Credit where credit is due

 It's a start.

Trump tariffs are not going over so well

 

Amazon reference background.

Amazon clarification

 

No threat necessary...

Perhaps Bezos doesn't have the balls.

UPDATE 03:08 pm:

As if.

UPDATE 04:12 pm:

It begins

 

1)  Depends on the definition of "low".

2)  We'll see how long they hold out.

Alexa - inviting a spy into your home

 

"And you can't opt out."

Jeff Bezos knows kissing the ring works

 

Bending the knee - Part whatever

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 1/6/25:

Filming on the Melania bio-pic began last month and will be directed by Brett Ratner. It is based of her autobiography ‘Melania’, which was released earlier this year. Ratner has been out of work for the last 10 years since Warner Brothers cut all ties with him after he was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, including actors Natasha Hensridge and Olivia Munn.

  Meidas Touch

UPDATE 01/07/2025:

Oh, we are in a new era, for sure.

UPDATE 01/10/2025:

I never noticed before that Mark Zuckerberg is painting his face orange, too.  Is this new?

Got an Amazon store near you?

If not, hopefully you've done your Amazon Xmas shopping already.

Anti-union forces will be out and proud on January 21, but until then...

Unions were gaining too much strength

I didn't know this was in the works, but they'd better do it now. When Trump takes over, unions are going to lose all the gains they've made in the last few years.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Cue the screaming me-mes

The misogynists and religious right will be boycotting and picketing Amazon.

Looks like it will be happening:

The draft decision  is truly full of bullshit.

UPDATE:

A tweet from Scotusblog, a respected news and analysis site, said it was “impossible to overstate the earthquake this will cause inside the court, in terms of the destruction of trust among the justices and staff. This leak is the gravest, most unforgivable sin.”

  Guardian

Agreed.* Except for the part about it being the most unforgivable sin.  That would be manipulating the appointment of judges.  I'm looking at you, Mitch McConnell.

But are we dismissing the possibility that one of the justices is the leaker?** Highly unlikely, but still possible.

UPDATE:

Not good enough, Dick.

Poor, Susan.  Duped again.

*  It's not the first time, of course.  Check out this thread for previous SCOTUS leaks.  It includes an instance of one of the justices doing the leaking.

**The case for a "pro-life" leaker

UPDATE:

You would think Jeffrey Toobin had embarrassed himself enough.

There is power in a union

Brave New World

Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen.

[...]

In a 2020 letter to management, Max Eliaser, an Amazon software engineer, said Ring is “simply not compatible with a free society”. We should take his claim seriously.

Ring video doorbells, Amazon’s signature home security product, pose a serious threat to a free and democratic society. Not only is Ring’s surveillance network spreading rapidly, it is extending the reach of law enforcement into private property and expanding the surveillance of everyday life. What’s more, once Ring users agree to release video content to law enforcement, there is no way to revoke access and few limitations on how that content can be used, stored, and with whom it can be shared. Amazon is cagey about how many Ring cameras are active at any one point in time, but estimates drawn from Amazon’s sales data place yearly sales in the hundreds of millions. The always-on video surveillance network extends even further when you consider the millions of users on Ring’s affiliated crime reporting app, Neighbors, which allows people to upload content from Ring and non-Ring devices.

[...]

[S]ince Amazon bought Ring in 2018, it has brokered more than 1,800 partnerships with local law enforcement agencies, who can request recorded video content from Ring users without a warrant. That is, in as little as three years, Ring connected around one in 10 police departments across the US with the ability to access recorded content from millions of privately owned home security cameras.

[...]

Ring’s cloud-based infrastructure (supported by Amazon Web Services) makes it convenient for law enforcement agencies to place mass requests for access to recordings without a warrant. Because Ring cameras are owned by civilians, law enforcement are given a backdoor entry into private video recordings of people in residential and public space that would otherwise be protected under the fourth amendment. By partnering with Amazon, law enforcement circumvents these constitutional and statutory protections, as noted by the attorney Yesenia Flores.

[...]

Although Ring doesn’t currently use facial recognition in its cameras, Amazon has sold this technology to police in the past. Following pressure from AI researchers and civil rights groups, Amazon placed a one-year pause on police use of its controversial facial recognition technology, but this moratorium will expire in June.

  Guardian

Jeff Bezos is Big Brother.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Alabamans votes against their own interests

Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama will not be forming a union.

The vast majority of votes cast by Amazon's workers in Bessemer, Ala., were against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in a stinging defeat of the union drive. The final tally showed 1,798 votes against unionizing and 738 votes in favor of the union.

[...]

Historically, unions have been a tough sell in Southern states such as Alabama. Some Bessemer workers quietly reached out to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union last summer, a few months after the warehouse opened. They described grueling productivity quotas, wanting more say in how people at Amazon work, get disciplined or get fired.

[...]

The retail union is now filing a legal challenge to the election and charges of unfair labor practices against Amazon. It's requesting a hearing by the National Labor Relations Board "to determine if the results of the election should be set aside because conduct by the employer created an atmosphere of confusion, coercion and/or fear of reprisals and thus interfered with the employees' freedom of choice."

  NPR

Maybe. Or...the employer just knew where to place its warehouse.

It was the first union election at an Amazon warehouse since 2014 when a small group of technicians in Delaware also voted against unionizing.

WTF, Delaware?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Rare sighting: A businessman with a conscience

Deconstructing America

President Trump on Friday threatened to block an emergency loan to shore up the U.S. Postal Service unless it dramatically raised shipping prices on online retailers, an unprecedented move to seize control of the agency that analysts said could plunge its finances into a deeper hole.

“The Postal Service is a joke,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. To obtain a $10 billion line of credit Congress approved this month, “The post office should raise the price of a package by approximately four times,” he said.

[...]

“If they don’t raise the price of the service they give, which is a tremendous service, and they do a great job and the postal workers are fantastic — but this thing’s losing billions of dollars,” Trump said. “If they don’t raise the price I’m not signing anything, so they’ll raise the price so that they become maybe even profitable but so they lose much less money, okay? ”

  WaPo

So NO ONE will be sending packages through the post office, and they'll go bankrupt anyway.

Trump for years has alleged the Postal Service has charged too little for packages and personally pushed the head of the agency to charge far more to ship goods for big online retailers. Several administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said Trump’s criticism of Postal Service rates is rooted in a desire to hurt Amazon in particular. They have said that he fumes publicly and privately at Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, for news coverage that Trump believes is unfair.

[...]

“This is about as catastrophically stupid an idea that anyone could ever imagine,” said Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University Business School. “As if anyone from Amazon to the local mom and pop delivery businesses would ever put up with a rate increase like that when they have alternatives.”

Jon Gold, the vice president of supply chain and customs policy at the National Retail Federation, said in a statement that higher prices would “significantly hurt rural communities and small businesses in addition to USPS.”

“Retailers and consumers are heavily relying on USPS during the pandemic to deliver goods, as bricks-and-mortar stores are temporarily closed,” Gold said.

Trump’s proposal could hit Amazon harder than other shipping companies because it cannot as easily pass costs onto consumers. It also contracts more often with USPS for “last-mile” service — or deliveries between warehouses and homes.

“Raising rates like that on the post office, which is a thinly veiled attempt to get at Bezos, will merely result in Amazon and other shippers moving their business,” Cohen said. “It will kill the post office.”

Like so many things Trump does, any side effects mean nothing to him. As long as he can punish someone he wants to punish, collateral damage does not concern him.

“Raising rates like that on the post office, which is a thinly veiled attempt to get at Bezos, will merely result in Amazon and other shippers moving their business,” Cohen said. “It will kill the post office.”

[...]

[O]verall, the pandemic has worsened the agency’s finances as catalogues, real estate ads and other business mail have spiraled down. Postal officials say revenue has plunged by almost a third, and growth in package business has not been able to compensate for the other losses.

[...]

Lawmakers, postal unions and other entities that rely on the post office accused the president of exploiting the pandemic to punish his enemies.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the president was trying to starve the Postal Service so he and his allies can turn it over to a private company.

[...]

“[Trump] is interposing his own flawed judgment for a very complex, technical enterprise that serves at least a $2 trillion industry,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who chairs the House subcommittee in charge of postal oversight. “It’s one of the most important services in America. It serves every business and every household and it has a workforce of 630,000 people who put themselves at risk every day on behalf of the American population. And he’s willing to risk it all because he’s got a bugaboo in his mind that Jeff Bezos and Amazon are getting a good deal.”

[...]

“Now, when Americans need affordable and reliable package delivery service more than ever, Congress must fight to guarantee emergency relief for the Postal Service and stop this package tax,” [former Army secretary John McHugh, chairman of the Package Coalition advocacy group, said.]

Indeed. And we need to flip the Senate in November. ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Amazon sleeze

Leaked notes from an internal meeting of Amazon leadership obtained by VICE News reveal company executives discussed a plan to smear fired warehouse employee Christian Smalls, calling him “not smart or articulate” as part of a PR strategy to make him “the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”

“He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,” wrote Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky in notes from the meeting forwarded widely in the company.

[...]

“We should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out the case for why the organizer’s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal, in detail, and only then follow with our usual talking points about worker safety,” Zapolsky wrote. “Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”

[...]

The discussion took place at a daily meeting, which included CEO Jeff Bezos, to update each other on the coronavirus situation.

[...]

Amazon fired the warehouse worker Smalls on Monday, after he led a walkout of a number of employees at a Staten Island distribution warehouse. Amazon says he was fired for violating a company-imposed 14-day quarantine after he came into contact with an employee who tested positive for the coronavirus.

Smalls says the employee who tested positive came into contact with many other workers for longer periods of time before her test came back. He claims he was singled out after pleading with management to sanitize the warehouse and be more transparent about the number of workers who were sick.

[...]

They discussed encouraging Amazon executives to use Smalls to discredit the wider labor movement at Amazon.

[...]

Amazon also weighed ways to generate a PR win from their mask stockpile with “different and bold” ways of giving away surplus masks to hospitals and independent grocers. “If we can get masks in quantity it’s a fantastic gift if we donate strategically,” Zapolsky wrote.

“Another idea for giving masks away — give 1,000 masks to every police station in the country,” Zapolsky wrote, adding this “reminds folks it’s not just medical workers who need these.”

[...]

Amazon has also begun efforts to to produce masks itself. While the company has a “line of sight” on a supply of N95 masks, the notes said, Amazon is “starting to put together internal efforts” for mask production, though this is described as “more of a nine month type project.”

Zapolsky’s notes imply the company’s attempts to purchase N95 masks from China fell through. “China has deemed N95 masks as ‘strategic,’” Zapolsky wrote. “They’re keeping them for optionality. They also want to use them for ‘diplomacy.’ The masks in China that we thought we had probably got redirected by profiteers.”

  

It takes one to know one.

Covid-19 roundup

So much for packed churches at Easter.

Somebody talked some sense into him.  Or more likely, Jerry Falwell's failure calling students back to campus and finding a number of them are infected, knocked the fear into him.

Meanwhile...

Because of course he did.

Amazon shuts first warehouse

Amazon is temporarily closing a New York delivery station after one of its workers tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

Rena Lunak, an Amazon spokesperson, told The Atlantic on Wednesday that the individual is now in quarantine and that the warehouse has enhanced its "daily deep cleaning" at the location as a precautionary measure.

"We’ve temporarily closed the Queens delivery station for additional sanitation and have sent associates home with full pay," Lunak said.

  The Hill

Such as it is.

Amazon changes in service

Amazon is suspending shipments of nonessential items to its warehouses in the United States and United Kingdom following shortages triggered by the coronavirus outbreak.

[...]

The freeze will be effective from Tuesday through April 5, according to Amazon, although an extension has not been ruled out.

Products already en route to facilities will still be accepted.

Limiting nonessential items is just one step Amazon has taken in response to increased demand for products to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

On Monday, Amazon announced it is planning to hire about 100,000 new employees.

  The Hill

Well, pay them a decent wage, you fuckers.

The company also plans to raise wages from $15 to $17 per hour for workers at American locations.

That's great. Too bad it took a pandemic to make them do it.

 Also...why just American locations?  I recall something about UK workers striking a few years ago and getting increased pay, so that might be the answer.

And will they be getting sick leave benefits?

“We are seeing a significant increase in demand, which means our labor needs are unprecedented for this time of year,” Amazon's senior vice president of operations, Dave Clark, wrote in a memo obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

And will you cut their pay after it's over?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Owned by a man richer than God