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ACCORDING TO LIZ - In the vein of Bernie’s burning desire to democratize the development of artificial intelligence by creating a sovereign wealth fund ensuring all Americans participate in A.I.’s explosive growth have a say on its direction to establish strong guardrails for public safety… let’s nationalize Amazon.
No single company has impacted consumer purchasing so profoundly nor experienced such a precipitous growth of profits.
Since almost all Amazon employees are considered replaceable, why not extend that benefit to the ones who made it possible and replace those at the Amazon apex by folding it under the United States Post Office as a public service?
Given that Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy are already extraordinarily wealthy – Bezos has a current net worth of $259 billion, and Jassy’s $2.1 million annual salary isn’t peanuts, especially compared to one of his own warehouse workers.
Not to mention that, at last reveal, Bezos holds two-and-a-quarter million shares of Amazon stock while Jassy has almost 900 thousand; shares worth over $300 each before Trump’s most recent war-of-choice belligerences buffeted the market.
Public-serving post offices here and in other countries should take over Amazon sales, shipping and delivery improving the lives of employees by granting them the unionization many have sought and making their work conditions safer and their jobs more secure.
Profits would feed back to pay for needed expansion and the revitalization of the once-great USPS, and beyond to created income for the country’s social programs.
Consumers would continue to benefit from ease of shopping, fewer hours on the road, and a less stressful lifestyle.
Less traffic would mean reduction of energy use, infrastructure wear-and-tear, and global warming. And increased ease of access for emergency vehicles.
Fewer brick-and-board stores and more virtual employment would free up real estate for housing.
Building conversions would create jobs and provide opportunities for improving energy efficiency.
The expansion of green energy careers will boost self-worth and encourage other living-wage enterprises.
The attendant changes would improve quality of life across the country and around the world.
During the past couple of decades, Amazon has dramatically changed the way Americans live, perhaps even more than the rise of social media. Both have significantly reduced human interactions with living, breathing, thinking people with the time to spare for talking with each other, learning about other’ lives, and caring for one another, instead of just survival, juggling multiple jobs to pay for the ever-mounting bills.
Social media-enhanced bubbles have turned neighbor against neighbor, friend into foe.
When in the 1950s, over a third of American workers belonged to a union, income inequality was low and pension, health insurance, and the forty-hour workweek were standard. We shared time with those around us instead of filling our lives with things.
We must also strive to rehumanize our experiences, become sharers, kinder.
Build relationships. Reach out to people where they are. Listen respectfully to their concerns, and show you care. Discuss apprehensions and how proposed changes will affect us. What we can do to help ourselves and our overlapping communities.
The same should apply to businesses and government services.
In conjunction with the folding of Amazon under the USPS banner, we should add back basic banking services and remove the profiteering of the high-risk financial sector from ordinary people’ lives.
The Post Office has been struggling for years but it still makes a stupendous contribution to the American people, especially those who live in rural areas far from the nearest big box store, for those of limited income, and for those who are house-bound.
The basic function of the USPS is its “obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.”
Better known are the words we learned in childhood: “Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night…” which, interestingly enough, derives from the writings of Herodotus praising the courier service that existed during the Persian Empire.
Today, Amazon’s corporate culture engenders a race to the very bottom to boost profits for those at the very top.
Chris Smalls, the Amazon worker fired for organizing the 2020 Staten Island strike, had previously exacerbated warehouse conditions by being so efficient that the company adopted his skills to justify bumping workers’ hourly quotas from 250 items per hour in 2015 to the 400 per hour demanded today.
The company’s focus on yield and scale echoes the productivity metric of slaves picking cotton in the field.
Amazon is the new slavery, but with technology, mechanization, machinery, and A.I..
A.I. will impact half of American jobs in the next couple of years – writers, teachers, nurses, cashiers, people at call centers and… warehouse workers.
Amazon just laid off 30,000 workers in favor of A.I. expansion. A.I. doesn’t make demands, require breaks or health insurance. It may not provide good customer service but on the scale of shortcuts to windfall profits, it’s an ace. Billionaires want to save money. And if that comes at the expense of a worker, they’ll take it every time.
Employees are too often viewed as interchangeable and disposable. Nobody’s job is safe and, for too many, the American Dream doesn’t exist anymore.
One of the first things Trump did in his first 10 days was dismantle the already underfunded and understaffed National Labor Relations Board.
For those who trusted Reagan and his corporate-friendly proclamation that: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help,” remember that the U.S. Postal Service was one of the most respected government benefits for all Americans…
…until the small-government advocates of 2006 passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act often denigrated as “the most insane law” ever passed by Congress.
It requires the Postal Service, which receives no money whatsoever from the taxpayer, to pre-fund retirees’ health benefits through the year 2056 to the tune of billions of dollars a year. No other entity, private or public, bears such an onerous obligation and, without it, the Post Office would actually turn a profit.
Even at the time, it was perceived as a manufactured crisis to boost the competitiveness of private companies and force the privatization of the USPS, a goal that was and continues to be pushed by so-called conservative – read plutocrat-friendly – think tanks for years.
Now it’s time for the private company whose bottom line has benefited the most to give back to the American people. That doesn’t mean that the USPS will turn its back on A.I. and efficiency but would hopefully use it more wisely, and with compassion for staff and customers.
The nationalization of Amazon has the unique ability to benefit their employees and all Americans. There are few other industries that offer us as much.
Many industries, have so many competing companies that any one would have little to offer we-the-people.
Whether or not Trump allows people to share in the A.I. bonanza, it is an extreme danger for the world without enforceable and enforced guardrails.
For the same reason, no arm of the government should invest fossil fuels and mining furthering the rush to global warming and environmental degradation. Ditto the armaments industry and wars.
Healthcare-for-all, which we desperately need, involves dismantling multiple corporations structured across multiple sectors and will need to be addressed separately.
If Bezos and the plutocracy object, perhaps we should flip to a 2020 Trump post on X: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Only this time, with the Post Office having been looted, it is only right and just that the big guns should take down Amazon. First.
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
