Monopolies Must Go

This zine is produced by the Economic Security Project in collaboration with many of our anti-monopoly partners and designed by Mon M.

2

Today, some corporations have grown so big and become so dominant they touch every aspect of our lives. These behemoths are in our homes, on our streets, in our pockets; their reach is inescapable.

These corporations are called monopolies: private businesses that have outsized power over our lives. They extract resources — money, wealth, labor, data, and other types of capital — from individuals like you and me, all in the name of profit.

At their core, monopolies thrive off of and exploit imbalances of power — between consumers and sellers, between users and service providers, and between workers and employers. Monopolies breed unhealthy, dependent, and sometimes even abusive relationships between corporations and everyday people. Think about the Amazon worker under constant surveillance, the chicken farmer drowning in debt to the Tyson chicken conglomerate, or perhaps your own family member who can’t afford their monthly meds.

Monopolies are the result of a system that’s rigged the rules for corporations to concentrate power at the expense of our wages, our privacy, and our democracy. History has shown us that economic policy can be the invisible hand of racism, sexism and classism. It’s no coincidence that exploiting Black and brown labor and harming communities of color are often at the heart of their business models.

Without policies that fairly distribute wealth and power, monopolies take over public institutions and lock us into their domains of control.

The privileged class of wealthy men at the helm of these monopolies are racing to become the world’s first trillionaire — and make no mistake, that is a race we all lose.

This zine, designed by Mon M. is intended as an organizing tool; a place to start unraveling the death grip monopolies have on our economy and our lives. In these pages, you’ll find stories from workers, reports from the field, and conversations from organizers working toward a better world: one where people and community needs are valued over profit, monopolies are broken up, and corporations are held accountable. Join us!

Black median family wealth was $24,100 in 2019.

Hispanic median family wealth was $36,100 in 2019.

Other people of color, including Asian and Indigenous Peoples, median family wealth was $74,000 in 2019.

3

Awood is the Somali Word for POWER ATHENA

The Awood Center is a community organization whose mission is to build economic and political power amongst workers in the East African community of Minnesota. It is also one of 50 organizations that are part of the Athena Coalition. The Athena Coalition is an alliance of local and national organizations representing working people, small businesses, people of color, immigrants, and neighbors alongside activists, advocates, policy experts, and academics joining together to stop Amazon’s growing, powerful grip over our society, economy, and democracy.

These quotes are all from workers at Amazon’s MSP1 fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota, the largest in the state. Together, they show the vast, indisputable power that Amazon holds over its workers—and how worker exploitation is core to its business model.

“Amazon is the size of a small country.

The amount of people it employs, the amount of money that it has… they can essentially do whatever they want. They can ignore laws or regulations, and most of the time they can get away with it....When Amazon commits an unfair labor practice—violating federal labor laws—what happens to them? They get a slap on the wrist. What is a $5,000 fine to a $1.5 trillion dollar company? That’s nothing, it doesn’t mean anything to them.”

- William Stoltz, MSP1 worker and Awood Center member

4

White median family wealth was $188,200 in 2019.

“There’s a lot of workers who have a lot of fear in regards to being able to come forward and bring about some of their complaints, not knowing what their rights are because of language barriers, or they’re new to the company.”

- Mohamed Suleimen, MSP1 worker and Awood Center member

“They have a huge amount of resources to invest into trying to stop workers from organizing. The way that the monopolization has affected my life most directly is that working in the warehouse, I have to wear this wrist brace on both of my hands everyday just so I don’t have pain doing this job. The only place I was able to find this exact brace that gives me enough support for my hands was on Amazon through one of their sellers. As workers, we’re just kind of stuck.”

- William Stoltz, MSP1 worker and Awood Center member

“You have a workstation, where you’re picking, you’re packing, you’re stocking things into the inventory so you’re stationary for 10-12 hours, and there’s a camera pointed right at you. There’s cameras covering almost every corner of the warehouse. Speaking of accountability, [...] if a government were doing [that], there would be outrage…”

- Tyler Hamilton, MSP1 worker and Awood Center member

5

App Store

Illustrated by Susie Cagle

6

7

#StopFacebook “It’s challenging to regulate algorithms directly, but lawmakers can cut off the fuel supply for Facebook’s destructive machine by enacting a real federal data privacy law strong enough to effectively kill surveillance capitalism as a business model.”

- Evan Greer, director of Fight theTHE Future FIGHTfor FOR FUTURE

8

Break Up Big Tech, Advance Racial Justice COLOR OF CHANGE Being Black on the internet shouldn’t be hazardous to your health, but since tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon have been complicit in the silencing of Black voices and the harassment of Black communities, we find ourselves in a hostile online environment that leads to offline repercussions. The unchecked corporate consolidation of the internet escalated at such an unprecedented rate.

From Black users receiving 30-day Facebook suspensions for responding to bigoted comments from white supremacists; to others being censored for posting images of the horrors of America’s past of slavery; to ignoring numerous complaints by people of color about the rampant racism and hate speech on major social media platforms.

When employees of Facebook and Instagram told their bosses about the discriminatory mechanisms baked into their systems, they were either disregarded, ordered to back off, or worse: punished.

When Black users speak up, these companies work hand-in-hand with law enforcement to surveil activists. They give law enforcement agencies access to big datasets and use facial recognition software to target communities of color, and they fail to protect leaders from having their personal information leaked online.

These actions undermine the effectiveness of calls for systemic change; if we want to advance racial justice, we need to break up Big Tech.

9

Global Vaccine Equity One in eight Americans have lost a loved one in the last 5 years because they couldn’t afford their medicine and that number is twice as high for people of color.

We live in a hierarchy of health; some people are going to get medical products first and some people aren’t going to get them at all, that is how the system works.

It is true here in America and it is true across the world.

When COVID hit, American pharmaceutical companies developed COVID vaccines with taxpayer money, and today are raking in billions of dollars in revenue. They are making astronomical amounts of money off the pandemic. Not only that, but because they own the intellectual property for these vaccines, they are the only ones who can produce them, giving them virtual control over the global supply.

“It is not possible to find justice in such a broken market.”

- Priti Krishtel, Co-Founder, I-MAK I-MAK

10

Klara Lou, a 22-year-old student at Vanderbilt University: “The idea behind a people’s vaccine is the belief that health is a human right and every human being is equal.”

“Until we have health equality and equity, we don’t have an equal society. Health disparities have long been linked to racism rooted in our social, political, and economic policies — including housing, environmental racism, insurance coverage, and access to care. You cannot fight for racial justice without also fighting for health equity, which can start with having a COVID-19 vaccine accessible to all.”

Sernah Essien, a 24-yearold student at the UC Riverside School of Medicine: “In short, a people’s vaccine is a safe, effective, proven, and tested vaccine that is made for the people and belongs to the people.

The technology and intel needed to make high-quality vaccines must belong to and be accessible to the people, not just a few corporations that ultimately decide who lives and who dies.

Vaccines must belong to the collective to ensure people’s lives are prioritized over profit.”

Global Vaccine Equity as told by members of the Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), a global organization made up of students who are adding youth momentum to the global access to medicines movement, to Jacqui Germain, 2021 Economic Security Project Fellow at Teen Vogue for “Vaccine Nationalism: What is it and How is it Playing Out During COVID-19?”

UAEM 11

12

13

The “They Take Everything” Store INSTITUTE FOR LOCAL SELF RELIANCE Amazon’s dual roles as platform and competitor make it nearly impossible for sellers who rely on its essential infrastructure to sustain a profitable business. Most fail, unable to pay the high fees the platform demands or driven out of business when Amazon copies its products and preferences them. Yet Amazon has no risk of running out of sellers; its monopoly ensures there’s an endless stream of people, both here and abroad, willing to try.

Amazon keeps an average of 30 percent of each sale made by independent sellers on its site. These seller fees netted Amazon almost $60 billion in 2019, accounting for 21 percent of Amazon’s total revenue.

14

If you “actually add up all the ways Amazon nickels and dimes you… you can’t make money.”

- Doug Mrdeza, Founder of Top Shelf Brands, an E-Commerce Seller in Michigan

As Amazon has grown, the number of independent businesses has fallen. Between 2007 and 2017, the number of small retailers fell by 65,000. About 40 percent of the nation’s small apparel, toy, and sporting goods makers disappeared, along with about one-third of small book publishers.

“There is no competition when an Amazon-made duplicate product can put someone out of business. It’s very predatory. Big Tech does not have anyone holding them accountable.”

Gina Schaefer, CEO of 13 ACE Hardware Stores Amazon also steals independent businesses’ best ideas and innovations. Both the House investigation and reporting by the Wall Street Journal have found that Amazon has spied on sellers and leveraged data about their sales, costs, and suppliers to gain an unfair competitive advantage. It then uses this information to create its own competing versions of their products, often giving its versions priority in the search results.

15

What Would the Web Look Like Without Big Tech Companies?

BIG TECH DETECTIVE Take a second to imagine your life on the internet without Google.

No Gmail, no Chrome, no Google Docs. No Google Maps or YouTube, or any of the “other bets” that comprise Alphabet. You’d have no phone at all if you use Android.

Big Tech Detective is a tool that pulls the curtain back on exactly how much control these corporations have over the internet. The browser extension lets you “lock out” Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, alerting you when a website you’re trying to access pings any one of these companies.

The truth is, you can’t do much online without your data being routed through one of these giants.

Sometimes a website might be running ads powered by Google.

Sometimes it may have a Facebook widget. And sometimes it’s hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS): a virtually invisible layer of the internet that accounts for 63 percent — that’s around $13.5 billion — of Amazon’s total profits. AWS is the infrastructure behind a huge portion of the internet, which becomes painfully obvious when there is an outage like in November 2020.

16

In fact, some argue that AWS has so much control and is so essential that it should be treated more like a public utility than a private company. Most recently, Open Markets Institute and others have called attention to the risks an overwhelming reliance on the cloud computing platform in financial markets poses, calling for the Federal Reserve to designate AWS as a “systemically important utility” to preserve financial stability.

Big Tech Detective lets you see just how dominant the big tech companies are online. What will you find?

Download the tool and see for yourself at bigtechdetective.net.

17

Another Tech is Possible Illustrated by Susie Cagle

18

19

Directory Of Anti-Monopoly Groups The anti-monopoly movement is vast and growing.

Whether you’re interested in diving into more resources to learn more about the relevance of anti-monopoly to your life, getting involved with local organizing efforts to reclaim our power from monopolies, or pushing legislators to act to rein in monopoly power, there’s plenty of ways for you to plug into this fight!

TECH - CAMPAIGNS Athena Coalition Color of Change Demand Progress Fight for the Future Freedom from Facebook and Google MediaJustice US PIRG Right to Repair Campaign

TECH - POLICY Electronic Frontier Foundation Public Knowledge

TECH - TOOLS Big Tech Detective

20

POLICY RESEARCH American Economic Liberties Project Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality’s Economic Security and Opportunity Initiative Open Markets Institute Revolving Door Project Roosevelt Institute Washington Center for Equitable Growth

RACIAL JUSTICE Action Center on Race and the Economy Color of Change Institute for Intellectual Property & Social Justice Liberation in a Generation

FOOD AND LAND Family Farm Action Alliance Friends of the Earth Young Farmers

WORKER’S RIGHTS Athena Coalition Coworker.org Public Rights Project Towards Justice

ACADEMIA Law and Political Economy Project Yale Thurman Arnold Project

21

SMALL BUSINESS VOICES American Independent Business Alliance Institute for Local Self-Reliance

STORYTELLERS Adamant Media Inequality Media Future of Music Coalition How to Citizen Monopoly Man

MEDICINE Action Center on Race and the Economy Center for Popular Democracy Feminists for a People’s Vaccine Coalition I-MAK People’s Action People’s Vaccine Alliance PrEP4All Public Citizen Social Security Works Universities Allied for Essential Medicine

NEW YORK ADVOCACY New York Communities for Change ALIGN: The Alliance for a Greater New York 22

we can Fighting monopolies is one way to see how ryone be radically inclusive in our organizing - eve ion, even has a stake in ending corporate concentrat ending though our stakes look or feel different dep what our on our race, our gender, where we live, and dent other circumstances are. Owners of indepen business, workers at huge corporations, and ution of neighbors surveilled or living under the poll united. facilities are not the same - but we can be s It’s exciting to see our different relationship e to corporations as a strength, and to organiz a real, across them. It helps us see and feel what l like participatory, multiracial democracy will fee when we win it.

-Dania Rajendra, Inaugural Director, Special Projects Athena

Jeff Bezos had $125 billion in wealth in 2019 and $200 billion in 2021.

Mark Zuckberg had $69 billion in wealth in 2019 and $125 billion in 2021.

Billionaire wealth has grown by 70%, that’s $2.1 trillion, over the pandemic thus far. If this graph were to scale, there would be over 1 million pages before you get to Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos.

23