The Amazon-ification of America
The Amazon-ification of America
By Steven Miller 8-14-2020
Last week, tech leaders spoke to Congress on Capitol Hill. Google’s Sundar Pichai, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos all spoke from prepared remarks. As the US economy shrank by 32.9%, Amazon’s share price rose by half, and Facebook’s growth rate approached 60%.
Congresspeople were supposedly “grilling” these uber-capitalists, but they were politely slobbering at their wealth. Since COVID began, American billionaires have made $637 billion, while 50 million people have lost their jobs. Timidly asking these billionaires questions about monopoly practices, the politicians refuse to address how this mega-wealth could be used to help people out in the greatest collapse in the history of capitalism.
Tech capitalism is fomenting the Amazon-ification and the Google-ization of America, right now in real-time. This will culminate in a major re-organization and the State. This is class warfare on the rights of humans to control their own basic needs to live and thrive. Private property is on the march to seize every resource of the public and to re-organize society in its own image.
Microsoft has controlled the Pentagon’s cloud computing efforts since October, 2019. Big tech is constantly making inroads into the military, including $11 billion in contracts in the last 3 years.:
“As we continue to execute the DOD Cloud Strategy, additional contracts are planned for both cloud services and complimentary migration and integration solutions necessary to achieve effective cloud adoption,’ the Pentagon said”. (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pentagon-jedi-idUSKBN1X42IU)
Then just look at what we are already seeing! Capitalism’s massive collapse as a result of COVID means that an estimated 40% of African-American business will not open. One-third of restaurants will never open again.
What happens when the restaurants close? People increasingly order online. Big Tech becomes ever more dominant. Then Big Box stores enter the scene and become the only places that provide the distribution of the necessities of life. Private equity corporations and hedge funds actively finance this extermination. Amazonification aims far higher than replacing mom and pop stores. It also rises to counter the demand for the domination and extension of public property to benefit everyone..
Then Rent Apocalypse is about to hit, with multi-billion dollar corporations waiting to evict up to 28 million people by Thanksgiving. This tidal wave is lead by Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity management corporation. Blackstone works closely with Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager, and shadow bank to the world, which was founded in partnership with Blackstone in 1988. While Blackstone proclaims that the rentership society is here, Blackrock manages the government multi-trillion bailout for financial speculators and the financial industry. By driving millions out of their homes, these criminals will keep the homes empty, and turning them into rentals, in an attempt to extract more wealth from our communities.
“Today the fast-growing ETF (“exchange-traded funds) sector controls nearly half of all investments in US stocks, and it is highly concentrated. The sector is dominated by just three giant American asset managers – BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, the “Big Three” – with BlackRock the clear global leader. By 2017, the Big Three together had become the largest shareholder in almost 90% of S&P 500 firms, including Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, General Electric, and Coca-Cola….
“Giant pension and other investment funds largely control the stock market, and the asset managers control the funds. That effectively puts BlackRock, the largest and most influential asset manager, in the driver’s seat in controlling the economy.”
(https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/24/meet-blackrock-the-new-great-vampire-squid/)
These corporations are hell-bent on imposing extractive capitalism on our communities and families. This model that vacuums wealth and information out of communities and sends it to the top. Oh yes, and what about the morality of evicting people to live on the street in the middle of a pandemic? Oh well, it’s just collateral damage.
That, of course, is what the Amazon-ification of America is all about. No longer even pretending to offer jobs, the capitalist class, lead by Big Tech, is re-organizing the economy and the government to extract wealth and give it to themselves.
Before COVID hit, the government had already authorized “Opportunity Zones” in 2017 to re-invest in impoverished American communities. Such predatory gentrification and dispossession is beloved by both Jared Kushner and Gavin Newsome. The giant capitalist equity companies and hedge funds are now in charge.
From “Displacement Zones: How Opportunity Zones Turn Communities into Tax Shelters for the Rich”:
“Boosters promised Opportunity Zones would help bring capital to the neighborhoods that most need it, but in reality allow wealthy investors to benefit from huge tax breaks while they speculate at the expense of the most vulnerable communities. The structure of the Opportunity Zones program was designed with the interests of speculators, not communities, in mind. Communities living inside many Opportunity Zones across the country are already experiencing rapid changes. Unregulated speculative investment will throw even more fuel on the fire. The Opportunity Zones program will exacerbate an already unbearable
“Opportunity Zones were created by the rich, for the rich.
“Opportunity Zones are an invention of the Silicon Valley millionaire-backed Economic Innovation Group and contain some of the most generous tax breaks currently available. The program gives capital gains tax exemptions that scale up based on the length of time an investment is held, eventually culminating in a 15% reduction in the taxable basis of the principal, and complete tax exemption of any profits made on the investment after 10 years. Because the distribution of capital gains income is highly unequal, the overwhelming majority of these tax benefits will flow directly to the richest investors in the country. Indeed, 90% of all capital gains income in the United States is owned by the wealthiest 10% of people, and 70% of all capital gains are owned by the wealthiest 1%.” (www.saje.net/…/2019/11/SAJE_DisplacementZones.pdf)
This was before COVID. The virus is now aggravating and amplifying every tendency that existed before its advent. It should be no surprise, therefore, that New York Andrew Cuomo recently invited Google and Microsoft into the state to “re-imagine” the new world where Big Tech companies seize control of telehealth, public education, and the entire society.
In other words, Cuomo is abrogating the responsibilities of the government to guarantee a safe and healthy environment for everyone and turning this charge over to corporations. They, of course, will place private profit above the public good.
“This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen “shared” on a mediated platform. It’s a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors, and drivers. It accepts no cash or credit cards (under guise of virus control) and has skeletal mass transit and far less live art. It’s a future that claims to be run on “artificial intelligence” but is actually held together by tens of millions of anonymous workers tucked away in warehouses, data centers, content moderation mills, electronic sweatshops, lithium mines, industrial farms, meat-processing plants, and prisons, where they are left unprotected from disease and hyperexploition. It’s a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable, and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.
“If all of this sounds familiar it’s because, pre-COVID, this precise app-driven, gig-fueled future was being sold to us in the name of convenience, frictionlessness, and personalization.” (https://naomiklein.org/the-screen-new-deal/)
The Social Response
Yes, the US capitalist class could have responded to the virus by taking steps, similar to Europe, to make things easier, but it didn’t. Now that the capitalist class is doubling down to make ever greater political and private profit from the crisis, we have already seen a decisive social force take the political stage. Two new generations have now mounted the stage of history. The great mass of protestors, though not all, in the massive George Floyd rebellion came from these new generations.
Millennials are roughly those who were born after 1980 and came to political awareness in 2000 or after, and who came into political maturity around 2000. This year they would be 40 years old. Rising behind them is the generation that came to political maturity with the Parkland Massacres in 2018, often called Gen Z by the corporate media. There are 74 million people in the US in this group who were born between 1995 and 2015.
These generations intend to assert their agency. They understand that their future will be there long after the Boomers have passed on. They intend to take control of the situation. For these generations, the American Dream is a hollow antiquated notion. They understood already that their future was imperiled with Climate Crisis. They already were the primary casualties of the digitally-driven laborless-production that is sweeping through every branch of the economy. Somehow, they must survive the Gig Economy that is consuming them. They are a substantial part of a new proletarian class, one that is being replaced by digitally-driven production.
The new social force already clearly holds the government for guaranteeing the safety of the public. This issue began with the murder of Trayvon in 2012, and escalated with the response to Michael Brown’s and Eric Garner’s murders, to name a few. It expresses itself as righteous rage at white supremacy and police murder. And it correctly holds the government and the State accountable. This rising demand for the public good threatens to overflow the narrow limits that the Democratic Party tries to impose. Voices from myriad directions have been asserting that if the government cannot do the job, we know very well how to govern ourselves and society.
This new proletarian class has much to learn, but objectively it cannot back down. We are witnessing the concretization for our times of Lenin’s famous statement that revolutions begin when the working class cannot live in the old way and the ruling class cannot rule in the old way.
As society is drawn further into a political crisis with re-opening schools, massive voter suppression, and an election that may well be suborned, the social response, sooner or later, will build its political consciousness. As Engels observed long ago, the people today are transforming themselves into the people of tomorrow:
“You will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power.” [Revelations concerning the Communist Trial at Cologne]
Steven Miller
August 9, 2020
Steven Miller is a retired public school science teacher in Oakland, California