https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMDlcfafheI&ab_channel=TheProgressiveVoice
Wednesday, September 9, 2020
Wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos surpasses $200 billion
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/09/amaz-s09.html
By Tom Carter
9 September 2020
On August 26, the wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, crossed over $200 billion ($200,000,000,000).
The net worth of this individual human being is now roughly equivalent to the annual gross domestic product of the entire nation of Greece ($218 billion), which in turn represents the collective labor of millions of workers over an entire year. For comparison, the Ukraine has a GDP of $131 billion, Hungary has a GDP of $157 billion, and Sri Lanka has a GDP of $89 billion.
The personal wealth of Bezos is also higher than the entire government budgets of Austria ($201.9 billion, according to 2017 figures), Turkey ($190.4 billion), Argentina ($161 billion), Israel ($102 billion), and Poland ($102 billion).
The scale of Bezos’s wealth is not even the most startling fact—what is most striking is the speed with which he has accumulated it. Since the start of the year, in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Bezos has increased his wealth by about $87 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. By comparison, this is on the scale of the entire national budgets of Iran ($86 billion), Iraq ($76 billion), New Zealand ($72 billion), and Egypt ($63 billion).
The wealth that Bezos has appropriated in eight months—$87 billion—exceeds the total combined annual national budgets of Libya (roughly $22.3 billion), Armenia ($2.9 billion), North Korea ($3.3 billion), Afghanistan ($6.6 billion), Georgia ($4.8 billion), El Salvador ($6.8 billion), Honduras ($5.1 billion), Turkmenistan ($4.7 billion), Zimbabwe ($4.8 billion), Nicaragua ($4.1 billion), Uganda ($5.3 billion), and Cambodia ($4.7 billion), and Jordan ($11.8 billion).
With wealth on this scale, Bezos has taken a large bite out of the total resources available to human civilization on Planet Earth. He is not just a country unto himself—he is many countries. The sum of $202 billion is the equivalent of the combined national budgets of 118 entire countries. This is a personal fortune unprecedented in modern history.
The comedian John Oliver once described the wealth accumulated by Bezos as a “computer glitch in capitalism.” In one sense, this quip captures the irrationality associated with the incomprehensible number of zeros that have been added to his account, as if by some sort of programming error at the bank. But it is not the case that the Bezos’s wealth is developing outside or in opposition to the foreseeable operation of capitalism in the current epoch. On the contrary, his obscene levels of wealth are a particularly concentrated expression of those processes.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the world’s 500 richest people have accumulated an additional $809 billion so far this year, increasing their total wealth by around 14 percent. This includes Silicon Valley mogul Elon Musk, whose worth topped $100 billion on Friday. By comparison, the entire military budget of Russia, which is so often accused of “meddling” and “interfering” with US interests, is around $50 billion.
“The enormous growth of industry and the remarkably rapid concentration of production in ever-larger enterprises are one of the most characteristic features of capitalism,” Lenin wrote in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), at a time when the revenues of the giant conglomerates were measured in the mere millions of dollars. Amazon’s total market capitalization is now $1.703 trillion.
Analyzing the latest statistics on the emergence and concentration of monopolies in 1916, Lenin wrote that “a very important feature of capitalism in its highest stage of development is so-called combination of production, that is to say, the grouping in a single enterprise of different branches of industry, which either represent the consecutive stages in the processing of raw materials (for example, the smelting of iron ore into pig-iron, the conversion of pig-iron into steel, and then, perhaps, the manufacture of steel goods)—or are auxiliary to one another (for example, the utilisation of scrap, or of by-products, the manufacture of packing materials, etc.).”
Amazon is an expression of this process of “combination” on a scale unimaginable in Lenin’s time. “Amazon has been obsessed with vertical integration since its inception,” wrote Enrique Dans, professor at the IE Business School in Madrid, in a blog post. “After establishing very high levels of operational efficiency in its warehouses, Amazon then offered companies the chance to store their products there, as well as using the company’s picking and packing services. Finally, Amazon began…developing its own fleets of vans and personnel. Offering its own logistics services is simply another logical step in Amazon’s vertical integration process.” As of December 2019, Amazon Logistics was already set to surpass delivery volume of FedEx and UPS by 2022.
In addition to Amazon Logistics, the Bezos-Amazon conglomerate, via numerous subsidiaries, has already extended its tentacles into maritime shipping, comic books, the Washington Post, voice-recognizing appliances, fitness watches, cloud storage, health care, banking, communications satellites, home automation, video games, and grocery stores.
Amazon has also been integrating itself into the state apparatus, accepting a $600 million contract from the Central Intelligence Agency, a $10 billion contract from the Department of Defense, and supplying facial recognition software (Amazon Rekognition) to police.
This process of monopolization and “combination” has placed Amazon in a position to leverage huge gains from the overall devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. The huge increase in Bezos’s wealth during the pandemic is bound up with the surge in the value of Amazon stock, of which he owns around 54 million shares. At the end of July, in particular, Amazon’s stock skyrocketed after the company reported second quarter results showing soaring cash flow, sales, and income.
During the second quarter of 2020—representing April, May, and June—Amazon reported an increase of net sales of 40 percent, to $88.9 billion in the second quarter, compared with $63.4 billion in second quarter 2019.
The company’s operating income swelled to $5.8 billion, compared with operating income of $3.1 billion over the same period in 2019, and net income increased to $5.2 billion ($10.30 per share), compared with net income of $2.6 billion ($5.22 per share) the same period in 2019.
This is the same period—April, May, and June 2020— that corresponded to a historic catastrophe in the United States and around the world, as work ground to a halt amid the pandemic, hundreds of thousands became ill and tens of thousands lost their lives. Meanwhile, tens of millions lost their jobs, and countless small enterprises were bankrupted. As a primary means of safely obtaining essential goods during the pandemic as they sheltered in their homes, tens of millions of people turned to Amazon.
While many workplaces closed their doors during the pandemic, Amazon insisted on operating at full speed without regard for the pandemic. When it came to personal protective and safety equipment, Bezos told Amazon workers they would have to “wait our turn.” When tens of thousands of workers refused to show up to the warehouses and risk infection, Amazon announced it would simply hire 175,000 more workers (upon which Bezos congratulated himself as a “job creator”).
As of June 22, as the close of the immensely profitably second quarter approached, former Amazon worker Jana Jumpp had counted 1,573 reported COVID-19 cases among Amazon workers. However, since Amazon refused to disclose the actual number of infections, she told the World Socialist Web Site: “I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
It is now clearer than ever why Amazon kept workers at their stations during the pandemic without adequate safety measures, even while workers became seriously ill and lost their lives, and even as workers’ anger exploded in protests and walkouts.
Amazon’s CEO, and all of the Wall Street elites whose fingers were in the pie, made a lot of money. Moreover, amid the smoking ruins of the world economy, Amazon now surveys the scene and sees boundless opportunities for further profit. Opportunities loom in every direction. Bloated with cash, it is poised to conquer new territory, crushing weakened and smaller competitors under its weight.
This state of affairs is not lost on Wall Street, as investors swarm to buy Amazon stock, driving the price (and Bezos’s own personal wealth) higher and higher. The dizzying rise in the stock price took it from just over $3,000 a share by the end of July up to $3,400 by the end of August.
This is not some kind of aberration within an otherwise healthy capitalist system; it is capitalism itself, in its final period of decline. Or as Lenin put it: “Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.”
The Democratic Party—one of the twin parties of the financial oligarchy that promotes militarism and war—is not a vehicle for opposition to capitalism or its particular expression in Amazon and Bezos. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, to cite just one example, raised significant sums for his campaign at a fundraiser in Seattle in November of last year co-hosted by Amazon general counsel David Zapolsky. Tickets ranged between $1,000 and $2,800 per person.
The piling up of obscene fortunes by the world’s top 500 billionaires in the midst of a global pandemic is a prelude to the social revolution of the proletariat around the world, who will not tolerate indefinitely the homicidal and incompetent policies of the financial oligarchy. Workers in every workplace, school, and industry must form squads and battalions of the rank-and-file, including at Amazon itself, to resist deadly working conditions, fight for collective workers’ control, and carry forward the struggle against capitalism and for socialism.
For help setting up a safety committee at your own site, contact the World Socialist Web Site’s International Amazon Workers Voice.
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“Pandemic be damned”: Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans list reveals billionaire bonanza
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/09/forb-s09.html
By Kevin Reed
9 September 2020
The American business magazine Forbes published its 39th annual list of the 400 richest people in the country on Tuesday, celebrating the parasitic elite’s total wealth expansion by $240 billion to a record $3.2 trillion over the past year.
While millions of working-class families in the US are facing unemployment, economic ruin, eviction and hunger arising from the deep economic crisis sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, Forbes introduces its top billionaires list with “Pandemic be damned.” Noting that the stock market has “defied the virus,” Forbes editors write, “Even in these trying times mega-fortunes are still being minted.”
Topping the Forbes list for the third year in a row is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, with a net worth of $179 billion. Up from $114 billion in 2019—an increase of 57 percent—Bezos’s increase in personal wealth of $65 billion in one year is greater than the individual wealth of all but eight others at the top of the list.
Along with Bezos, the top ten richest Americans include: Bill Gates (Microsoft, $111 billion), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, $85 billion), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway, $73.5 billion), Larry Ellison (Oracle, $72 billion), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft, $69 billion), Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, $68 billion), Larry Page (Google, $67.5 billion), Sergey Brin (Google, $65.7 billion) and Alice Walton (Walmart, $62.3 billion).
With the exception of Warren Buffett, whose net worth dropped by $7.3 billion over the past year, the other nine of the top ten richest billionaires increased their wealth by a total of $194 billion. This means that 80 percent of the increases in the top 400 wealthiest fortunes went to nine of the ten richest individuals.
Forbes began the repugnant business of hailing the accumulation of personal capitalist wealth in 1982. This was during the decade that began with the election of Republican Ronald Reagan as President and when the ruling elite went on the offensive against every gain made by the working class since the 1930s. Since that time, a massive intensification of the exploitation of the working class and transfer of wealth to the financial oligarchy has taken place.
Providing something of a picture of just how far the social counterrevolution of the past four decades has penetrated American society, in 1982 there were 13 billionaires in the Forbes 400, and someone with a fortune of $75 million could secure a spot on the list.
In what passes for analysis, Forbes provides additional details about the “mega-fortunes” being “minted” by this year’s list makers. “We welcome 18 new members to the ranks, who made their piles in everything from electric trucks to the now-ubiquitous Zoom. Plus, there are 9 returnees—former 400 members who fell off the list and have made a comeback.”
Attempting to inject some semblance of reality into their report, the Forbes editors add, “Two from last year’s list died, and 25 dropped off as their fortunes fell; 10 of those setbacks were directly attributable to the Covid crisis.” Although it does not mention the President specifically, the report shows that Donald Trump’s fortune fell by $600 million to $2.5 billion, dropping him from number 275 to 339 on the list.
Forbes explains the methodology behind their net worth calculations in “how we crunch the numbers.” Here, editor Jennifer Wang writes: “Uncovering their fortunes required us to pore over thousands of SEC documents, court records, probate records and news articles. We took into account all types of assets: stakes in public and private companies, real estate, art, yachts, planes, ranches, vineyards, jewelry, car collections and more. We factored in debt and charitable giving. While some billionaires provided documentation for their private assets and companies, others were less forthcoming.”
In short, given that the financial elite specializes in concealing the full extent of their wealth, the net worth given in the Forbes 400 are no doubt below the real amounts of wealth owned.
The Forbes 400 list also includes some qualifying data points such as the age, sex, industry, state where they are located, the corporate source of their wealth, a philanthropy score and something called the “self-made score.” The last of these has a scale from “1: Inherited fortune but not working to increase it” to 10: “Self-made who not only grew up poor but also overcame significant obstacles.” Media mogul Oprah Winfrey, who came in with a net worth of $2.6 at number 327 on the list, has a self-made score of ten along with investor and philanthropist George Soros (#56 at $8.6 billion).
What the Forbes report leaves out, of course, is any reference to the role that the US government has played in the colossal escalation of Wall Street wealth during the coronavirus pandemic. With the passage of the misnamed CARES Act, supported with a near-unanimous vote by both Democrats and Republicans—Congress and the White House began injecting massive amounts of cash from the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve into the coffers of corporate America, the stock market and the pockets of the super-rich.
The richest have seen their wealth rise while tens of millions of workers lost their jobs and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined by an annualized rate of 34.3 percent during the coronavirus economic shutdown in the second quarter of 2020, the lowest on record. Meanwhile, the $600 federal supplement to unemployment payments which had provided a lifeline to those put out of work by coronavirus restrictions has been cut off since the end of July, plunging millions into misery or forcing them to return to work under unsafe conditions.
While effective analogies illustrating the scale of the wealth accumulation of the super-rich and the degree of inequality that exists in the US are very hard to come by, a look at the joint wealth of Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife Mackenzie Scott is instructive. Adding Scott’s net worth ($57 billion) to that of Bezos, the two would have a combined wealth of $236 billion.
First of all, recent reports show that 40 percent of Americans have a negative net worth. This means that their debts, such as loans, credit cards and student debt, are greater than their assets, such as a car or a house or savings in a bank account. Still, the median net worth of American families—the point at which 50 percent are below and 50 percent are above this value—is $97,300. This means that the former Bezos family has a net worth that is equal to 2.4 million times that of a median family’s net worth.
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Two decades of US “war on terror” responsible for displacing at least 37 million people and killing up to 12 million
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/09/cost-s09.html
By Jacob Crosse
9 September 2020
A staggering new report coauthored by Professor David Vine at the Watson Institute at Brown University conservatively estimates that 37 million people, equivalent to the entire population of Canada, have been forced to flee their home country, or have become internally displaced within it by nearly two decades of unending US imperialist war.
The analysis, published by the Costs of War Project, sought to quantify for the first time the number of people displaced by the United States military operations since President George W. Bush declared a “global war on terror” in September 2001 following the still unexplained attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon.
Professor Vine and his coauthors note that the 37 million estimated displaced is a “very conservative estimate,” with the real number of people displaced since September 2001, “closer to 48-59 million.” That is as much as, or more than, all of the displaced persons in World War II and therefore more than any other war in the last century. It is difficult to articulate the levels of misery, poverty, hardship, strife, pain and death visited upon entire societies and endured by millions of people.
The latest Costs of War report focused on eight countries that have been subjected to major US military operations: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
The two countries with the highest number of displaced persons were Iraq and Syria, whose populations have suffered for decades under US-led regime-change operations and military occupations initiated by both Republican and Democratic administrations. The authors estimate that 9.2 million people in Iraq and 7.1 million in Syria have been displaced respectively, in both cases roughly 37 percent of the prewar population.
The authors were careful to note that they only counted Syrian refugees and displaced persons post-2014, even though US-funded and supplied terrorist groups such as the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front, the Islamic State and other Islamist groupings began operations against the Syrian government as early as 2011. If the figures were to include the previous three years, the estimates exceed 11 million.
Somalia, where US forces have been operating since 2002, has the highest percentage of displaced persons with 46 percent of the country or nearly 4.2 million people displaced.
Throughout the “war on terror,” the authors estimate between 770,000 and 801,000 civilians and combatants on all sides have died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen since US forces began military operations in those countries. The number of “indirect deaths,” that is, those who weren’t confirmed killed by military weaponry, but died due to lack of healthcare, infrastructure, or food as a result of US military operations, embargoes and blockades may exceed 3.1 million, although the authors noted that credible estimates range in excess of 12 million.
While orders of a magnitude lower, an estimated 6,100 US military personnel and contractors have also died since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. If one were to include US deaths from Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and the dozens of African countries the US military has been waging secretive covert wars for years, the death toll rises to roughly 15,000.
Mentally and physically broken from the trauma of war, hundreds of thousands of US veterans have returned with horrific physical and mental wounds, from amputations and burns to post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries. As of 2018, 1.7 million veterans have reported a disability connected to their deployment.
The horrific numbers are a damning indictment of the capitalist system, the source of imperialist war and conflict. Since the fall of the USSR in 1990-1991, the US ruling class has embarked on an endless effort to reverse through military means the protracted erosion of its dominant global economic position and stave off any challenges to American hegemony in Eurasia, Africa and the Pacific.
Despite President Donald Trump’s recent statements in which he attempted to posture as an opponent of the “top people in the Pentagon” who just “fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs...stay happy,” the report illustrates that far from ending the illegal US wars or cutting back on military spending, the Trump administration has continued the aggressive regime-change operations, began under the Obama-Biden administration, in Libya and Syria, and accelerated bombing campaigns in Afghanistan and Somalia.
In addition to unending wars in central Asia, Trump has broadened the scope of the “war on terror” to include large swaths of Africa with over 6,000 troops spread out over 22 countries. In all, some 80 countries are now occupied by over 800 US bases, airfields, black sites and private military watch posts, costing over $50 billion a year to maintain.
Trump has also continued the US military occupation of the Philippines, specifically the southern islands of Mindanao, where up to 6,000 US special forces and “military advisers” have engaged in a four-decade-long campaign to root out “terrorists” and “counterinsurgents.” In 2017, US forces fought alongside the Philippine military, providing weapons, training and aerial reconnaissance, leading to the destruction of the historic city of Marawi, displacing nearly 200,000 people.
Since assuming the presidency, Trump has repeatedly boasted that he has “replenished” the US’s “depleted” military under his watch. With the help of the Democrats in Congress, Trump has increased the US military budget each year in office, including signing a monstrous $738 billion budget for fiscal year 2020, a 5.3 percent increase over the previous year. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that arm sales revenues for the top five US war profiteers, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics, increased by 30 percent between 2015 and 2019.
While the Trump administration has refused to publish a monthly Airpower Summary since February 2020, US Central Command declared earlier this year that US warplanes dropped 7,423 bombs on Afghanistan in 2019, more than any other year since 2006. Since Trump came into office, Afghanistan, with an estimated 5.3 million displaced since 2001, has seen over 20,000 US bombs dropped on the country, including the criminal deployment of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (video), the most destructive bomb used in combat since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, capitalism has turned entire regions of the globe into a foul prison, with millions of refugees forced to live in squalid refugee camps, rife with disease and exploitation. The vast majority of those fleeing evictions, death threats, and ethnic cleansing, perpetuated by US-fueled sectarian violence in countries such as Iraq, Syria and Somalia, are not soldiers or “radical terrorists,” but young jobless men, single mothers, and unaccompanied children.
Global travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic have forced those fleeing US-instigated conflict to seek refuge within their own country, resulting in millions of internally displaced persons. Based on their conservative estimate of the 37 million total displaced, the authors estimate eight million people have been forced to flee across international borders as refugees and asylum seekers, equivalent to the entire population of Virginia, while 29 million, more than the entire state of Texas, have been internally displaced.
Thousands have died attempting to flee war zones as the imperialist powers in Europe and America wage proxy wars throughout Africa and Asia in order to secure markets and resources for exploitation. The European Union has adopted a policy of mass murder, refusing to accept refugees fleeing from Libya and Syria across the Mediterranean Sea, leading to over 20,000 drowning deaths between 2014-2020, according to statista.com.
A Democratic administration led by former Vice President Joe Biden would not reverse these horrific trends. As former Obama administration officials repeated throughout the Democratic convention last month—which featured a bevy of neoconservative war criminals responsible for the destruction of Iraq and nearly two-decades-long occupation of Afghanistan—a Biden administration, no less than Trump, would increase US military aggression, leading to millions more dead and displaced.
While the human cost of the so-called “war on terror” is incalculable, the material cost to the US population is astronomical, with Brown University estimating the cost of the wars exceeding over $6.4 trillion as of November 2019. To put that in perspective, the US government spent roughly $260 billion to provide 13 weeks of enhanced unemployment benefits to roughly 30 million people, allowing millions of people to feed and clothe their families, while staying home in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19. $6.4 trillion would equate to roughly 320 weeks of $600 weekly payments, or over 6 years’ worth.
The US government’s switch in 2018 from the “war on terror” to “great power conflict” portends an even more massive and deadly conflagration that will lead to the displacement and deaths of hundreds of millions of people. The ever-deepening crisis of capitalism and the global order, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, a trigger event in world history, poses starkly and urgently the question of building a massive anti-war, anti-capitalist and socialist leadership in the working class, capable of leading an international movement to put an end to imperialist war.
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