Nationalize Amazon
There are many lessons we could take from the last decade of American politics, in which our country has degenerated further and further into an oligarchic hellscape. One I hope a majority would agree with is that current levels of wealth inequality are incompatible with political democracy. There are various ways this issue might be addressed, but one I’d prefer is nationalizing giant corporations, like Amazon, by which I mean putting them under public control and redirecting the profits to socially-beneficial ends.
I was struck by a recent post that appeared on the website Bluesky, which said that given Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a net worth of more than $253 billion, he could light $1 million on fire every day for almost 700 years without exhausting his funds. If this wasn’t incredible enough, a number of commentators pointed out the post was misleading, since Bezos earns more than $1 million in interest every day, so, actually, the oligarch could burn $1 million a day in perpetuity. This is, needless to say, outrageous.
Compared to many, I live a life of privilege. And, yet, is there any sense in which I can claim equality with Bezos? The question is laughable on its face. Take our ability to participate in the democratic process. Sure, we both have one vote, but, if I want to influence the views of others, I must write a letter to the editor which newspaper staff choose to run or create a short-form video which happens to go viral. In contrast, Bezos can purchase even more of the media landscape than he already has and change the editorial line as he sees fit.
To help neutralize this threat to democracy, we should nationalize companies like Amazon. The federal government should take over all aspects of the business, from the stock warehouses and delivery fleets to its streaming applications and cloud-computing services. The profits could be put toward any number of worthy projects, like rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, funding local news organizations in communities without them, providing free healthcare to all, or offering no-cost college education to anyone who wants it.
Personally, as an animal activist, I’d like to see a portion of such profits devoted to funding cultivated-meat research. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. I view developing this technology as the most promising means of reducing nonhuman suffering and premature death. We should be establishing facilities like the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture across the country. The point, however, is these profits could be put toward anything we might democratically decide on.
Present levels of wealth inequality are destabilizing the United States in any number of ways. Among other things, it’s fueling a fascist movement which has taken control of the White House and the wider Republican Party. Such politics reflect what’s been termed ‘the socialism of fools,’ a far-right populism which blames racial, religious and gender minorities for the existing, miserable state of affairs, rather than the obscenely wealthy. Let’s help preserve American democracy by nationalizing giant companies like Amazon.
Selling on Amazon is a tough business. Sure, you can reach a lot of customers, but this comes at a very high price: the junk fees that Amazon extracts from its sellers amount to 50-60% of the price you pay.
That’s a hell of a lot of money to hand over to a middleman, but it’s not like vendors have much choice. The vast majority of America’s affluent households are Prime subscribers (depending on how you define “affluent household” it’s north of 90%). Prime households prepay for a year’s worth of shipping, so it’s only natural that they start their shopping on Amazon, where they’ve already paid the delivery costs. And because Amazon reliably meets or beats the prices you’d pay elsewhere, Prime subscribers who find a product on Amazon overwhelmingly stop their shopping at Amazon, too.
At this point you might be thinking a couple things:
I. Why not try to sell the non-affluent households, who are far less likely to subscribe to Prime? and
II. If Amazon has the lowest prices, what’s the problem if everyone shops there?
The answers to these two questions are intimately related, as it happens.
Let’s start with selling to non-affluent households – basically, the bottom 90% of American earners. The problem here is that everyone who isn’t in that top 10% is pretty goddamned broke. It’s not just decades of wage stagnation and hyperinflation in health, housing and education costs. It’s also that every economic crisis of this century has resulted in a “K-shaped” recovery, in which “economic recovery” means that rich people are doing fine, while everyone else is worse off than they were before the crisis.
For decades, America papered over the K-shaped hole in its economy with debt. First it was credit cards. Then it was gimmicky mortgages – home equity lines of credit, second mortgages and reverse mortgages. Then it was payday lenders. Then it was “buy-now/pay-later” services that let you buy lunch at Chipotle on an installment plan that is nominally interest-free, but is designed to trap the unwary and unlucky with massive penalties if you miss a single payment.
This produced a median American who isn’t just cash-poor – they are cash-negative, drowning in debt. And – with the exception of a brief Biden intercession – every presidential administration of the 21st century has enacted policies that favor creditors over debtors. Bankruptcy is harder to declare, and creditors can hit you with effectively unlimited penalties and confiscation of your property and wages once your cash is gone. Trump has erased all the small mercies of the Biden years – for example, he just forced 8,000,000 student borrowers back into repayment:
https://prospect.org/2025/12/16/gop-forcing-eight-million-student-loan-borrowers-into-repayment/
The average American worker has $955 saved for retirement:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html
There’s plenty to worry about in a K-shaped economy – big things like “political instability” and “cultural chaos” (the fact that most people are broke has a lot to do with the surging fortunes of gambling platforms). But from a seller’s perspective, the most important impact of the K-shaped economy is that only rich people buy stuff. Selling to the bottom 90% is a losing proposition because they’re increasingly too broke to buy anything:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations
Combine the fact that the richest 10% of Americans all start their shopping on Amazon with the fact that no one else can afford to buy anything, and it’s easy to see why merchants would stay on Amazon, even when junk fees hit 60%.
Which brings us to the second question: if Amazon has the best prices, what’s the problem with everyone shopping there?
The answer is to be found in the California Attorney General’s price-fixing lawsuit against Amazon:
The suit’s been running for a long time, but the AG’s office just celebrated a milestone – they’ve finished analyzing the internal memos they forced Amazon to disgorge through civil law’s “discovery” process. These internal docs verify an open – and very dirty – secret about Amazon: the company uses its power to push up prices across the entire economy.
Here’s how that works: sellers have to sell on Amazon, and that means they’re losing $0.50-$0.60 on every dollar. The obvious way to handle this is by raising prices. But Amazon knows that its power comes from offering buyers prices that are as low or lower than the prices at all its competitors.
Amazon could ban its sellers from raising prices, but if they did that, they’d have to accept a smaller share of every sale (otherwise most of their sellers would go broke from selling at a loss on Amazon). So instead, Amazon imposes a business practice called “most favored nation” (MFN) pricing on its sellers.
Under an MFN arrangement, sellers are allowed to raise their prices on Amazon, but when they do, they must raise their prices everywhere else, too: at Walmart, at Target, at mom and pop indie stores, and at their own factory outlet store. Remember: Amazon doesn’t have to have low prices to win, it just needs to have the same prices as everyone else. So long as prices rise throughout the economy, Amazon is fine, and it can continue to hike its junk fees on sellers, knowing that they will pay those fees by raising prices on Amazon and everywhere else their products are sold.
Like I say, this isn’t really a secret. MFN terms were the basis of DC Attorney General Ken Racine’s case against Amazon, five years ago:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#prime-facie
Amazon’s not the only company that does this. Under the Biden administration, the FTC brought a lawsuit against Pepsi because Pepsi and Walmart had rigged the market so that when Walmart raised its prices, Pepsi would force everyone else who carried Pepsi products to raise their prices even more. Walmart still had the lowest prices, but everything everywhere got more expensive, both at Walmart and everywhere else:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/secret-documents-show-pepsi-and-walmart
Trump’s FTC dropped the Pepsi/Walmart case, and Amazon wriggled out of the DC case, but the California AG’s office has a lot more resources than DC can muster. This is a timely reminder that America’s antitrust laws can be enforced at the state level as well as by the federal authorities. Trump might be happy to let Amazon steal from Americans so long as Jeff Bezos neuters the Washington Post, writes a check for $1m to sit on the inaugural dais, and makes a garbage movie about Melania; but that doesn’t stop California AG Rob Bonta from going after Amazon for ripping off Californians (and, in so doing, develop the evidentiary record and precedent that will allow every other state AG to go after Amazon).
The fact that Amazon’s monopoly lets it control prices across the economy highlights the futility of trying to fix the Amazon problem by shopping elsewhere. A “boycott” isn’t you shopping really hard, it’s an organized movement with articulated demands, a theory of change, and a backbone of solidarity. “Conscious consumption” is a dead-end:
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/individual-boycotts-collective-action-ice
Obviously, Californians have more to worry about than getting ripped off by Amazon (like getting murdered or kidnapped by ICE agents who want to send us all to a slave labor camp in El Salvador), but the billions that Amazon steals from American buyers and sellers are the source of the millions that Bezos uses to support Trump’s fascist takeover of America. Without billionaires who would happily support concentration camps in their back yards if it means saving a dollar on their taxes, fascism would still be a fringe movement.
That’s why, when we hold new Nuremberg trials for Trump and his collaborators, we should also unwind every merger that was approved under Trump:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification
The material support for Trump’s ideology of hate, violence and terror comes from Trump’s program of unregulated corporate banditry. A promise to claw back every stolen dime might cool the ardor of Trump’s corporate supporters, and even if it doesn’t, zeroing out their bank-balances after Trump is gone will be an important lesson for future would-be billionaire collaborators.
No comments:
Post a Comment