Tag: news

Amazon: Anatomy of a Behemoth

Despite its humble beginnings in a Seattle two car garage in 1994 and web presence in 1995 as a purveyor of books, Amazon has subsequently grown into a behemoth, becoming the world’s largest online retailer with a current market cap of $1.61 trillion.

Founder Jeff Bezos, ever the visionary and e-commerce pioneer, observing that the internet was growing at a rate of 2300% a year, quit his job at a Wall Street firm and moved to Seattle, hoping his venture world payoff in the best and largest online mall.

He initially dubbed his new company Cadabra, Inc, but after his lawyers misheard it as cadaver, he decided on a change. Browsing through a dictionary, the word Amazon for the world’s largest river caught his eye.

It wasn’t long before Amazon moved beyond its foothold of selling books to diversifying in 1999 into selling and auctioning toys, electronics, tools and hardware, and kitchenware.

Sales took off and Amazon hired 20,000 seasonal employees to meet demand.

Today, Amazon continues to be the global leader in e-commerce, providing a refined marketplace which connects buyers with sellers, boasting the largest fulfillment network in the world, and promoting a vibrant culture of innovation and emerging technologies.

The Seattle based company employs more than 90,000 people in the state of Washington, with the actual number of employees exceeding 380,000 worldwide, making Amazon one of the biggest job creators in the last decade. These jobs consist of anything from corporate engineers and marketers to hourly warehouse and customer service representatives. The company operates at a scale unequaled in contemporary business and technology.

Unfortunately, it’s become “a bloody beast,” says one of its critics, swallowing up independent brick and mortar enterprises, commencing with its purchase of Whole Foods in 2017, a $13.7 billion deal.

Now a multifaceted eCommerce platform, it earns its income through arrangements of retail, third-party sellers, subscriptions and,more recently, in servers and other forms of employee data storage.

Innovation has been the hallmark of Amazon’s continuing success. Kindle, for example, proved one of its best, changing the way the public buys its books to the chagrin of physical bookstores.

Currently, Amazon has been investing in drone delivery, which would revolutionize how packages are sent and received worldwide.

Despite Amazon’s critics, the public’s response has been very favorable, with Amazon delivery trucks now a daily sight in residential neighborhoods .

Amazon’s adoption of public reviews of its many goods is a stroke of genius. Readers can see what others think before making a purchase.

Then there’s the convenience of not having to climb into your car, consuming time and gas. The fallout, of course, is huge for local retail.

Amazon is also consumer friendly, offering fast delivery, easy return of goods, and speedy refunds. According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Amazon is the #1 company in the US for customer satisfaction. Over 100 million paid subscribers globally have signed up for Amazon Prime, which allows for two day delivery on more than 100 million items, unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows, along with a million songs.

Recently, it purchased audio.books.

Critics have too often ignored its progressive hiring policies. Amazon has ranked in the top three for new job creation in the United States. Its employee headcount has grown from 31,000 in 2008 to 382,400 in 2017, and it is expected to continue growing. Amazon is known for creating jobs that are not temporary or seasonal.

A study done by eHealth found that Amazon ranks first as the most Military Spouse Friendly Employer in the list of the top 50. Additionally, Amazon has fulfilled its pledge to hire 25,000 Veterans and Military Spouses by 2021. Amazon is committed to training and hiring Veterans for the Career Choice Program, which is exclusively for active duty service members and spouses. The program educates and prepares them for job placement at Amazon or any other company. This exclusive program is a win for Veterans who are searching for a new career, as they receive training for a job that is guaranteed to them.

Moreover, Amazon is dedicated to hiring people with disabilities and provides accommodations for over 120 roles. They have expedited the hiring process to as little as 48 hours for those who apply.

Amazon is one of the front runners in hiring ex-offenders and individuals who were recently incarcerated. With the Ban the Box movement gaining momentum, many companies are removing criminal offense questions from their initial job applications.

Amazon has also approached the United States and Canadian Governments for vital roles in public sectors and special clearance jobs that help fund public projects. An example of this is Amazon’s creation of a second headquarters (HQ2), in Arlington, VA, which is expected to create an estimated 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in investments over the next 10-15 years.

Amazon is focused on long-term employment and has been implementing various initiatives to improve job quality and employee benefits. An example of this is the large recruiting and hiring efforts in the state of Wisconsin.

But there remain negative aspects that merit attention; namely with regard to warehouse employees, pressured to take on physically demanding tasks, skip bathroom breaks to maximize targets, penalized for taking sick days or time off, resulting in high turnover.

The extent of Amazon surveillance has led to numerous complaints as workers feel their privacy is being compromised and that they’re being treated like robots. In 2018, warehouse workers reported they were being monitored by GPS tags, with exact details of their location and any rest breaks they take.

Alongside surveillance, there are strict productivity quotas involving a completion rate of tasks within a certain time frame. Failure to do so can lead to warnings and in worse cases, termination of employment.

When it comes to stock units paid to new employees in their third or fourth year, many aren’t around to receive them.

Stress is inherent with any Amazon hire, whether in a warehouse, office, or delivery. Amazon ranks employees against each other and eliminates the bottom 6% annually.

Meanwhile, Amazon has maintained a tough stance against unions, hiring the firm Complete Solution Staffing to inform its employees of the problems with unions.

Amazon has recently been subjected to controversy over its tax policies and their implications. Over the past few years, the corporation has paid very little or no taxes to the government. Contrary to most U.S. based corporations, Amazon paid no federal taxes for the year 2017 and 2018, despite the fact it was a highly profitable company.

Despite this, the company has contributed state taxes that total almost $1.2 billion dollars and has created many jobs that have in turn, increased tax revenue. Amazon defended their tax payment policy in a statement to Business Insider: “Amazon pays all the taxes we are required to pay in the U.S. and every country where we operate, including paying $2.6 billion in corporate tax and reporting $3.4 billion in tax expense over the last three years.”

Critics cite Amazon’s dynamic growth as a detriment to retail business, under selling them and driving them out of existence. Former Amazon chief financial officer Warren Jenson commented that if your business makes a profit, Amazon sees you as the competition and will be coming for you. Currently, it seeks to imitate highly successful Trader Joe’s.

The Federal Trade Commission has recently sued Amazon for being an illegal monopoly, where 40% of online shopping occurs on Amazon.com, creating higher prices for consumers. 

Amazon vigorously disputes the FTC assertion and continues to seek expansion.

—rj

Democracy’s Failure

While democracy has been widely touted as the best form of government, it’s had many detractors in Britain and America, who fearing a working class majority of the uninformed, intellectually unprepared, politically manipulated by partisan interests, proposed education in the liberal arts as a safeguard for assuring an informed, discriminating electorate.

One thinks of Matthew Arnold’s classic Culture and Anarchy and John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University as examples. The truth is it hasn’t worked to salvage democracy. As Costica Bradatan comments in his insightful book, In Praise of Failure, “Populism and authoritarianism are flourishing today in places with remarkably high educational levels. For all the self-flattering talk about civic-mindedness and political engagement, the citizenry in the West is in no better shape than it was one hundred years ago. And we seem resigned to the situation.”

Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, comments in his Universities in the Marketplace that the arts and sciences faculties “display scant interest in preparing undergraduates to be democratic citizens, a task once regarded as the principal purpose of a liberal education.”

Viewing our current political milieu, I see only the debris of a once heralded idea to make government truly feasible in the best interests of our nation. Alas, not since the Civil War, has America been so fractured in its allegiances.

Alexander Hamilton, suspicious of public sovereignty, supported the idea of the Electoral College. That certainly hasn’t worked.

Back in England, John Stuart Mill proposed a plutocracy of the educated allowed multiple votes. Fortunately, it wasn’t well-received.

As for the prototype Athenian democracy, women couldn’t vote, nor foreigners and slaves.

I confess I don’t know the answer, except to offer that democracy, for all its liabilities, surpasses those protocols previously attempted.

—rj

Oh, my god! The Political Morass Confronting Americans

Oh, my god! We’re all in trouble. Here we are, facing a presidential election, caught in a catch-22 situation, the choice between a president clearly showing incipient symptoms of mental decline, and an ex-President promising revenge and demagoguery. Biden’s lapses have been widely reported in the press for some time: tumbling on aircraft steps, lingering pauses in speech delivery, mix-up in identifying political leaders, befuddled recall of events.

Now comes the President’s frantically called press gathering, just 23 minutes warning in the aftermath of special prosecutor Robert Hur’s devastating findings on Biden’s alleged national security lapses: storage of top secret files in his Delaware home and sharing of classified information with the ghostwriter of his memoirs, Mark Zwonitzer.

Hur’s office considered charging Zwoniker, who has been cooperative, but the ghostwriter had previously destroyed the interview tapes with Biden when he learned of the special counsel probe, resulting in the improbability of a conviction for lack of evidence.

Hur found the president’s recall of how the classified documents ended-up in his basement as “hazy.” He had said he found them in his then rented house in Virginia.

What really instigated Biden’s frenetic press appearance was probably Hur’s reporting the President’s inability to recall when his son Beau died of brain cancer: “I don’t need anyone, I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away,” the President angrily retorted.-

Biden couldn’t even recall the dates he’d been vice-president.

The reality is that his combative press conference only seems to lend credence to Hur’s allegations of a President of “diminished faculties in advancing age.”

About to leave the room, Biden returned to the lectern to respond to a reporter’s belated question on the Gaza crisis. Committing yet another gaffe of mistaken identity, piling up in recent days to the chagrin of his staff, Biden confused Egyptian leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi as “the president of Mexico.”

Several days earlier in Nevada, he confused deceased French president Francois Mitterand with current French president Emmanuel Macron. Mitterand died in 2015.

This past Wednesday, Biden said he had interviewed Germany’s chancellor Helmut Kohl in 2021. Kohl died in 2017.

I think of Ronald Reagan in his second term, then America’s oldest president, falling asleep in cabinet meetings. A few years later, 1994, Reagan announced his Alzheimer diagnosis. The signs, however, of its progression had already been evident while in office.

I wish our President well, but I fear the fallout of mental facility in a nuclear age, the challenge of climate warming, the looming threat of a Russia-China-Iran alliance, and still more, to nightmare my sleep.

Hiding presidential infirmity has a long history, embracing Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. We’ve mustered through so far, but why take the risk?

Faulting Republican Robert Hur constitutes its own partisanship.

As Democratic strategist James Carville candidly put it, “I don’t know how you get out of this.”

–rj

US Complicity: A Lack of Political Will


KHAN YUNIS, GAZA -t. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

If ever there’s been a clarion call for the United States to abandon its military support for Israel, it’s now. Prime Minister Natanyahu has made it clear to Washington that there will be no Palestinian state on the West Bank, rejecting Secretary of State Blinken’s recent plea for a two state resolution as Israel’s surest means to security.

Nor will the Prime Minister, a friend of Donald Trump since the 1980s, scale back Israel’s offensive in Gaza until total victory and return of remaining hostages is achieved.

As I write, nearly 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them women and children; hospitals, mosques, churches and refugee camps bombed; and a frightened civilian population, 1.9 million of them, or 80% of the Gaza population, herded into a southern corridor, and confronted with disease and starvation.

This constitutes the true genocide, which South Africa has brought to the attention of the International Court of Justice (ICC), the UN’s highest court. Fifty-six other nations support the suit, but not the United States and UK. The European Union has chosen silence.

KHAN YUNIS, GAZA – General view of buildings which were destroyed during Israeli bombardment. Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

South Africa has also filed a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC), not to be conflated with the ICJ, though both are located in the Hague. The ICJ can issue arrest warrants, as it did for Vladimir Putin, who must now avoid signatory countries that include South Africa.

What’s not received ample attention is the economic plight Palestinians face. Before Hamas’ October 7 incursion, 400,000 Palestinians were employed by Israel, largely in construction, agriculture and service sectors. I87,000 Gazans have had their work permits canceled; similarly, 167,000 Palestinians on the West Bank.

In the meanwhile, Israel has set up worker recruiting offices in India and Sri Lanka, with the goal of importing between 50,000 to 100,000 replacements.

This may be part of a long term stategy by Israeli nationalists to encourage Palestinians to leave Israel. Take, for example, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s call for Palestinian residents of Gaza to leave, replaced by Israelis, who could “make the desert bloom.”

Unfortunately, the Biden administration, despite its call for a cease fire and a two state solution, is unwilling to risk political capital and rebuff Netanyahu by suspending military aid to Israel.

By default, it’s rendered the US complicit in Israel’s criminality, angered Progressives, alienated the Muslim community, made the US a global atavar of hypocrisy, and risks dragging the country into a wider conflict, inflicting incalculable consequences, both home and abroad.

–rj