defenders of the status quo will warn that substantially reducing money’s role in American politics is sure to threaten democracy and civil liberties by ceding undue power to the state and, horror of horrors, putting us on the road to “socialism,” the right wing’s bogeyman du jour. This is ludicrous. Other democracies have taken strong steps to prevent economic inequality from subverting their politics and haven’t become less free as a result. Even those democracies that don’t limit political contributions have adopted measures to curb the power of money, including bans on television ads (a huge expense for candidates in American elections: $3 billion in 2018 alone just for access to local stations), free airtime to allow competitors to disseminate their messages, and public funds to ease the financial burden of election campaigns. Compared to other democracies, the United States appears to be in a league of its own when it comes to money’s prominence in politics.

Those who favor continuing business as usual like to point out that federal “matching funds” exist to help presidential candidates not be steamrolled by competitors who’ve raised mounds of money. Those funds, however, do no such thing because they come with stringent limits on total spending. Candidates who accept matching funds for a general election cannot accept contributions from individuals. Moreover, matching funds are capped at $20 million, which is a joke considering that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent a combined $1.2 billion in individual contributions alone during the 2012 presidential election. (Super PACs spent another $350 million to help Romney and $100 million to back Obama.)

A New American Tradition?

Rising income inequality, wage stagnation, and slowing social mobility hurt ordinary Americans economically, even as they confer massive social and political advantages on the mega-rich — and not just when it comes to college admissions and politics either.

Even the Economist, a publication that can’t be charged with sympathy for left-wing ideas, warned recently of the threat economic inequality poses to the political agency of American citizens. The magazine cited studies showing that, despite everything you’ve heard about the power of small donations in recent political campaigns, 1 percent of the population actually provides a quarter of all the money spent on politics by individuals and 80 percent of what the two major political parties raise. Thanks to their wealth, a minuscule economic elite as well as big corporations now shape policies, notably on taxation and expenditure, to their advantage on an unprecedented scale. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans support stricter laws to prevent wealth from hijacking politics and want the Citizens United ruling overturned. But then just how much does the voice of the majority matter? Judging from the many failed efforts to pass such laws, not much.

Unrealistically Great Expectations

Posted on May 29, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Our expectations have continued ever higher even as the pie is shrinking..

Let’s see if we can tie together four social dynamics: the elite college admissions scandal, the decline in social mobility, the rising sense of entitlement and the unrealistically ‘great expectations’ of many Americans.

As many have noted, the nation’s financial and status rewards are increasingly flowing to the top 5%, what many call a winner-take-all or winner-take-most economy.

This is the primary source of widening wealth and income inequality: wealth and income are disproportionately accruing to the top slice of earners and owners of productive capital.

This concentration manifests in a broad-based decline in social mobility: it’s getting harder and harder to break into the narrow band (top 5%) who collects the lion’s share of the economy’s gains.

Historian Peter Turchin has identified the increasing burden of parasitic elites as one core cause of social and economic collapse. In Turchin’s reading, economies that can support a modest-sized class of parasitic elites buckle when the class of elites expecting a free pass to wealth and power expands faster than what the economy can support.

The same dynamic applies to productive elites: as I have often mentioned, graduating 1 millions STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) PhDs doesn’t magically guarantee 1 million jobs will be created for the graduates.

Such a costly and specialized education was once scarce, but now it’s relatively common, and this manifests in the tens of thousands of what I call academic ronin, i.e. PhDs without academic tenure or stable jobs in industry.

This glut is a global: I’ve known many people with PhDs from top universities in the developed world who have struggled to find a tenured professorship or a high-level research position anywhere in the world.

In other words, what was once a surefire ticket to status, security and superior pay is no longer surefire.

No wonder wealthy parents are so anxious to fast-track their non-superstar offspring by hook or by crook.

There is an even larger dynamic in play. As I explained here recently, the economic pie is shrinking, not just the pie of gains that can be distributed but the pie of opportunity.

Would parents and students be so anxious about their prospects if opportunities abounded for average students? The narrowing of opportunities to secure a stable career and livelihood is driving the frenzy to get into an elite university.

As everyone seeks an advantage, there’s a vast expansion of people with advanced diplomas: what was once relatively scarce (and thus valuable) is no longer scarce and therefore no longer very valuable.

The soaring cost of the middle-class membership basics–home ownership, healthcare and access to college–has drastically reduced the number of households who can afford these basics.

Two generations ago, just about any frugal working-class household with two wage-earners could save up a down payment for a modest home and later, save enough to put their children through the local state college.

Now, even two relatively well-paid wage earners in Left and Right Coast urban areas cannot afford to buy a house or put their kids through college. They are lucky to afford the rent, never mind buying a house.

As the number of upper-middle class slots declines, expectations have risen.This manifests in two ways: a rising sense of entitlement, which broadly speaking is the belief that the material security of middle class life should be available without great sacrifice.

The second manifestation is is higher expectations of material life in general: not only should we all have access to healthcare, college and home ownership, we also “deserve” to eat out every day, own luxury brand items, take resort vacations, and so on.

In a recent pre-recording conversation with a podcast host, we were talking about the number of average workers who think very little (apparently) of buying a $15 breakfast and/or a $20 lunch for themselves every day, plus an expensive coffee or beverage. This contrasts with the “old school” expectations which reserved lunches in restaurants for executives with expense accounts or The Boss. Everyone else filled a thermos with coffee at home and packed a brown bag lunch (or kau-kau tin in Hawaii).

From this perspective, $25 a day is $125 a week or $6,250 annually (a 50-week year). That’s $12,500 annually for a two wage-earner household. Five years of foregoing this luxury yields a nest egg of $62,500, a down payment for a $300,000 house, or the full cost of a four-year university education for two students who attend the local state university and who live at home.

(Sidebar note: a kind person gave us a $50 gift certificate to a popular casual-dining breakfast-lunch cafe. I reckoned we’d get a nice chunk of change after ordering two basic sandwiches and one beer. The $50 didn’t cover the three items, much less the tip. I nearly fell out of my chair. Over $50 for two sandwiches and a beer? And yet the place is jammed with people young and old, and I wondered: is everyone here earning $200,000+ annually, i.e. a top 5% income? If not, how can they afford such a costly luxury?)

As I noted earlier this month in the blog, the Federal Reserve’s obsession with generating a “wealth effect” by inflating bubbles in stocks and housing have enriched owners of capital at the expense of the young.

But even if we set aside the perverse and destructive impact of this disastrous policy, the economy is changing in structural ways. Scarcity value is becoming, well, scarcer. Global competition has reduced the scarcity value of education, ordinary labor and capital, and so the gains flowing to these has declined accordingly.

Yet our expectations have continued ever higher even as the pie is shrinking. Common sense suggests realigning expectations with a realistic appraisal of what’s possible and what sacrifices are necessary is a good first step.

Surveillance Capitalism

Posted on May 19, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By John Bucher

Source: Adbusters

The alarm beside your bed rings, triggered by an event in your calendar. The smart thermostat in your bedroom senses your motion and turns on the hot water, reporting your movements to a central database at the same time.

News and social updates ping your phone, with your decision whether to click them carefully monitored (and parameters adjusted accordingly). How far and where your morning run takes you, the conditions of your commute, the contents of your text messages, the words your smart speaker overhears, the actions you make under all-seeing cameras, your impulse purchases, your online searches (and selections) of dates and mates – all recorded, rendered as data, uploaded to the cloud, processed, and analyzed. This happens so often and so extensively that we become numb, forgetting that this is not some dystopian imagining of the future. It’s the present.

Welcome to surveillance capitalism.

Google and Facebook might not call to mind the belching smoke stacks and child labourers of the Industrial Revolution, but their leaders have revealed themselves to be as ruthless and profit-seeking as any Gilded Age tycoon. Instead of mining the natural landscape, however, surveillance capitalists extract their raw material from human experience.

“Google is a shape-shifter, but each shape manifests the same aim: to hunt and capture raw material.

Baby, wonʼt you ride my car? Talk to my phone? Wear my shirt? Use my app?”

Fortunately for them, the surveillance matrix of present-day capitalism provides plenty of inputs to work with. It should; they built it. We are the source of what technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational by-products of our every connected movement and decision. As it happens, very little of the data is interesting or important on its own. So why are surveillance capitalists vacuuming it up from every corner of our lives? Because at scale, it furnishes a startlingly accurate picture of human behaviour. Behaviour modification is a numbers game, and the prediction algorithms are hungry for ever more of your data.

You know the old saw that if the service is free, the product is you? Turns out it isn’t true.

To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, people are neither customer nor product. We are more like the elephant, that most majestic mammal—or, at least, part of one. What surveillance capitalists are really interested in is our behaviour, our preferences—our ivory. And when, like poachers, they get it, are they inclined to worry about what happens to the rest of the elephant?

No, to the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we aren’t even the product. We are the abandoned carcass.

The Great Unraveling Begins: Distraction, Lies, Infighting, Betrayal

Posted on May 14, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The good news is renewal becomes possible when the entire rotten status quo collapses in a putrid heap.

There are two basic pathways to systemic collapse: external shocks or internal decay. The two are not mutually exclusive, of course; it can be argued that the most common path is internal decay weakens the empire/state and an external shock pushes the rotted structure off the cliff.

As Dave of the X22 Report and I discuss in The World Is About To Change & It’s Going To Be Glorious, we are in the early stages of terminal internal decay.There are a number of dynamics shared by decaying empires/states:

1. The ruling elites lose the moral imperative to sacrifice for the good of the empire/state. Instead they use the power of the state to further their own private interests and agendas.

2. The ruling elites start “fudging” reports (i.e. lies are presented as truths) and promoting narratives to mask their self-aggrandizement and the erosion of the nation/empire under their self-interested rule.

In other words, the elites know the public would resist their leadership if the truth were widely known, so the ruling elites devote tremendous resources to massaging the news to distract the public from reality and reflect positively on their self-serving leadership.

Since the weaknesses of the empire are being hidden, they cannot be addressed, and so rot that could have been fixed early becomes widespread and fatal.

3. Flush with the state’s wealth and power, the ruling elite splinters into warring camps which squander the empire’s remaining wealth on private battles over which camp will rule what appears solid and eternal–the empire.

4. As the elites battle it out, the nation/empire falls apart as the leadership’s focus is on internecine conflicts over the spoils of the empire, rather than on preserving the foundations of the empire’s wealth and security.

5. As the truth inevitably leaks out, the public grasps the enormity of the elites’ betrayal of the nation and the public interest. Faith in the elites and the institutions they control plummets, and the Great Unraveling becomes unstoppable.

6. In a last-ditch effort to save their wealth and power, the elites distract the public with Bread and Circuses– “free money” in various guises (Universal Basic Income, Modern Monetary Theory, etc.)–and the distracting Circus of political theater and a surfeit of entertainment.

Whether the elites or the public are aware of it or not, America is well down the path to terminal internal decay: Distraction, Lies, Infighting, Betrayal.

The good news is renewal becomes possible when the entire rotten status quo collapses in a putrid heap of broken promises, dysfunctional institutions, blatant lies, unpayable debts and cascading defaults.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: Inequality

The Great Unraveling Begins: Distraction, Lies, Infighting, Betrayal