A group of Google employees protested Tuesday in California and New York against the information technology corporation’s provision of cloud computing services to Israel, according to reports.
The protesters in Google’s Sunnyvale, California location entered the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian Tuesday morning and said they would leave only if Google would withdraw from Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon to provide cloud services and data centers to the Israeli government, the Washington Post reported.
A similar protest took place in a common space within Google’s New York office, Zelda Montes, one of the protesters, told the outlet. A banner reading “Google Worker Sit-In”, “Against Project Nimbus”, and “No Tech for Genocide” hung above the common space, the outlet revealed.
A protester wore a T-shirt sporting the slogans “Googler against Genocide” and “No Tech for Apartheid” according to Gizmodo.
The provision of public cloud services to the Israeli government is the first of five “central layers” of the “multi-year, large-scale flagship project” that started in 2019, according to Israel’s Government Procurement Administration. Google and Amazon shrugged off Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, the other tenderers who also bid for the contract, in Apr. 2021, Reuters reported.
A group of Google employees staged sit-ins at the company’s offices to protest the tech giant’s work with Israel’s government, escalating the conflict inside tech companies over the war in Gaza and whether U.S. companies should sell technology to Israel. https://t.co/xGxXOnXrGW
Protests from within Google and Amazon have erupted in various forms since then. More than 90 Google employees and more than 300 Amazon employees collectively signed an anonymous Oct. 2021 letter accusing the companies of “aggressively” pursuing military and law enforcement contracts that “are part of a disturbing pattern of militarization, lack of transparency and avoidance of oversight.” They called on both companies to “pull out of Project Nimbus and cut all ties with the Israeli military.”
Two months after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 terror attack on Israel, workers staged a “die-in” at Google’s downtown San Francisco offices to protest against Israel’s reported use of what appeared to be a separate artificial intelligence program—termed “the Gospel”—in its military response to Hamas, according to the San Francisco (SF) Chronicle.
Google fired an employee who heckled the corporation’s top executive in Israel during a conference in New York in March, leading Montes to contemplate the possibility of being fired, too, according to the Washington Post report. “I have been waiting for months for people to be in the same position as me and be ready to put their job on the line,” Montes told the outlet in part.
'Google is directly profiting from what's taking place in Gaza'
Zelda Montes, a software engineer and No Tech For Apartheid activist, says tech workers are mobilising to put an end to Google and Amazon’s project Nimbus which enables Israeli apartheid ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/VF3bC4PPSb
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2024-04-19 13:42:532024-04-19 14:29:30‘No Tech For Apartheid’: Google Workers Protest Company’s Services To Israel
What’s the difference between books and any other kind of speech? Books have an emotional quality to them.
Delete someone’s post and it can be called enforcing community guidelines, but burn a book and suddenly you’re a Nazi. Speech is still speech, but the idea of going after books in particular summons all sorts of historical references from the Muslim destruction of the Library of Alexandria to book-burning rallies in Berlin.
It’s why the Left was able to mobilize so much opposition by accusing school boards and parents of trying to “ban books” by keeping pornographic books out of schools.
Still every prior form of political censorship was defended by leftists, why not go after books on Amazon?
Tyler O’Neil at the Daily Signal reports that the Biden team saw no apparent difference between targeting books on Amazon and any other forms of social media censorship that it was pushing.
Andrew Slavitt, then a senior adviser on Biden’s COVID-19 response team, had previously asked, “Who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation [on] Amazon?”
And by “talk to”, they meant get rid of.
In one email produced through a House Judiciary Committee subopena had an Amazon employee asking, “Is the [Biden] Admin asking us to remove books”?
After the March 9 meeting at the White House, Amazon staff strategized how to respond to a negative story that Buzzfeed would publish discussing “COVID-19 related books for sale on Amazon.” Staff noted that they were “feeling pressure from the White House Taskforce” on the issue of books “related to vaccine misinformation.”
The resulting compromise instead settled for shadowbanning the books.
In this discussion, a staffer noted that “we did enable Do Not Promote for anti-vax books whose primary purpose is to persuade readers vaccines are unsafe or ineffective on 3/9, and will review additional handling options for these books with you, [redacted], and [redacted] on 3/19.”
That March 9 decision to change Amazon’s algorithm to avoid promoting “anti-vax books” appears to have happened after the meeting with White House staff.
The media will predictably support this or ignore it: thus crossing another line. And at some point we’ll run out of lines. Liberals used to love Heinrich Heine’s line, “where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.” There’s some truth to it. At least insofar as the sorts of regimes that burned people tended to have also burnt books beforehand.
The pattern here is similar to what we saw before with the #TwitterFiles. While externally Dot Coms defend censorship, internally we’ve seen a good deal of discomfort from top execs with what they’re being asked to do.
That discomfort is key. A judicial decision banning the government from pushing companies to censor materials was protested on the grounds that the government was persuading, not ordering. Liberals pretended that there was such a distinction. But the more of these cases are aired, the more that distinction collapses.
Justice Clarence Thomas had warned that government agencies pressuring social media companies to censor might not be considered “private action.” And without that, it’s just government censorship.
The 8,000 members of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) – the tiniest drop in Jeff Bezos’ bucket, for Amazon employs 1.6 million people – held a protest in late July which had nothing to do with wages or working conditions at Amazon, but rather, had only to do with the tiny Jewish state that seems always to attract such malignant, and ignorant, attention. Israel was accused of apartheid and genocide, and the ALU wanted Amazon to cancel a contract with the government of Israel to supply cloud-based services. More on this protest by the ALU, aided and abetted by the well-known anti-Semite Linda Sarsour, can be found here:
To say that Israel covets this technology to oppress Palestinians is yet another example of blatant anti-Israel hatred and bias,” AJC said in a statement. “Israel has every right to modernize its society.
The Amazon Labor Union, which represents more than 8,000 employees at the tech behemoth, took part in a protest on Wednesday accusing Israel of apartheid and genocide in response to an Amazon contract with the Israeli government.
Videos and photos provided to The Algemeiner show executives from AWS and Salesforce being disrupted at least five times during their keynote address at the Amazon Web Services summit in New York. Dozens of protesters outside the event held signs with slogans including “Zionism is Genocide,” “Israeli Apartheid and Genocide Funded by the US,” and “Amazon Profit$ Off Israel’s Military Occupation.” The organizers claim that Wednesday’s anti-Israel protest was the first time that Amazon tech workers and warehouse workers have protested together.
Another speaker and organizer at Wednesday’s protest, the Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, who has a history of making statements widely considered by Jewish groups to be antisemitic and whose MPower Change organization runs the ongoing #NoTechForApartheid campaign against Amazon and Google, said that she was happy to see Israel’s democracy “crumble from within” amid the judicial reform protests.
Among Sarsour’s antisemitic remarks, the mildest is her claim that Israel “was built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody else.” And according to Sarsour, the Jewish state is guilty of committing every conceivable crime against the Palestinian people, including “apartheid” and “genocide.”
“I want you all to know that while the Palestinian people are suffering oppression, brutality, and murder and genocide at the hands of the state of Israel, they’re still resilient,” Sarsour said.
The “oppression” the “Palestinians” are suffering comes not from Israel, but from the twin despotisms of Hamas in Gaza and the PA in Judea and Samaria. Both regimes have long records of crushing dissidents, arresting, imprisoning, and sometimes murdering those who oppose the corruption and mismanagement of their respective rulers. The latest victim was Nizar Banat, who on social media proved to be an effective critic of Mahmoud Abbas’ corruption. When he refused to remain silent, Abbas had his goons beat Banat to death.Hamas has been accused by Amnesty International of torturing and strangling to death numerous critics, beginning with Osama Atallah in 2009. The impoverishment endured by so many Palestinians, in both Gaza and the West bank, is a result of the colossal corruption at the top. Just two Hamas leaders, Khaled Meshaal and Mousa Abu Marzouk, each managed to amass fortunes of $2.5 billion. In addition, 600 “Hamas millionaires” from the terror group’s upper echelon live in resplendent villas, with gardens and pools. in Gaza. In the P.A., Mahmoud Abbas and his two grasping sons Tarek and Yasser have acquired a family fortune of $400 million. In both cases, much of the money was skimmed from aid supplied by foreign donors.
Far from “oppressing” the Palestinians, it is the Israelis who tried in the past to turn over a large and flourishing greenhouse business created by Jewish settlers in Gaza; the Palestinians, instead of taking over that turnkey operation, vandalized and destroyed all of the greenhouses. Israeli officials have agreed to collect import taxes on goods meant for the Palestinians and to transfer the sums collected to the PA. More recently, and as a response to the PA’s “Pay-For-Slay” program, Israel has withheld from such transfer exactly the amounts the PA spends on “Pay-For-Slay,” money which is provided to imprisoned terrorists and to the families of terrorists killed while committing their attacks. Israel is perfectly ready to turn over those sums that it has withheld just as soon as the PA puts an end to the program that rewards past, and incentivizes future, terrorism. Israel also provides jobs to Palestinians — some 20,000 from Gaza and over 100,00 from the West Bank, at wages from three to t en times what comparable jobs in Gaza and the PA territories would pay. Israel is thus trying to help the Palestinians economically. Finally, Israel has in the past sent Mossad chief Yossi Cohen to persuade the Qatari rulers to send aid to Hamas in Gaza.
The Amazon Labor Union’s President Christian Smalls on Twitter Wednesday liked and retweeted a post describing the protest as opposing the “Israeli apartheid regime,” while the union’s main Twitter account approvingly quote Tweeted a post from Sarsour’s MPower Change.
The organizers of the protest, which included the Amazon Labor Union, the Alphabet Workers Union and Jewish Voice for Peace, allege that Amazon and Alphabet–the parent company of Google–are participating in Israeli “apartheid” against the Palestinians as a result of a $1.2 billion contract the companies have signed with the Israeli government for cloud computing services. The “Project Nimbus” contract aims to move Israeli government services into the cloud with support from the two tech giants….
The American Jewish Committee (AJC) told The Algemeiner in a statement that singling out Israel for using technology that governments around the world are pursuing is a clear indication of anti-Israel animus.
“To say that Israel covets this technology to oppress Palestinians is yet another example of blatant anti-Israel hatred and bias,” AJC said in a statement. “Israel has every right to modernize its society.”…
The technology that the protesters object to being sold to Israel — that is, the cloud computing services supplied to it by Amazon and Google – is also sold to, and used by, governments around the globe, including the United States. There is nothing sinister about this, unless the recipient is itself a criminal state, like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. If Israel is guilty, as charged by the Amazon Labor Union, of “apartheid” and “genocide,” then, of course, a protest is appropriate. But is the Jewish state guilty of either crime? The ALU has not supplied a shred of evidence for either claim.
Let’s take the charge of “apartheid” first. Are Israeli Jews and Arabs treated unequally according to Israeli law? No, they have exactly the same political, economic, and social rights. Arabs sit in the Knesset, serve on the Supreme Court, go abroad as ambassadors. The chairman of Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi, is an Arab. Jews and Arabs are both treated by Jewish and Arab medical personnel and often in the same hospitals. Jews and Arabs work in the same offices and factories. Arabs and Jews play on the same sports teams and in the same orchestras. Jews and Arabs are partners in businesses, from restaurants to high tech start-ups. There is exactly one respect in which Jews and Arabs are treated differently. Jews must, while Arabs may, serve in the military.
The ALU’s anti-Israel stance was overwhelmingly rejected, 16 years ago, by the most important unions in the US, including the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers, the Teamsters, and 40 other unions, who signed a letter opposing the BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction) movement.
In fact, let’s not forget that the Amazon Labor Union represents only 8,000 out of the 1.6 million Amazon employees; who knows how the other 99.998% feel about the Jewish state? None of them have announced their solidarity with the ALU.
Speaking at the rally Wednesday, one of the ALU’s co-founders, Jordan Flowers, said that Amazon “should have nothing to do with the Israeli government.”
“We are here today to fight back, and everyone should have their chance to say that Amazon needs to be held accountable, Google needs to be held accountable, and the Israeli government should be held accountable for all charges and crimes,” Flowers said.
And who else should be held accountable for “all charges” made about Israel? Why, those who make those charges, like Linda Sarsour, like the Staten Island ALU, like Jordan Flowers himself. We have already discussed above the absurdity of the claim that Israel is an “apartheid” state.
Now let us consider the second charge, that Israel is guilty of “genocide.”
Rafael Lemkin’s coining of the sadly necessary term “genocide” was used first to describe the the systematic annihilation of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis and their collaborators. At the end of the Second World War, there were six million fewer Jews in the world than at the beginning.
Has anything comparable been inflicted by the Israelis on the Palestinians? Are there Israeli gas chambers into which Palestinians have been herded? Does Israel have the mobile killing vans of the Einsatzgruppen, or the crematoria into which both the living and the dead were shoved by the Nazis, or those “shooting parties” in which tens of thousands of people were shot in the back of the neck at the edge of large pits into which they then toppled, only to be covered with dirt whether dead or still alive? Where are the cattle cars in Israel like those inside of which 8,000 people at a time were locked in by the Nazis, and at the end of the journey, and the cars unsealed, only one person was still alive? That’s what “genocide” means.
It is undeniable that Israel, in the three wars it has had to fight for its survival, in 1948, 1967, and 1973, and in the nearly dozen campaigns it has had to fight against the terror groups — the main ones being the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP — has made enormous efforts to minimize civilian casualties? Haven’t we all learned of the various means employed by the IDF to warn civilians away from buildings about to be targeted, through telephoning, emailing, leafletting, and the “knock-on-the-roof” technique? Don’t Israeli pilots abort missions if they detect the presence of children or of more than a handful of civilians? Isn’t this astonishing record what led British Colonel Richard Kemp, the veteran of a half-dozen campaigns, including Afghanistan, where he led the British forces, to describe the IDF as “the most moral army in the world”? How does this compare with the Palestinian terrorists who have murdered nearly 4,000 Jewish civilians — men, women, and children — in terror attacks since 1948?
In 1950, just after the first Arab-Israeli war, the Arab population of Gaza was 63,444; in 2023 the population is now estimated at 778,187. In Israel in 1950, there were 167,000 Arabs; in 2023 there are 2.1 million. In the West Bank in 1950 there were 700,000 Arabs; in 2023 there are 2.7 million. If Israel is committing “genocide” on the Palestinians, it is certainly going about it in a most peculiar way.
Asked by The Algemeiner about the comments by the ALU and Amazon tech workers that Amazon was participating in “apartheid” and that its executives were “war profiteers” because of the Project Nimbus contract, a spokesperson for Amazon told The Algemeiner that Amazon “respect [its] employees’ right to express themselves.”
Of course the Amazon employees have a “right to express themselves.” And we have the right, and even the duty, to hold up the charges of “apartheid” and “genocide” against Israel, made by the members of the Staten Island ALU, for examination, criticism and ridicule. Israel is not an “apartheid” state in any sense. Indeed, it guarantees more rights to its Arab citizens than the governments of 22 Arab states grant to their citizens. And the charge of “genocide” is simply absurd, given that in 1949 the Arab population of Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank was 1.4 million, and today is over 5 million.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2023-08-06 09:09:112023-08-06 09:17:15Amazon Labor Union Accuses Israel of ‘Apartheid’ and ‘Genocide’
Doctors Without Borders is handing out maps to migrants that show several different routes to the U.S. border, according to a map seen by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“As a medical humanitarian organization providing medical and mental health care to people on this migration route, MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] prints and distributes these maps to ensure that people know where to find shelter and humanitarian assistance and how to access mental health services along the migration route,” Doctors Without Borders spokeswoman Jessica Brown told the DCNF.
The Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) labels the documents “literal roadmaps to guide migrants from Central America to our southern border,” in a statement to the DCNF.
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala — Doctors Without Borders, a medical aid nonprofit which is funded by a number of prominent tech companies, is publishing and distributing maps to migrants showing routes through Central America that reach the U.S., according to a copy of the map seen by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The map is labeled “shelters for people on the move” in Spanish and lists a number of clinics and other areas where aid can be found along the journey to the U.S., according to the document. While Doctors Without Borders hasn’t received U.S. government funding since 2002, the group still receives sizable donations from American companies, including from tech giants Microsoft, Google.org and Amazon.
The group has also gotten millions in donations from the foundations of billionaires Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg, according to its website.
“As a medical humanitarian organization providing medical and mental health care to people on this migration route, MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] prints and distributes these maps to ensure that people know where to find shelter and humanitarian assistance and how to access mental health services along the migration route,” Doctors Without Borders spokeswoman Jessica Brown told the DCNF.
The map shows paths starting in Guatemala that lead up to the U.S.-Mexico border. Each path is marked with locations for shelter and aid along several different routes through Central America that end in the U.S.
The map also lists the locations of clinics and shelters along the Mexican border across from major U.S. cities, such as El Paso, Texas and San Diego, California.
“The fact that an international medical NGO with billions in the bank is making literal roadmaps to guide migrants from Central America to our southern border is not only an affront to its core mission, but a globalist attack on our sovereignty,” Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) Director of Government Relations and Communications RJ Hauman told the DCNF.
The map is labeled “Medicos Sin Fronteras,” which is the name used by the organization’s offices in Argentina and Spain, which have separate finances in addition to a combined international account with the U.S. office.
Doctors Without Border has previously highlighted its work “assisting migrants on their dangerous journeys.”
“We provided treatment for people emerging from the Panama side of the jungle, who are mainly from Cuba or Haiti, although our teams have seen people from West Africa. Regardless of origin, everyone passing through the Gap is heading north, where they still face the dangerous route through Mexico, in search of a better life in the United States,” the group noted in a 2021 report.
Between October 2021 and September 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered roughly 2.3 million migrants at the U.S. border with Mexico. Many of the migrants made the trek through South and Central America, where some are receiving the map, which Hauman compared to the smuggling operations of cartels.
“No American citizen, company, or foundation should give a dime to Doctors Without Borders until they quit working hand in glove with cartels and smugglers to enhance mass migration in the region While the federal government hasn’t funded Doctors Without Borders since 2002, there are plenty of other NGOs with similar missions that do quietly receive taxpayer dollars. Republicans must examine this immediately next Congress,” Hauman said.
Bloomberg, Google, Amazon and Microsoft also didn’t respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
The Musk Foundation couldn’t be reached for comment.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2022-11-03 08:37:322022-11-03 09:10:14EXCLUSIVE: Migrants Are Given ‘Literal Roadmaps’ To Reach The U.S. Border. And Big Tech Is Funding It!
The battle for the freedom of speech is heating up this week, with Elon Musk chasing out the Twitter fascists and beginning to open up the platform for free discussion and dissent (amid howls of rage from the Left), but the other social media giants are showing no signs of retreating from their fascism. New English Review Press announced Sunday that a book it published back in 2017, The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology by the renowned ex-Muslim scholar Ibn Warraq, has been pulled for sale from Amazon without explanation or the possibility of appeal.
It’s a strange move. I have the privilege and honor of having known Ibn Warraq for many years and calling him my friend. I’ve also read The Islam in Islamic Terrorism. Before I met him, his groundbreaking and courageous work Why I Am Not A Muslim was a powerful influence on me in the 1990s and had a great deal to do with my beginning to write about jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women myself. Ibn Warraq is a gentle soul, a careful scholar, a superb writer, and a profound and original thinker. The Islam in Islamic Terrorism is not some flame-throwing hate screed but a carefully documented exploration of the elements of Islam that jihad terrorists use in order to justify violence and make recruits among peaceful Muslims.
Amazon, however, is run by Leftists, and for Leftists, any criticism of Islam, including any hint that it may have some connection to Islamic terrorism, is “Islamophobic” and thus to be rejected out of hand without any discussion of the actual evidence. For years now, the notorious far-Left smear machine, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), has defamed opponents of jihad violence and Sharia oppression as “hate group leaders,” and Amazon has banned counter-jihad 501c3 charitable organizations from its Amazon Smile charity program on the basis of the SPLC’s “hate” listings.
Amazon has also shown a readiness to ban books that counter the Left’s nonsense. A few years back, the Leftist behemoth banned Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. It has also banned other books that jihadis and their allies would find offensive, such as Peter McLoughlin’s Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal, and Mohammed’s Koran by McLoughlin and British activist Tommy Robinson.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2022-11-01 06:37:142022-11-01 06:41:34Amazon Fascists Ban Another Book That Leftists Hate
Amazon promotes its Echo series of devices from the Dot to the Show. According to the Amazon shopping site:
ALEXA IS READY TO HELP: Set timers, reminders, and alarms. Alexa answers questions like “Alexa, what time is it?”
Have you noticed that your Amazon Echo Show device automatically and regularly displays information, without us asking, about where to get the Covid vaccination and where to get a Covid booster shot? We have.
QUESTION: Have you ever asked your Amazon Echo devices questions about the negative effects of being vaccinated?
We decided to ask our Amazon Echo some Covid questions just to see what the answers would be. Amazon has access to its own vast databases for information on a variety of things including where to get jabbed.
Asking Alexa About Covid
Understanding Amazon has access to information about Covid, we decided to ask some questions about the negative effects of the vaccines that are readily available on both government and medical websites. Here’s the list of Covid questions we asked and how Alexa answered:
Alexa, how many Americans have died from taking the Covid vaccines? Alexa’s answer: Sorry, I don’t know that one.
Alexa, how many women have miscarried after taking the Covid vaccine? Alexa’s answer: Hum, I don’t know that one.
Alexa, are Covid vaccines FDA approved? Alexa’s answer: Sorry, I don’t know that one.
Alexa, what is the age of the youngest child who died after taking a Covid vaccine? Alexa’s answer: The dates that vaccines will be available for children in Florida.
Alexa, can you sue companies that makes the Covid vaccines? Alexa’s answer: No answer given, it just blinked.
Alexa, are government Covid mandates constitutional? Alexa’s answer: Sorry, I don’t know that.
Alexa, how many Americans have been hospitalized after taking the Covid vaccine? Alexa’s answer: Sorry, I’m not sure.
Alexa, how many women died after taking the Covid vaccine? Alexa’s answer: Sorry, I don’t know that one.
Alexa, how many children died after taking the Covid vaccine? Alexa’s answer: Sorry, I don’t know that one.
QUESTION: Are Amazon Echo devices programmed to censor any negative questions about Covid vaccines?
Alexa, How Many Genders Are There?
After asking about Covid we then decided to ask our Amazon Echo a very simple question about gender. I learned in high school biology that gender is binary, male (XX) and female (XY).
OUR QUESTION: Alexa, How many genders are there?
Here’s how our Amazon Echo responded:
Alexa’s answer: The two categories in the gender spectrum, male and female called the gender binary. However, because gender identity is conceptually questioned there is no definitive way to show how many genders there are.
The Bottom Line
If you have an Amazon Echo device in your home take the time ask these same questions and see if you get a different answer.
It is clear from what we asked that Amazon is unable to tell the truth about the negative impacts of taking the Covid vaccines. Amazon is also gender confused.
Think about what your children are learning from these Amazon devices when they ask questions.
QUESTION: Is it that Alexa doesn’t know or that Alexa doesn’t want you to know about the negative impacts of the Covid vaccines and gender?
Can you trust your echo to tell you the truth? If not, then why have an Echo device in your home.
Just asking.
What is really scary is the ad that Amazon played during the Super bowl. Watch:
Is this “Mind Reader” the next generation of Amazon’s way of impacting your personal life?
Last week, we urged you to treat yourself with Halloween necessities from H-E-B, Great Pretenders, and Spirit Halloween. These are companies which put you over politics. If you missed it, here’s the link for you to read!
Today, we’ll be asking you to say “Boo” to three companies which put politics over customers. These are companies which rank poorly on 2ndVote’s 1-5 scale for their donations and company policies.
Kroger (1.70) is the parent company to grocery store chains like its own name brand, Harris-Teeter, and QFC. The company ranks at just 1.70 on the 2ndVote scale as it scores a 1.00 in all categories except its 5.00 in Basic Freedoms.
Amazon (1.62) is the world’s largest retailer. They rank at 1.62 with 2ndVote because of their opposition to Basic Freedoms like religious liberty and speech, and their environmental radicalism. Amazon also scores a 1.00 in each category except for our 2nd Amendment category which earns a 4.70.
Target (2.31) is one of middle-class America’s favorite places to go for everything retail. However, the company has also endangered women’s privacy and safety through its decision to allow men to use women’s restrooms and changing rooms. With scores of 1.00 in each category except a 4.86 in Basic Freedoms and a 4.97 in Civil-Safe Society.
If you would like to see changes in these scores, use YOUR voice to call them out. Contact them through our website with these links: Kroger, Amazon, and Target.
It’s important to treat – and not trick – yourself when it comes to Halloween. We encourage you to spend your hard-earned money with companies like Spirit Halloween,H-E-B, and Great Pretenders this Halloween season!
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png002ndvote .comhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png2ndvote .com2021-10-30 08:32:492021-10-30 08:33:50Don’t Trick Yourself into Buying from These Companies This Halloween
One of the most reliable and comprehensive sources of alternative news is The Epoch Times. And one of the beats covered assiduously by The Epoch Times is the ongoing epidemic of online censorship. This week The Epoch Times exposed two serious new acts of censorship.
The first, in an act that rivals the arrogance of Twitter’s permanent expulsion of President Trump, is YouTube’s decision to take down an interview with President Trump that was posted on the Newsmax TV channel. As quoted in the Epoch Times report, “A Google spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email: ‘We have clear Community Guidelines that govern what videos may stay on YouTube, and we enforce our Community Guidelines consistently, regardless of speaker and without regard to political viewpoints.’”
This is a stunning degree of arrogance on Google’s part. It is also counterproductive. Every time Google, or any of the big media corporations, exercise this level of censorship, tens of thousands of Americans lose trust in them. Ultimately, what Google has done only serves to further divide the nation.
The second, equally arrogant but if anything more sinister, is Amazon’s quietly removing the book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.” This book is critical of “transgender ideology,” and as a result, according to the arbiters of truth at Amazon, it had to disappear.
These acts stand out simply because of their brazen enormity. YouTube, still owning a near monopoly share of online video viewers, deletes an interview with a former U.S. President. Amazon, the juggernaut that has crushed millions of retail jobs, owning a near monopoly share of online retail purchasing, deletes a book that attempts to, gasp, suggest that encouraging prepubescent children to begin irreversible “gender reassignment” medical treatments may not be a good idea.
Silencing a former president. Silencing any challenge to “trans ideology.”
If the big tech companies that have overwhelmed our public square and public marketplace can do these things, what can’t they do?
Thank God for Epoch Times, Newsmax, OneAmerica, Andy Ngo, Project Veritas, and hundreds of others that are still fighting to preserve a balanced dialog in American society. But they are gnats fighting elephants.
Online retail giant Amazon opposed mail-in voting for a union election, according to a filing with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Amazon’s position on mail-in voting conflicts with that of the Washington Post editorial board’s position on mail-in voting. Both companies are owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man.
In a petition filed with the NLRB on Jan. 21, Amazon argued that mail-in voting would decrease turnout and create security concerns in a unionization election at the company’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse.
Amazon argued in the petition, uploaded by The Verge, that “concerns about election security run particularly high” due to the use of “an unreliable electronic signature platform.”
Amazon further claimed that mail-in voting in union elections is fundamentally different from that in political elections. In political elections, the Amazon lawyers wrote, a “continuously updated voter address roll” and the ability to vote in person or by mail “promote security and voter turnout.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Amazon on Twitter, saying that the company had to let its workers form unions.
The company’s position on mail-in voting contradicts that of owner Jeff Bezos’s other major company, the Washington Post. The Post’s editorial board ranmultiplearticles assailing then-President Donald Trump’s criticisms of mail-in voting. One op-ed, published August 17, called his comments “bogus fear-mongering.”
Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said in 2019 of Bezos’s tenure as owner of the newspaper, “He hasn’t interfered with a single story. He hasn’t suggested a story. He hasn’t squelched a story. He hasn’t critiqued a story, hasn’t criticized a story,” according to Deadline.
If Amazon’s efforts to force an in-person vote fail, the Bessemer warehouse will hold the union election between Feb. 8 and March 30, according to AL.com
In late July, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) that Google would “conduct ourselves in a neutral way” with regards to the November election. This claim should be met with skepticism by conservatives given that Google joins Facebook and Apple — whose chief executives testified to Congress with Pichai — in having a perfectly liberal corporate culture.
2ndVote ranks Big Tech corporations such as Facebook, Apple, and Google at 1.00 out of 5.00 on the political scale, which means that their corporate actions, cultures, and political donations are explicitly liberal. Amazon is a little better, at 1.29. As a non-profit, 2ndVote can’t and won’t tell these companies which candidates to support — but we will remind Facebook and Apple that their support for the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization didn’t protect them from Democrats’ attacks at the hearing.
These corporations are only hurting themselves by engaging in politics. First, they are alienating millions of potential customers. Second, they are doing so without reward from their supposed liberal allies — and the aforementioned congressional critiques are nothing compared to what the Obama administration did to several Big Tech companies.
Weeks before President Donald Trump took office, the Obama administration sued multiple technology firms for alleged discrimination. The lawsuit did not cite actual cases of employee discrimination but instead used statistical differences between the number of minorities who applied for a job versus the number hired. It did not matter that Google was the first corporate donor to President Barack Obama’s presidential foundation – their support for a left-leaning candidate could not save them from such an unjust lawsuit.
No matter how liberal Big Tech tries to be, they will never fully satisfy the left. Businesses like Home Depot (1.90), Twitter (2.14), and Starbucks (1.14) have also repeatedly tried and failed to make the left happy by endorsing social justice ideologies like abortion and gun control.
Starbucks in particular has been a huge supporter of LGBT rights. That did not stop the left from shaming Starbucks into closing 8,000 of its locations after a Philadelphia store manager asked two loitering customers – who happened to be black – to leave.
It’s past time for Big Tech to go neutral like Google CEO Sundar Pichai promised when he said their search engine would not favor Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Big Tech should appeal to everyone’s political preferences instead of supporting left-leaning candidates, especially when it’s clear these actions gain them no favors with…well, anyone.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png002ndvote .comhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png2ndvote .com2020-09-05 08:27:432020-09-05 08:49:56Big Tech Should Ditch Leftist Politics For a Fair Election
The who’s who of Big Tech took a turn before Congress this afternoon — and not a moment too soon, considering the mess they’re making of free speech. The men behind Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon have a lot of questions to answer about censorship, if House leaders will let Republicans ask. And the first one, considering what happened this week with the frontline doctors’ conference ought to be: Why are you letting your political agenda get in the way of the coronavirus facts?
By the time Facebook had taken it down, their news conference on COVID had beaten out some of the biggest names on the platform. With 17 million views, even the group — America’s Frontline Doctors — was surprised at how desperate people were for information. They’d come to D.C. with one goal: to address some of the rumors about the pandemic and share their views on the best ways to fight it. As men and women who’d spend the last several months treating patients with COVID, their opinion was valuable — to everyone, it turns out, but Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg’s platform pulled the video, insisting it was full of “false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19.” Twitter and YouTube soon followed suit. Dr. Teryn Clark, one of the participants who joined me on Washington Watch yesterday, was “shocked.” First, because the event got so much attention, and then because it was considered controversial. Their intention, she insisted, was only to help answer people’s questions. “The numbers are starting to look like they don’t add up, people are living in fear. There have been a lot of deaths, but recently, more of the people who have … tested positive with this have not had symptoms, have been younger, healthier, and recovered more quickly. So I think there is really a curiosity in our society as well. ‘It’s not looking like in my community, like it’s supposed to look and like it looks on the news. So what’s the story here?'”
Their main goal, Teryn said, was to share what they’d see up close. “We had, as you said, millions and millions of viewers. And then we were equally surprised when we woke up and all of it had been taken down.” Even the website that hosted their conference was gone, along with all the links to the studies that have been done on hydroxychloroquine. That, she shook her head, is where so many people seem intent on shutting down debate. There are papers, she explains, from our own government talking about the drug’s effectiveness in treating other COVIDs. “I don’t know how it’s controversial that we’re looking at NIH paper [from] the time Anthony Fauci was at the NIH.”
The facts, Teryn argued, are being ignored. And she knows it, because she’s treated actual patients and watched them recover. “I was referring people to the CDC’s own website,” she said, which has a two-page fact sheet on the drug, and even that is cause for censorship. Look, Teryn argued, the medical community has studied this drug for years. “It’s been around a really long time… So it’s not a mystery. It’s not unsafe. It’s effective immediately… I just don’t know how it could be seen that we’re [advocating something] dangerous.”
These 20 physicians, from across multiple specialties, aren’t doing this for media attention. “We don’t have a dog in the fight. We have nothing to gain financially… We’re motivated because we want to help people and we want to [cut] through what some of the medical boards are doing with this medication.” It’s so out-of-control, she explained, that pharmacists refusing to fill the prescriptions. “I’ve never been questioned about a prescription,” she said. “[I could probably write a prescription] for a crazy amount of opioids and get less pushback than I get on this for 20 tablets of this medicine.” It’s unprecedented.
What’s driving this “unusual behavior” in the medical community? Teryn doesn’t know. What she does know is that these social media platforms are just as committed to covering up the facts as anyone. And it’s time to call them out.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2020-07-30 08:05:172020-07-30 08:22:03PODCAST: Doctor Video Suffers from Acute Censorship
Some of America’s largest corporations have pledged or donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the main Black Lives Matter organization, founded by “trained Marxists,” that calls for replacing the nuclear family with a “village.”
Prominent brands giving money include Amazon, Microsoft, Nabisco, Gatorade, Airbnb, and the Atlantic and Warner record labels.
Black Lives Matter as a movement or sentiment is not necessarily tied to the radical organization, called the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, but it has become the greatest beneficiary of corporate largesse.
The Daily Signal previously reported that the website for the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation notes that replacing the nuclear family structure and promoting the LGBT political agenda are central to its mission. A co-founder also has said that she and other “trained Marxists” formed the network foundation.
In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>
The BLM Global Network Foundation began in 2016 with the fiscal sponsorship of Thousand Currents, a liberal nonprofit group. Susan Rosenberg, convicted and imprisoned in 1984 for domestic terrorism, is vice chairwoman of Thousand Currents’ board of directors, The Daily Signal also reported.
At least 18 companies have donated or pledged to donate money to the BLM Global Network Foundation, according to a list compiled by the Washington-based Capital Research Center, which monitors nonprofits and charities. Another seven companies have not been clear which Black Lives Matter entity they chose for contributions.
Thousand Currents has said that all donations filtered through it, corporate and otherwise, “are received as restricted donations to support the activities of BLM.”
The Daily Signal contacted spokespersons for all the companies mentioned in this report several times over the course of a week, seeking comment about their financial support for the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.
The Daily Signal asked whether the companies supported that organization’s stated beliefs and goals, which extend well beyond advocating racial equality and opposing police brutality.
Several companies state merely that they are giving to “Black Lives Matter,” without specifying which organization. The BLM Global Network Foundation likely is the recipient, given its prominence, but that isn’t always clear in an announcement.
It also is possible that, similar to the tech giant Cisco, other companies gave to the Black Lives Matter cause through donations to traditional civil rights groups such as the NAACP and the Urban League.
A growing roster of corporations has issued press releases, memos, and tweets vowing financial support for “Black Lives Matter,” linking directly to or using the Twitter handle of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Here are 18 of them, plus some examples of ambiguous giving.
1. DoorDash
DoorDash, which delivers prepared food, gave $500,000 to the organization. In an email to The Daily Signal, DoorDash spokesperson Liz Jarvis-Shean wrote:
In partnership with our Black@DoorDash Employee Resource Group (ERG), DoorDash pledged a total of $1 million in donations, with $500,000 going to Black Lives Matter via the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation and $500,000 to create a fund to be directed by the Black@DoorDash ERG towards state and local organizations.
Our goal with these donations and the other actions we announced is to stand with our employees and community members to fight injustice, inequality and discrimination and to support organizations that are working to root out structural and systemic racism and providing local community development, mentorship, education and entrepreneurship programs to support Black communities across the country.
2. Deckers
“Deckers as a company is standing together in solidarity to fight for equality,” Deckers Brands said in an email to The Daily Signal.
“To show immediate support, we are donating a total of $500,000 to the following organizations,” the company said, listing seven organizations, including “Black Lives Matter Foundation,” which it said “builds power to bring justice, healing, and freedom to Black people across the globe.”
Although a smaller organization called the Black Lives Matter Foundation exists, as does another called Movement for Black Lives, a blog post from the Deckers brand Ugg links to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. That post uses language similar to the email from Deckers to The Daily Signal.
3. Amazon
Amazon linked to the BLM Global Network Foundation in a press release June 9, identifying it as among 12 groups that would get a total of $10 million from the online retail giant. Amazon announced:
As part of that effort, Amazon will donate a total of $10 million to organizations that are working to bring about social justice and improve the lives of Black and African Americans. Recipients—selected with the help of Amazon’s Black Employee Network (BEN)—include groups focused on combating systemic racism through the legal system as well as those dedicated to expanding educational and economic opportunities for Black communities.
4. Gatorade
Gatorade, the sports drink maker, identified the BLM Global Network Foundation as being among groups benefiting from a $500,000 donation.
Microsoft announced June 5 that it would donate $250,000 to the “Black Lives Matter Foundation,” but linked to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.
Microsoft also named five other civil rights organizations with whom it would “deepen our engagement” by donating $250,000 apiece.
6. Glossier
Glossier, a skin care and makeup company, said in a May 30 press release that it would divide $500,000 among five organizations, including “Black Lives Matter,” and linked to the BLM Global Network Foundation’s website.
7. 23andMe
23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki announced June 2 that the company and its employees would donate to “Black Lives Matter” and linked to the BLM Global Network Foundation.
8. Airbnb
Airbnb announced on Twitter that it was splitting a $500,000 donation between the NAACP and the “@Blklivesmatter Foundation,” using the organization’s Twitter handle.
We stand with #BlackLivesMatter. We are donating a total of $500,000 to the @NAACP and the @Blklivesmatter Foundation in support of their fight for equality and justice, and we'll be matching employee donations to both groups. Because a world where we all belong takes all of us. pic.twitter.com/lIfsLgvq2H
We will not stay silent on the issue of systemic racism. We stand with the Black community and recognize the importance of taking action to drive change. As a first step towards this, Degree is pledging $100K to @Blklivesmatter#BlackLivesMatterpic.twitter.com/YHP5nfzJTK
Bungie didn’t provide a dollar amount, but said it would make “financial contributions” to six organizations and linked to the BLM Global Network Foundation.
Ritz, a cracker brand from Nabisco, announced June 4 that it and sister brands were donating $500,000 to the NAACP and to the BLM Global Network Foundation.
We've come together as sister brands to support @NAACP and @blklivesmatter with a $500,000 donation as an important step in our commitment to helping impact change. pic.twitter.com/VLB87auphS
Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston announced June 3 that the company was giving $500,000 to the BLM Global Network Foundation, tagging the group on Twitter.
Systemic racism and police brutality in this country must end. I’m personally donating $500,000 to @Blklivesmatter to fight racial injustice. I’ll also match every @Dropbox employee’s donation on top of the company’s match. pic.twitter.com/9pTSu7Q0Ej
Individual employees of Devolver Digital donated $65,000 to the BLM Global Network Foundation as of June 2 through the company’s ActBlue online giving account.
The individual employees of Devolver Digital and the company itself have donated $65,000 in support of the Black Lives Matter movement through the link below.
— Devolver Digital (@devolverdigital) June 2, 2020
15. Skillshare
Skillshare CEO Matt Cooper, in an online message June 1, said the company was “donating to the following organizations” and referred to the “official #BlackLivesMatter Global Network,” which it said “builds power to bring justice, freedom, and space for imagination and innovation to Black people.”Skillshare was among the few businesses to specifically name the network foundation.
16. Square Enix
Square Enix, a game developer, announced that it was giving $250,000 to the NAACP and Black Lives Matter, linking to the BLM Global Network Foundation.
In one tweet, That Game Co. announced plans to give a total of $20,000 to both the NAACP and Black Lives Matter. In a follow-up, the company linked to the BLM Global Network Foundation.
Tinder, the online dating network, announced that it was donating and provided a link to the BLM Global Network Foundation.
Ambiguous Giving
The California-based tech firm Cisco identifies @Blklivesmatter, the Twitter handle for the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, as among recipients of $5 million in donations.
But a Cisco spokesperson says the company isn’t contributing to that main group.
Cisco’s Robyn Blum told The Daily Signal in an email:
With our recently announced $5M donation, we are pleased to be able to pledge funds to these organizations:
• Equal Justice Initiative–a private, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization providing legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons.
• The NAACP Legal Defense Fund–a premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice through litigation, advocacy, & public education.
• Color Of Change–America’s largest online racial justice organization.
Contacted again by The Daily Signal with reference to that tweet, Blum said the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation was not among recipients of Cisco’s donations.
The tech company Intel, in a May 31 memo from CEO Bob Swan, announced that the business would donate “$1 million in support of efforts to address social injustice and anti-racism across various nonprofits and community organizations.”
“I also encourage employees to consider donating to organizations focused on equity and social justice, including the Black Lives Matter Foundation, the Center for Policing Equity and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, all of which are eligible for Intel’s Donation Matching Program,” Swan said.
However, the Intel CEO’s memo didn’t provide a link to a Black Lives Matter group. Nor did it specify which foundation—the larger and more prominent BLM Global Network Foundation or the smaller Black Lives Matter Foundation.
The Daily Signal sought clarification from Intel, but it did not respond before publication of this report.
The Pokemon Co. is another example of a company that didn’t specify which organization, but said it was donating $100,000 to Black Lives Matter.
Atlantic Records announced that it “will be contributing to Black Lives Matter and other organizations that are doing crucial work to combat injustice.” But the legendary record company didn’t specify whether it was donating to the BLM Global Network Foundation and didn’t respond to multiple inquiries.
— Atlantic Records (@AtlanticRecords) May 30, 2020
Similarly, Warner Records announced that it would contribute “to Black Lives Matter and other organizations that are doing crucial work to combat racial injustice.”
Discord, a communications company, announced that it is donating to the “Black Lives Matter movement.” It did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal about the specific organization.
Pusheen, the company behind the cartoon cat of the same name, called on fans and followers to join it in donating to Black Lives Matter among other organizations, but didn’t specify which BLM entity.
Ubisoft also said that it was contributing $100,000 to both the NAACP and Black Lives Matter, without specifying which organization or affiliate.
We stand in solidarity with Black team members, players, and the Black community. We are making a $100,000 contribution to the NAACP and Black Lives Matter and encourage those who are able to, to donate. #BlackLivesMatterpic.twitter.com/KpHZCF6VWx
This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.
The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.
They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Signalhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Signal2020-07-08 08:10:042020-07-08 08:17:28These 18 Corporations Gave Money to Radical Black Lives Matter Group
The fix is in. What in that review conceivably violates Amazon guidelines? This is clear evidence that Amazon is not a bookstore, but part of the Left-fascist cabal that is working so hard today to crush all dissent from the Leftist agenda.
Strike a blow against the sinister Leftist establishment: if you have read The Palestinian Delusion and like it, please leave a favorable review at Amazon. If you haven’t read it, please buy a copy now. You could even buy it from Amazon, even as it is clearly trying to suppress this book: buying it from elsewhere is not going to dent this elephantine corporation’s earnings, while buying it from Amazon will show that their attempts to deep-six this book aren’t working.
Proclaiming Justice to The Nations (PJTN), a Tennessee-based non-profit evangelical Christian organization committed towards standing with Israel and fighting antisemitism, has been removed from the AmazonSmile program, which enables Amazon customers to donate a percentage of their purchase to their favorite charity.
PJTN President Laurie Cardoza-Moore told JNS that “all of a sudden, we began being inundated with e-mails from supporters whose AmazonSmile donations to Proclaiming Justice to the Nations had been repeatedly rejected. They were being instructed to choose another charity, despite wanting to support PJTN.” After reaching out to Amazon for an explanation—assuming it was a technical glitch—the retail giant informed PJTN that customers would no longer be able to donate towards the organization using the AmazonSmile platform, following the listing of PJTN as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
The SPLC, whose website says that part of its mission is to monitor domestic hate groups in the United States, has PJTN listed on its “hate map” as being one of 36 Tennessee-based hate groups. SPLC specifically accuses PJTN of being “anti-Muslim.”
Amazon employs 566,000 people worldwide. The company clearly does not lack for personnel to study non-profit groups and to advise Amazon as to which ones qualify for its customers to use the AmazonSmile platform, which allows them to donate part of their purchase to a favorite charity.
But Amazon chose not to do that work itself. Instead, it handed over the decision making as to which groups are to be considered “hate groups” to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a grand total of 254 employees. That means that for every employee of the SPLC, Amazon has more than 2,000 of its own. Is the SPLC so very good at its job that mighty Amazon, with its 566,000 employees, is right to rely on the 254 employees of that outside group? For years, the SPLC presented itself as beyond reproach, an organization of selfless do-gooders at a non-profit. But in recent years, defectors from the group have painted a grim picture of an organization run by scam artists – its head a “flimflam man” — who have arranged colossal salaries for themselves, in some cases have been guilty of sexual harassment of fellow employees, have exhibited racist attitudes, and have been thoroughly unmasked for these and other offenses in numerous damning reports.
Here is some of what Jessica Prol Smith, of the Alliance Defending Freedom, discovered about the SPLC:
For years, former employees revealed, local journalists reported and commentators have lamented: The Southern Poverty Law Center is not what it claims to be. Not a pure-hearted, clear-headed legal advocate for the vulnerable, but rather an obscenely wealthy marketing scheme. For years, the left-wing interest group has used its “hate group” list to promote the fiction that violent neo-Nazis and Christian nonprofits peacefully promoting orthodox beliefs about marriage and sex are indistinguishable. Sometimes, it has apologized to public figures it has smeared, and it recently paid out millions to settle a threatened defamation lawsuit.
These shameful secrets are no longer hidden in shadows. The New York Times, Politico, NPR and a host of other mainstream publications are reporting on the corruption and widening credibility gap. The SPLC dismissed its co-founder in March, and its president has resigned amidst numerous claims of sexual harassment, gender discrimination and racism within the organization — a parade of disgraces that vividly force the conclusion: The SPLC is hollow, rotten and failing at the very virtues it pretends to celebrate.
Morris Dees, co-founder of SPLC, was dismissed for many reasons. A multimillionaire from his work as a direct-mail marketer before founding SPLC, Dees was reportedly more concerned with fund-raising than with litigating; he had not tried a case in more than a decade, and other than raising money for himself and others, took little part in the SPLC’s day-to-day operations. During his tenure, there were accusations of gender discrimination and racism in hiring and promotions, as well as sexual harassment. The SPLC’s president, Richard Cohen, apparently resigned for much the same reasons — charges of race and gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and other, unspecified offenses. Both Cohen and Dees had been receiving very large salaries, way out of whack with non-profits of similar size.
The criticism comes from many corners. There’s the Current Affairs editor who seems sympathetic to the center’s progressive mission but decries its “hate group” list as an “outright fraud” and a “willful deception designed to scare older liberals into writing checks to the SPLC.”
There’s the retired investigative journalist who helped research and write an eight-part series on the center’s “litany of problems and questionable practices” in the mid-1990s. His Washington Post opinion piece reads with a thinly veiled message: We nearly got a Pulitzer Prize for TELLING YOU SO.
But perhaps most damning of all are the indictments leveled by former employee Bob Moser in The New Yorker. He remembers being welcomed to the “Poverty Palace” and recounts the heart-sinking reality of it all — being “pawns” in a “highly profitable scam.”
Stephen Bright, a Yale law professor and former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, has long questioned what he calls the center’s “fraudulent” fundraising.
“The chickens have had a very long trip, but they finally came home to roost,” Bright said.
“Morris is a flimflam man and he’s managed to flimflam his way along for many years raising money by telling people about the Ku Klux Klan and hate groups,” he said. “He sort of goes to whatever will sell and has, of course, brought in millions and millions and millions of dollars.”
While the SPLC funded some good work, Bright said, he had long heard complaints about race discrimination and sexual harassment from the center’s former attorneys and interns.
The SPLC has been thoroughly discredited during this last year, yet Bezos has not said a word. Could it be he still doesn’t know about the scandalous goings-on at SPLC, or is that he doesn’t care? Perhaps he’s been busy, swallowing up yet another industry, but he really ought to give Amazon’s reliance on SPLC for deciding which are the “hate groups” to be banned from AmazonSmile more of his attention. And then he might decide to cut the cord.
Given all this, here’s what Jeff Bezos ought to do to spare himself further embarrassment. He ought to read what Tim Moser, the former employee of SPLC, wrote about the organization in The New Yorker. He should read the eight-part series by an investigative journalist on the “problems and questionable practices” at SPLC. He ought to find out what The New York Times, Politico, and NPR have reported about SPLC, which has led many to conclude, with Ms. Smith, that the SPLC “is hollow, rotten, and failing at the very virtues it pretends to celebrate.” And he ought to interview Yale Law Professor Stephen Bright, to find out why he calls Morris Dees a “flimflam man.”
What were the charges, not specified at the time, that forced SPLC co-founder Morris Dees to resign in disgrace? What were the charges that led President Richard Cohen to quit the SPLC? What have close observers of the SPLC discovered about how it has been run, to their dismay and horror?
Jeff Bezos should take a day or two out of his busy schedule of insensate empire-building in order to learn more about the SPLC, on which he has chosen to rely for the identification of “hate groups.” He needs to do more than read what Moser, Bright, and a dozen others who have either worked for SPLC or been close observers of the organization, have written. He needs to talk directly with them, so that he will realize the full extent of the SPLC’s transgressions, can ask them probing questions, and learn more about those “flimflam men” at the top, who have lately been exposed as being guilty of gender and race discrimination, among many other sins.
Bezos should also investigate SPLC’s readiness to label as “anti-Muslim hate groups” those who do not preach hate of any sort, but are simply islamocritics. The SPLC long ago consigned Jihad Watch to the outer darkness. When it included Maajid Nawaz, the founder of the Quilliam Foundation, on a 2016 list of “anti-Muslim extremists,” the SPLC was sued by Nawaz, who won a $3.4 million dollar judgment against the group. That has not stopped the SPLC from continuing to describe Jihad Watch, AFDI, and similar websites as being “hate groups.” SPLC describes, with its wonted tone of hysteria, Robert Spencer as that “notorious Muslim-basher and pretend expert on Islam.”
An email request by JNS [Jewish News Service] to SPLC asking for an explanation about their listing of PJTN went unanswered as of press time.
When asked by JNS what would cause the SPLC to label her organization as being anti-Muslim, Cardoza-Moore responded, “Proclaiming Justice to the Nations exists to fight the oldest hate on earth: antisemitism. We were given no explanation as to why we were blacklisted. If our work highlighting antisemites like [Reps.] Ilhan Omar [D-Minn.] and Rashida Tlaib [D-Mich.] got us on the list, we’ll wear it as a badge of honor. Despite the financial penalties that we are facing with AmazonSmile, will not be silenced for fulfilling our biblical responsibility to defend the State of Israel and Jewish people in the face of growing global antisemitism.”
She added that “sadly, the SPLC lost its way long ago, becoming a tool to shame any organization that doesn’t share their extremist agenda.”
Cardoza-Moore said that initially, she thought it was a joke that PJTN had been placed on the SPLC list of hate groups alongside the KKK. However, she said that “I have now learned that this political witch hunt against those who don’t share SPLC’s extremist liberal views has been adopted as a religious doctrine by Amazon. This could dramatically affect our ability to raise funds and function as a nonprofit organization.”
She added that it appears that Amazon “has become the nation’s new moral compass powered by the subversive Southern Poverty Law Center. Charities should not be persecuted in this way; this has to stop.
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to JNS via email that PJTN had been dropped, saying in a general statement that according to their policy, “organizations that engage in, support, encourage or promote intolerance, hate, terrorism, violence, money laundering or other illegal activities are not eligible.”
Just as a matter of interest, perhaps Amazon would care to tell us if CAIR is eligible to receive donations through AmazonSmile. If it does, would Bezos be willing to consider the evidence that CAIR just might be an organization that “encourages or promotes intolerance, hate, terrorism, violence”? And while we’re at it, have any of the many pro-BDS groups that many of us believe encourage “intolerance, hate, terrorism, violence” been banned from participating in the AmazonSmile program?
The statement [from Amazon] mentioned that since 2013, Amazon has relied on the SPLC along with the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (of the US Department of the Treasury) to make its determination on which organizations are eligible for the AmazonSmile program.
Cardoza-Moore says that as a result of being dropped, she is calling on her donors to bypass Amazon in order to help support Israel and combat antisemitism.
“We have asked our donors to continue supporting PJTN directly instead of through AmazonSmile. Nobody will silence us, even when we stand up against giants like Amazon; we know that we have truth and justice on our side,” she said.
“Our answer to this hateful blacklisting will be to continue building more PJTN chapters across the United States and beyond. We will continue to fight antisemitism and defend the State of Israel, wherever and whenever necessary,” she continued. “We will endeavor to reach more people than ever because our message is needed now, more than ever.”
A statement from PJTN said that in recent months, the organization has led the struggle against the BDS movement in the United States with a wave of state resolutions, and has exposed textbooks used in public schools that it says are indoctrinating children with inaccurate historical information and bias that do not reflect American values.
In 2016, JNS reported that PJTN drafted the state of Tennessee’s anti-BDS resolution, which passed in the General Assembly, making it one of the first states to pass such state-level legislation against BDS.
So PJTN, unbowed, continues to be active in its campaign against the BDS movement. And its donors will now simply find other, more direct ways to support it, now that PJTN has been banned, so absurdly, from the AmazonSmile program. Many people, as they find out more about Amazon, and its continuing reliance on the discredited SPLC for its determination of which groups promote “hatred” and “intolerance,” may want to express their own displeasure with that malevolent and powerful Amazon, and take their custom elsewhere.
Amazon is suing thousands of “fake” reviewers, who, for a fee, have posted positive reviews for various products. These pseudo reviews violate the spirit — and possibly the functionality — of Amazon’s largely self-governed rating system. Customers rely on reviews to guide their own choices, and a wave of sponsored reviews can mislead them into choosing inferior products.
A similar theme plays out in George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s newest behavioral economics-cum-self-help book, Phishing for Phools. The authors, both Nobel laureates, claim that an unregulated market leads to massive amounts of manipulation and deception. Just how much remains unspecified, but the general thrust of the argument is that regulatory heroes are needed to rein in villainous dealers.
Heroic Regulators?
It is no surprise then that the authors favor heroic efforts of an older progressive sort, such as the works of Alice Lakey or her modern-day counterpart Elizabeth Warren. Their work, respectively, led to the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. These progressives are seen as heroic for taking “action not selfishly but for the public good.” The trouble with such heroes, however, is that they invariably focus not on educating consumers so that they may make better choices but on corralling the cat herd of bureaucrats and politicians into ever-expanding spheres of regulation.
While it is true that consumer regulation can provide focal points that help buyers and sellers interact — in fact, Amazon appealed to just that in its lawsuit — this truth nevertheless misses the pivotal point (and an awkward one for Akerlof and Shiller) that it is Amazon that is working to resolve the problem, not government regulators.
Make no mistake. Akerlof’s classic paper on the quality of goods in a world of imperfect information clearly outlines a problem that markets must address, but it is a problem for both consumers and the market platforms on which they participate. Those platforms have a natural incentive to promote the information consumers need in order to make more informed decisions. The incentives faced by regulators are less well aligned with consumers’ interests. (But advocates of regulation rarely ask what incentives drive government regulators.)
There is another aspect of Akerlof’s model that is telling in this regard: in equilibrium, the so-called “lemons market” should unravel as more and more consumers become frustrated with ever-decreasing levels of quality. Thus, the market platform should topple over. The trouble with this theoretical outcome is that it again fails to account for the empirical observation that it is markets that are solving market problems.
Akerlof’s co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize, Michael Spence, would have no trouble with this observation. Spence noted that it is far more interesting to compare the outcomes in the market to what is possible in a world of incomplete information, not to what is found where no imperfection exists by assumption. Spence explained in his Nobel address that when facing a world of imperfect information, the asymmetry between buyer and seller “cannot be simply removed by a wave of the pen.”
Compared to What?
Even when we acknowledge that individuals may be limited in their analytical and decision-making capabilities, we must ask ourselves, “Compared to what?” As noted elsewhere in these pages, every flaw in consumers is worse in voters. Furthermore, the immediate call for greater government regulation ignores the ongoing knowledge problem: acquiring information is limited by the abilities of normal people (after all, we can’t all be heroes). Knowing which transactions to avoid is valuable information, but that knowledge must first be discovered to be shared. If this information is not readily attainable, then it is unclear how regulators will know what market processes to target, much less how to improve on them.
And if the information does exist, then there is an opportunity for entrepreneurial action to gather this information and sell it to consumers. Put another way, market failures that cause individuals to make poor decisions are themselves profit opportunities for entrepreneurs to help people make better decisions.
In a world of uncertainty, ensuring quality can be a powerful competitive advantage. Amazon wants you, the customer, to use its search and recommendation system to buy new products, products that you cannot physically touch and inspect. The review system is one method of overcoming this informational asymmetry. When the integrity of the review system is challenged, Amazon is faced with the prospect of a lower volume of transactions and therefore lower profits.
Private Heroes
This is why Amazon is acting to curtail its rogue members. Retailers can only justify high prices when they can guarantee quality. Amazon’s feedback system constitutes a significant informational subsidy to its users, and the company is willing to create this information (or have it created by users) because it leads to a higher volume of trade and the accompanying consumer benefits that Amazon brings to book readers worldwide.
What Akerlof and Shiller miss is that creating and maintaining a viable platform for trade opportunities is enormously expensive. Having customers exit the door to never return — or perhaps write negative Yelp reviews — causes instability to the market that can be fatal if left unattended.
Rather than focusing on the failure of consumers, the original sin of our humanity, we should instead notice how information entrepreneurs are enabling us to make better choices. The information revolution led by these innovators has changed the world with the costs of distribution lower than ever.These may not be the welfarist heroes of Akerlof and Shiller’s fantasy world but market troubleshooters of the one we actually occupy.
Public-spirited regulators may be the heroes we want, but they are not the heroes we need.
Adam C. Smith is an assistant professor of economics and director of the Center for Free Market Studies at Johnson & Wales University. He is also a visiting scholar with the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University and coauthor of the forthcoming Bootleggers and Baptists: How Economic Forces and Moral Persuasion Interact to Shape Regulatory Politics.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/hero-e1452163994342.png319640Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2016-01-07 05:53:452016-01-07 05:55:48Regulators Are Not Heroes by Adam C. Smith & Stewart Dompe
