Amazon restores affiliate access to Missouri, Rhode Island, and Vermont

How typically Amazon, busily screwing society and destroying competitors. Anything for a buck. The company’s upper executives seem more like machines that people. As G. K. Chesterton put in long ago in Eugenics and Other Evils, they regard people as mere tools, useful only when manipulated by their betters.

The retail stores in those states had to collect sales tax, putting them at a competitive disadvantage, while Amazon doesn’t pay a penny. Treating associates as a legal presence in those states led Bezos, in a snit, to end associates in those states. The company will do anything to avoid taxes and block fair competition. And keep in mind that every penny not collected from Amazon has to be made up for with more taxes on mom and pop stores.

Here’s the reason Amazon is relenting from the link David gave:

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A proposed Rhode Island law would mimic Colorado’s in ordering companies that don’t collect sales taxes to post a “conspicuous” online pop-up notice informing customers about what they owe and following that up with an email and an annual tax obligation mailing. The measure is a way to effectively coerce companies to collect the tax if they don’t want to burden their customers with unpleasant notices.
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Think of this as being like the nasty ‘don’t smoke’ ads that used to run on TV. Tobacco companies agreed to stop advertising on TV in order to bring an end to those messages. Amazon is agreeing to collect sales taxes to avoid those messages and the “annual tax obligation mailing”—a copy of which could easily be sent to state tax authorities. And it is only doing that in states that have those reporting requirements. Mine apparently does not, because it isn’t in the list of those where Amazon will start to collect sales tax.

Note that Colorado alone will get over $170 million from thise move, so Amazon sales must run into the billions in states where it has paid no taxes at all since the mid-1990s, that’s over twenty years ago. That means it has contributed nothing to the schools, social services and law enforcement in those states during all this time. All it does is take, take, and take. And when it locates in a state with low-paying warehouse jobs—perhaps soon to be ended by robots—it demands tax advantages not enjoyed by those mom and pop stores. And those drones, although I suspect the idea will bomb, represent an effort to put your local UPS or FedEx driver out of work.

Amazon doesn’t even spread its better paying jobs around the country. Perhaps to better regiment its white-collar workforce and apply nasty Henry-Ford-at-River-Rouge metrics to their labors, Amazon is putting most of those jobs in skyscrapers in Seattle’s South Lake Union district. I left Seattle, in part, to escape the skyrocketing apartment rent that was creating.

Here’s an Economist article about the link between Henry Ford’s factories, so dreadful worker turnover in a single year often exceeded 100%, and Amazon employees. Scientific management, also called Taylorism, is named for its inventor Frederick Taylor.

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Scientific management provoked a backlash. Aldous Huxley satirised it in “Brave New World” (1932), as did Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times” (1936). A rival school of managers argued that workers are more productive if you treat them as human beings. But a recent article about Amazon in the New York Times suggests that Taylorism is thriving. The article claimed that the internet retailer uses classic Taylorist techniques to achieve efficiency: workers are constantly measured and those who fail to hit the numbers are ruthlessly eliminated, personal tragedies notwithstanding….

Far from being an outlier, it would seem that Amazon is the embodiment of a new trend, digital Taylorism….

This new version of Taylor’s theory starts with his three basic principles of good management but supercharges them with digital technology and applies them to a much wider range of employees—not just Taylor’s industrial workers but also service workers, knowledge workers and managers themselves. In Taylor’s world, managers were the lords of creation. In the digital world they are mere widgets in the giant corporate computer.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21664190-modern-version-scientific-management-threatens-dehumanise-workplace-digital
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Note that those brutal techniques appealed to both giant capitalists such as Henry Ford and communists such as Vladimir Lenin. The common ground is a mindset that regards people as tools when they are needed and as “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” when they are not. Make no mistake, the latter two are terms to be used for classes of people you want to eliminate.

Yes, it’s not just Amazon and not just retail sales. I’ve been watching the Apple/IBM partnership and the “tools” it is creating for healthcare workers such as nurses. I worked in nursing for over two years. The apps will do less that nothing to make their work more productive. They are intended to create generate metrics that will allow administrators to bully doctors, nurses. It is like much like that NY Times article detailed how Amazon treats its white-collar workers, with response time to to-do posting replacing response time to emails. You can find the Apple/IBM healthcare apps described here.

https://www.ibm.com/mobilefirst/us/en/mobilefirst-for-ios/industries/healthcare/

The term in that Economist article, “Digital Taylorism” is as good a term as any for the future some want to impose on us. And as that article noted, nasty, nasty Amazon is a leader in that trend. This is not just about sales taxes. It’s about having a decent life as a worker.

The only solution is to create and maintain so many good jobs that we don’t need to work for those who want to regiment us and ensure that want to eliminate us as bitter clingers and deplorables have no ‘useless mouths’ excuse to do so.

–Michael W. Perry, co-author of Lily’s Ride (set in another nasty time and place in U.S. history)

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