Now it's Apple's turn to ask localities for a huge handout

Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., in Silicon Valley.

Adapted From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

Apple says it plans to build another corporate campus. It also says it will hire another 20,000 workers, in  part because of the new U.S. tax law, which cuts corporate income taxes. (Not all of the windfall will go to investors in the form of stock buybacks and dividend increases!)_

Of course, Apple’s announcement means that various cities and states around America are already looking into how they can bribe the Cupertino, Calif., company to build its new campus in their jurisdiction. Presumably vast tax breaks, to be subsidized by the individuals and businesses already there,  will be offered, along with very expensive physical-infrastructure improvements. As with Amazon, Greater Boston (which you might say now sort of includes northern Rhode Island) would be in the running because of the huge technology complex there. But would such legal bribery be worth it for the macro-economy of Greater Boston?

Local politicians’ and some business leaders’ obsession with luring huge, rich, sexy tech companies may be popular in the short term but the diversion of so many public resources to a few extremely profitable big companies could have a very big long-term cost. The problems of General Electric that were revealed after it was lured to set up its headquarters in Boston  provide a useful caution sign.

Jim Hightower: Bribing big firms to lure them to your area is a fool's game

"Eve Tempted by the Serpent,.'' by William Blake.

Via OtherWords.org

Governors and mayors insist that giving our tax dollars to corporations to lure them to move to our cities is good public policy. The corporations create jobs, those workers pay taxes, and — voila! — the giveaway pays for itself!

Does it really work that way? Unfortunately, no.

Good Jobs First tracked the 386 incentive deals since 1976 that gave at least $50 million to a corporation, then tallied the number of jobs created. The average cost per job was $658,427 — each! That’s far more than cities and states can recover through any kinds of taxes those jobholders would pay in their lifetimes.

The rosy job-creation claims by incentive dealmakers also tend to be bogus, because they don’t subtract the number of jobs lost as a result of these deals.

Amazon, for example, has leaned on officials in every major metro area to subsidize its creation of a nationwide network of warehouses, data centers and other facilities.

In a 2016 report titled “Amazon’s Stranglehold,” the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that more than half of Amazon’s facilities had been built with government subsidies. And Good Jobs First found that since 2005, Amazon has received more than $1 billion from taxpayers to build their private business.

Each handout was made in the name of local workers — and, yes, Amazon does employ thousands. But the subsidies enable the retail giant to undercut local, unsubsidized competitors, driving them out of business and causing devastating job losses that greatly outnumber jobs gained.

The Institute reports that at the end of 2015, Amazon employed 146,000 people in its US operations. But the taxpayer-supported giant had meanwhile killed some 295,000 U.S. retail jobs.

Check out the report for yourself at ilsr.org/amazon-stranglehold.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. 

Jim Hightower: Jeff Bezos wants the key to your house

Amazon is watching you.

Via OtherWords.org

Would you give your house key to a complete stranger, letting that person (whose name you don’t even know) walk right into your home when you’re not there?

One stranger who’s brazenly asking you and millions of other people to do just that is Jeff Bezos.

He’s the head honcho of Amazon, the e-commerce behemoth whose vast supercomputer network routinely compiles and stores dossiers on every one of his customers. He’s obsessed with having the most data on the most people — it’s a little creepy.

Now, adding to the creep factor, Bezos literally wants Amazon to get inside your home. And, ironically, he’s using “security” as his rationale.

Rather than simply delivering the products you order from Amazon to your doorstep, the corporation wants a key to unlock your door, allowing its delivery crews to go inside and do you the favor of placing the packages securely in your abode.

What could possibly go wrong with that?

Other than you being robbed, of course, either by rogue Amazon employees or by hackers who will certainly gain access to the corporation’s computerized key codes. Or maybe “Crusher,” your pitbull, mauls the Amazon intruder and you get sued.

Need I mention that Bezos expects you to pay for the privilege of having his employees enter your home? First, his dicey, open-sesame program, which he calls “Amazon Key,” is available only to customers who shell out $99 a year to be “Amazon Prime” members.

Second, you must buy a special Internet-unlocking gizmo and a particular camera to join his corporate key club. And guess where you must go to buy this entry technology? Yes, Amazon — where prices for the gizmo and camera setup start at $250.

This is Jim Hightower saying… What a deal! For Amazon, that is.

Bezos’s  real goal — indeed, his only goal, always — isn’t so much to get inside your home. It’s to get inside your wallet.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown.

A behemoth company and democracy

"Amazon preparing for a battle,'' by Pierre-Eugène-Emile Hébert, at the National Gallery of Art,  in Washington, D.C.

Adapted from "Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24com:

Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo promised in her well-intentioned pitch to Amazon to build its “second headquarters’’ in the state that  “You’d {Amazon} have the access, influence and impact that comes from being a dominant employer in our state.’’

This (along with a bizarre rendering showing Amazon buildings taking over much of the area around the State House) is a tad chilling. Does a tiny state want to take orders from some huge company?

Of course it would be very nice to get some Amazon jobs. With Boston a leading (and perhaps the leading) candidate to get the company’s second headquarters, perhaps Greater Providence could get some spillover employees from  the behemoth online retailer, especially in  such specialties as design, in which Rhode Island has particular strengths. But it’s dangerous for democracy and long-term, steady economic growth to be at the beck and call of one huge company. Better 50 small and medium size companies than one huge quasi-monopoly.  Big company means big hiring but also eventually big layoffs.

Some Amazon executives are reportedly pushing hard for Boston to be the second headquarters. To learn more, please hit this link:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/amazon-execs-want-second-hq-in-boston-says-report.html

Jim Hightower: Push back against arrogant Amazon

"Battle of the Amazons,'' by Peter Paul Rubens.

Via OtherWords.org

Isn’t it funny that right-wing politicians across America piously rant against giving a few bucks worth of jobless benefits to the needy — then turn around and shove billions of our tax dollars into corporate welfare for the greedy?

You’re right. It’s not funny. But here we go again.

We’re witnessing the most disgusting spectacle yet of the politico-corporate cabal extracting money from the people’s wallets to  further enrich themselves.

Amazon.com, the $136-billion-a-year Internet colossus, has initiated a sleazy, self-serving public bidding war over where it will locate its new corporate headquarters. The city and state that offer the most bribe money to this private enterprise will be “the winner.” {Boston and Providence are among the bidders.}

Uber-rich Amazon doesn’t need — and certainly doesn’t deserve — any public handout. But officials in 238 cities have prostrated themselves in front of this Amazonian welfare queen in embarrassing bids to win her nod.

Amazon’s arrogant executives even sent out a list of basic benefits they expect every applicant to deliver, including a “business-friendly environment and tax structure,” free land, a subsidy to reduce its operational costs, tax breaks, relocation grants for executives and workforce, reduced utility bills, and — oh yeah, also give us first-rate schools and an educated labor pool.

As one analyst of Amazon’s bribery scheme noted, “These incentives aren’t free. There’s no fairy godmother paying for them.”

The typical result of corporate giveaways is that they cost the public more than we get back. By demanding such corporate spoils, Amazon brands itself a common thief, not only taking our money, but also stealing our trust in the fairness of the system and widening inequality in our society.

To help stop this corruption, go to GoodJobsFirst.org.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator,  writer and public speaker. He’s also the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. 

Chris Powell: Amidst current sexual-abuse scandals, prurience is a growth industry; 'fake media' love Trump's pro-monopoly FCC

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Suddenly it seems as if everyone has been sexually abused or worse by someone else. But it only seems to be sudden. In fact it has been going on since sex was discovered by people who had power over other people. It has become fashionable to declaim about it only recently, thanks to mass media that increasingly profit less from useful information than from mere prurience, which seems to be what most people want most these days, after sex itself.

What has this phenomenon really proved? Not much -- maybe two things.

First, that power still corrupts, most of all in regard to sex, and that its victims ordinarily keep silent about it to avoid embarrassment except when going public long afterward can unhorse a perpetrator who has achieved some high position. Then the victim's enjoyment of revenge outweighs embarrassment and may signify a sort of corruption itself.

And second, that a contemporaneous complaint to the police or at least the perpetrator's acquaintances is worth any number of belated and merely vengeful complaints. For a contemporaneous complaint can stop an abuser before he makes a career out of it.

The movie industry was infamous for this corruption long before Harvey Weinstein began taking advantage of the casting couch. Back in 1955, having spent two years as a screenwriter in Hollywood, Norman Mailer novelized about it well in The Deer Park, concluding that the world was a place "where orphans burn orphans and nothing is more difficult to discover than a simple fact." 

Having married six times, Mailer himself turned out not to be such a nice guy either. Maybe it took one to know one.


RACKETEERING ISN'T INNOVATION: To lure Amazon's second headquarters, Connecticut has joined nearly every other state and dozens of cities in offering the company billions of dollars. Amazon is to be exempted from state and municipal taxes for many years while the company strives to put other retailers out of business even though they  do  pay state and municipal taxes. 
 
It's as if the retail business isn't hard enough already. Indeed, the site that the town of Enfield, Conn., is pitching to Amazon is the Enfield Square shopping mall, which used to house the major department stores Amazon has undermined. Now Enfield Square is struggling.

Other retailers and businesses generally should respond to the Amazon frenzy by demanding similar payoffs just to stay put. 

Amazon justly profits from its innovation in internet retailing but its original innovation was only to enlarge sales-tax evasion. Now the company wants direct subsidy from government. That's a racket.



‘FAKE MEDIA' LOVE TRUMP'S FCC: While President Trump rants about "fake news" from the "fake media," his Federal Communications Commission is planning to repeal regulations so that media companies can become even bigger and concentrate ownership of television and radio stations and newspapers.

The FCC, which now has a Republican majority, aims to let companies combine ownership of television and radio stations and newspapers in the same market and to let TV stations absorb each other even if doing so would leave a market with fewer than eight stations.

The commission already has repealed a rule requiring TV and radio stations to have offices in the communities they are licensed to serve.

Government policy should diversify and democratize ownership of the news media and the whole economy, not concentrate it. Concentrating ownership of the news media just makes "fake news" and propaganda easier to spread. Trump's "fake media" love his FCC. 


Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

 

Desperately chasing business

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

Worcester is putting in its own bid to get Amazon’s “second headquarters’’ in addition to being part of the  Massachusetts  application to the Seattle-based monster. Not a bad idea – two lottery tickets instead of just one.  But it is hard to see Worcester having the infrastructure, techno personnel and tax-break resources to lure Amazon and what the company asserts will be 50,000 new employees. Maybe, like Providence, they could get a couple of small slices of the pie if Amazon picks Boston. (I still bet on Austin.)

xxx

I ask again: Why does Massachusetts, a rich state, refuse to help pay to build sports stadiums for private companies while much poorer Rhode Island is looking to cough up such money for the Pawtucket Red Sox?

Will Amazon spawn old-fashioned Main Street retailing?

"View of Manchester, Vermont, '' by DeWitt Clinton Boutelle (1870)

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

What will become of cities as more and more work is done on the Internet and more and more stuffis delivered by mail (and drones?). At first glance you might think that these changes will hollow out the cities.

But people seek respite from screens and, for that matter, much paid work will continue to be done off screen.  Consider that big growth areas for future jobs include such trades as electricians, plumbers, roofers, linemen, etc.

Seeing people in the flesh, not just virtually, will become more attractive as we become sated with screen life. Indeed, it’s essential for good health. And important decisions will continue to be best completed, and new ideas most cogently expressed, in real encounters. That’s one reason  that Manhattan still thrives, in spite of its high costs.  You can’t do a merger deal online. You have to meet in person.

Young adults, especially those with children, will continue to move to, or stay in, the suburbs, but future suburbs will look different from ‘50s- and ‘60s-style subdivisions.  For one thing,  they will have dense, very walkable centers for shopping, distribution and entertainment, and, especially, meeting people, with many smaller specialty stores in place of the vast malls and even vaster windswept parking lots around them. There will be fewer ugly big-box stores because so much of their brand-name stuff will be shipped directly to customers via Amazon, etc.

Highly specialized stores, many with unique items – some of them locally made ---can do well in these suburbs-becoming-mini-cities within broader metro areas. They’ll be staffed by salespeoplevery knowledgeable about their products and services and with long-term relationships with customers.  

The Boston Globe reports: “Credit Suisse has predicted that upwards of a quarter of the 1,200 malls in America will close in the next five years.’’

“Today, if you know what you need, you go to Amazon and buy it,’’ Pam Danziger, president of the Pennsylvania-based Unity Marketing, told The Globe. “Where you’re going to find interest is on Main Street and not in these homogeneous same-old, same-old outlet stores. Main Street — where people really know you — that’s where the future of retail is.’’

Read the highly instructive case of  toney Manchester, Vt., suffering from the decline in shopping at its many national chain outlets and so now looking to go more local. Please hit this link:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/09/15/there-app-for-this-retail-town-suffers-age-commerce/uArZDDp6UX5lzQlB0nsciP/story.html

Meanwhile, the car culture, even in the suburbs, will probably continue to fade with further proliferation of such ride-sharing services as Lyft and Uber and the expansion and diversification of mass transit associated with our aging population and environmental concerns.

Some suburbs are starting to look like center cities. Consider Tysons Corner, in suburban Fairfax County, Va., outside of Washington.  Tysons looms like a mini-Manhattan, with office and residential towers. And then there are the small old cities within broader metro areas, of which there are many in New England – think Concord, N.H. and Portland, Maine. I think that they’ll grow as people seek the conveniences of more than traditional suburban density but without the costs of living in such big cities as Boston and New York, whose centers are increasingly for the rich.

Relatively new  suburban places such as Tysons are called“edge cities’’ . But we’ve got what are small  old “edge cities’’ around here, such as Pawtucket, R.I., which might have the urban bones to become more lively and prosperous.

Then there are the mid-size cities, such as Providence, Worcester and New Haven. They’ll draw people with their commercial and cultural attractions but won’t have the critical mass to become big cities. Rather, they’ll be ancillaries that will perform some of the services provided in nearby big cities -- e.g., Boston and New York. They’ll continue to lure folks who want to live in real cities but want/need somewhat less density and considerably lower costs than in Boston and New York.

Even Hartford, now an urban disaster area, ought to be able to eventually turn itself around and market its assets (especially its riverfront) as well as, say, Providence has done with its advantages.

Then there will be new mini-metro areas far away from big cities. One is the Lebanon, N.H.-Hanover, N.H.-White River Junction in the Upper Connecticut River Valley. There, the intersection of two major Interstate highways – Routes 89 and 91 -- along with the presence of a well-known university (Dartmouth College) and associated large medical center has for several decades been creating a kind of city – still sprawling but gradually being pulled together by, among other things, public transportation (encouraged by the proliferation of facilities, many of them high-end, for the elderly in areas with major colleges and medical centers).

New England, with its many still well functioning towns and small cities with an almost European settlement pattern, would seem well placed to benefit from the technological and behavioral changes roiling the country,  the sprawling , utterly car-dependent  metro areas of much of the Sunbelt and Middle West less so.  People will continue to seek community. At leastin New England that will be easier to find and/or rebuild than in most of the country.

Jill Richardson: Amazon selling farm-fresh electronics at Whole Foods

Home loudspeaker.

Via OtherWords.org

Now that Amazon’s taken over Whole Foods, the "natural-foods'' grocery known for its high prices, the new owners have pledged to lower prices.

I stopped by the store to see what had changed. In addition to a few discounts — organic apples went from $2.99 to $1.99 per pound — I noticed a big display in the middle of the produce section.

“Farm Fresh,” it read. “Just Picked.”

What agricultural product was this ad for? Amazon Echo — a wireless speaker.

Presumably Amazon grew the electronic devices on a nearby farm and, once ripe, harvested them off the vine and shipped them to the produce aisle in my local Whole Foods.

The same day, while browsing hiking socks online, I came across a brand I hadn’t seen before called Farm to Feet.

Seriously? Farm to Feet?

It’s true that wool — and the socks were mostly made of wool, in addition to a few synthetic fibers like spandex — comes from a sheep, and sheep are raised on a farm. The socks certainly had more of a connection to a farm than an Amazon Echo.

But I think we can officially say that “Farm to Table” has jumped the shark.

Initially, sellers who claimed to offer “Farm to Fork,” “Farm to Table,” or “Farm to School” goods supported a closer connection with your local farmer.

The idea was — and is — a great one. Get to know a local grower and learn more about where your food comes from. Support a local business. Better yet, you’ll get to eat foods that are fresh picked because they weren’t shipped halfway across the world in order to reach you.

One farm I visited near my home in Southern California grows blackberries that are bigger than some plums. These juicy giants simply can’t survive shipping. You can eat them locally or not at all.

When I lived in the Midwest, my favorite local farmer grew luscious varieties of pears and apples I’d never heard of before. They’re more delicious than apples I’ve found at any grocery store.

Often, when farmers sell directly to consumers, it’s a win-win. Farmers can charge higher prices than they can charge wholesalers, while consumers pay lower prices than they’d pay at a store.

When restaurant chefs work with farmers, they can ask farmers to grow specific varieties they want to serve, and promise the farmers a guaranteed market for their produce once it’s harvested.

My local school system found that smaller sized fruits, which farmers would otherwise be unable to sell, were the perfect size for young schoolchildren. Their Farm to School program gave a market to nearby growers while providing nutritious food to kids for lunch.

But advertising a pair of socks as “Farm to Feet” because the wool came from some farm, somewhere — that’s missing the point.

As for advertising electronics as “Farm Fresh,” I have no words. I’ve visited a lot of farms on five continents, and I’ve yet to meet a farmer who grows electronics.

Getting to know where your food comes from is a great idea. Supporting farmers in your community is wonderful. It’s a privilege that not everyone has, and it’s enriched my life immeasurably to be able to thank the people who grow my food face to face.

But for some, it’s just a marketing slogan. If your product doesn’t directly connect consumers to farmers, you shouldn’t advertise it as “Farm to” Anything.

Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. 

Sam Pizzigati: Retailers connive to tighten screws on public-school budgets

 "The Old Beggar,'' by Lewis Dewis.

Via OtherWords.org

Back to school! These three simple words used to leave America’s public-school teachers giddy with anticipation. Now they leave them opening up their wallets and worrying.

The problem? Teachers have been spending out of their own pockets for generations to decorate their classrooms and the like. Now many have to spend their own money for basic school supplies — everything from pens and pencils to cleaning supplies.

One national study last year by Scholastic and YouGov found teachers spending an average of $530 a year on classroom supplies. The number of teachers who spend over $1,000 out of pocket, adds a National School Supply and Equipment Association report, has doubled.

In Oklahoma, third grade teacher Teresa Danks has been spending $2,000 annually of her own money. Earlier this summer, with her school district facing a $10 million budget cut, Danks actually started panhandling. She took to a busy street corner with a simple hand-made sign: “Teacher Needs School Supplies! Anything Helps.”)

Many passers-by did help. But the fiscal squeeze on America’s public-school budgets and teacher wallets is now threatening to get even worse.

That’s because big-box retail giants — the very stores where many teachers go to buy school supplies — have unleashed a fierce lawsuit offensive to significantly lower their local property- tax bills.

Property taxes remain, in most of the country, the single most pivotal source of local public school funding. If corporate retail powers like Home Depot and Target succeed in their new greed grab, the state comptroller in Texas recently warned, local public schools in his state alone would lose $1.2 billion annually, with another $703 million in school funding lost from the state level.

Our top big-boxers are flourishing: Home Depot profits last year jumped nearly 14 percent to $8 billion. And Home Depot CEO Craig Menear took home $11.5 million.

So on what grounds should the big-box boys be taxed less? Retail CEOs, Education Week reports, are having their lawyers make the astonishingly audacious argument that “the massive stores they operate ought to be appraised as if they were vacant.”

This ridiculous “dark store theory” has been winning lawsuits in Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin, and school districts in the Midwest have already lost millions of dollars in revenue. In some cases, court rulings have actually forced local governments to reimburse big-box retailers for the higher property taxes they’ve already paid.

The new attack on local public-school funding isn’t just coming from brick-and-mortar retailers. Amazon, the online retail king, is taking new steps to avoid taxes, too.

Amazon now collects sales taxes on the goods consumers buy online in states that impose them.But Amazon is only collecting taxes on about half the goods that people who click onto Amazon itself buy. The half of sales that go through the third-party vendors that the Amazon site spotlights go untaxed.d.

The State of South Carolina is demanding that Amazon end this tax avoidance. Amazon is disputing the South Carolina claim, and the case is going to the courts. All the big online retailers will be watching closely. A South Carolina victory could mean higher tax revenue nationwide from big online retailers.

All these big-time retailers can afford to pay higher taxes. Our biggest retail empires, after all, have already made their emperors into some of the world’s richest people. The chief executive of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, now holds the third-largest individual fortune in the world.

Panhandling Oklahoma teacher Teresa Danks says she’s “tired of not having enough funding for our classrooms but being expected to always make it happen.”

The super rich who run retail in America could ease that fatigue. They could start paying their taxes.

Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, co-edits inequality.org. 

Amazonian ambiguities

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

Here’s yet another observation on Amazon, which has been hiring thousands of people across America and a few hundred at its new distribution center in Fall River:

Those warehouse jobs are being taken by many people who might otherwise have been working in the thousands of stores being put out of business by Amazon. Those are people who would have been customers of nearby stores and restaurants and, because they were working in local stores (which paid local taxes) -- people much more likely to be civically engaged than those working for a gigantic global corporation most of whose buildings are gigantic warehouses far from town or city centers. Thus Amazon’s relentless expansion will accelerate the decline of local economies and local government.

But, as I’ve said, people love the convenience of dealing with Amazon, which will trump the attractions of local retailing in most places.  High-end stores, with intense personal service, in very affluent neighborhoods will be partial exceptions. As for the good PR Amazon gets from its hiring binge, that will fade as the geniuses in Seattle figure out more ways to automate its warehouses.

Amazon's Whole Foods takeover: Automation will be the job killer

A Whole Foods store in Boston.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

Amazon’s plan to buy Whole Foods has elicited a lot of heavy breathing and assertions that Amazon will wipe out a lot of grocery stores. I thinkthat these forecasts are exaggerated. Groceries – stuff that can rot – are not the same things as books and clothes.  The distribution challenges are very different.

Most people will continue to drive or walk to a regular (not high-end, expensive “organic”) supermarket or small grocery store for the foreseeable future. Inflation-adjusted wages have been falling for most people. The market for expensive (and some would say pretentious) food is unlikely tovastly expand. For all its alleged glamour, most people don’t shop at the expensive likes of Whole Foods – and never will.

An Amazon-Whole Foods mating might work very well in densely populated affluent areas with a close enough proximity to warehouses to ensure that the stuff can be delivered unspoiled to Amazon-Whole Foods supermarkets or to your home. But it wouldn’t work well in thinly populated areas.

Finally, even in this plutocratic age,  it’s possible that the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Justice Department will awake from their all-too-frequent torpor and press monopoly charges against the company if it tries to take over a big hunk of the grocery business.

Anyway, I’m more worried about the effects on employment and wages of the automation of cashier and other jobs now underway in many kinds of stores than about Amazon specifically (I always use cashiers, not those machines, in a tiny effort to help preserve jobs.) And I worry about the effects on local tax revenue and jobs from so many stores of all kinds closing because of the online revolution.

Robert Whitcomb: In the Amazon jungle

 

Amazon is an impressive if rather creepy company, with its style set by its cold, “data-driven’’ founder/CEO, Jeff Bezos. An Aug. 15 New York Times piece, “Inside Amazon,’’ laid out the travails of the monopolistic and Darwinian enterprise’s white-collar workforce. Their issues have gotten more attention than the much worse Dickensian conditions of the blue-collar employees in its warehouses and the company’s relentless accumulation, like the also Orwellian Google’s, of our personal information. Amazonianism’s causes?

One is in the mirror. Americans have grown addicted to buying stuff online -- of course, the cheaper the better. They seem to want to avoid face-to-face interactions in stores -- and community engagement in general -- and Amazon’s power ensures that they’ll get low prices, at least for now (see below), even as their local stores close because of such online competition.

The preference for communicating via screens rather than person-to-person is especially common among the young, who grew up in the Internet Age. Human-resource managers have told me that young job applicants often don’t look them in the eye because in-person encounters make them anxious.

The disappearance of many well-paying jobs, and static (or worse) compensation except for top executives and investors, have encouraged consumers to seek out cheaper stuff than a few decades ago. But – irony of ironies! – Amazon and other high-tech automators have helped destroy good U.S. jobs in their “data-driven’’ mania to take full advantage of the international low-wage, cheap-goods machine.

Physical-store chains such as CVS and Home Depot are doing their bit to kill jobs --- by, for instance, installing automatic checkouts. I try to boycott stores with these machines because I know that each means the loss of another entry-level or second job for someone who needs it. This makes me feel better for a few minutes.

If Amazon’s workplace brutalities offend some consumers, they could resume shopping in their own communities and thus help employ some of their neighbors. Most won’t.

And look to Washington, where ideology and campaign contributions ensure that the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division doesn’t go after such monopolies as Amazon and Google. Until about 1980, Republican and Democratic administrations actually enforced laws against monopoly. The long disinclination to do so will hit consumers hard when Amazon, which has been undercutting other retailers to gain maximum market share, killing many brick-and-mortar competitors, suddenly jacks up prices big time.

Also consider the collapse of the private-sector union movement. If there were unions at Amazon, the Third World work environment would quickly go away. Gilded Age working conditions helped spawn the union movement in the first place. Now, management’s utter dominance has employees ready to put up with anything to keep their jobs.

Meanwhile, the “Big Data’’ revolution is turning workers into organic robots, soon to be replaced by real, inorganic robots. When every move of workers is measured for maximum productivity and profit potential, as at Amazon, kindly treatment of employees pretty much disappears. Employees are mere data points.

This process started with assembly-line and other blue-collar workers. The generally affluent types who read, say, The New York Times didn’t care that much. But turning employees into metrics is now heading rapidly up the food chain. Physicians, lawyers, tech engineers, middle managers and journalists (monitored for the number of Internet clicks their work gets) are being measured daily by senior executives who see their employees as entirely fungible and disposable.

And don’t expect the executive suite to share the riches from this speed-up with lower-level employees. The tendency for more and more of the wealth of companies to be shared by fewer and fewer people continues apace. We’re on a selfishness wave.

Amazon has created a fascinating machine for distributing goods. (Its delivery drones are next -- maybe equipped with surveillance gear?) Mike Daisey, writing in The Guardian (“Amazon’s brutal work culture will stay: bottom lines matter more than people,’’ Aug. 22), quoted comedian Louis C.K. as saying about such enterprises that “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy’’ . Well, some are.

Anyway, most Americans seem to adore Amazon, which will repay them good and hard.

xxx

Lovely dim late-summer light today, and  leaves are falling off the plane trees from sheer exhaustion.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) is a  Providence-based editor and writer, a partner at Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com) and a Fellow of the Pell Center, in Newport, He used to be the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal, the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune and an editor at The Wall Street Journal, among other jobs.

Great glitz, bad economics

And so it goes: Fall River officials, excited by the glitz of a big techno name, give huge tax breaks to get Amazon to built a giant warehouse with low-paid workers  there while loyal local companies get no break. They must subsidize Jeff Bezos. Does anyone ever do a macro-economic stuff of how many jobs might be created if all businesses in an area  were  to get a tax break instead of a sweetheart deal for a big, sexy out-of-state company? Too much thought required!

It reminds me of the reasoning that goes into luring casinos to an area.  Casinos REDUCE an area's income and jobs by draining discretionary income from existing businesses and sending it to the owners and/or operators out of state. But the local officials want the headline of  getting hundreds of job at one place, rather than the dozen here, the five there, lost at hundreds of small establishments when the casino moves in.

-- Robert Whitcomb