Elon went full-fascist in record time.

now since tumblr apparently loves to support non-american authors, but is surprisingly mum about this, imma tell you.

you see, everybody's favorite evil corp, Amazon, bought Indian publishing house Westland some six years ago. Now Westland is a very famous and reputed publishing house in India, and has put forth some of the best titles the country has seen. It didn't shy away from controversial and uncomfortable topics, and some of its books quite vocally criticise the current government, which has been responsible for the current state of india as a pseudo-democratic, pseudo-secular, economically ruined country, the most notable one being The Price of the Modi years by Aakar Patel. It also produced Amish Tripathi's pathbreaking Shiva Trilogy.

Now here's the thing that got me nuts.

AMAZON. SHUT. IT. DOWN. A WEEK AGO.

JUST OUT OF THE BLUE, IT IS CLOSING DOWN WESTLAND FOREVER. NOBODY KNOWS WHAT IS TO COME OF THE HUNDREDS OF TITLES PUBLISHED BY IT, OR OF THE AUTHORS ITS CONTRACTED, OR THE PEOPLE EMPLOYED BY IT.

It has triggered a buying surge in India, as people go on shopping spress to get their hands on the titles they want from this house. Short on supply and high on demand, bookstores across India are showing solidarity and moving surplus books around.

here you go with a few links that i think sum up the problem quite nicely, and please guys. just. please support westland.

here they talk about how this is becoming a trend with global corps.

here they talk about the future of indian publishing houses.

this one talks about a bleak future for literature and how it feels like we're living in a dystopian novel

spread this around. jeff bezos continues to be evil, and will be. he is quite literally, irredeemable.

Holy fuck there's no chill at Gizmodo

They have to dismantle a historic bridge just to get it out of the river it's being made on

And I'm really, REALLY hoping the local public protest the hell out of it to the point where they cant dismantle the bridge and so Jeff's $540 million dollar toy gets locked in

On Facebook, locals are proposing to pelt the yacht with rotten eggs when it passes through.

Bezos spreads his own propaganda.

#TaxTheRich #WealthTax

Musk’s and Bezos’s Great Escape

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to colonize outer space to save humanity, but they couldn’t care less about protecting the rights of workers here on earth.

Musk’s SpaceX just won a $2.9 billion NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon, beating out Bezos.

The money isn’t a big deal for either of them. Musk is worth $179.7 billion. Bezos, $197.8 billion. Together, that’s almost as much as the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined.

And the moon is only their stepping-stone.

Musk says SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2026 and wants to establish a colony by 2050. Its purpose, he says, will be to ensure the continued survival of our species.

“If we make life multiplanetary, there may come a day when some plants and animals die out on Earth but are still alive on Mars,” he tweeted.

Bezos is also aiming to build extraterrestrial colonies, but in space rather than on Mars. He envisions “very large structures, miles on end” that will “hold a million people or more each.”

But Musk and Bezos are treating their workers like, well, dirt.

Last spring, after calling government stay-at-home orders “fascist” and tweeting “FREE AMERICA NOW,” Musk reopened his Tesla factory in Fremont, California before health officials said it safe to do so. Almost immediately, 10 Tesla workers came down with the virus. As cases mounted, Musk fired workers who took unpaid leave. Seven months later, at least 450 Tesla workers had been infected.

Musk’s production assistants, as they’re called, earn $19 an hour – hardly enough to afford rent and other costs of living in northern California. Musk is virulently anti-union. A few weeks ago, the National Labor Relations Board found that Tesla illegally interrogated workers over suspected efforts to form a union, fired one and disciplined another for union-related activities, threatened workers if they unionized and barred employees from communicating with the media.

Bezos isn’t treating his earthling employees much better. His warehouses impose strict production quotas and subject workers to seemingly arbitrary firings, total surveillance and 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks – often not enough time to get to a bathroom and back. Bezos boasts that his workers get $15 an hour, but that comes to about $31,000 a year for a full-time worker, less than half the U.S. median family income. And no paid sick leave.

Bezos has fired at least two employees who publicly complained about lack of protective equipment during the pandemic. To thwart the recent union drive in Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon required workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned they’d have to pay union dues (untrue – Alabama is a “right-to-work” state), and threatened them with lost pay and benefits.

Musk and Bezos are the richest people in America and their companies are among the country’s fastest growing. They thereby exert huge influence on how other chief executives understand their obligations to employees.

The gap between the compensation of CEOs and average workers is already at a record high. They inhabit different worlds.

If Musk and Bezos achieve their extraterrestrial aims, these worlds could be literally different. Most workers won’t be able to escape into outer space. A few billionaires are already lining up.

The super-rich have always found means of escaping the perils of everyday life. During the plagues of the 17thcentury, European aristocrats decamped to their country estates. During the 2020 pandemic, wealthy Americans headed to the Hamptons, their ranches in Wyoming or their yachts.

The rich have also found ways to protect themselves from the rest of humanity – in fortified castles, on hillsides safely above smoke and sewage, in grand mansions far from the madding crowds. Some of today’s super rich have created doomsday bunkers in case of nuclear war or social strife.

But as earthly hazards grow – not just environmental menaces but also social instability related to growing inequality – escape will become more difficult. Bunkers won’t suffice. Not even space colonies can be counted on.

I’m grateful to Musk for making electric cars and to Bezos for making it easy to order stuff online. But I wish they’d set better examples for protecting and lifting the people who do the work.  

It’s understandable that the super wealthy might wish to escape the gravitational pull of the rest of us. But there’s really no escape. If they’re serious about survival of the species, they need to act more responsibly toward working humans here on terra firma.

Bezos, McConnell, and COVID Capitalism

As a former Secretary of Labor, I often receive mail from workers with job complaints, who apparently believe I still have some authority. But the email I received a few days ago from a worker at Amazon’s Whole Foods delivery warehouse in Industry City, Brooklyn, New York, was particularly distressing.

She said that six of her co-workers had tested positive for COVID since October 22, because “safe social distancing is not only being ignored but discouraged,” adding that “when we express our discomfort to management, we are yelled at about filling orders faster, or told that we can take a leave of absence without pay.”

She ended by noting “we work for a trillionaire.”

Well, not quite. Jeff Bezos is worth $180 billion, making him the richest person in the world. And his corporation, Amazon, which also owns Whole Foods, is among the world’s richest corporations.

Bezos has accumulated so much added wealth over the last nine months that he could give every Amazon employee $105,000 and still be as rich as he was before the pandemic.

So you’d think he’d be able to afford safer workplaces. Yet as of October, more than 20,000 U.S.-based Amazon employees had been infected by the virus. That estimate comes from Amazon, by the way. There’s been no independent verification, nor has Amazon revealed how many of them have died.  

Decades ago, employees in most large corporations could remedy unsafe working conditions by complaining to their union, which pressured their employer to fix the problems, or to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (founded in 1970), which levied fines.

Alternatively, they could embarrass their companies by going public with their complaints. As a last resort, they could sue.

None of these routes is readily available to Amazon warehouse workers – nor, for that matter, to warehouse workers at Walmart, or to most workers in other super-spreader COVID workplaces such as meatpacking plants and nursing homes.

Amazon’s workers have no union to protect them. (Throughout its 25-year history, the corporation has aggressively fought union organizing.) Nor, for that matter, do 93.8 percent of America’s private-sector workers. Fifty years ago, more than a third were unionized.

And OSHA? Since the start of the pandemic, it’s been useless. Although receiving more than 10,000 complaints of unsafe conditions, it has issued just two citations.

Amazon employees who go public with their complaints are likely to lose their jobs. The corporation prohibits its workers from commenting publicly on any aspect of its business, without prior approval from executives. So far during the pandemic, it has fired at least two white-collar employees who publicly denounced conditions at its warehouses, as well as several warehouse workers who raised safety concerns to media outlets.

Amazon isn’t alone. A survey conducted in May by the National Employment Law Project showed that 1 in 8 American workers “has perceived possible retaliatory actions by employers against workers in their company who have raised health and safety concerns” about COVID.

The final option is to sue the company, but lawsuits against employers over COVID have been rare because of difficulties proving that the employee contracted the virus at work. A Washington Post analysis found that since the pandemic began, just 234 personal injury or wrongful death lawsuits have been filed due to the virus.

All of which reveals the utter fatuousness of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s and his fellow Senate Republicans’ demand that any new COVID relief package must include a corporate “liability shield” against COVID cases.

Even if such lawsuits were successful, corporations already have limited liability. That’s what it means to be a corporation. In the unlikely event Amazon were sued and plaintiffs won, Jeff Bezos would remain comfortable.

The heinous resurgence of COVID makes clear that corporations need more – not fewer – incentives to protect their workers from the virus.  

As millions of Americans lose whatever meager income they had, they should not have to choose between taking a risky job – such as in an Amazon warehouse – or putting food on their family’s table.

Bezos, as well as every major employer in America, can easily afford to protect their workers. And as Mitch McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans should know, the richest nation in the world can easily afford to provide every American adequate income support during this national emergency.

That they’re not doing so is disgraceful.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon are a fucking blight upon the working class. He got rich by treating rank and file employees like hot garbage toiling under dehumanizing, backbreaking conditions for shitty pay. When there are this many random strangers across various sectors/departments of a single company sharing similar horror stories, that can’t be dismissed as just a few disgruntled ex-employees. Grievances like these are why I quit using Amazon. They made my life easier at the expense of thousands of hardworking people being mistreated and disrespected behind closed doors. (thread)

This is why deregulation ruined us. It caused businesses to be able to do whatever they wanted to employees. If we had regulations in place to prevent this then it wouldn't have gotten this far and yet we let it happen.

This is due in part at least to the "American Dream" you hear so much about. That if you work hard and apply yourself then you will be successful and wealthy. After all Bezos did it himself didn't he so why not you too. That mentality leads to anyone who slogs through the brutal dehumanizing conditions to some sort of position of privilege, and even some that don't get that far but think they could, to have the temporarily embarrassed millionaire attitude. Like somehow they just know this is all temporary and they have more in common with their overlord than the person working next to them.

Politicians and corporations alike have encouraged and built up this ideology over decades despite a stagnant increase in wages vs overall profits. They learned their lessons from the Miner Strikes and Teamsters of the early 1900s whereas most working people forgot in the wake of start ups and "new wealth". We've allowed the idea of organizing and demanding suitable working conditions to become something "other" people do. Thing is as much as amazon puts on a face of stepping into the future and being super automated they would break in record time without a human workforce. Same thing for any number of other companies out there that treat their employees as disposable, they need people cause people produce, whether it's a product, an end result, some desired effect, they want it and you make it happen for cash. Get enough people that do so together, and agree that you won't do diddly till they treat you right and suddenly they magically have more pay for you and better conditions.

Truth is they always had more money to give but would you pay more for something than the sticker price? Collective bargaining is how a workforce sets their price, that includes working conditions and for some reason we seem to have forgotten that and the billionaires of the world did a collective rollback on us to make sure their own wealth would be unassailable. The flaw in their plan is that they are human just like the rest of us and so they need us more than we need them

That was just pure disrespect, she deserves the money, it was accumulated in her presence, with her support, can we please use respectful language when we speak about women please

Misogyny is so hilarious to me

PAY UP!!!!👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

Men are pathetic.

She’s reduced to the worth of her ‘pussy’, and thus OP sidesteps the question of what man is worth $130 billion to begin with. Is it his dick? His brain? His heart? No, he is rich from the labor of thousands of exploited workers.

#NotMeUs is the multi-racial multi-generational working class coalition needed to defeat Trump. Every vote is important to reach a majority of 1991 delegates before the convention (otherwise it’s almost certain Biden will be chosen), so please take action to help make Bernie Sanders the nominee. There’s everything to fight for! Plan ahead, get to the polls early, and stay in line.

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Bernie Sanders | Amazon workers are urinating in bottles because they’re afraid of failing to meet productivity targets, according to @J_Bloodworth who went undercover at an Amazon warehouse in the UK.

If you have $1,000 in cash and spend 1 penny, that’s the equivalent of Jeff Bezos spending $1.5 million

Good for him. Money doesn’t just fall from the sky. He had to do something to be that wealthy.

like have parents who could give him $100,000 without breaking a sweat then working people literally to death?

“He had to do something to be that wealthy.” should be a very ominous phrase not a positive one.

i like that this person says “he had to do something to be that wealthy”

like. they aren’t sure, they have absolutely no idea about how he acquired all of his wealth, they know nothing about the topic, and yet they will continue to firmly believe that mr. bezos would never do us wrong

Al Capone was the first American to make $100 million, and he had to do “something” fof his money too.

Al Capone actually cared about poor people, though. He came from a family of immigrants and took care of his own, donating to charities and even running a soup kitchen (x, there are better sources but I’m lazy). Some people even characterized him as a kind of modern Robin Hood.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying Al Capone was a good guy. I’m saying he might’ve been a better guy than Jeff Bezos.

And I’m saying that while Al Capone wasn’t a great guy, he was DEFINITELY A better guy than Jeff Bez-ass. This is on mobile, so I can’t do resources right now, I’ll add them later.

Capone, even though he didn’t fire the bullet, once paid for the hospital bills of a woman that had been caught in the crossfire of a scuffle. And while he was there, after paying her medical bills and giving her over $100 of flowers to cheer her up, he paid off all the bills of the children in the hospital. Which he did regularly. He sent flowers to the families of his dead enemies. HE IS THE REASON MILK HAS AN EXPIRATION DATE! His son (or nephew or something) died from complications from bad milk. And he got to work and made the milk and dairy industry hold to a much tighter standard, with included sell by dates and expiration dates. Not because it was family that got sick (or died), but because he found out that a lot of kids were getting sick off of bad milk products.

Capone was always a gentleman, he paid his workers well, treated his women good, and protected his own. If one of his workers got hurt or died, he would pay the bills and expenses, and help out their families.

He wasn’t a good guy, but the dude had a moral standard that Jeff Bez-ass doesn’t even pretend to have.

Oh, and Capone also heavily supported local shops, went to baseball games with his kids, funded his workers’ children to go to school, and was the kind of guy that wouldn’t sucker punch ya unless it was absolutely necessary.

How many rich assholes do we know of that does that kind of stuff?

Mafia Tumblr I knew you were out there somewhere