Seattle Times Four-part Series on Amazon

Behind the Amazon.com smile: About this series

In a four-part series, The Seattle Times gives readers a glimpse inside the company.

From the moment Jeff Bezos launchedAmazon.com in a small Bellevue house in 1994, it has cultivated a reputation as the consumer's friend.

Even the company's logo sports an inviting smile.

That obsession with personalized customer service — "If you enjoyed this product, let me tell you about that one!" — has helped Amazon grow into a global behemoth. Last year, sales topped $48 billion and its headquarters, sprawled across nearly a dozen buildings, has remade Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood.

But as Amazon prepares to turn 18 this summer, its practices are drawing increasing scrutiny, from civic leaders in its hometown to lawmakers around the country, from business partners to labor activists.

In a four-part series, The Seattle Times gives readers a glimpse behind the Amazon smile.

We found that the company is a virtual no-show in the civic life of Seattle, contributing to nonprofits and charities a tiny fraction of what other big corporations give. In the political world, the company's hardball efforts to fend off collecting sales taxes — a key advantage over brick-and-mortar stores — has ignited a backlash in several states. In the publishing world, smaller companies have begun to publicly criticize Amazon's bullying tactics. And in some of its warehouses around the country, Amazon is drawing fire for harsh conditions endured by workers.

The world's biggest online retailer is a minor player — at best — in local charitable giving.

By Amy Martinez and Kristi Heim

Seattle Times business reporters

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AARON JAFFE / THE SEATTLE TIMES

South Lake Union's old, low-slung warehouses have given way to modern, high-tech offices. In this aerial view, Amazon's campus rises at center between Lake Union and downtown Seattle's skyscrapers, but you won't find the Amazon name on any of the buildings. Company representatives didn't even show up for the campus groundbreaking.

Graphic: Amazon's annual sales

Click to enlarge image.

Graphic: How Amazon stacks up

Click to enlarge image.

Timeline: How the fortunes of Amazon and Jeff Bezos have grown

Click on the image above to explore a timeline about Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos.

Part 1: Behind the smile in Seattle

• About this series: Examining Amazon's corporate practices
• Amazon a virtual no-show in hometown philanthropy
• Bezos invests in space travel, time
• Amazon issues statement on its role in the community
• Discuss on Facebook: Do corporations have a civic responsibility to their communities?

Part 2: A hammer on the publishers

• Amazon trying to wring deep discounts from publishers
• Discuss on Facebook: Where do you buy books, online or at a bookstore?
• Authors, readers discuss Amazon's relationship with book industry in live chat

Part 3: Pushing back on sales taxes

• States fight back against Amazon's tax deals

Part 4: Worked over in the warehouse

• Amazon warehouse jobs push workers to physical limit
• Amazon recruits holiday 'work campers'
• Amazon's statement regarding warehouse safety

From the editor

• Amazon series draws torrent of negative reaction online

It does not, for example, belong to the Washington Roundtable, a group of corporate executives focused on education and transportation issues. Although Amazon recently endorsed Washington's gay-marriage legislation, it did so only after Microsoft and other prominent Northwest companies came out in support.

Last year, for the first time, an Amazon executive joined the boards of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Seattle Association, but he has since left the company.

"Now that they're a major neighborhood presence, they have a lot of employees for whom the quality of that neighborhood is going to be important," said Kate Joncas, president of the Downtown Seattle Association.

Amazon may pay CA sales tax, get much of it Back

Two California fulfillment centers, with at least 1,000 employees each, are preparing to give Amazon the lion's share of their sales-tax take as a reward for setting up shop there.

By Marc Lifsher

Los Angeles Times

PATTERSON, Calif. — Amazon.com for years has fought government efforts to tax e-commerce. Now it's poised to pocket millions of dollars in sales taxes paid by California customers.

As part of a pact reached last year with state lawmakers, some online retailers agreed to begin collecting sales taxes this fall.

About half of the projected $316 million raised in the first full year is expected to come from merchandise sold by Amazon, which is also setting up two California fulfillment centers with at least 1,000 employees each.

San Bernardino and Patterson, where the centers will be located, will gain not only jobs but also a tax bonanza: Sales to Amazon customers throughout California will be deemed to take place there, so all the sales tax earmarked for local-government operations will go to those two cities.

It's a windfall so lucrative — about $8 million a year initially for each city — that local officials are preparing to give Amazon the lion's share of their take as a reward for setting up shop there.

Talks with Amazon about a so-called sales-tax rebate are still in the early stages. But in Patterson, a struggling Central California community of 21,000, Mayor Luis Molina said he's ready to do what it takes to help his city.

"This is huge. This is monumental, not only for the city but for the county and the region," he said. "We're up to 20 percent unemployment, and this is going to make a dent."

But critics worry that any deal would embolden other retailers to demand similar concessions at a time when California cities are scrambling to plug budget holes. Particularly grating, some said, is the idea that Amazon — whose business model long was based on selling merchandise without collecting taxes — could now profit from those levies.

"The tax is supposed to be supporting government," said Lenny Goldberg, executive director of the California Tax Reform Association. "Instead, it's going back into Amazon's pocket."

Amazon did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Hello Amazon. You're Accountable to the 99%

The 99% movement is back, taking the call for corporate accountability straight to CEO's and top executives at shareholder meetings across the country.  In San Francisco, thousands demonstrated at Wells Fargo's meeting over bailouts, bonuses, ad foreclosures. In Detroit, shareholders interrupted a speech by the CEO of General Electric to call for the company to pay their fair share of taxes. Amd at dozens of other shareholder meetings, people are rising up, speaking out, and demanding big corporations and the top 1% do right by the rest of us.

Next stop: May 24th, hundreds will rally at Amazon's shareholder meeting right here in Seattle to call on the giant retailer to be accountable to the 99%.

We hold Amazon accountable for:
Taking advantage of unfair tax loopholes.

• Amazon paid an effective Federal income tax rate last year of only 2.6%--dramatically lower than the 35% rate set by law.
• As their revenues have grown rapidly over the past several years, their income tax rate has gone down, from more than 11% in 2008, to less than 3% in 2011.
• Amazon avoided paying millions in taxes by taking advantage of an outlandish loophole that gives a $1 tax deduction for every $1 in stock options they give to millionaire executives.

We hold Amazon accountable for:

Brutal conditions at its sweatshop warehouses.

• Amazon's giant warehouse in Allentown, Pennsylvania was exposed last year for nightmarish working conditions, including indoor temperatures that rose above 100 degrees in the summer.
• The company's initial response was not to increase ventilation or install air conditioning.  Instead, they stationed paramedics outside the warehouse.
• Similarly brutal conditions have been documented in Nevada and Kentucky.

We hold Amazon accountable for:

Supporting the extreme right-wing group known as ALEC.

• Amazon was a "Director Level" sponsor of ALEC in 2011.
• ALEC has become notorious for its support of Stand Your Ground Laws, as well as efforts to create tax loopholes, undermine worker rights, and make it harder for young people and people of color to vote.
• While major corporations like McDonald's and Kraft have publicly dropped support for ALEC, Amazon refuses to do so.

Corexit in the news again (oil dispersant)

(Also on CNN yesterday, Fukishima tsunami trash is now reported all up the west coast of the US, and environmental scientists in Alaska are finding containers of toxins by the hundreds up and down beaches.  As anticipated, our seafood and health are at risk.)

Quite incredibly, the EPA issued a positive report on May 1, 2012 regarding the safety and toxicity of various dispersants used in the BP Gulf Oil Spill. Included in this assessment was the use of Corexit.

This report “indicated that all eight dispersants had roughly the same toxicity, and all fell into the “practically non-toxic” or “slightly toxic” category. Scientists found that none of the eight dispersants displayed endocrine-disrupting activity of “biological significance.” The same report went on to say that “dispersant-oil mixtures were generally no more toxic to the aquatic test species than oil alone.”

The first question that jumps out for those who have researched this subject with any degree of thoroughness is how this recent report fails to reconcile with previous studies performed by the EPA. Here is some test data retrieved from the EPA website that was posted previous to the BP Gulf Oil Spill.

“The dispersant (Corexit 9500) and dispersed oil have demonstrated the following levels of toxicity per the EPA website link that follows:

(1) 10.72 parts per million (ppm) of oil alone will kill 50% of the fish test species in a normal aquatic environment within 96 hours.
(2) 25.20 parts per million of dispersant (Corexit 9500) alone will kill 50% of the fish test species in a normal aquatic environment within 96 hours.
(3) 2.61 parts per million of dispersed oil (Corexit-laden) alone will kill 50% of the fish test species in a normal aquatic environment within 96 hours.”

Bank v America

This spring is a season of confrontation at the shareholders’ meetings of U.S. banks and other major corporations. And this week, Bank of America has been in the spotlight.

On Wednesday, around a thousand protesters rallied outside the bank’s annual meetings in Charlotte, North Carolina, brilliantly rebranding the event “Bank vs. America.” The demonstration was remarkable in uniting people across a wide range of issues. As Laura Gottesdiener wrote at Waging Nonviolence, protesters are targeting the bank for

funding mountaintop coal removal, perpetuating student debt that has now surpassed $1 trillion nationally, laying off more than 100,000 workers in the last few years and, of course, foreclosing on millions of homeowners across the country. In anticipation, the Charlotte City Council has already passed laws criminalizing protest, as well as camping and carrying permanent markers.

The latter part of the quote, about the great lengths officials have gone to truncate rights to free speech and assembly, is unfortunately less remarkable than the activists’ coalition-building. There is no doubt more to come, since Charlotte will host the Democratic National Convention in September—and Occupy activists have promised to target that event.

In addition to outside marches, there were also critics of BoA inside the annual meeting, with dissidents introducing shareholders’ resolutions challenging the bank’s overseas tax havens and its support of environmentally destructive mining practices. As Zach Carter of the Huffington Post reported, Bank of America CEO and public enemy number one Brian Moynihan defended the company’s operation of subsidiaries in nations identified as international tax havens by saying, “We’re a global business,” suggesting that Bank of America needs its sub-companies in other nations because that’s where the business is.“I don’t think there’s a whole lot of Bank of America operations in the Cayman Islands,” one disgruntled shareholder responded.

Later Bob Kincaid, president of Coal River Mountain Watch, spoke out:

“You are part of the poisoning.  In my view, the Bank vs. America protests provide more evidence for the baselessness of cooptation complaints. While the decision to focus attention on the spring meetings of major corporations did come out of a coalition of institutional left groups, you’d be hard pressed to argue that the actions we saw this week do not fit comfortably within the established ethos of Occupy. And even if joining those confronting Moynihan was not your cup of tea, it’s hard to see how the Charlotte protests were mutually exclusive with other Occupy-related organizing. If anything, they helped to keep the movement in the press and generate a continuing sense that activists are coming back strong after a winter of semi-hibernation.

The more valid criticism is that it does not appear that 99% Spring, despite trying to ready tens of thousands of people for escalating civil disobedience, resulted in particularly disruptive actions in Charlotte. The reports I’ve seen suggest that there were six anti-BoA protesters arrested there—with a handful of other arrests occurring at solidarity events in places like New York City. That’s hardly an avalanche of civil resistance.

On the plus side, there’s still more than a month of spring opportunities left, and there are upcoming protests at Sallie Mae, Chevron, Target, and WalMart—not to mention the NATO summit in Chicago. Worthy targets all, I’d say!

[Bank of America is responsible for destroying most of] Appalachia and so is every one of your directors and so is every one of your shareholders,” Kincaid said. “You are part of the destruction of an entire region of the country.”“Sir, our environmental team will take a look at it. We look at it all the time,” Moynihan said. The crowd responded with jeers.

The move to target corporate shareholders meetings is the outgrowth of an ad hoc coalition that is calling itself 99% Power. This umbrella campaign includes participation from community groups (National People’s Action, the New Bottom Line, the Unity Alliance), environmental organizations (Rainforest Action Network), and major unions (UNITE HERE, SEIU, USW)—and it overlaps very substantially with the groups that organized the 99% Spring trainings last month. Those trainings—an effort to provide 100,000 people will skills in nonviolent direct action—drew some over-the-top criticism. Adbusters magazine led the way with frantic cries of cooptation. It characterized the trainings as a scheme to make the Occupy movement a “reelection campaign for President Obama” and encouraged its readers to “Jump, jump, jump over the dead body of the old left!”

This was more paranoia than it was an actual effort to look at the 99% Spring agenda or to assess the range of groups involved in it. As I wrote in April, the trainings ended up getting some mixed reviews, but, on the whole, they could hardly be characterized as Camp Obama cheer sessions. Moreover, what some frame negatively as cooptation could easily—and more accurately—be framed positively as Occupy gathering and successfully setting the agenda for a far-reaching progressive movement.

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via DemocracyUprising.com. He is a contributor to Dissent Magazine, where this article originally appeared.

Military-corporate influence and Drug Wars

Noam Chomsky sums up the Latin American revolt against US policies (drug wars). May 8, 2012, Nation of Change
Though sidelined by the Secret Service scandal, last month’s Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, was an event of considerable significance. There are three major reasons: Cuba, the drug war, and the isolation of the United States.

A headline in the Jamaica Observer read, “Summit shows how much Yanqui influence had waned.” The story reports that “the big items on the agenda were the lucrative and destructive drug trade and how the countries of the entire region could meet while excluding one country – Cuba.”

The meetings ended with no agreement because of U.S. opposition on those items – a drug-decriminalization policy and the Cuba ban. Continued U.S. obstructionism may well lead to the displacement of the Organization of American States by the newly-formed Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, from which the United States and Canada are excluded.

Cuba had agreed not to attend the summit because otherwise Washington would have boycotted it. But the meetings made clear that U.S. intransigence would not be long tolerated. The U.S. and Canada were alone in barring Cuban participation, on grounds of Cuba’s violations of democratic principles and human rights.

Steve Coll interviews on the "sovereign" Exxon-Mobil

Amy Goodman, Democracy NOW

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to look at one of the largest and most powerful corporations in the country: ExxonMobil. In the hour it takes for this show to broadcast, ExxonMobil will earn almost $5 million in profit. Last week, the corporate giant reported that it had earned nine-and-a-half billion dollars in profits in the first three months of this year, or almost $104 million per day.

Earlier this week, ExxonMobil signed a contract with the Iraqi Drilling Company in Basra to drill 20 oil wells in one of world’s largest undeveloped fields with recoverable oil reserves. Iraq is expected to be the world’s biggest source of new oil supplies over the next few years after signing contracts for big development projects with major oil companies.

This is ExxonMobil vice president, Jon Penn.

JON PENN: The contract that we’re executing with IDC is for 20 drill wells in West Qurna-1, for a value of $124 million. It is an important step that we take with IDC today and is a historic moment for our continuing partnership with SOC as well as our partners.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Coll, who pulls back the curtain on Exxon in his exhaustive new book,Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power. Steve Coll is president of the New America Foundation and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, he was managing editor at the Washington Post, has also been a reporter, foreign correspondent and editor at the Washington Post. He was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for his book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. He is also author of The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century.

Steve Coll, welcome to Democracy Now! Let us start with the title of your new book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power. Explain.

STEVE COLL: Well, ExxonMobil, I came to think as I worked on this over four years, really sees itself as an independent sovereign in the world, and one that is almost the equivalent of a state. And it makes sense, when you look at their revenue of just under $500 billion a year. That’s actually more than the size of the economies of most of the countries in the world. It’s about the same as the economy of Norway.

And then the private part is that they really are one of the most closed corporations headquartered in the United States. They work on a closed system, and they don’t invite scrutiny. And in fact, as I worked on this project, which was hard, I really was struck by how—for myself as a journalist, over a long period of time, you know, I had spent so much time focusing on governments, trying to understand how they exercise power, and I came to realize that right in our midst are these very large and important institutions that are hardly ever scrutinized in the way—in the ways that journalists try to do.

Robert F Kennedy leads the Cry Against Coal

CONTACTS:

Brett VandenHeuvel, Executive Director, Columbia Riverkeeper (503) 348-2436 bv@columbiariverkeeper.org

Laura Stevens, Sierra Club, 503-740-9078, laura.stevens@sierraclub.org

Kimberly Larson, Climate Solutions, 206-443-9570 x 36, kimberly@climatesolutions.org

Bethany Cotton, Greenpeace USA, 503-327-4924, bethany.cotton@greenpeace.org

WHEN: Monday, May 7, Noon – 1pm.

WHERE: Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland. 

WHAT:   Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leads a noon rally in Portland to expose controversial plans that threaten Oregon and Washington with highly polluting coal exports. A strong proponent of clean energy and a vocal critic of the coal industry’s environmental, health, and safety record, Mr. Kennedy adds a national voice to the growing chorus of concern about coal exports.  

Oregonians from around the state will gather in Portland to shed light on the impact of several dirty coal export proposals on the health, environment, and values of the Pacific Northwest.  Guaranteed to be Oregon’s largest demonstration against coal exports yet, the rally will feature compelling stories, colorful banners and artwork, surgical masks to represent the health impacts of coal, and a call for environmental justice. Hao Xin from Zhejiang Province, China, will present the international perspective on why coal exports are wrong for families in the United States and China. Speakers include: