Using Amazon, or Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, or Doordash, or Uber doesn't make you lazy. Platform capitalism isn't enshittifying because you made the wrong shopping choices.

Remember, the reason these corporations were able to capture such substantial market-share is that the capital markets saw them as a bet that they could lose money for years, drive out competition, capture their markets, and then raise prices and abuse their workers and suppliers without fear of reprisal. Investors were chasing monopoly power, that is, companies that are too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

The tactics that let a few startups into Big Tech are illegal under existing antitrust laws. It's illegal for large corporations to buy up smaller ones before they can grow to challenge their dominance. It's illegal for dominant companies to merge with each other. "Predatory pricing" (selling goods or services below cost to prevent competitors from entering the market, or to drive out existing competitors) is also illegal. It's illegal for a big business to use its power to bargain for preferential discounts from its suppliers. Large companies aren't allowed to collude to fix prices or payments.

But under successive administrations, from Jimmy Carter through to Donald Trump, corporations routinely broke these laws. They explicitly and implicitly colluded to keep those laws from being enforced, driving smaller businesses into the ground. Now, sociopaths are just as capable of starting small companies as they are of running monopolies, but that one store that's run by a colossal asshole isn't the threat to your wellbeing that, say, Walmart or Amazon is.

All of this took place against a backdrop of stagnating wages and skyrocketing housing, health, and education costs. In other words, even as the cost of operating a small business was going up (when Amazon gets a preferential discount from a key supplier, that supplier needs to make up the difference by gouging smaller, weaker retailers), Americans' disposable income was falling.

So long as the capital markets were willing to continue funding loss-making future monopolists, your neighbors were going to make the choice to shop "the wrong way." As small, local businesses lost those customers, the costs they had to charge to make up the difference would go up, making it harder and harder for you to afford to shop "the right way."

On March 13, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act by an overwhelming 352 to 65 margin. If legislated, it would ban the hugely popular TikTok social media app in the U.S., where it has 150 million users — unless its owner, the Chinese tech company ByteDance, sells off TikTok within six months to a buyer not “controlled” by a “foreign adversary.” The U.S. Senate could take up the TikTok bill soon, and President Joe Biden has said he’ll sign it into law.

While U.S. geopolitical and economic competition with China is the underlying driver of the ongoing attacks on TikTok, another factor has emerged: its role in spreading news about the plight of Palestinians amid Israel’s monthslong assault on Gaza that has killed over 33,000 people and wounded over 76,000. Key backers of the TikTok ban have, with little evidence, openly criticized the app for being “anti-Israel.”

Truthout spoke to several tech experts and Palestinian organizers about the TikTok bill. They stressed that social media platforms have offered Palestinians the ability to document and share their stories with mass audiences across the world. For younger people in particular who sympathize with Palestinians, apps like TikTok have been ways to gather news and spread information. All this comes even as social media platforms — TikTok included — have been accused of flagging and repressing pro-Palestinian content.

“For so long, a Palestinian narrative has been censored in the mainstream media,” says Sandra Tamari, a Palestinian organizer and the executive director of Adalah Justice Project, a Palestinian-led advocacy organization based in the U.S. Now, amid horrific violence, “it’s Palestinians in Gaza narrating their story.”

Building Union Power" National Organizing Campaign Underway
April 4, 2024

On June 25, the APWU will begin negotiations with postal management for a new union contract covering 200,000 postal workers. Negotiations are never easy. Our success depends on building power and leverage.The foundation of our union starts with each and every member. The vast majority of postal workers are proud union members! But too many others are non-members – they don’t pay their fair share and they weaken us all.

NOW IS A GREAT TIME TO TALK TO - AND SIGN UP - ALL THE NON-MEMBERS.
WHY ORGANIZE?

Building a stronger and more active membership builds more worker power. Whether in the fight for a good new union contract, protecting jobs and service in the face of network “modernization,” gaining better staffing, winning needed legislation, and ensuring on-the-job safety, working together in our union is what wins the day!

We are the American Postal Workers Union! Since our first Collective Bargaining Agreement (union contract) in 1971 following the Great Postal Strike, we have won improved wages, benefits, rights, and job security by standing together. With negotiations for a new union contract just months away, this is an important time to build our strength.

Here's a silver lining to global monopoly capitalism: it means we're all fighting the same enemy, who is using the same tactics everywhere. The same coordination tools that allow corporations to extend their tendrils to every corner of the Earth allows regulators and labor organizers to coordinate their resistance.

That's a lesson Mercedes is learning. In 2023, Germany's Supply Chain Act went into effect, which bans large corporations with a German presence from using child labor, violating health and safety standards, and (critically) interfering with union organizers:

https://www.bafa.de/EN/Supply_Chain_Act/Overview/overview_node.html

Across the ocean, in the USA, Mercedes has a preference for building its cars in the American South, the so-called "right to work" states where US labor law is routinely flouted and unions are thin on the ground. As The American Prospect's Harold Meyerson writes, the only non-union Mercedes factories in the world are in the US:

https://prospect.org/labor/2024-04-08-american-workers-german-law-uaw-unions/

But American workers – especially southern workers – are on an organizing tear, unionizing their workplaces at a rate not seen in generations. Their unprecedented success is down to their commitment, solidarity and shrewd tactics – all buoyed by a refreshingly pro-worker NLRB, who have workers' backs in ways also not seen since the Carter administration:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

Workers at Mercedes' factory in Vance, Alabama are trying to join the UAW, and Mercedes is playing dirty, using the tried-and-true union-busting tactics that have held workplace democracy at bay for decades. The UAW has lodged a complaint with the NLRB, naturally:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/alabama-mercedes-benz

"Somebody better investigate soon."

That's a lyric in Bob Dylan's "Oxford Town," a 1962 song deploring the relentless murdering of Black people and civil rights activists in the Deep South. The line mocks the refusal of racist officials to punish the white murderers, instead cynically covering up atrocities by promising do-nothing "investigations."

Six decades later, the depraved ethic of "Oxford Town" is allowing Israel's indiscriminate carpet-bombing of Gaza, wreaking horror at a genocidal pace on the Palestinian people. So far, some 33,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered, with another 75,000 horribly injured — and two-thirds of these victims are children and women. Hundreds of thousands more face imminent starvation because their homes, cities and entire economy have been blown to smithereens. Adding to the depravity, Israel's fanatical ruler, Benjamin Netanyahu, restricts humanitarian aid from reaching the Palestinian people.

Yet our government is Netanyahu's biggest international apologist and enabler! Oh, for sure our officials condemn each of his atrocities, loudly demanding "a full investigation." But even when investigations happen, they produce no punishment ... and no change in our shameful open-ended policy of annually supplying the billions of U.S. dollars and mega-weapons he's now using to exterminate the innocent men, women and children of Gaza. Thus, the horrendous 2,000-pound bombs he's dropping on Palestinians bear our U.S. flag.

President Joe Biden said last week that he's heartbroken by the relentless killing of innocent Palestinians, calling it "unacceptable." Then he accepted it! Even as he expressed anguish, Biden authorized a shipment of another $18 billion-worth of U.S. bombs and jets to Netanyahu.