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Amazon to America: We Are Good For Our Vassals
 To celebrate Small Business Week, Amazon released its first Small Business Impact Report. Unsurprisingly, the giant corporation insisted it is very, very good for small businesses. After all, small businesses use its network to reach millions of customers. What’s not to like?
An awful lot, Stacy Mitchell and Olivia LaVecchia, of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance contend.
In a response to Amazon released early in May they contend, “Amazon is framing itself as a boon for entrepreneurs, but in fact the company’s increasing dominance of the consumer goods market is having a profoundly negative impact on the nation’s small and mid-sized businesses…tens of thousands of small businesses have closed their doors in recent years and many cite Amazon’s growing market dominance as a primary factor in their decline…”
Indeed, as Mitchell, co-director of ILSR explained earlier this year in a cover story for The Nation, “Amazon Doesn’t Just Want to Dominate the Market—It Wants to Become the Market.”
“As Amazon’s own release today makes clear, many small businesses now must depend on an aggressive competitor for the infrastructure they need to get to market. In the absence of meaningful competition in online retail platforms or federal regulation of Amazon’s platform as a common carrier, this dependence means that Amazon controls the fates of these small businesses. It can abruptly change the terms by which they are allowed to operate, demote them in search results, suspend their accounts, or use the knowledge it gleans from them to compete directly against them with its own offerings.”
This year Amazon increased it fulfillment fees by as much as 14 percent, on top of similar increases in 2017. “Without any meaningful competition in online retail platforms, sellers have no real options but to accept these fee increases,” Mitchell and LaVecchia maintain.
In a detailed report, Amazon’s Stranglehold, Mitchell and her ILSR colleague Olivia LaVecchia offered chapter and verse on Amazon’s unprecedented growth and reach, the power that has given them, and how it has been used to pressure, coerce, and sometimes to terrorize small businesses. Read it, and organize.
Philadelphia Tackles Evictions
 In his 2016 best selling book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond offered a compelling case that eviction is not only a reflection of urban poverty but is one of its principal causes. His Eviction Lab maintains the first national database on evictions.
Philadelphia is one city suffering an epidemic of evictions. In 2017 over 24,000 eviction filings were recorded, roughly one in 14 tenants. Illegal evictions might be double that number.
Last fall, after hearing from tenants battling unresponsive landlords, substandard housing, and soaring rents, the Philadelphia city council secured $500,000 for eviction prevention measures and additional legal aid for tenants and created a Task Force to recommend strategies. Read more...
Risk and Rates: The Central Feature of Obamacare Explained
Right after passage of Obamacare, Charles Gaba began to statistically track its progress, gathering mountains of data and converting them into easily (well, mostly easily) digestible charts and graphs and brief text. Gaba and his web site, ACASignups.net quickly became the go-to source for reporters, academicians and policymakers wanting to understand this enormously complex and highly controversial initiative. And in the process he became one of the most informed observers of the American health care system.
Recently Gaba has begun generating short videos to explain the concepts behind Obamacare and the health care system in general. His latest explains risk pools.
Before the American Care Act, traditional insurers asked new enrollees to provide them an exhaustive medical history. If the company’s actuaries concluded the applicant was in a high risk category, it could reject the application outright, or impose very stiff premiums. A central feature of Obamacare is that high risk and low risk applicants largely pay the same premiums. Read more...
Addressing the Affordable Housing Crisis One Granny Unit at a Time
For many years, accessory dwelling units (ADUs), sometimes called granny flats have been outlawed in urban and suburban zoning codes. The affordable housing crisis has led a growing number of cities to reconsider.
In an article in Next City, the intrepid Jared Brey explains how San Francisco has tackled the problem. In 2014, San Francisco led the way, passing an ordinance allowing homeowners to legalize one accessory unit per residential lot. Later, it created a neighborhood pilot program to streamline the construction of new ADUs, including backyard cottages. Still later, the program became citywide.
Accessory units have to meet all the standards of the Building Code, but not some zoning requirements like standards related to parking, open space, and density. Read more...
Using Unemployment Insurance So Workers Can Buy Their Businesses
In 1985, Italy’s trade and industry minister Giovanni Marcora proposed what came to be called the Marcora Law. On the Cooperative News website, Camillo De Berardinis, managing director of CFI, (Cooperazione Finanza Impresa – Cooperation Finance Enterprise), discusses at the Marcora Law’s history and operation. Under the law workers been laid off when companies close or downsize can use their unemployment insurance money to capitalize a new worker coop. The government also provides additional funding to match that coming from the unemployment insurance fund,
With the help of the law, more than 9,000 workers who would have otherwise been out of a job have instead created 257 new worker-owned businesses in the past 30 years.
The program was suspended in the 1990s because it was deemed to contravene European competition law by giving over-generous state support to one form of business model – worker self-management. As if we shouldn’t give a leg up to locally owned and worker owned businesses rather than global corporations where business decisions are made remotely and the health of the local community is rarely determinative. Read more...
Loneliness Kills
More than 42 million adults over age 45 suffer from chronic loneliness, according to a survey by the American Association of Retired Persons. That’s not just bad for their social life. It is a danger to their health.
As Mattie Quinn writes in Governing magazine, scientists now agree: “Loneliness isn’t just an undesirable way to live. It can kill you.” A pioneering 2010 study from Brigham Young University found that weak social connections can shorten a person’s life by 15 years, roughly the same impact as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. A more recent study showed that greater social connection corresponds with a 50 percent decrease in the risk of early death.
Strategies for reducing loneliness inevitably target local communities. One such effort is CareMore a health plan serving Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries. Read more...
Prisons and Rural Economies: A Marriage Made in Hell
As Sylvia Ryerson and Judah Schept report in Boston Review, Eastern Kentucky will soon host its fourth federal prison, a 1200 bed high security prison in Letcher County. At $500 million, it will be the most expensive prison ever built.
Since the 1980s, 350 new prisons have been built in rural areas of the United States. Many view these prisons as solutions to the problems of deindustrialization. As an example, Ryerson and Schept point to a NBC News story with the instructive headline. “Does American Need Another Prison? It May be this Rural County’s Only Chance at Survival.”
The authors link national and regional data that offer empirical evidence that in economically struggling areas, prisons fail to provide the promised growth.
A 2010 study that reviewed the impact of prisons on county level employment from 1976-2004 concluded, “We provide evidence that prison construction impedes economic growth in rural counties, especially in counties that lag behind in educational attainment.” A 2016 study examined the impacts of prison development in Central Appalachia, since 1989, and found “little evidence to support the claim that prisons are engines of growth.” Read more...
In Austin, Texas the Final Score is: Uber 1, Democracy 0
 In the summer of 2014, when Lyft and Uber began operating illegally in Austin, city officials tried in vain to punish Uber and Lyft drivers caught violating the law. In 2016, Michael Theis staff writer for the Austin Business Journal described the dynamic, “after months of corporate civil disobedience, the City Council approved a basic set of guidelines for transportation network companies, legalizing their operations.”
Then, in 2015, a new City Council with a new structure–10 council members elected by district, one mayor–came to office. Responding to their constituents’ desire to feel absolutely safe when getting into the car with a stranger, Councilmembers tightened the rules to include fingerprint-based background checks. Uber and Lyft went into action, drumming up citizens to demand that the Council revisit its decision. When that failed, the two giant rideshare companies gathered signatures to put on the ballot a measure that would overturn the Council’s actions. They spent more than $8.6 million to pass the measure. The opposition raised a little more than $100,000.
Uber and Lyft lost, by a wide margin — 56 to 44 percent. Rather than abide by the decision, they left town. At the time Theis described it as “a victory for a coalition of Austin activists who were motivated by a variety of factors, from safety concerns related to background checks to worries over corporate influence on Austin government.”
In the wake of their exit about a dozen ride sharing enterprises willing to embrace the new regulations arose. For some, the prospects were promising. Read more...
Consumers Demand: Stop Me Before I Sin Again
In 2008, by a 64-36 majority, California voters passed Proposition 2, the “Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act,” which mandated minimum cage sizes (116 square inches of floor space per chicken) for egg farms in the state of California. Previously the size was that of a 10×11 piece of paper,
The regulations were intended to allow hens to lie down, stand up, turn around, and fully extend their limbs.
In 2010, amid concerns that California egg farmers would be at a competitive disadvantage due to the additional costs required to comply with these new regulations, the California Legislature required all eggs sold in California comply with the cage-size requirements included in Proposition 2, regardless of the laws in the state where the eggs were produced.
The law also prohibited the use of gestation crates for swine and solo housing for dairy calves.
The regulations went into effect in 2015.
In 2016, in Massachusetts voters approved a similar ballot initiative by a vote of 76 to 22. It requires that all eggs sold in the state be from hens raised in cage-free environments by 2022 and applies similar animal-welfare requirements to gestation crates and calf facilities. Read more...
European Tourist Capitals Take on Airbnb
 As summer beckons, the battle between Airbnb and urban tourist destinations is heating up. Europe is a current battleground.
In 2017 the autonomous region of the Balearic Islands, allowed authorities to issue apartment owners fines of up to €40,000 ($47,000 U.S. dollars) if they were caught renting unlicensed properties to tourists. Travel agents or websites caught advertising unlisted flats to rent on the islands, such as Airbnb and HomeAway, face fines of up to €400,000 ($470,000 U.S. dollars.
In April, Wolf Street reports, Palma, the capital of the region and Spain’s eighth largest city became the first Spanish city to impose a blanket ban on all tourist apartments. Starting in July homeowners in the capital of the popular island destination, Mallorca, will not be able to rent out their apartments to tourists. Only owners of detached, single-family homes, which represent just 12 percent of the city’s housing stock, will be left untouched by the ban.
The ban is intended to end to surging rental prices in the city. The city sees vacation rentals a big factor in the 40 percent rise in average rental prices since 2013. Private investors are snapping up apartments in popular tourist destinations. The number of non-licensed apartments on offer to tourists increased by 50 percent between 2015 and 2017 alone. Read more...
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