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Jeff Bezos’s Corporate Takeover of Our Lives

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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

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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.

 

HOW THE AMERICAN CULTURE OF CONVENIENCE IS KILLING US

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TROY, OH – MAY 11: An employee restocks a shelf in the grocery section of a Wal-Mart Supercenter May 11, 2005 in Troy, Ohio. Wal-Mart, America’s largest retailer and the largest company in the world based on revenue, has evolved into a giant economic force for the U.S. economy. With growth, the company continues to weather criticism of low wages, anti-union policies as well as accusations that it has homogenized America’s retail economy and driven traditional stores and shops out of business. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

By Daisy Luther

Source: Waking Times

In the United States, we are lucky to have massive convenience at our fingertips. I was talking to one of the instructors for the urban survival course, who is from Sweden, on a car ride. He was blown away by some of the things I told him about the levels of convenience and comfort in the United States. Things I completely took for granted don’t even exist there. I thought some of you might be interested in hearing about some of the insights we discussed.

Before I left for the course, I was walking my dogs a mile or two every day with my dogs, but that was about it. I thought it was enough but I learned during the field exercises that it wasn’t even close to the physicality required during an SHTF situation. But I digress. Let’s get back to convenience.

A caveat before people respond indignantly and tell me about all the inconvenience with which they deal every day: this is an opinion piece. Obviously many people in America still work out hard and have manual jobs. But when two-thirds of American adults and 30% of American children are overweight or obese, you have to see that you are not in the majority.

And it’s the majority here that I’m discussing. Between a combination of low-quality food and extremely sedentary lifestyles, the majority are killing themselves with convenience.

The American Culture of Convenience

The first thing that struck me when I landed in the Balkans was how different their lifestyle is from ours in the United States. But the longer I’ve been here, the more obvious it has become.

In the United States, depending on where you live, everything is dropped in your lap.

Food can be quickly acquired by shouting your order into a microphone and driving around a building, all without you having to leave your car. And if you live in a larger town or city, with the advent of services like GrubHub and DoorDash, the food delivered to your home is no longer the domain of pizza chains. You can have your choice of practically any restaurant in town brought right to your door within 45 minutes.

But it isn’t just about food. Instacart offers pick-up services from a wide variety of stores, including places like chain grocers, Wal-Mart, and Target. All you have to do is drive up, let them know by phone that you’ve arrived, and pop your trunk. Poof. Your shopping is done. In some cities, you can even use services like Instacart to have these things brought to your door.

Amazon has brought us practically anything else we could want with two-day shipping, regardless of where you live in the country. Gone are the days of scouring half a dozen stores to locate the whatchamacallit you needed. A quick search on Amazon and One-Click ordering and it’s yours within 48 hours and you never moved off your comfy chair.

If you need to go somewhere you don’t even have to drive yourself or take public transit. Uber or Lyft will happily send somebody to pick you up and drive you anywhere you need to go for a reasonable price, and you can watch the approach of your driver from the convenience of your phone.

Entire billion dollar industries are evolving to make our lives more convenient and easy every single day. Imagine how stunned our hunter-gatherer ancestors would be to discover we don’t even have to leave the house to be clothed and fed in epic abundance.

We don’t walk much, either.

And speaking of drive-thrus and driving to the store to get your Instacart packages, we drive everywhere. Part of this is because of the way suburbia is developed. It’s rare to live in a neighborhood where you can walk to the market, the bakery, and the wine store. So instead of walking to get our goods, we drive there, dash in, and get back in our cars. Those in big cities probably walk far more than those in suburbia, and for those in the country, it depends if they actually have a place to walk and whether they’re taking care of a large property.

And if we’re not walking to run our errands, we’re not carrying stuff. We get as close as possible with our cars if heavy groceries need to be lugged in and we carry as little as we can if we’re heading somewhere. When you walk the dogs, you might take your phone and some poop bags but you’re generally not taking it as a training opportunity and strapping on a pack.

Then there are the stairs.

Even two-story buildings in the United States have elevators much of the time because everything, by law, has to be easily accessible to every person. (And no, I’m not saying that people in wheelchairs need to try to haul themselves up the stairs. I’m discussing a trend.) But it goes even further than that. Adding elevators to your home is a growing trend in both the United States and Canada. New home builders are including elevators in the original design of some homes.

On the other hand, in Europe, they don’t have elevators in many buildings with fewer than five floors. I walked up and down more stairs in the past month than I have in the past year at home combined, and I live in a three-story house.

And the list of conveniences that would blow the minds of people I met in the Balkans goes on.

It’s an agoraphobic’s paradise in the United States.

You can get all sorts of mobile services that come to your door – everything from hairstyling to dog grooming. Other people mow our lawns, clean our homes, service our vehicles, and take care of us in general. There are even people who hire others to walk their dogs. Some people definitely need help with physical tasks but able-bodied people should be able to do a little yard work, shouldn’t we? Especially if we’re preparing for some kind of apocalypse.

In many areas, things are perfectly level, the sidewalks are carefully maintained (because who wants to ask for trouble in our litigious society), and a slight incline is considered a “hill” that people avoid to make their dog walk a little easier.

You can get meal kits brought to your door with every single ingredient you need to make a gourmet meal, right down to the seasonings accurately doled out in little packages. You can have fresh fruits and vegetables dropped off at your door by your local CSA. You can get subscription services of all types with the delivery of things like cosmetics, fitness gear, food from exotic locales, wine, candy, home decor items, socks, and dog paraphernalia.

Looking at it from the perspective of the area where I’ve been spending time, it’s simply mind-boggling that all of these riches are brought to you at the click of a button.

And it’s killing us.

As I mentioned earlier in this article, the obesity rate in the United States is staggering. A lot of it is our food. Thanks to subsidization by the USDA, many of the foods that are cheap are highly processed with low-quality ingredients. The NY Times reports:

At a time when almost three-quarters of the country is overweight or obese, it comes as no surprise that junk foods are the largest source of calories in the American diet. Topping the list are grain-based desserts like cookies, doughnuts and granola bars. (Yes, granola bars are dessert.)

That’s according to data from the federal government, which says that breads, sugary drinks, pizza, pasta dishes and “dairy desserts” like ice cream are also among Americans’ top 10 sources of calories.

What do these foods have in common? They are largely the products of seven crops and farm foods — corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sorghum, milk and meat — that are heavily subsidized by the federal government, ensuring that junk foods are cheap and plentiful, experts say.

Between 1995 and 2010, the government doled out $170 billion in agricultural subsidies to finance the production of these foods, the latter two in part through subsidies on feed grains. While many of these foods are not inherently unhealthy, only a small percentage of them are eaten as is. Most are used as feed for livestock, turned into biofuels or converted to cheap products and additives like corn sweeteners, industrial oils, processed meats and refined carbohydrates. (source)

And even when we try to clean up our diets, foods are genetically modified, produce is doused in pesticides, and it’s packaged in all sorts of hormone-disrupting material that leaches in when you heat it up.

But it’s not just the crappy food. A lot of folks in the United States just do not get off their butts. And – I hate to say it – but I’m talking to a lot of people in the survival and preparedness world. Sitting at a keyboard or phone typing all day while Netflix plays in the background is sedentary to a deadly degree. On average Americans sit for 8.2 hours per day and this does not include the average 7-ish hours a day we’re sleeping.  And when we’re not sitting, it doesn’t mean we’re doing things that are good for us. We spend a great deal of time standing in line and driving in our cars. And the trend toward inactivity is only increasing.

Meanwhile, obesity contributes to many diseases such as:

  • High blood glucose (sugar) or diabetes.
  • High blood pressure (hypertension).
  • High blood cholesterol and triglycerides (dyslipidemia, or high blood fats).
  • Heart attacks due to coronary heart disease, heart failure, and stroke.
  • Bone and joint problems, more weight puts pressure on the bones and joints. This can lead to osteoarthritis, a disease that causes joint pain and stiffness.
  • Stopping breathing during sleep (sleep apnea). This can cause daytime fatigue or sleepiness, poor attention, and problems at work.
  • Gallstones and liver problems.
  • Some cancers.

The National Institute of Health is incredibly concerned about the future of overweight, sedentary Americans.

More recent evidence points to differential roles for body fat distribution patterns, in addition to excess overall adiposity, in elevating risk of many major chronic diseases. The large numbers of children entering adulthood overweight, together with increased weight gain in adulthood, portend an enormous burden in terms of human suffering, lost productivity, and health care expenditure in the coming decades. (source)

And – since it’s the purview of this website – imagine if the SHTF and you were too overweight and sedentary to go out and acquire the supplies you need to survive. Imagine what will happen when your medication runs out and you have a preventable disease brought on by your sedentary lifestyle. Imagine how your family will feel watching you suffer.

You need to add more movement to your life.

Unless you are among the 23% of Americans who meet the national exercise guidelines, you need to add more movement to your life. I suspect that there are a lot of people who believe they are disabled because getting started on a movement program is hard. It really does hurt, I know. But there’s a very good chance as you begin to move more it will become far easier. Don’t give in to it if your doctor says, “Oh, you’re disabled” and hands you a sticker for your car unless you really, truly are. If there’s even a glimmer of doubt in your mind, try to move just a few more steps each day. Instead of using the scooter to shop, push a cart to give yourself something to lean on. You aren’t training for a marathon – 10 extra steps a day will add up if you keep on pushing. But, MOVE.

The best way to increase movement is to decrease convenience. I don’t mean that you need to suddenly become a hunter-gatherer but you need to get off your duff. (To get started, check out this article or Bug Out Boot Camp and of course, always contact your doctor before beginning an exercise program. Blah, blah, blah.)

You need to carry heavy things instead of getting them delivered. You need to climb the stairs instead of taking the elevator or escalator. You need to actually go inside the store to do your shopping instead of sitting in your car, waiting for stuff to get loaded into your trunk. Park at the back of the parking lot, or better yet, at a store further away. Quit ordering from Amazon and buy things locally so you can walk around the store. Look for the hills and walk up and down them instead of avoiding them. If you want to eat restaurant food, go to the dad-gum restaurant. Find a place to walk to every day – maybe the post office, a coffee shop, or the dog park – and make it part of your routine.

It’s not unusual in other parts of the world to walk 8, 10, or even more miles, every single day. You don’t need to start there but maybe you should strive to get there. Once you’re in your groove, it should only take an hour or so to walk 4 miles. Using your feet as transportation is one of the healthiest things you can do.

 

Stick to the Plan

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Illustration by Mike Faille

Reclaiming central planning from the clutches of corporations

By Brendan James

Source: The Baffler

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state—Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

–CCA Chairman Arthur Jensen, Network

WHAT DO JEFF BEZOS AND JOSEPH STALIN have in common? A certain supervillain chic. Cold-blooded austerity. Iron discipline. A penchant for back-breaking output targets. A healthy appetite for terror.

Yet perhaps their most surprising overlap is that the General Secretary and the chairman of Amazon, Inc. built two of history’s largest centrally planned economies. Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising: What embodies the trademark Bezos-ethos of “Get Big Fast” better than the Five-Year Plan? Thanks to its cutting-edge logistics and coordinated supply chains, Amazon last year clocked a GDP of $230 billion[*]. To Jared Kushner’s recent demand that “the government should be run like a great American company,” let all communists raise a fist of solidarity!

In fact, write Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski in The People’s Republic of Walmart, Amazon is just one of thousands of firms, big and small, that centrally plan their inputs and outputs. Of the top hundred global economies, around sixty-nine of them are businesses, not countries; most, if not all, are internally planned. (Sears, which over the last decade broke its firm into an “internal market” of competing units thanks to CEO and Ayn Rand-devotee Eddie Lampert, is conspicuously absent from this list.) Despite the collapse of the USSR and the global gospel of markets that spread in its wake, it seems planning is still working all around us.

The problem is that planning is not working for most of us. Yes, automation and “Big Data” have conjured cheaper goods for consumers—unfortunately, most consumers are also laborers who remain ruthlessly exploited. As the promise of new technology expands each day, workers sleep while standing or collapse from heat exhaustion. Planning, once a revolutionary tool meant to reduce labor time and eliminate exploitation, has become just another vulgar mechanism for maximizing the profits of unelected, authoritarian, union-busting, planet-cooking, superrich vampires. The People’s Republic of Walmart makes the case that the left should reclaim the radical demand for a democratically planned economy and repurpose this corporate apparatus for the flourishing of all. Far from a dry pamphlet on logistics theory, the book raises crucial questions about justice, technology, and our capacity to build a new world in the face of economic and climate catastrophe.

The planned economy was supposed to have gone extinct three decades ago. The Soviet Union gasped its last breath, American capitalism sprayed a bottle of Cristal, European social democracy ordered another latte, and China pressed a big button labeled “Market Socialism.” But if you really put the time in, you could probably get a wonk from the Hoover Institution to grudgingly accept that government planning still beats the market in the realm of certain public services, such as health care or fire departments. The knives come out, though, when this approach is proposed for things like housing, pharmaceuticals, energy, or, heaven forbid, consumer goods in general.

What may surprise newcomers, however, is that many self-described Marxists are wary of planning, too. Despite being thanked in Phillips and Rozworski’s acknowledgements, Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of the left-wing magazine Jacobin, identifies as a market socialist. In a 2013 essay sketching an agenda for the left, Jacobin’s executive editor Seth Ackerman conceded that markets are necessary, so perhaps we’d best just find a way to socialize them. Vivek Chibber, professor of sociology and, along with Sunkara, one of several co-authors of The ABCs of Socialism, dismisses planning as a dead-end: “We can want planning to work, but we have no evidence that it can.” One of the left’s “worst legacies” has been to “identify socialism with central planning.” Market socialism, we’re told, is communism for grown-ups.

Everyone from the market socialist to the Austrian economist has taken one side of an incredibly sexy academic exchange known as the “socialist calculation debate.” The argument should be familiar: market transactions provide producers with essential information about what consumers and other producers need, and therefore how much to make. To try and calculate (that is, plan) this galaxy of interdependent inputs and outputs is impossible in a fluid economy. It’s a matter of information, you fool. And like it or not, market prices are the best way to collect the information we need to map out supply and demand.

A rich tradition of heterodox economics, mathematics, and computer science has materialized to answer this problem of calculation. But it is modern processing power, dwarfing the bandwidth available in the twentieth century, that truly rebukes the argument above. Consider computer scientist and economist Paul Cockshott who, in about two minutes, using only university equipment, claims to have run models that were able to optimize an economy “roughly the size of Sweden.” You get the feeling that the mammoth data centers at Amazon, Ford, or Foxconn might be capable of even more impressive calculations. And besides, to insist communist theory prove some perfect equation is either disingenuous or missing the point. The question is not whether planning is mathematically pristine, but whether it can allocate better than the market.

The answer, to return to the material world, is yes it can. It’s true that under capitalism firms plan internally but compete with each other, a dance that keeps companies innovating new ways to capture surplus and, sometimes, inadvertently benefit regular people. This dynamic would not occur naturally in a planned economy; one cannot just seize Amazon or Walmart, socialize it, and call it a day. Phillips and Rozworski apparently recognize this (there is an entire chapter in The People’s Republic of Walmart titled “Nationalization Is Not Enough”) and point to an interesting line of thought from economist J. W. Mason: Banks tend to operate as a privatized Gosplan, where the slush fund of finance capital flows to whichever firm a group of Brooks Brothers-clad planners decide deserves investment, regardless of profitability. Market competition, in other words, is hardly the divine engine of innovation if so many firms are, as Mason writes, “born new each day by the grace of those financing it.”

Even so, could planning replicate the market’s capacity to innovate? Ford’s former CEO Mark Fields certainly seemed to think so, declaring in 2016 that his company would soon “be able to use analytics to anticipate people’s needs, as opposed to people trying to tell us what they want.” And to the perennial taunt of the lizard-brained conservative—“I love seeing idiot millennials protest capitalism on their Apple-made IPHONES”—one may point out it was largely the market-immune Pentagon and Department of Energy, not Apple, that developed the batteries, algorithms, touch screens, and microprocessors our right-wing friend uses to tweet about the Muslim Caravan. Once again, none of this is to celebrate the actual decisions or practitioners of planning as it exists under capitalism, but to recognize its power and how else it might be put to use.

So much for feasibility. Still, the left has good reason to harbor deeper techno-skepticism. When most of us hear the phrase “data collection,” we think not so much of social justice but of Facebook selling our personal information, NSA surveillance, and racist models of “predictive” policing. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks catalogs state policies that placed welfare applications, housing allocation, and child welfare investigations under algorithmic control. The results have been catastrophic for the poor and working class, of every race and gender. Algorithms, after all, are written by humans, and prejudices operate just as easily in digital form as they do in twentieth century analog—perhaps even more so. Phillips and Rozworski acknowledge this reality and rightfully urge vigilance. If planning is to make use of such technology, we must make sure not to bake this poison into the cake.

But hope lies in the very recognition that technology is a political construct, rather than some transcendental, neutral force. If we can program the reinforcement of hierarchies, we can certainly work to program their destruction. (There’s already encouraging research as to how to account for problems such as “disparate impact.”) As Eubanks writes, “if there is to be an alternative, we must build it on purpose, brick by brick and byte by byte.”

Beyond algorithmic justice, the real specter haunting socialism is, naturally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, whose record in planning was less than exemplary. While capital-C Communism brought about modern industry, literacy, and social security, Phillips and Rozworski don’t deny the ultimate failure of the Soviet experiment. The October Revolution was contorted and compromised by a world war, a civil war, imperialist invasion, economic backwardness, another world war, and a half-century of military competition with the United States. For the sake of the revolution, democracy was indefinitely postponed. Even if Soviet and East German firms were just as or more efficient than their Western counterparts, this arrangement still resulted in workers resisting work and managers lying about output, i.e., bad information. (In a particularly cruel irony, Gosplan bureaucrats even took to sabotaging new computerized approaches to planning, lest they personally lose their political clout. Their unlikely co-conspirators were “reform” minded crypto-capitalists who worried the algorithms would actually succeed, leaving planning in place forever!)

For Phillips and Rozworski, it wasn’t communist planning that led to authoritarianism and disaster, but authoritarianism and disaster that led to bad planning. “Democracy,” they write, “is not some abstract ideal tacked on to all this, but essential to the process.”

A few years ago. Francis Spufford’s novel Red Plenty cast the very idea of Soviet planning as its hero, wherein it falls from grace, as all tragic heroes do. There’s no need to understate that tragedy, but it ispossible to overstate it. Let’s not forget what happened after the victorious arrival of the market in the former USSR: production of consumer goods, industrial output, and human life expectancy all cratered. A new class of homeless citizens emerged, frozen to death in streets, alleyways, and parks. We often discuss the millions of deaths in the Stalinist 1930s. We don’t discuss the millions of deaths in the post-Communist 1990s. Unsurprisingly, recent polling revealed that a majority of those surveyed in Russia still regret the collapse of the USSR and its planned economy. (In 1996 they nearly voted in Communist presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov until—get this—right-wing hucksters colluded with a hostile foreign government to help install a widely unpopular and corrupt buffoon through a media campaign that peddled rank propaganda.) The Soviet experience was a lesson, all right, but not quite the one many smug market fetishists would have us believe.

And if all that can happen to a superpower, imagine what faced Chile, the would-be socialist alternative to Soviet technocracy: in 1970, buoyed by the support of the working class, Marxist president Salvador Allende was elected and set about building a nation-wide, participatory planning network. This novel approach was predictably stymied by a U.S. economic blockade and finally snuffed out by a CIA-backed military coup in 1973. Still, the pioneering spirit of this moment was poignantly captured by Eden Medina in her wonderful study Cybernetic Revolutionaries. What happened next is a depressing cliché: Chileans were placed under the rule of a distinctly not-left-wing dictatorship and enrolled as fresh test subjects in the mad laboratory of the market.

How will that same market treat the workers of tomorrow who fall victim to imminent waves of automation? Is the market really compatible long-term with progressive policy goals like universal basic income, or full employment? Will the market really permit the end of mass incarceration? Then there’s the C-word: last month we learned that potentially catastrophic climate change is now beyond prevention, and that even if we swore off carbon tomorrow, by 2099 the Arctic will still be 5°C hotter. The expression “glacial pace” doesn’t quite mean what it used to. In light of this, The Atlantic, official mouthpiece for the death god Nyarlathotep, predictably suggests that “any realistic plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy will almost surely require the sort of commercial technological breakthroughs that tend to come from private entrepreneurs.” Not to be outdone, the New York Times last month published an op-ed titled—no shit—“Can Exxon Mobil Protect Mozambique From Climate Change?”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Converting industries to renewable energy, Phillips and Rozworski argue, is wholly within the power of America, India, and China. But, wouldn’t you know it, the principles of commerce just aren’t incentivizing them fast enough! Carbon-free agriculture is a trickier feat, but certainly less tricky as a state-sponsored venture freed from market meddling, à la Sputnik or the Manhattan Project. Climate reporter Kate Aronoff suggests: “If you create a successful drive to nationalize [the fossil fuel industry] or rapidly scale back their power that will create a real precedent for other industries . . . then you can nationalize Monsanto. Have that be the crux of a populist demand of a climate movement.” There are different schools on the left when it comes to ecology (Phillips, science writer by day, has been criticized for consumerist, growth-happy “ecomodernism”), but one hopes we can all agree that smashing the existing energy market is a necessary step.

More than any other crisis of capitalism, ecological calamity is the most self-evident reason to abandon the dumb, short-sighted, animal logic of the market for a rational and humane plan. It has been, to quote the superior critique of capital, Gremlins 2, “a complete failure of management.” And if the history of capitalist crises is any guide, the odds are that climate change will produce a bigger, bulkier, more controlling state no matter what. Before things really start to crack up, we may want to pick whether that state runs on egalitarian principles or the fascist death drive. Does anyone who doesn’t own a yacht called Fountainhead truly want to cede that decision to the invisible hand of the market?

To their credit, Phillips and Rozworksi return throughout the book to the necessity of mass mobilization. Planning is not One Weird Trick to Achieve Socialism. Unless we simply want state-capitalist profit optimization, the real thing will require continuous and brutal class struggle. It will require experimentation, failure and, as Marv Alpert once said, tenacious defense. Any hope of success lies in a rejuvenated, robust and, yes, global people’s movement to shatter the political, legal and physical barricades put up by governments and capital. But planning must be part of the agenda.

Here the cybernetic concept of feedback is useful: the very idea of a plan, of giving everyone control of their own lives, is just the kind of revolutionary notion that can energize, inspire, and keep such a movement alive. The final line of Spufford’s Red Plenty need not be read as the end of a dream, but the real beginning of history: “Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?”

Hope for the best, of course. And plan for the worst.

Cyberpunk is Now and No One Knows What to Do With It

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By Pattern Theory

Source: Modern Mythology

Cyberpunk broke science fiction. Creeping in alongside the commercialization of the internet, it extrapolated the corruption and dysfunction of its present into a brutal and interconnected future that remained just a heartbeat away. Cyberpunk had an attitude that refused to be tamed, dressed in a style without comparison. Its resurgence shows that little has changed since its inception, and that’s left cyberpunk incapable of discussing our future.

Ghost in the Shell got the live-action treatment in 2017, a problematic remakeof the 1995 adaptation. Some praised its art direction for increasing the visual fidelity of retrofuture anime cityscapes, but the general consensus was that the story failed to apply care and consideration towards human brains and synthetic bodies like Mamoru Oshii had more than two decades before. A few months later came Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to the cyberpunk classic. Critics and fans praised it for high production values, sincere artistic effort, and meticulous direction. Yet something had gone wrong. Director Denis Villeneuve couldn’t shake the feeling that he was making a period movie, not one about the future.

Enough has changed since the 1980s that cyberpunk needs reinvention. New aesthetics. An expanded vocabulary. Code 46 managed this years ago. It rejects a fetish for all things Japanese and embraces China’s economic dominance. Conversations being in English and are soon peppered with Mandarin and Spanish. Life takes place at night to avoid dangerous, unfiltered sunlight. Corporations guide government decisions. Genetics determine freedom of movement and interaction. Climate refugees beg to leave their freeway pastures for the safety of cities.

Code 46 is cyberpunk as seen from 2003, a logical future that is now also outdated.

If Blade Runner established the look, Neuromancer defined cyberpunk’s voice. William Gibson’s debut novel was ahead of the curve by acknowledging the personal computer as a disruptive force when the Cold War was at its most threatening. “Lowlife and high tech” meant the Magnetic Dog Sisters headlining some creep joint across the street from a capsule hotel where console cowboys rip off zaibatsus with their Ono Sendai Cyberdeck. But Gibson’s view of the future would be incomplete without an absolute distrust of Reaganism:

“If I were to put together a truly essential thank-you list for the people who most made it possible for me to write my first six novels, I’d have to owe as much to Ronald Reagan as to Bill Gates or Lou Reed. Reagan’s presidency put the grit in my dystopia. His presidency was the fresh kitty litter I spread for utterly crucial traction on the icey driveway of uncharted futurity. His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.” — William Gibson

“Fragments of a Hologram Rose” to Mona Lisa Overdrive is a decade of creative labor that was “tired of America-as-the-future, the world as a white monoculture.” The Sprawl is a cyberpunk trilogy where military superpowers failed and technology gave Japan leadership of the global village. Then Gibson wrote Virtual Light and readers witnessed extreme inequality shove the middle class into the gig economy as corporations schemed to profit off natural disasters with proprietary technology.

Gibson knew the sci-fi he didn’t care for would absorb cyberpunk and tame its “dissident influence”, so the genre could remain unchanged. “Punk” is the go-to suffix for emerging subgenres that want to appear subversive while posing a threat to nothing and no one. It’s how “hopepunk” becomes a thing. But to appreciate cyberpunk’s assimilation, look at how it’s presented sincerely.

CD Projekt Red (CDPR), known for the Witcher game series, has spent six years developing what’s arguably the most anticipated video game of the moment, Cyberpunk 2077. Like Gibson, Mike Pondsmith, creator the original “pen-n-paper” RPG, and collaborator on this adaptation of his work, has had his writing absorbed by mainstream sci-fi. CDPR could survive on that 31-year legacy, but they insist they’re taking their time with Cyberpunk 2077 to craft an experience with a distinct political identity that somehow allows players to remain apolitical. In a way this is reflective of CDPR’s reputation as a quality-driven business that’s pro-consumer, but has driven talent away by demanding they work excessive hours and promoting a hostile attitude towards unions. This crunch culture is a problem across the industry.

We’ll soon see how Cyberpunk 2077 developed. What we can infer from its design choices, like giving protagonist V a high-collar jacket seen on the cover of the 2nd edition game book from 1990, is that Cybperpunk 2077 will be familiar. Altered Carbon and Ready Player One share this problem. Altered Carbon is so derivative of first-wave cyberpunk it’s easy to forget its based on a novel from 2002. Ready Player One at least has the courtesy to be shameless in its love of pop culture, proud to proclaim that nothing is more celebrated today than our participation in media franchises without ever considering how that might be a problem.

What’s being suggested, intentionally or not, is that contemporary reality has avoided the machinations of the powerful at a time when technology is wondrous, amusing, and prolific. If only we were so lucky.

238 cities spent more than a year lobbying Amazon, one of two $1 trillion corporations in existence, for privilege of hosting their new office. In November it was announced that Amazon would expand to Crystal City, Virginia and Long Island City, Queens. Plenty of New Yorkers are incensedthat the world’s largest online marketplace will get $3 billion in subsidies, tax breaks, and grants to further disrupt a housing market that takes more from them than any city should allow. Some Amazon employees were so excited to relocate they made down payments on their new homes before the decision went public, telling real estate developers to get this corner of New York readyfor a few thousand transplants. But what of the people already there?

Long Island City is home to the Queensbridge Houses, the largest housing project in the US. Built in 1939, these two buildings are home to more then 6,000 people with an average income of $16,000. That’s far below the $54,000 for Queens residents overall. But neither group is anywhere near the average salary for the 25,000 employees Amazon will bring with them, which will exceed $150,000. How many of those positions will be filled by locals? How many will come from Queensbridge?

Over 800 languages are spoken in Queens, making it the most linguistically diverse place in the world. Those diverse speakers spend over 30% of their income on rent. They risk being priced out of their neighborhoods. Some will be forced out of the city. Has Governor Cuomo considered the threat this deal poses to people’s homes? Has Mayor de Blasio prepared for the inevitable drift to other boroughs once property values spike? Looking at Seattle and San Francisco, there’s no reason to expect local governments to be proactive. So New Yorkers have taken up the fight on their own.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos toyed with these politicians. He floated the idea that any city could become the next Silicon Valley and they believed him. They begged for his recognition, handed over citizen data, and took part in the $100 billion ritual of subsidizing tech companies.

It was all for nothing. Crystal City is a 20-minute drive from Bezos’ house in Washington DC, where Amazon continues to increase its spending on lobbyists. That’ll seem like a long commute compared to the helicopter ride from Long Island City, the helipad for which is subsidized by the city, to Manhattan, the financial and advertising capital of the world, where Bezos owns four more houses.

The auction for Bezos’ favor was a farce. New York and Virginia give him regular access to people with decision-making power, invaluable data, and institutions that are are sure to expand his empire. These cities were always the only serious options.

Amazon’s plans read like the start of a corporate republic, a cyberpunk trope inspired by company towns. Employers were landlords, retailers, and even moral authorities to workforces too in debt to quit. Many had law enforcement and militias to call on in addition to the private security companies they hired to break labor strikes, investigate attempts at unionization, and maintain a sense of order that resulted in massacres like Ludlow, Colorado.

Amazon is known for labor abuses, monitoring, and tracking speed and efficiency in warehouses without bathroom breaks, where employees have collapsed from heat exhaustion. They sell unregulated facial recognition services to police departments, knowing it misidentifies subjects because of inherent design bias. Companies with a history of privacy abuses have unfettered access to their security devices. They control about half of all e-commerce in the US and, as Gizmodo’s Kashmir Hill found out, it is impossible to live our lives without encountering Amazon Web Services.

It doesn’t take a creative mind to imagine similar exposition being attributed to corporate villains like Cayman Global or Tai Yong Medical.

Rewarding corporations for their bad behavior is just one way the world resembles a fictive dystopia. We also have to face rapid ecological and institutional decay that fractionally adjusts our confidence in stability, feeding a persistent situational anxiety. That should make for broader and bolder conversations about the future, and a few artists have managed to do that.

Keiichi Matsuda is the designer and director behind Hyper-Reality, a short film that portrays augmented reality as a fever dream that influences consumption, and shows how freeing and frightening it is to be cut off from that network. Matsuda’s short film got him an invitation to the World Economic Forum in Davos to “speak truth to power.” What Matsuda witnessed were executives and billionaires pledging responsibility with t-shirts and sustainability, while simultaneously destroying the environment, as an audience of their peers and the press nodded and applauded “this brazen hypocrisy.” So Matsuda took a stanchion to his own installation.

Independence means Matsuda gets to decide how to talk about technology and capitalism, and how to separate his art and business. It also means smaller audiences and fewer productions.

Sam Esmail used a more visible platform to “bring cyberpunk to TV” with Mr. Robot. Like Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, it’s cyberpunk retooled for the present — post-cyberpunk. Esmail never hesitates to place our villains in Mr. Robot. Enron is an influence on logo designs and tactics of evil corps. Google, Verizon, and Facebook are called out for their complicity with the federal government in exposing customer data. AT&T’s Long Lines building, an NSA listening post since the 1970s, plays the role of a corporate data hub that reaches across the county. Even filming locations serve as commentary.

An anti-capitalist slant runs through Mr. Robot, exposing the American dream as a lie and our concept of meritocracy as a tool to protect the oligarchy, presenting hackers as in direct contact with a world of self-isolation and exploitation, those who dare to hope for a future affected by people rather than commerce. And Esmail somehow manages this without interference from NBC.

Blade Runner will get more life as an anime. Cowboy Bebop is joining Battle Angel Alita in live action. Altered Carbon is in the process of slipping into a new sleeve. There’s no shortage of revivals, remakes, and rehashing of cyberpunk’s past on the way. They’ll get bigger audiences than a short film about submitting to algorithms. More sites will discuss their pros and cons than a mobile tie-in that name-drops Peter Kropotkin and Maria Nikiforova. But in being descriptive and prescriptive, moving to the future and looking for sure footing in the accelerated present, Matsuda’s and Esmail’s work reminds us that cyberpunk needs to be more than just repeating what’s already been said about yuppies, Billy Idol, and the Apple IIc.

We live at a time where 3D printing is so accessible refugees can obtain prosthesis as part of basic aid. People forced to migrate because of an iceless arctic will rely on that assistance. Or we could lower temperatures and slow climate change by spraying the atmosphere with sulfate, an option that might disrupt advertising in low-orbit. Social credit systems are bringing oppressive governments together. Going cashless is altering our expectations of others. Young people earn so little they’re leveraging nude selfies to extend meager lines of credit. Productivity and constant notifications are enough to drive some into a locked room, away from anything with an internet connection. Deepfakes deny women privacy, compromise their identity, and obliterate any sense of safety in exchange for porn. Online communities are refining that same technology, making false video convincing, threatening our sense of reality. Researchers can keep our memories alive in chat bots distilled from social media, but the rich will outlive us all by transfusing bags of teenage blood purchased through PayPal.

In a world that increasingly feels like science fiction it’s important to remind ourselves that writing about the future is writing about the present. Artists worthy of an audience should be unable to look at the embarrassment of inspiration around them and refuse the chance to say something new.

Bust the Trust: Now is the Time to Break Up Amazon

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By Andy Laties with additional reporting by Sander Hicks

Source: The New York Megaphone

Standing at the cash register at an Upper West Side independent bookstore I used to run, I once noted the frequent passage of cars painted all over with Amazon’s “And You’re Done” logo. These same-day delivery vehicles were Amazon’s way of pushing back against the resurgence of New York City independent bookselling in progress. Soon, the cars were joined by a Columbus Circle location of the Amazon Books chain. That brick-and-mortar store gave lie to Amazon’s long-standing rhetoric that physical bookstores were doomed.

I have competed with Amazon for twenty years. A couple years ago, we indies were finally winning. 2015 was a great year. More independent stores were opening than closing: Books Are Magic, Greenlight, Word Up, Stories, Archestratus Books & Foods, Astoria Bookshop and Quimby’s. New locations for Book Culture, McNally Jackson, WORD and Books of Wonder were in the works. That trend was mirrored nationally. While our numbers had fallen from 4,000 to 1,500, between 1995 and 2005, now we were pushing 2,000 bookstores again.

Why do indy bookstores matter so much? Well, here’s one way to put it, from the writer Ocean Vuong, “The way I see it, whenever someone walks into a bookstore, they are walking into the future of their cultural and intellectual life. A bookseller collaborates with who you are in order to show you a way forward towards more of yourself, a way you might not have known existed for you–but is still entirely your own. Amazon, with its algorithms, can only show you where you’ve been, can only give you the calcified mirror of your past. In a bookstore, you get a human being who is also a mapmaker of possibility.”

 

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF AMAZON

Amazon itself had started as a New York City project. But retailers don’t collect sales tax on out-of-state shipments. So when hedge fund boy wonder Jeff Bezos rounded up his one million in in start-up capital, he left New York City behind. He launched his company in the lightly-populated Washington State. Bezos planned a national mail-order operation that wouldn’t have to collect sales tax in any other state, especially populous New York and California. Thus, most customers would enjoy a six percent or more cost reduction on each sale.

We indie businesses fought together for twenty years to force Amazon to collect sales tax. And we won. I’m proud of what we fierce indies did to force Amazon to pay sales tax. These taxes fund public services like Medicaid and the local fire department. But Amazon had evolved during the battle, and like that strangling kudzu vine you thought you killed last Fall, it grew back even bigger in the Spring. Instead of dying, Amazon turned into that monster plant from Little Shop of Horrors.

After our victories at the state and national levels, there was no longer any reason for Bezos to base his company in Seattle. That’s one reason Amazon is expanding with a big new HQ2 planned for Crystal City, VA. They recently planned to come back to New York City, but chickened out due to the public criticisms about Amazon’s lucrative tax breaks.

Ten years ago, Amazon used to be an innovative book-seller online. Today, They work for CIA, NSA, they help do facial recognition for ICE. They are bidding to create a “new brain” for the Pentagon, in the little-known “JEDI” program. With Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, they are simultaneously powerful DC lobbyists, defense contractors, spies, and a leading DC media vehicle. Amazon is one juggernaut of unbridled corporate and war-making power.

Amazon developed its Amazon Web Services (AWS), the highly profitable, cloud-hosting division, out of the software and hardware infrastructure that runs its online retail operation. Recent headlines tell the tale of how Amazon monetized AWS. Technology Review reported, “Amazon is the Invisible Backbone Behind ICE’s Immigration Crackdown” And Business Insider let us know that “Amazon is Launching a ‘Secret’ Cloud Service for the CIA.” “‘Alexa, Drop a Bomb’: Amazon Wants in on US Warfare” reveals the plans between Amazon and the Pengaton, for the new JEDI program, as reported by Truthout.

The new Amazon wants to become a leading merchant of death, specializing in robotic drones, while moonlighting as web host for ICE and CIA. Its planned “Washington D.C. footprint” is just across the highway from the Pentagon. The failed effort to come into Queens was offering “twenty-five-thousand jobs.” But who can count how many jobs Amazon has killed, and how many retail stores have closed, due to Amazon artificially lowering prices? (A recent article in Yale Law School journal makes the case that Amazon might be on the road to being a monopoly, since it artificially lowers prices to kill competition.) Amazon promises to add jobs in NYC, but recently committed to making those jobs non-union. Workers at Amazon warehouses complain of onerous conditions at low wages, in which bathroom breaks are rare, and workers sometimes have to urinate into plastic bottles.

Amazon is super convenient. It’s true. But Amazon’s retail customers will feel angst and regret once they learn their dollars pay for robotic drone warfare and racial profiling of immigrants.

Recently, the American Booksellers Association reported that Amazon could be a monopoly. They control 75% of all online retail bookselling, the way that Standard Oil controlled the oil industry, before it was broken up as a monopoly, in 1911.

Let’s resist this new version of the Amazon monopoly. Amazon is an arms dealer and corporate spy. Let’s advocate that the Federal Trade Commission dismember the Amazon octopus. Let’s support a movement that is fired up to do “trust-busting.”

For our safety, it’s time to break up Amazon.

 

Andrew Laties is the author of Rebel Bookseller: Why Indie Businesses Stand for Everything You Want to Fight For, from Free Speech to Buying Local to Building Communities. He currently co-owns Book and Puppet Company, in Easton, Pennsylvania.

CEOs should have been the fall guys; why are they still heroes?

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By Carl Rhodes

Source: aeon

On 15 September 2008, the giant financial services firm Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, starting a chain reaction that saw the global economy spiralling toward total collapse. The global financial crisis that ensued revealed just how fragile and unstable the world economic order really was. If there was ever a time that neoliberal capitalism should have faced a legitimation crisis, this was it.

One only needs to think back to December 2008 when the then US president Barack Obama scolded the heads of the largest US auto firms for flying to Washington in private jets to ask for financial bailouts. As one Democratic Party representative added: ‘Couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it.’

For a short time after the crash, those on the top of the corporate ladder seemed as powerless as those on the bottom. The failure demonstrated that neither chief executive officers (CEOs) nor their financial advisors had much of an idea of how the market worked or how to control it. All that was left for modern citizens was to brace themselves as a runaway global free market fell off the proverbial cliff. The CEO suddenly appeared like a fall guy for the crash rather than as a hero.

Fast-forward 10 years, and it’s hard to believe that the economic and political supremacy of the CEO could have even been put into radical question the way it was in 2008. CEOs never really lost their stride and, now more than ever, they are considered to be visionaries and idealised as leaders. Nor did they lose their corporate jets. Other than for a brief symbolic belt-tightening immediately after the crisis, CEOs were soon flying high again on company planes.

Today, business founders such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or even Larry Fink epitomise a new class of celebrity CEOs, seen by so many as personal heroes who can save the world, and the same goes for the larger array of employee CEOs such as Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase or Tim Cook at Apple. Yet all the while, CEOs participate in a world economy wracked by increasing inequality, as epitomised by the kind of obscene CEO remuneration that sees the likes of Amazon’s boss Jeff Bezos earning almost a million times that of the workers in his warehouses.

More ominously, millions of Americans voted for an ostentatiously super-rich CEO, electing Donald Trump as their president. In his acceptance speech, Trump praised his own business acumen as being key to his political success: ‘I’ve spent my entire life in business, looking at the untapped potential in projects and in people all over the world. That is now what I want to do for our country.’

The barely interrupted veneration of the CEO as a hero, marked most expressively by the Trump presidency, has brought us to a point today where CEOs are not just valued for their skills in business but have become role models in all walks of life. We now live in what we call a ‘CEO society’: a society where corporate leadership has become the model for transforming not just business, but all human activity, where everyone from politicians to jobseekers to even those seeking love are expected to imitate the qualities of the lionised corporate executive.

The contemporary adulation and admiration of CEOs raises the question of what enabled their continued idolisation, given what could well have been their fall from grace 10 years ago? At the time, many hoped that the sad devastation of the crisis might open the door for an economic and political paradigm shift that would usher in a fairer, more equal and just society. It’s not that this promise of change has not arrived, it’s that it seems farther away than ever.

After 2008, for a brief time, people clamoured for CEOs to be held accountable and be prosecuted. This was, not least, a practical matter. With jobs being lost, shop fronts being boarded up, and politicians crying austerity, what people wanted above all else was economic recovery. Yet with the world’s top executives in disgrace, who could lead such a dramatic economic revival?

What arose from peril was a novel fantasy of executive-led recovery that allowed the shattered reputation of the CEO to stage a prompt, if not miraculous, comeback. This played into an appealing crisis narrative. With such a narrative, all faith must be invested in the recuperation of an imaginary golden past that existed before the upheaval. Most recently, this has manifested in Brexit’s investment in the promise of a renewed British sovereignty, as well as in populist political rallying cries such as ‘Make America Great Again’.

These desires for recovery and return are of course perfectly understandable, and they clearly shed light on why ideologies of free-market heroism thrived again after crisis. But this still only scratches the surface of why CEOs continue to be idolised by so many. Whereas individual executives from Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharmaceuticals to Harvey Weinstein of Miramax might be reviled for their greed, corruption or abuse of power, the CEO – as an ideal – has been reinstated with a solid-gold allure.

The financial crisis pointed to a deep insecurity rested in the fear that it was futile for humans to control the economic world that we had created, and this reverberated with a more general fear that we lack agency more widely. Suddenly, people were pushed into facing the possibility that their lives were lost to the whims and unpredictable fate of a supernatural market. Where since the advent of the 20th century it had been righteously condemned that ‘money is the secular God of the world’, now it was feared that finance had become an even more reckless God, one who cared little for the humans who worshiped at his gilded altar.

The quick rehabilitation of the image of the CEO in the popular imagination was not just a practical matter of wanting to hold on to the material benefits afforded by neoliberal capitalism. It was a psychic measure needed to counteract the fear of dehumanisation at the hands of a runaway Frankenstein economy. In other words, we just wanted to pretend that someone was in control, even if all the facts and evidence were telling us that this wasn’t the case. Everything could be forgiven if hope could be returned.

The retention of the CEO myth was an assertion of the power of individuals to shape events and control their destiny. To achieve this meant holding on to the heroic character of the CEO such that people might regain a sense of control over their own lives too.

Maintaining faith in the CEO was less a matter of empirical fact and more a symptom of a human need to find something to believe in at the end of a hard-earned day; with the reality too hard to bear, the fantasy had to return. Held out was the promise that everyone could receive grace if only he accepted the modern CEO gospel. This is the very same faith that allows people to believe that the business acumen of an impetuous, loud-mouthed, misogynist bully is able to lead America to greatness. When Trump said that he would run the US like a business project, ‘under budget and ahead of schedule’, enough people believed him to pave his way to the White House.

CEOs represent the ability to be in control of a market that appears uncontrollable and uncaring of its profound human costs. This desire for control belies the reality for too many people of being on the wrong side of the rising tide of inequality, and of being subjected to the tyranny of a new singleminded political authoritarian intolerance. Let’s hope that with the next crisis we learn that we need to let go of the fantasy of the CEO.

Wealth of 400 richest Americans hits record $2.9 trillion

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These six men own as much wealth as half the world’s population

By Alec Anderson

Source: WSWS.org

On Wednesday, the US finance magazine Forbes released its annual “Forbes 400” list of wealthiest Americans, revealing an immense increase in wealth among the top social stratum in the United States.

The total net worth of the 400 people included on the list hit a record $2.9 trillion this year, up from $2.7 trillion last year. The most heavily represented sector was finance, from which 88 people on the list, including bank executives, hedge fund managers and investors, drew their wealth.

The next highest proportion comes from technology giants such as Google and Facebook. The CEO of Twitter and payments firm Square, Jack Dorsey, registered the greatest percentage growth in wealth from the previous year, an increase of 186 percent to $6.3 billion. This was due in large part to a jump in Square’s stock price.

The threshold necessary for inclusion on the list rose to $2.2 billion in 2018, up $100 billion from last year’s threshold. Fully one-third of billionaires in the United States, a record 204 individuals, failed to make this year’s Forbes 400 list.

The average net worth of billionaires on the list rose to $7.2 billion, an increase of a half-billion over last year’s average of $6.7 billion.

As Forbes notes, the vast increase in wealth among the very richest Americans is largely thanks to a continuing surge in US stock indexes. They have reached new record highs in part due to unprecedented levels of stock buybacks and dividend increases, which are parasitic diversions of wealth away from productive investment in areas that produce decent-paying jobs and to the detriment of pursuits such as research and development. The billionaires on the Forbes 400 list have also benefited immensely from the Trump tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy signed into law in December 2017.

Topping the list is Amazon CEO and world’s richest person Jeff Bezos, whose $160 billion is $63 billion more than the second-wealthiest person on the list, Bill Gates, and a full $78.5 billion more than last year. Bezos has made his fortune through the super-exploitation of warehouse workers around the world, enabling Amazon to move its products faster and at cheaper prices than its retail competitors.

The staggering increase in Bezos’s wealth over the past year has been due to the more than 100 percent increase in Amazon’s stock price. The $2,950 Jeff Bezos has earned per second in 2018 is more than the $2,796 a fulfillment center worker in India makes in an entire year.

Ironically, the Forbes report was published the same day that the press was full of praise for Bezos’s supposed generosity and humanitarian concern for his workers, occasioned by the announcement that he was raising the minimum wage of his US-based employees to the poverty-level wage of $15 an hour.

If the $160 billion fortune Bezos holds were divided among Amazon’s global workforce of 500,000, each worker would receive $320,000.

Coming in second on the list with a net worth of $97 billion is Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates, who had topped the Forbes list since 1994. The top 10 wealthiest people on the list alone have a total net worth of $730 billion, up from $610 billion in 2018.

However, just the top 45 individuals out of the 400 on the list accounted for fully half of the total wealth, or $1.45 trillion. That amounts to an average fortune of more than $32 billion each, which is more than the estimated $30 billion required to end world hunger, according to a United Nations estimate.

The Forbes report illustrates that the barrier to resolving societal ills, such as poverty, hunger and disease, is the siphoning off and hoarding of a growing proportion of society’s resources by the wealthiest segment of society.

The $2.9 trillion in the hands of these 400 richest people in the United States is roughly three-quarters of the total federal budget. It represents nearly three times the 2018 budget for the Department of Health and Human Services, which was slashed from over $1.126 trillion in 2017 to $1.112 trillion this year, and 176 times the $16.4 billion budget for the Department of Education in 2018.

Rather than addressing these issues, the Democratic Party’s midterm election campaign has instead been centered on a right-wing effort to channel opposition to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump behind a #MeToo-style hysteria over alleged sexual abuse. This is accompanied by the ongoing campaign to demonize Russia and Vladimir Putin and brand Trump as a stooge of the Kremlin.

The timing of the release of the Forbes list is significant, coming as it does on the 10-year anniversary of the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)—the $700 billion bank bailout that set the stage for the trillions that were essentially stolen from the working class to rescue the financial oligarchy and make it richer than ever. The result of the decade-long plundering of society since the crash, carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations, is the ever-increasing concentration of wealth at the very top reflected in the new Forbes 400 list.