Stealing Life with the Big Bad Retail King — One-third of All Buying Transactions
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
— Iago, Shakespeare’s Othello
Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (BEZOS for short) is the Senate version of a bill Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna introduced to Congress yesterday. It's not popular with plutocrats and oligarchs. One of their newspapers, the Wall Street Journal phrased their coverage as "an unusual public spat between Amazon.com Inc. and Sen. Bernie Sanders over workers’ wages...
(CD) — After Amazon issued a rare blog post on Wednesday denouncing Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) recent criticism of the retail behemoth as “inaccurate,” Sanders quickly responded with a statement accusing Amazon of being “less than forthcoming” about how much it actually pays its workers and highlighting the fact that Amazon warehouses are considered some of the “most dangerous places to work in the United […]
There’s a new scandal quietly unfolding in Washington. It’s far bigger than Housing Secretary Ben Carson buying a $31,000 dinette set for his office, or former EPA chief Scott Pruitt deploying an aide to hunt [...]
Some 300 newspapers, large and small, joined today in publishing, often on their front pages, editorials defending the First Amendment’s freedom of the press, often making note of their own efforts to combat current threats to that freedom posed by President Trump’s attacks on journalists and the entire Fourth Estate, which Trump routinely denounces in tweets and at rallies as “enemies of the people.”
SEATTLE – Amazon’s flagship annual sales event, Prime Day, encountered a tangle of difficulties starting Monday as aggrieved workers, boycotts, and a range of technical glitches brought new attention to the online retailer’s troubled internal regime.
For four years now, Prime Day has grown as the company’s top promotional event, bringing billions in revenue on a level comparable only to the holiday season’s Black Friday. For the past several weeks, the company has promoted the event widely across its site and various online media. The promotion is a 36-hour event.
Trade secrets, cybersecurity startups and robo prototypes + this day in history w/the Port Chicago disaster and our song of the day by the Beastie Boys on your Morning Monarchy for July 17, 2018.
“The message is clear—while the online giant gets rich, it is saving money on the health of its workers.” (CD) — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has just become the richest man in recorded history—surpassing $150 billion in net worth—thanks to his business model of subjecting employees to low wages, brutal working conditions, and scant benefits, and on Tuesday […]
In Part 1 of our investigative series on Surveillance Capitalism, MPN spoke to author Yasha Levine and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster about the rise of the Amazon.com empire and its fusion with the U.S. state apparatus.
In our next installments, we will continue exploring the rise of Surveillance Capitalism and the implications of Amazon-fueled spying technology, both in the workplace and in U.S. city streets.
