Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos made a staggering $74 billion in 2020, despite the U.S. entering its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And the combination of COVID restrictions and holiday shopping season has wreaked havoc on small businesses as shoppers turn to Amazon Prime for socially distanced gift-giving. Amazon just keeps getting bigger and […]
Big Tech and the Future of Capitalism
The power of Big Tech only seems to be growing as the pandemic has shifted work, education, and social life online. Large tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google are both being praised for providing valuable services and publicly criticized for unjust labor practices, wealth hoarding, and allowing misinformation to spread on digital platforms. Today […]
Uncovering Unsafe Working Conditions in Amazon Warehouses
The team at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting made headlines last month with their findings from a year-long investigation into unsafe working conditions at Amazon warehouses. In this episode, we talk to data reporter Melissa Lewis to get a fuller picture of Amazon’s labor practices, including the effects of robots in the fulfillment […]
Split Show: Greenland’s Not for Sale and the Amazon Is Burning
The Trump administration recently declared its interest in purchasing Greenland from Denmark. What’s this all about? In the first segment, we talk to Claus Elholm Andersen, professor of Scandinavian studies in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic at UW–Madison, to get some insight on Greenland’s history and resources—and why it’s strategically important to global […]
Living with Big Tech
The internet is dominated by five companies: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. And it’s not just online—these giant tech companies are behind a lot of the smart devices collecting information about us every day, from Amazon Echo to robot vacuums to even “smart” toothbrushes that many consumers are bringing into their homes. Today on […]
Native Waorani tribe in Ecuador win against Amazon forest development
The Ecuadorian government’s plans to sell a half million acres of Amazonian rainforest to oil companies has been blocked by the legal rights of the indigenous Waorani tribe, and by the legal rights of nature itself. Reynard Loki has been following this conflict and has written an article in Common Dreams about the history and […]
