Can't have any fundamental changes going on out there

Jane McAlevey's postmortem on the always doomed Amazon organizing campaign also explains why the PRO Act can never ever ever be allowed to pass.

The conditions most workers in the United States endure when trying to form a union make the recent actions by Georgia’s legislature to institute further voter suppression seem tame. If the Senate passes the PRO Act, there’s no question the unionization rate would increase quickly, which is one reason winning its passage in the near future seems oddly distant. Despite the nation having the most pro-union president in nearly 100 years, the Senate remains immovable on issues far less challenging than major labor law reform; it wouldn’t even accept a federally mandated $15-an-hour minimum wage. And progressives have been trying to pass labor law since Jimmy Carter’s presidency—without success.

And, no, the answer isn't "because Joe Manchin." There are a ton of things the Democratic Party led by this so-called "most pro-union president in nearly 100 years" could do to rein that guy in.  They choose not to, though.  A strong labor law would "fundamentally change" the power relationships workers have with their bosses and boost the political power of the working class in general.  But that's not what these Democrats were elected to do. 

The thing about bosses is

 The bosses always lie.

Rep. Mark Pocan replied via tweet: “Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a progressive workplace when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles,” echoing reports from 2018 that Amazon workers were forced to skip bathroom breaks and pee in bottles. Amazon’s denial was swift: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.”

1/2 You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.

— Amazon News (@amazonnews) March 25, 2021

But Amazon workers with whom I spoke said that the practice was so widespread due to pressure to meet quotas that managers frequently referenced it during meetings and in formal policy documents and emails, which were provided to The Intercept. The practice, these documents show, was known to management, which identified it as a recurring infraction but did nothing to ease the pressure that caused it. In some cases, employees even defecated in bags.

And when they aren't lying about the problems they cause for their own workers, they are shaming the workers for them. 

An email that Brown received from her manager this past August has a section titled “Urine bottle” and states: “In the morning, you must check your van thoroughly for garbage and urine bottle. If you find urine bottle (s) please report to your lead, supporting staff or me. Vans will be inspected by Amazon during debrief, if urine bottle (s) are found, you will be issue an infraction tier 1 for immediate offboarding.”

While Amazon technically prohibits the practice — documents characterize it as a “Tier 1” infraction, which employees say can lead to termination — drivers said that this was disingenuous since they can’t meet their quotas otherwise. “They give us 30 minutes of paid breaks, but you will not finish your work if you take it, no matter how fast you are,” one Amazon delivery employee based in Massachusetts told me.

Asked if management eased up on the quotas in light of the practice, Brown said, “Not at all. In fact, over the course of my time there, our package and stop counts actually increased substantially.”

The Bessemer Amazon workers are currently voting to unionize. That election period ends on Monday. The US Senate is able to give American workers their best path to organizing they will have had in decades if it just passes the PRO Act.  They're close but...

With Democrats holding a slim majority in the Senate, passing the PRO Act would require reforming the filibuster, as the prospect of 10 Republican votes for labor reform is beyond a fantasy. The number of high-profile Democrats joining the push to reform the filibuster has steadily grown, with Biden and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., endorsing unspecified changes to filibuster rules earlier this month.

The Democrats can choose to deliver this essential and potentially transformative piece of legislation which they claim to support.  But, you know, Democrats are a lot like bosses in certain regards so, stay tuned. 

Keeping the faith 2021

Happy New Year! Pandemic is over now. Congratulations to all who participated. 

(CNN)President-elect Joe Biden received his first dose of the Pfizer and BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on live television Monday afternoon and reassured Americans of the vaccine's safety.

The shot, which Biden received in his left arm, was administered at ChristianaCare's Christiana Hospital in Newark, Delaware, by Tabe Mase, who is a nurse practitioner and the head of employee health services at the hospital, according to the Biden transition team. 

 

"We owe these folks an awful lot," Biden said, thanking those involved in the vaccine's development and distribution and front-line health care workers. 

 

Biden said the Trump administration deserved "some credit" for Operation Warp Speed, the federal government's vaccine program, and their role in making coronavirus vaccinations possible.

Certainly we do love to get up every day and remember to give Trump "some credit" for everything that's gone on this year.  But let's try to remember that.. popular and electoral vote counts notwithstanding... he isn't the only winner. 

The real winners are the bosses. The bosses have won the pandemic.  They actually have been the winners since the very beginning but if you read this website you would have seen us bleating about it many times over already.  We could already see how they were going to win early as March. Before the CARES act even passed it was clear that first shot at a federal response was going to be the one opportunity for a just outcome . And it was just as clear we were well on the way to missing it.  I didn't explicitly use the phrase "bosses are winning the pandemic" until about a month later but anyone could tell what was happening. By May we had the whole picture and it has not changed since. 

Eventually they're just going to make everyone go back to work. The Brennans will send a six foot rabbit to force us there at the point of a sword. Those of us there are even jobs for, that is. Those of us that can be used under whatever temporary and tenuous conditions that are set down. It will happen before anyone is safe from the virus. If there is no further action from congress and the status quo order is already maintained, everything will still be as broken as it is now and we will all be several orders of magnitude poorer for it.  Poorer workers are cheaper workers. When unemployment is high they are more disposable. The conditions that force them to work despite the danger make them easily exploitable. The bosses have won the pandemic.

I don't bring that up to get in a cheap I-told-you-so. If you read this website you also know nothing I can tell you matters.  I just want to point out how obvious all of this has always been even to an idiot blogger who only knows what he reads in John Geroges's newspapers. 

From the moment the pandemic hit, the most likely thing to happen, as has been the case with every of our century's many disasters, was yet another concentration of wealth and power at the very top and a further immiseration and impoverishment of the vast majority.  Jesus I said that too way back in March.  Look, if you are wondering why there has been less and less posting on the yellow blog as this year has gone along it's because fewer and fewer new things have happened as it's gone along.

 Anyway here we are a few days before the end of the year and how is all that going? 

Meanwhile, America’s wealthiest have seen their fortunes soar. The 100 richest people in the U.S. added about $600 billion to their wealth in 2020, enough to send a $2,800 check to every adult in the country. One, Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, ended 2020 six times richer than at the beginning of the year.

Individual billionaires getting more billions? Check.  The engines that siphon the billions upward continue to crush and devour everything in their path?  Check on that too. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers. In a report published last month, we found that many of America’s top retail and grocery companies have raked in billions during the pandemic but shared little of that windfall with their frontline workers, who risk their lives each day for wages that are often so low they can’t support a family. This is especially true of Amazon and Walmart, the country’s two largest companies. Together, they have earned an extra $10.7 billion over last year’s profits during (and largely because of) the pandemic—a stunning 56% increase. Despite this surge, we ranked Amazon and Walmart among the least generous of the 13 large retail and grocery companies studied in our report. The two companies could have quadrupled the extra COVID-19 compensation they gave to their workers through their last quarter and still earned more profit than last year.”

Sounds about like mission accomplished, right?  Well, they're almost there.  As I type this right now, I'm watching Mitch McConnell fend off a last minute attempt by Bernie Sanders to tack a one-time $2,000 payment to individuals onto the jumble of giveaways to Wall Street firms and defense contractors that just passed as the (likely final) COVID relief bill.

They wouldn't even be there had our ingeniously unstable President not thrown one last incoherent fit during which he happened to mention that $2,000 is a larger amount than $600. Before Trump opened his mouth, the deal was already closed. Our leading opinion makers were well on their way to lionizing the moonshine sipping centrists who brought it to us and explaining that it was "good enough" the way it was. Who would have thought we might actually miss having Trump around to light random things on fire like this?  Going back to brunch is going to suck. 

Or maybe it doesn't matter. McConnell seems to have the situation well in hand. 

McConnell introduced the parallel pandemic relief bill on Tuesday, S.5085, which would include the $600 to $2,000 increase in checks to individual Americans, but tacks on a repeal of section 230 of the Communications Act of 1996 and funding for a commission to investigate voter fraud. Both of these additions to McConnell's surprise bill are demands which have been made by Trump for months. The Section 230 repeal would pull back protections for internet companies and allow such media companies as Twitter and Facebook to be sued if users feel wronged by messages on the platform.

Aside from maybe Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell is the most consequential American political figure of the 21st Century.  Over the course of the previous two Presidential administrations, McConnell has completely turned over the federal judiciary. He delivered trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the corporate ruling class.  Now he is leveraging the pandemic to crush workers' rights and bankrupt every state and municipal government which will result in radical austerity nationwide. When future historians write about the dawning of the American neo-feudal age, McConnell will be remembered as a prime architect.

Not to give him too much credit.  I mean being an insider hatchet man for the establishment is always an easier job than trying to protect the disenfranchised.  That's kind of the definition of how power works. McConnell isn't engaging in any dark wizardry. He's just making obvious moves that no one can muster the effort to counter.  It's very easy to muck up something everyone wants by tying it to something else everyone know cannot pass.  State and local governments need relief but McConnell killed that by tying it to liability shields for bosses who callously expose workers to danger during the pandemic. And now he has blocked these one time survival checks by tying them to internet censorship and Trump election conspiracy crap. Being a jerk really isn't that hard as long as you are sufficiently insulated from any consequences.  

So McConnell isn't the definitive US politician of the moment just because he happens to be the guy in position to pull the lever on the machine that feeds the abattoir. It's more the fact that he, or any person who would get to work those controls embodies the universal ethic of the governing class. It's a power that only does one thing. And so anyone who seeks to wield that power necessarily wants to do that thing. Which is another way of saying they're all like this. None of them is here to help.  In fact as I'm continuing to type now, I see the Democrats in the Senate have, in fact, caved on their gambit for the $2000. It looks like they decided it was more important to continue funding the current push for war with Iran.  Here's Joe Biden barely acknowledging the issue while literally turning his back and walking away.  You're not going to get a clearer image of where the Democrats are than that.

Of course, a one time check for $2,000 or even the $2,800 we could have by splitting up the billionaires' profits from this year is still an insult. A just pandemic response policy would pay people to stay home, protect them from their exploitative bosses and rapacious landlords, guarantee treatments and vaccinations are free, and "re-start the economy" through continued fiscal stimulus on the back end.  But we'll never do any of that. All we care about, even at this very late stage of the game, is keeping the military and police state funded while also giving away billions of dollars to rich people. 

WASHINGTON — Tucked away in the 5,593-page spending bill that Congress rushed through on Monday night is a provision that some tax experts call a $200 billion giveaway to the rich.

It involves the tens of thousands of businesses that received loans from the federal government this spring with the promise that the loans would be forgiven, tax free, if they agreed to keep employees on the payroll through the coronavirus pandemic.

But for some businesses and their high-paid accountants, that was not enough. They went to Congress with another request: Not only should the forgiven loans not be taxed as income, but the expenditures used with those loans should be tax deductible.

The truly remarkable thing now is how little it matters that the supply side philosophy guiding such policy has been repeatedly discredited over the course of our 50 year experiment with it. Tax privileges for the one percent do not magically raise revenues. They do not end racial inequality. They do not "create jobs" or raise the general standard of living.  No matter. Our leaders will press on with it as an article of faith. It's the central creed of both parties from Congress all the way down to your local City Council. Giving money to rich people is the reason our electeds are called to service.  The hours are running short on the year now. But real quick, here are a few of our favorite local examples of neoliberal gospel preached in 2020. 

Just last week, Governor John Bel proudly announced a plan to give away $3 million in state funds to a company owned by the world's richest man who proposes to "create jobs" paying $32,000 on average.

Besides the access to Interstate 49 and 10, Amazon is eligible for a performance-based grant from Louisiana Economic Development of $3 million. The grant is payable over two years and can offset facility infrastructure costs. The state will also give Amazon access to LED FastStart, the state's workforce training program, which has given 463,000 training hours to more than 29,000 employees since 2008.

In October, with Orleans Parish homeowners still reeling from last year's property tax assessment, and renters facing a wave of evictions as CARES act protections and unemployment benefits ran out, Erroll Williams announced a $42 million tax cut for corporate owners of downtown commercial properties. 

According to data compiled by the Downtown Development District, almost a third of the total cut in commercial sector valuations — or about $90 million — is accounted for by 10 downtown properties, including the cluster of properties at the river end of Canal Street owned by Harrah's New Orleans Casino, a division of Caesars Entertainment of Las Vegas. Harrah's valuations were more than halved to about $15.3 million, which will reduce its property tax bill by an estimated $2.4 million, according to the assessor's office.

Similarly, the Marriott Hotel on Canal, the Sheraton, the Intercontinental, the Crowne Plaza, the Roosevelt and the Ritz-Carlton will see their property taxes halved.

All are owned by national hotel management groups, suggesting that any tax savings will head to corporate coffers outside of the city.

This gift to out of state mega-landlords will be paid for by about a $12 million dollar drop in revenues meant for public schools and services while homeowners and renters will have to pay $30 million more collectively. 

But let's not get too caught up in the distinction between businesses and neighborhoods. Because another thing we learned this year is that the city's official position is that neighborhood ARE businesses. 

“I really want to be thoughtful on the term business, because we were worried that there may be criticism that we only are thinking of businesses. I say business as a very global perspective where neighborhoods are businesses in my mind. People that have never been through this process and want to expand their gate, those individuals, those customers are businesses. So it’s not just ‘hey let’s help big business.’ “

That is New Orleans CAO Gilbert Montano employing a special kind of capitalism-inflected gobbledygook to talk about his plan to reorganize city planning, permitting and land use departments under something called the Office of Business and External Services. The scheme, which Montano describes as a "paradigm shift," would essentially change the mission of these agencies from protecting  public safety and quality of life from the hazards of profit-driven development to assisting the profit-seekers in getting around those protections.  

As if to drive the point home, the person they hired to implement this new vision made his own fortune monetizing the gentrification of New Orleans neighborhoods. 

Bowen’s new position caught the attention of some affordable housing advocates on Monday due to his former job as general manager of Sonder — a San Francisco-based company that has grown to be one of the largest operators of short-term rentals in New Orleans. In the resume he submitted for the job, Bowen claimed that during his tenure at Sonder he “Blitz Scaled the New Orleans market for Sonder from launch to 1,000 apartments (2,500 rooms) in under 36 months.” 

A report from March 2018 by Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, an affordable housing group that opposed the expansion of the legal short-term rental market in the city, found that Sonder had more listings on Airbnb than any other short-term rental operator in the city with 124.

Neighborhoods are businesses.  They are fodder for "blitz-scaled" profits regardless of whether anybody can actually live there.  It probably helps if they don't, in fact. That way they won't need things like public libraries which, incidentally, the city proposed to de-fund in order to pay for Bowen's new neighborhood monetization department. That proposal was killed by voters. But it's only a temporary set-back. It's clear where the city's priorities lie. Eventually they'll get the budget to follow. 

To expect anything different would be to expect a sudden conversion of the entire political class away from its religious belief in trickle-down economics.  But why would that happen when our priests continue to reaffirm their orthodoxy over and over?  As our final example, we have here one of Mayor Cantrell's very first actions in response to the emergency way back in March. She decided to give businesses a tax break. 

Despite worries about the city’s bottom line, Cantrell announced on Tuesday that the city would waive all penalties for late sales tax payments from businesses for the next 60 days. That measure is intended to make sure businesses have the money on hand to keep paying their employees while state and city closures are in place during the height of the outbreak.

What could possibly go wrong? Well they did ask her that. 

Given the strains to the city budget, Cantrell urged those businesses who are remaining open and can pay their sales taxes to do so, to lighten the burden on city government. Asked about concerns that businesses would simply pocket the money, not turning it over to their workers or to the government, Cantrell said she choose to look at the situation from an optimistic perspective.

“I’m not being negative at all and thinking that our businesses or employers will not do the right thing,” Cantrell said. “This is all with the expectation that they’ll do the right thing.”

Don't be "negative." Just hold fast to the belief that doing nice things for those at the top of the ladder will result in nice things for those at the bottom. For ever and ever amen. Anyway, the true believers only need to hold out a bit longer. The sooner we can declare the pandemic over, the sooner we can dismiss any heresy that suggests that poor people have anyone besides themselves to blame. 

The savior is coming in the form of a vaccine... eventually... maybe.

It’s happening all over again. For months, Americans who despaired about the country’s coronavirus-suppression efforts looked desperately to the arrival of a vaccine for a kind of pandemic deliverance. Now that it has arrived, miraculously fast, we are failing utterly to administer it with anything like the urgency the pace of dying requires — and, perhaps most maddeningly, failing in precisely the same way as we did earlier in the year. That is, out of apparent, near-total indifference.

Well, they'll figure it out.  After all, as Joe Biden might say, we gotta give Trump some credit. Just have a little faith.

We elected the bosses

The reason the bosses are winning the pandemic is because we put the bosses and friends of the bosses in charge of our government.  The reason your unemployment benefits are jammed up right now, your stimulus check isn't coming for months, and your state and city governments are about to slash any and every public service that benefits you is because you elected a bunch of bosses to guide us through the crisis. 

It's important to remember that when you go online and post at how mad mad mad you are at Amazon for its aggressive and horrifying union suppression tactics, it's important to remember that your state and local elected officials, only two short years ago were tripping over themselves to shovel $ 6 billion in public subsidies to this company in hopes of "winning" its hideous headquarters relocation sweepstakes.

The bosses are going to keep doing this to you as long as you keep voting them into power.

Privacy is important to Google

The company monetizing every bit of personal data about everybody on earth is very careful about what information it shares about itself.

Last May, officials in Midlothian, Tex., a city near Dallas, approved more than $10 million in tax breaks for a huge, mysterious new development across from a shuttered Toys R Us warehouse.

That day was the first time officials had spoken publicly about an enigmatic developer’s plans to build a sprawling data center. The developer, which incorporated with the state four months earlier, went by the name Sharka LLC. City officials declined at the time to say who was behind Sharka.

The mystery company was Google — a fact the city revealed two months later, after the project was formally approved. Larry Barnett, president of Midlothian Economic Development, one of the agencies that negotiated the data center deal, said he knew at the time the tech giant was the one seeking a decade of tax giveaways for the project, but he was prohibited from disclosing it because the company had demanded secrecy.

A very long time ago Google was more or less just a website you used to search for information.  Like if you wanted to know about who your elected representatives were about to shower favors and tax breaks upon, you might use Google to do some of that research.  You can still do that. But Google is hoping you won't find what they're up to until it's too late.

Why are they so worried? Well, it turns out that showering favors and tax breaks onto mega-corporations and international oligarchs isn't the no-brainer political winner it used to be.

The inevitability of Amazon’s arrival, however, had formed a strong common sense. Many acknowledged that it was a crummy deal – including, at times, the plan’s own architects – but urged New Yorkers to resign themselves to its eventuality. Just two days ago, the New York Times published an editorial by historian Kenneth Jackson that granted the subsidies’ absurdity, but suggested still that the city capitulate, stating: “this is how the game is played.” A few weeks earlier, Governor Cuomo, in an interview with Brian Lehrer, said that in a perfect world a company should not have states bidding against one another, but that: “We pray for the perfect, we live in the real.”

In other words, the deal may stink but our hands are tied. Mayor de Blasio acknowledged the obscenity of tax breaks for Bezos, but insisted that the deal was democratic because its key negotiators — the mayor and governor — were democratically elected. The message to New Yorkers was clear: sit down, there is no alternative.

And then, on Valentine’s Day, New Yorkers proved them all wrong. They burst the ideological bubble the establishment was floating, and showed that they will not accept the trickle-down, supply-side urban economics under the vague and misleading banner of “progressive” policy. This demonstrates that we can — and we must — do more than “play the game,” “pray for the perfect,” and follow the leaders.

God bless the kids who write this stuff for Jacobin.  They really do try like hell to convey a sense that great things are happening and victory is right around the corner and man is that ever annoying.  But that doesn't mean they're wrong about what happened. People in New York got together and said they'd had just about enough of this shit in so loudly that it ran the world's richest man right out of town.  So good job, those guys.  How's the rest of the world making out, though?  Not so good.

Making out especially not so good are we here in Louisiana where we're still very much invested in a model of governance that requires us to shower favors on the wealthy first and then hope for good things to come from that.

Maybe they can run Bezos off in New York but we can barely reserve the right to review the occasional industrial tax exemption. Not a single person in New Orleans questioned the cash payroll subsidies handed out to DXC Technology in 2017.  The Sonder STR hotel project is going to have full city council backing. 

In New York they told the world's richest man to fuck off. We can't even stand up to Torres and Motwani and Joe Jaeger. Jaeger just bought himself a dang plantation.  But all indications are we're going to subsidize his downtown hotel with money that could be better spent on shoring up our infrastructure.

What's worse is all of this stuff happens right out in the open where we can read about it in the local papers and whatnot.  What would happen if the local oligarchs started getting all huffy about their privacy when anybody tried to hold them accountable.

Show em what they've won

So who among us could have predicted that the year long Amazon HQ2 grift would have a happy ending?  It sort of does, anyway.  I mean, from the looks of things, Amazon, the global behemoth built on horrific labor exploitation and led by the world's richest man, is still going to get its multi-billion dollar gift from the public coffers of three states.  The happy news, though, is that a growing portion of what we might call the media and political mainstream is beginning to recognize that this is a bad thing.

Was this national auction nothing more than a scripted drama to raise the value of the inevitable winning bid? And did the retailer miss an opportunity to revitalize a midwestern city by choosing to enrich the already-rich East Coast?

All good questions. But here’s the big one: Why the hell are U.S. cities spending tens of billions of dollars to steal jobs from one another in the first place?

Every year, American cities and states spend up to $90 billion in tax breaks and cash grants to urge companies to move among states. That’s more than the federal government spends on housing, education, or infrastructure. And since cities and states can’t print money or run steep deficits, these deals take scarce resources from everything local governments would otherwise pay for, such as schools, roads, police, and prisons.

In New York, where the Governor offered to change his name to "Amazon Cuomo" in what we hope was a joke, the criticism has extended now into the state house and even the US House of Representatives. Those voices remain significantly marginalized, of course. But it's a positive step.  We're still making the super-rich super-richer at the great expense of everybody else. But it's now somewhat accecptable to be critical of that.

Even in Louisiana, you start to see the tide begin to turn a little bit.  It's not happening fast enough, obviously.  Here, for example, is the Governor still happy to hand out public money and favors to hotel developers. Legislators are proud of their restrained compromise decision to only give away $180 million a year to movie productions. All of New Orleans continues unquestioningly to celebrate the Amazon-style package it bestowed on DXC last year in order to help subsidize that company's international cost-cutting and downsizing strategy. And, of course, Louisiana entered its own gift package into the Amazon sweepstakes worth an estimated $6.5 billion.

But even here there are signs of a developing pushback.  For exaple, last year J.P. Morrell, who unfortunately continues to support a lot of these tax incentive deals, at least began to subject them to greater scrutiny.   Also last December, the Advocate ran a major in-depth report by Rebekah Allen on the Industrial Tax Exemption which has been one of Louisina's most costly giveaways and particularly damaging to local municipalities and school districts.  The Governor has granted local taxing authorities more discretion to approve or deny ITEP requests as of late. Some of them have even begun to exercise this discretion. Most notably, the Orleans Parish School Board recently denied such a request from Bollinger.  Baton Rouge teachers actually voted to walk out on Halloween in order to protest an ITEP break  for Exxon.  That issue is currently on hold.

So the good news is there's progress.  We're still losing but people are finding their voices have more reach than they once did.  Speaking of which, here is a video.

Number nine on the list is if you are supporting this event you are crossing a picket line

NOLA.com is fine running an Amazon commercial for you at the top of the page (just under the red bar header about the death of a fox.)  The commercial doesn't anything about the strike, though.  Wonder why they're comfortable running that.

Update: See also

Crying at work is the new normal

I'd love it if it were possible to boycott the omnipotent leviathan that Amazon has become but I think maybe the better path would be to take some sort of state action against these kinds of abuses.

Employees who spoke with Business Insider said the walks have instilled fear across every department of Whole Foods’ stores.

“I wake up in the middle of the night from nightmares about maps and inventory, and when regional leadership is going to come in and see one thing wrong, and fail the team,” a supervisor at a West Coast Whole Foods said. “The stress has created such a tense working environment. Seeing someone cry at work is becoming normal.”

The maps this employee referenced are diagrams drawn up by Whole Foods’ corporate office that dictate where every item in the store should be placed.

“The fear of chastisement, punishment, and retribution is very real and pervasive,” another worker said.

Of course that's also not likely to happen. Last I checked our elected representatives were bending over backwards to subsidize the behemoth with public funds.

Florida said he admires Amazon as a company and believes some incentives for tech jobs can be a good idea. But he said research suggests that offering big subsidies to large companies rarely drives economic growth, and Florida worries that a new precedent is being set, one in which public officials feel obliged to hand over increasingly larger magnitudes of money to corporations.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has proposed $5 billion in incentives, while New Jersey has offered a reported $7 billion subsidy deal to bring the company to Newark. Other cities and states have yet to make public their bids; they could be offering even more. Hogan called the Amazon project “the single greatest economic development opportunity in a generation,” for its potential to bring a Fortune 100 corporate nameplate, high-paying jobs and economic growth to the state.

“The level of incentives that some communities were talking about were overdoing it and not fiscally prudent,” Florida said. “Even worse, I was worried that the Amazon search was signaling to the environment that megadeals and megadeal competition is the new normal.”

As usual, Richard Florida is behind the curve. Public bribes to billionaires isn't the "new normal." It's just normal. Your so called progressive local politicians are likely to call it economic development. LaToya Cantrell's recent campaign for mayor centered around her enthusiasm for offering "incentives" to developers and employers like Amazon. She was quick to tout her role in facilitating the much publicized package handed over to DXC recently. It's not clear just how involved she actually was in that. But her eagerness to take credit tells you something about just how normal it is for your representatives to do these deals with the devil.

And, yeah, Amazon is definitely the devil. 

Companies love using the latest and greatest technology to keep track of employees, even when they’re at home. But Amazon’s new idea goes to extremes to treat employees like fleshy robots. The Seattle-based company was just granted two patents for employee wristbands that look like something from dystopian science fiction.

The two new patents, first spotted by Geekwire, are for wristbands that track where a given warehouse workers’ hands are at all times. You read that correctly. I have seen the future, and it’s just rows and rows of low-paid workers in endless warehouses being told to stop picking their noses. Or to get back from their bathroom break, as it were.

People want to let this company fix health care now too.  Sounds like a fantastic idea. 

"Off-the-shelf"

I think this phrase is meant to reassure people.  See, the state's 6 billion dollar offer to Amazon isn't all that alarming. These are just the "off-the-shelf" bribes we hand out to everybody.

The figure, which Louisiana Economic Development revealed publicly for the first time Tuesday in response to a records request from The Advocate, consisted almost entirely of off-the-shelf benefits the state regularly offers to qualifying businesses, though not typically of that magnitude.

In its proposal, dubbed "Project Pearl" by LED officials, the state pitched Amazon on five locations — three in New Orleans and two in the New Orleans area, although officials were willing to look farther afield.

Of course a lot of the stuff we keep on that shelf is pretty bad already. We saw some of it in the highly questionable deal that is expected to bring DXC to New Orleans.  It also comes at a time when the Governor and Legislature are preparing to sort out just how badly they're going to ask the state's poor to sacrifice in terms of schools, hospitals, and sales taxes so that they can continue subsidizing the profits of some of the world's largest corporations. 

What's worse, though, is that the "Project Pearl" formed for this pitch now becomes the template for the next package offered up in the next such sweepstakes.  New Orleans didn't "win" this round, which kind of feels like dodging a bullet, all things considered.

Amazon has turned Seattle, its current headquarters, into a 21st-century exemplar of income inequality. Living in the Pacific Northwest’s largest city is a beautiful thing for a worker with the skill set to slip effortlessly into a high-tech job. For everyone else, Seattle now features all the disturbing traits of any place that rewards knowledge workers at the top of the food chain and flushes away just about everyone else: from astronomical housing costs that have long since displaced middle- and lower- income people to punishing commutes for everyone who has to move in and out of the city.

Amazon’s arrival is bound to accelerate the displacement of people of more modest means and send the cost of living in the “lucky” victor soaring. The New York and Washington metro areas, already two of most expensive places to live in the United States, would become even more unaffordable for the average worker. (There are actually 15 “cities,” not 20, competing. New York and Newark constitute one mega-city; while Washington, D.C., Montgomery County, Maryland, and Northern Virginia are effectively another single metropolitan area—whether local leaders like it or not.)

But clearly this is all well within the deliberate scope of the policy goal.  State and local political leaders are set on exacerbating the already gross inequalities at work in New Orleans. It's hard to remember a time when this was not the case. It certainly has been the thrust of the post-Katrina era. And the "shelf" full of instruments for funding these schemes off the backs of the poorest people is getting more and more sophisticated.

The boil orders are not the reason Amazon isn't coming

People are gonna have jokes at the ready, I guess. But, no, that's not the reason. The reason is they found more willing marks elsewhere with bigger ransoms to pay.

Some state and local governments have made public the details of the financial incentives they are dangling. Boston's offer includes $75 million for affordable housing for Amazon employees and others. Before he left office Tuesday, Republican Gov. Chris Christie approved a measure backed by Democrats to allow New Jersey to offer up to $5 billion to Amazon. Newark also proposes to give Amazon $2 billion in tax breaks, although the city has yet to release its application to the AP.

But many of the state and local governments competing for the headquarters have refused to disclose the tax breaks or other financial incentives they offered. Of the 20 finalists, 13 including New York, Chicago, and Miami declined requests from the AP to release their applications while other requests were still pending. Applications from Columbus, Denver, Los Angeles and Raleigh, North Carolina, were submitted by outside groups not typically bound by the same disclosure rules.

It has been reported that Chicago is actually offering to give all the tax money collected from Amazon employees back to the company. In other words, Amazon will tax its own workers' paychecks. Fresno's proposal takes that a step further and actually incorporates Amazon executives into city government.

Submitted by Fresno Mayor Lee Brand, the proposal would place 85 percent of every tax dollar generated by Amazon into a so-called "Amazon Community Fund," which would be administered by a city committee along with Amazon executives. In essence, Amazon would be able to dictate were all that tax money goes, whether it be worker housing, public transportation to get Amazon employees to work, or parks and bike paths for the exercise and leisure of Amazon workers.

“Rather than the money disappearing into a civic black hole, Amazon would have a say on where it will go,” Fresno's economic development director Larry Westerlund told the LA Times. “Not for the fire department on the fringe of town, but to enhance their own investment in Fresno.” This isn't good for those who live on the fringes of town, but not to worry: The agreement would only last for the next 100 years.

So, no, the fact that New Orleans didn't make the cut doesn't have anything to do with Sewerage and Water Board.  That is, unless Amazon were getting into the water privatization business which we're pretty sure they aren't... yet. 

Kicking each other (and you) off the internet

I dunno. Maybe content should be universally accessible across platforms and networks instead of subject to artificial proprietary fragmentation benefiting one or another oligopolic megaliths.

The latest standoff between Google and Amazon was ridiculed by a trade association of high-speed internet providers. The group, USTelecom, has been trying to persuade skeptics that internet providers will preserve equal access to all digital services, even if the Federal Communications Commission adopts a proposal to rescind current "net neutrality" regulations .

Internet providers are committed to "protections like no content blocking or throttling," said USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter. "Seems like some of the biggest internet companies can't say the same. Ironic, isn't it?"

 Or maybe this is the best of all possible worlds. Who is to say?

"Wheel estate"

This is all very healthy and good. Things are going great.

My first encounter with one group of the new nomads came in 2013, at the Desert Rose RV park in Fernley, Nevada. It was populated by members of the “precariat”: temporary laborers doing short-term jobs in exchange for low wages. Its citizens were full-time wanderers who dwelled in RVs and other vehicles, though at least one guy had only a tent to live in. Many were in their 60s and 70s, approaching or well into traditional retirement age. Most could not afford to stop working – or pay the rent.

Since 2009, the year after the housing crash, groups of such workers had migrated each fall to the mobile home parks surrounding Fernley. Most had traveled hundreds of miles – and undergone the routine indignities of criminal background checks and pee-in-a-cup drug tests – for the chance to earn $11.50 an hour plus overtime at temporary warehouse jobs. They planned to stay through early winter, despite the fact that most of their homes on wheels weren’t designed to support life in subzero temperatures.

Their employer was Amazon.

It's interesting to watch the continuing discussion in town as New Orleans pretends to compete in the national sweepstakes for Amazon's new headquarters. We're all falling over each other to "incentivize" them to bring the good jobs to town.  Your excitement over this prospect is directly related to whether you imagine yourself among the employees of HQ2 or whether you're more likely to be booted out of the way so those employees can pay the rents you can't.

But, hey, life on the road sounds exciting.

The company store

The Amazon Sweepstakes was always going to get out of control. And yet, we regret we must still inform you that the Amazon Sweepstakes is out of control.

The e-commerce giant said last month that it had attracted 238 offers from cities that want to be the location for Amazon’s second headquarters. The company says it will spend $5bn (£3.8bn) on the new base, known as “HQ2”, which will employ 50,000 people.

Several of the cities’ bids have been published, revealing the lengths that authorities are willing to go to lay out the red carpet for big businesses.

Chicago and the state authorities of Illinois have jointly offered to hand Amazon more than $2bn in tax breaks, including $1.32bn of its workers’ income taxes. The scheme, known as a personal income tax diversion, would mean Amazon workers pay full income taxes, but instead of the state getting the money to use for schools, roads and other public services, Amazon would keep it.

A 2012 report by the Good Jobs First non-profit organisation said such practices mean that “workers are, in effect, paying taxes to their boss”.

Has New Orleans's proposal to Amazon been published? All I can find is Mitch's cover letter where he talks up our nearly all-charter school system.  Odd that the "data-driven" mayor would leave out the latest performance ratings for some reason.  Maybe it's because he's coming around to the absurdity of the grading system. Probably it's something else, though. We'd love to see what the city has actually offered.  No doubt it's well in line with the proto-fascist "best practices" Chicago and others have put in play where everyone who works for the state sponsored billion dollar company also pays directly for that privilege.

You can find similar characteristics in the much ballyhooed deal with DXC where the state and city guarantee a package of tax incentives (including a "payroll rebate") to a company bringing (possibly) 300 jobs to town next year as part of what looks more or less like a stock-fluffing stunt/downsizing strategy.  Everyone was very proud of that.

This includes Mayor-elect Cantrell, naturally.  During the final televised debate, she made certain to claim that she, "definitely had a hand in making (the DXC deal) happen." She didn't offer any specifics about her role, though.  She did spend a lot of time on the campaign trail talking about how she wanted to "depoliticize" the process by which these "incentives" are doled out. This means she prefers to remove even the possibility of public oversight from the disbursement of public money to private interests. On December 13, LaToya will address the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce's annual meeting at the Hyatt.  No doubt she'll have some fascinating insights to offer on all of this.

Happy Cyber Monday!

Amazon is not coming here

New Orleans is not going to win the big national corporate welfare sweepstakes to lure one of the country's most notorious labor abusers to build a headquarters here. This is probably a good thing. It means local poor people won't be subsidizing whatever package of "tax incentives" are required to bring in the "quality tech jobs" that won't go to them anyway.  The local booster crowd needs to find a new obsession.

This does NOT mean they should get any ideas about handing whole neighborhoods over to tech conglomerates so that they can turn them into EPCOTs. Somebody already thought of that.

Amazon always reading over your shoulder

What could go wrong?

Your networked Kindle tells Amazon where you've got to in each book. This is so that if you switch to, say, the Kindle app on your smartphone, you can pick up exactly where you left off. But this also means that Amazon knows not only what you're reading, but even where you've got to. So anonymous reading goes out of the window.

Drone War On Christmas

Maybe not this year, though.  Package delivery drones such as the sort that Amazon proposed this week are technologically possible but still largely impractical for a number of reasons.  Also they don't appear to solve any problem Amazon's customers can possibly identify.

The reason it generates so much excitement, though, is that it attacks a problem large companies like Amazon are continually concerned with and that is eliminating labor costs. 

The drone fleet would also eliminate a principal line of defense for the disruption Amazon has already brought to the economy. Some would argue that sure, jobs are lost as in-person retailers go out of business due to pressure from Amazon . . . but then again, more deliveries means more business for delivery workers! With drones, though, “delivery workers” are set to go the way of the travel agent and disappear. And while Amazon provides (terrifying) jobs for warehouse workers, it’s only a matter of time before robots learn how to pack boxes themselves.

This is still a pipe dream for Amazon.  But it's worth noting what they dream about. (Electric sheep?) If there's a job out there, rest assured your nation's self-described "Job Creators" are working on a way to give that job to a robot.