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Hofstadter might have been surprised to find that the party of conspiracy is also the party of government. The paranoid style, he noted, was typically a function of powerlessness. “Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed.”

The principal lesson of paranoia is the ease with which politically aroused people can mistake errors for deceptions, coincidences for patterns, bumbling for dereliction, and secrecy for treachery. True conspiracies are rare but stupidity is nearly universal. The failure to know the difference, combined with the desire for a particular result, is what accounts for the paranoid style.

America already has one party that’s lost its mind. We don’t need another.

The United States currently has the lowest minimum wage, as a proportion of its average wage, of any advanced economy,

On the other hand, two recent meta-studies (which pool together the results of multiple analyses) have found that increasing the minimum wage does not have a significant impact on employment.

The minimum wage has been a hobgoblin of economism since its origins

Think tanks including Cato, Heritage, and the Manhattan Institute have reliably attacked the minimum wage for decades, all the while emphasizing the key lesson from Economics 101: Higher wages cause employers to cut jobs.

In today’s environment of increasing economic inequality, the minimum wage is a centerpiece of political debate

The real impact of the minimum wage, however, is much less clear than these talking points might indicate.

In 1994, David Card and Alan Krueger evaluated an increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage by comparing fast-food restaurants on both sides of the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border. They concluded, “Contrary to the central prediction of the textbook model ... we find no evidence that the rise in New Jersey’s minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state.”

Card and Krueger’s findings have been vigorously contested across dozens of empirical studies. Today, people on both sides of the debate can cite papers supporting their position, and reviews of the academic research disagree on what conclusions to draw.

economists who have long argued against the minimum wage, reviewed more than one hundred empirical papers in 2006. Although the studies had a wide range of results, they concluded that the “preponderance of the evidence” indicated that a higher minimum wage does increase unemployment.

The argument against increasing the minimum wage often relies on what I call “economism”—the misleading application of basic lessons from Economics 101 to real-world problems, creating the illusion of consensus and reducing a complex topic to a simple, open-and-shut case.

The profession as a whole is divided on the topic: When the University of Chicago Booth School of Business asked a panel of prominent economists in 2013 whether increasing the minimum wage to $9 would “make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment,” the responses were split down the middle.

The idea that a higher minimum wage might not increase unemployment runs directly counter to the lessons of Economics 101

there are several reasons why the real world does not behave so predictably.

In short, whether the minimum wage should be increased (or eliminated) is a complicated question. The economic research is difficult to parse, and arguments often turn on sophisticated econometric details. Any change in the minimum wage would have different effects on different groups of peop

At the other extreme, very large employers may have enough market power that the usual supply-and-demand model doesn’t apply to them. They can reduce the wage level by hiring fewer workers

In the above examples, a higher minimum wage will raise labor costs. But many companies can recoup cost increases in the form of higher prices; because most of their customers are not poor, the net effect is to transfer money from higher-income to lower-income families.

In addition, companies that pay more often benefit from higher employee productivity, offsetting the growth in labor costs.

why higher wages boost productivity: They motivate people to work harder, they attract higher-skilled workers, and they reduce employee turnover, lowering hiring and training costs, among other things

If fewer people quit their jobs, that also reduces the number of people who are out of work at any one time because they’re looking for something better. A higher minimum wage motivates more people to enter the labor force, raising both employment and output

Finally, higher pay increases workers’ buying power. Because poor people spend a relatively large proportion of their income, a higher minimum wage can boost overall economic activity and stimulate economic growth

Even if a higher minimum wage does cause some people to lose their jobs, that cost has to be balanced against the benefit of greater earnings for other low-income workers.

Although the standard model predicts that employers will replace workers with machines if wages increase, additional labor-saving technologies are not available to every company at a reasonable cost

Nevertheless, when the topic reaches the national stage, it is economism’s facile punch line that gets delivered, along with its all-purpose dismissal: people who want a higher minimum wage just don’t understand economics (although, by that standard, several Nobel Prize winners don’t understand economics

This conviction that the minimum wage hurts the poor is an example of economism in action

one particular result of one particular model is presented as an unassailable economic theorem.

A recent study by researchers at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, however, found that higher minimum wages have not affected either the number of restaurants or the number of people that they employ, contrary to the industry’s dire predictions, while they have modestly increased workers’ pay.

The fact that this is the debate already demonstrates the historical influence of economism

Low- and middle-income workers’ reduced bargaining power is a major reason why their wages have not kept pace with the overall growth of the economy. According to an analysis by the sociologists Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, one-fifth to one-third of the increase in inequality between 1973 and 2007 results from the decline of unions.

With unions only a distant memory for many people, federal minimum-wage legislation has become the best hope for propping up wages for low-income workers. And again, the worldview of economism comes to the aid of employers by abstracting away from the reality of low-wage work to a pristine world ruled by the “law” of supply and demand.

Since Philip V was barred from the succession by the treaties confirming his Spanish throne, and since the third grandson of Louis XIV, the Due de Berry, died in 1714, only one sickly five-year-old child, the second son of the Due de Bourgogne, would separate Philip of Orleans from the crown at the old King’s death

The powers bestowed upon Orleans as Regent deflated the pride of the over-confident Du Maine and frustrated the plans of his ambitious wife

Apart from the defeated faction, which had the backing of the ultramontane party, and in particular of Madame de Maintenon (the former governess of the royal bastards and keeper of the late King’s conscience), the triumph of Orleans was greeted with enthusiasm

The personality of Philip of Orleans lives in the correspondence of his mother, Elizabeth Charlotte of Bavaria

the Regent acted as his own Beau Brummell, and directed with whimsical inconsequence the adoption of Turkish, Polish and English fashions

Nevertheless, it continued the persecution of the Huguenots instituted by the late King, and ran counter to the intentions of the tolerant and free-thinking Regent

The reaction was so strong that in January 1718 the Regent yielded to the pressure of the old order and suppressed the dixième, a minor tax levied by Louis XIV and borne in part by the nobility

In October, at the time when a similar wave of speculation in England was in the process of collapse, the Regent withdrew his support

The Due de Bourbon, encouraged by his profits, began to challenge the political power of the Regent and Dubois

Since their bargain with Philip of Orleans in the repudiation of Louis XIV’s will, the magistrates had made use of their right of remonstrance to win a permanent share of the power of the monarchy

Both the regency and the Hanoverian Whig regime in England were subject to external threats—the Regent from the designs of Philip V, abetted by the Du Maine faction, and the government of George I from the plots of the Pretender

Austria, too, was threatened in Italy by the ambitions of Philip V’s Queen, Elizabeth Famese and of his chief minister, the adventurer Alberoni. The Hapsburg Emperor, Charles VI, knew that he might count on English support

the Triple Alliance of 1717, and then with Austria in the Quadruple Alliance late in the same year

His pupil, the Regent, himself occupied the post of First Minister in the few months that were left to him

Louis XV displayed affection for no one save his former governess, the Duchesse de Ventadour; but the kindly Regent won his respect

The crises of later years were in part due to the failure of the Regent to exorcise the ghost of Louis XIV during the minority of his great-grandson.

He liked to be compared with Henry IV, that first and most humane of Bourbon Kings

The growth of a large royal army, however, was only one effect of the increased level of military activity. The financial administration of the country also underwent a drastic reorganization

By the reign of Francis I, the king, even in times of peace, was unable to make do with his ordinary revenue from rents and seigneurial dues. In 1523 Francis established a new central treasury, the Trésor de l’Épargne, into which all his revenues, ordinary and extraordinary, were to be deposited.

Successive monarchs were forced, therefore, to seek additional revenue. This was no simple matter, because French kings traditionally could not tax their subjects without their consent.

The early Valois kings had negotiated with the Estates-General or with the provincial Estates for their extra money; but in the middle of the 15th century, when the Hundred Years’ War with England was reaching a successful conclusion, Charles VII was able to strike a bargain with the Estates. In return for a reduction in overall taxation, he began to raise money to support the army without having to seek the Estates’ approval.

Jan-Werner Müller argues that the true challenge comes not from nationalism per se but from a particular populist variant. The best response is to avoid getting distracted and focus on delivering practical results

Yael Tamir suggests that the main problem today is a clash between nationalism and neoliberal globalism. Nationalists want states to intervene in the market to defend their citizens; their opponents favor freer trade and freer movement of people. Jack Snyder concurs, suggesting that the proper response is to allow governments greater freedom to manage capitalism

Underneath all the theory and history and science, everything boils down to politics. Leaders and governments need to produce real solutions to real problems. If they don’t, their disaffected publics will look for answers elsewhere. It’s as simple as that

the revolving door between public service and private-sector employment, think-tank fellowships, fees on the lecture circuit, and so on.

3. Campaign contributions

4. Defining the agenda:

the 0.1 percent has an extraordinary ability to set the agenda for policy discussion, in ways that can be sharply at odds with both a reasonable assessment of priorities and public opinion more generally.

The example I have in mind was the extraordinary shift in conventional wisdom and policy priorities that took place in 2010-2011, away from placing priority on reducing the huge suffering still taking place in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and toward action to avert the supposed risk of a debt crisis

The bursting of the housing bubble, and the subsequent attempts of households to reduce their debt, had let to a severe shortfall of aggregate demand. Despite very low interest rates by historical standards, businesses weren’t willing to invest enough to take up the slack created by this household pullback.

the obvious, Economics 101 move would have been to implement another significant round of stimulus. After all, the federal government was still able to borrow long-term at near-zero real interest rates.

Somehow, however, over the course of 2010 a consensus emerged in the political and media worlds that in the face of 9 percent unemployment the two most important issues were … deficit reduction and “entitlement reform,” i.e. cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

voters tend to place a relatively low priority on deficits as compared with jobs and the economy. And they overwhelmingly favor spending more on health care and Social Security.

Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright managed to survey a group of wealthy individuals in the Chicago area. They found striking differences between this group’s policy priorities and those of the public at large. Budget deficits topped the list of problems they considered “very important,” with a third considering them the “most important” pro

While the respondents also expressed concern about unemployment and education, “they ranked a distant second and third among the concerns of wealthy Americans.”

And when it came to entitlements, the policy preferences of the wealthy were clearly at odds with those of the general public. By large margins, voters at large wanted to expand spending on health care and Social Security. By almost equally large margins, the wealthy wanted to reduce spending on those same programs

What happened, essentially, was that the political and media establishment internalized the preferences of the extremely wealthy.

Lacombe point out the enduring effects of plutocratic political influence on the Social Security debate: “Despite the strong support among most Americans for protecting and expanding Social Security benefits, for example, the intense, decades-long campaign to cut or privatize Social Security that was led by billionaire Pete Peterson and his wealthy allies appears to have played a part in thwarting any possibility of expanding Social Security benefits. Instead, the United States has repeatedly come close (even under Democratic Presidents Clinton and Obama) to actually cutting benefits as part of a bipartisan ‘grand bargain’ concerning the federal budget.”

Where do the preferences of the wealthy come from? You don’t have to be a vulgar Marxist to recognize a strong element of class interest. The push for austerity was clearly linked to a desire to shrink the tax-and-transfer state, which in all advanced countries, even America, is a significant force for redistribution away from the wealthy toward citizens with lower incomes

The fact remains that the wealthy, on average, push for policies that benefit themselves even when they often hurt the economy as a whole. And the sheer wealth of the wealthy is what empowers them to get a lot of what they want.

in the end big money will find a way — unless there’s less big money to begin with. So reducing the extreme concentration of income and wealth isn’t just a desirable thing on social and economic grounds. It’s also a necessary step toward a healthier political system

Landfills of rotting food emit methane, a gas that is roughly 25 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. And to harvest and transport all that wasted food requires billions of acres of arable land, trillions of gallons of water and vast amounts of fossil fuels.

For consumers, cutting back on food waste is one of the few personal habits that can help the planet. But for some reason, a lot of people who fret about their carbon footprint aren’t sweating the vegetables and rump steak they toss into the garbage.

“There’s been a lot of focus on energy,” said Paul Behrens, a professor in energy and environmental change at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. “But climate change is as much a land issue and a food issue as anything else.”

Reducing waste is a challenge because selling as much food as possible is a tried, tested and ingrained part of all-you-can-eat cultures. Persuading merchants to promote and profit from “food rescue,” as it is known, is not so obvious.

“Consumers are paying for the food, and who wants to reduce that?

After the two met in a Copenhagen cafe, REMA 1000 eliminated in-store bulk discounts. As of 2008, there would be no more three hams for the price of two, or any variations on that theme

“Food waste might be a uniquely American challenge because many people in this country equate quantity with a bargain,

Nine of the 10 United States supermarket chains that were assessed by the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity last year were given a C grade or lower on food-waste issues

Some of the most promising food waste efforts are apps that connect food sellers to food buyers

Among the most popular is Too Good to Go, a company based in Copenhagen, with 13 million users and contracts with 25,000 restaurants and bakeries in 11 countries. Consumers pay about one-third of the sticker price for items, most of which goes to the retailer, with a small percentage paid to the app

“I was on a business trip to Scotland and I read about Selina in a newspaper,” Mr. Jensen recalls. “Around that time, we learned that every Dane was throwing out 63 kilos of food per year” — about 139 pounds — “and I was sitting in this airport thinking, she’s right.”

A growing number of supermarkets, restaurants and start-ups — many based in Europe — are trying to answer that question. The United States is another matter.

Executives at S-market in Finland make no such claims about their happy hour. Mika Lyytikainen, an S-market vice president, explained that the program simply reduces its losses.“When we sell at 60 percent off, we don’t earn any money, but we earn more than if the food was given to charity,” he said. “On the other hand, it’s now possible for every Finn to buy very cheap food in our stores.”

But the bigger questions in any democracy are always about the how: how will governments exercise the extraordinary powers we give them? And how will we respond when they do?

These are the questions that have always preoccupied political theorists. But now they are not so theoretical.

As the current crisis shows, the primary fact that underpins political existence is that some people get to tell others what to do.

At the heart of all modern politics is a trade-off between personal liberty and collective choice. This is the Faustian bargain identified by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the middle of the 17th century, when the country was being torn apart by a real civil war.

As Hobbes knew, to exercise political rule is to have the power of life and death over citizens. The only reason we would possibly give anyone that power is because we believe it is the price we pay for our collective safety. But it also means that we are entrusting life-and-death decisions to people we cannot ultimately control.

The primary risk is that those on the receiving end refuse to do what they are told. At that point, there are only two choices. Either people are forced to obey, using the coercive powers the state has at its disposal. Or politics breaks down altogether, which Hobbes argued was the outcome we should fear most of all.

Autocratic regimes such as China also find it hard to face up to crises until they have to – and, unlike democracies, they can suppress the bad news for longer if it suits them. But when action becomes unavoidable, they can go further. The Chinese lockdown succeeded in containing the disease through ruthless pre-emption.

The rawness of these choices is usually obscured by the democratic imperative to seek consensus. That has not gone away. The government is doing all it can to dress up its decisions in the language of commonsense advice.

But as the experience of other European countries shows, as the crisis deepens the stark realities become clearer

This crisis has revealed some other hard truths. National governments really matter, and it really matters which one you happen to find yourself under.

In a democracy, we have the luxury of waiting for the next election to punish political leaders for their mistakes. But that is scant consolation when matters of basic survival are at stake. Anyway, it’s not much of a punishment, relatively speaking. They might lose their jobs, though few politicians wind up destitute. We might lose our lives.

for now, we are at the mercy of our national leaders. That is something else Hobbes warned about: there is no avoiding the element of arbitrariness at the heart of all politics. It is the arbitrariness of individual political judgment.

Under a lockdown, democracies reveal what they have in common with other political regimes: here too politics is ultimately about power and order. But we are also getting to see some of the fundamental differences. It is not that democracies are nicer, kinder, gentler places. They may try to be, but in the end that doesn’t last. Democracies do, though, find it harder to make the really tough choices.

We wait until we have no choice and then we adapt. That means democracies are always going to start off behind the curve of a disease like this one, though some are better at playing catch-up than others.

Though the pandemic is a global phenomenon, and is being experienced similarly in many different places, the impact of the disease is greatly shaped by decisions taken by individual governments.

Some democracies have managed to adapt faster: in South Korea the disease is being tamed by extensive tracing and widespread surveillance of possible carriers. But in that case, the regime had recent experience to draw on in its handling of the Mers outbreak of 2015, which also shaped the collective memory of its citizens

It is easier to adapt when you have adapted already. It is much harder when you are making it up as you go along

In recent years, it has sometimes appeared that global politics is simply a choice between rival forms of technocracy

In China, it is a government of engineers backed up by a one-party state. In the west, it is the rule of economists and central bankers, operating within the constraints of a democratic system

This creates the impression that the real choices are technical judgments about how to run vast, complex economic and social systems.

But in the last few weeks another reality has pushed through. The ultimate judgments are about how to use coercive power.

These aren’t simply technical questions. Some arbitrariness is unavoidable. And the contest in the exercise of that power between democratic adaptability and autocratic ruthlessness will shape all of our futures.

our political world is still one Hobbes would recognise

“We usually do about two storage deals a day,” said Mr. Barsamian, who runs a company in Princeton, N.J., called the Tank Tiger, a nod to the local university’s mascot. “We have done about 120 in the last couple of weeks.”

People in the energy industry say they have never seen changes happening at the speed and magnitude that are occurring because of the coronavirus.

The first major downturn in demand occurred in February when China, the world’s largest energy consumer, shut down much of its economy in an effort to stabilize the spread of the coronavirus. Now, the slowdown is rolling across the world, with much of Europe and major parts of the United States in lockdown.

The price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia has exacerbated the situation. The Saudis are slashing prices and threatening to ramp up oil output by about 25 percent to 12 million barrels a day, beginning in April. The surplus, IHS Markit forecasts, could add up to a tank-busting one billion barrels or more.

Not only does oil need a place to go, but the state of the oil market has provided traders with an opportunity to make money. They are taking advantage of a market where prices in the future are much higher than current levels. For instance, a barrel of light, sweet U.S. crude is priced at about $25 a barrel for May, about $6 lower than August. So a trader or an oil company can make easy money by buying oil at today’s depressed prices, selling it on the futures market and pocketing the difference minus storage and other costs — a situation known as contango.

Knowing how much oil is stored around the world is a key metric to “understanding the health of the oil market,” said Hillary Stevenson, an analyst at Genscape, a market intelligence firm. But, she warned, “capacity is finite; the safety net is only so big.”

One sign of a glut: The volume of oil placed on ships to wait for better days has grown by about 25 percent in March. According to Mr. Booth, about 81 loaded tankers — an unusually high number — are loitering off coasts around the globe.

The fact that oil is being put on ships, a more costly proposition than storage on land, implies that the world is running out of room, at least in some places, Mr. Booth said. Chinese buyers, perhaps seeing current prices as a bargain, continue to import at high levels, he said. Mr. Booth estimated that three-quarters of a billion barrels of usable storage capacity remained around the world — not enough room for the buildup in supplies some forecasters are predicting.

In the wake of price-cutting by Saudi Arabia and other countries, oil companies in the United States are being paid less. On Tuesday, Enterprise Products, an Oklahoma company, posted prices for various grades of crude that ranged as low as $7.61 a barrel.

Space is running out in western Canada, whose 40 million barrels of storage is now more than three-quarters full, according to Rystad Energy, which estimates that producers will need to slash production by 11 percent

Biden calls for a $15 minimum wage, increased Social Security benefits for the poorest Americans, and strengthening the power of unions to organize and bargain. He advocates a substantial program to tackle infrastructure, and a sweeping gun control plan.

He proposes to assist low-income schools by tripling the amount of federal assistance to fund universal pre-K and raise teachers’ salaries. A frequent critic, German Lopez of Vox, describes his proposal for criminal justice reform as “one of the most comprehensive among presidential campaigns, taking on various parts of the criminal justice system at once.” And he is committed to fighting voter suppression and expanding the right to vote.

When it comes to the environment, even the progressive Sunrise Movement (which supports Sanders) calls Biden’s plan to combat climate change “comprehensive.” Focused on achieving clean energy and eliminating harmful emissions, it would cost $1.7 trillion over a decade—which, while far less the cost of the Green New Deal, represents a giant leap forward.

His immigration plan is smart and balanced. While avoiding the extremes of decriminalizing the border or abolishing ICE, it protects Dreamers, provides a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, welcomes increased immigration, and reverses our shameful and sadistic maltreatment of asylum seekers and their children.

How does Biden propose to raise revenue? By tax increases of $3.4 trillion over a decade, virtually all derived from raising rates for corporations and wealthy—including treating capital gains as ordinary income.

The relevant question is not how all this compares to Sanders’s unachievable wish list, but to the reality of America under Donald Trump. Anyone who dismisses the difference is not a progressive, but a myopic and politically-infantile purist.

Still, at its heart this election is about one man: Trump. That’s why it’s imperative that Biden daily remind voters, in style and substance, that he is Trump’s antithesis: decent, dignified, compassionate, and competent; a man they can trust.

To a great extent, Biden is less a leader than a vehicle. Which means that his campaign will need to present Biden at his best—the warm and engaging guy who looks like a “can-do” president.

As a child, Biden struggled to conquer a congenital stutter he fights against still, which may explain some of his verbal tics in debate. To control stuttering requires immense concentration and willpower: that Biden became a politician is a triumph—and something of a wonder

that’s the Biden his campaign needs voters to internalize: a leader with the resilience to conquer adversity and come out stronger and more compassionate than before. Which is a pretty fair metaphor for the America which, millions hope, will follow Donald Trump.

A Morning Consult poll in February showed that 30 percent of independent voters were less likely to support Biden because of controversy regarding his son. Republican senators are primed to use their subpoena power to “investigate” Hunter and thereby deep-dye the damage to his father, undercutting his appeal as an ordinary guy who exemplifies middle-class values.

The fact that Amazon’s retail operations are functioning at all is a testament to the flexibility of the company’s infrastructure during a health crisis that few if any companies were prepared for.

But the crisis is laying bare the cracks in Amazon’s ability

Those cracks include times when up to half the workers in some of the company’s facilities haven’t shown up, with some saying it was due to their fear they wouldn’t be adequately protected from coronavirus.

It’s also due to Amazon’s just-in-time supply chain, reliance on third-party sellers and largely automated systems of buying and selling that were never designed to handle such a crisis.

Amazon shoppers are unable to get many of the essential products the company says it’s prioritizing now.

everything considered nonessential takes more time than the two days Amazon conditioned us to expect.

as of March, 55% of Americans polled had ordered groceries online, compared with 36% two years ago.

One-third of respondents said the first time they had ever ordered groceries online was in the past 30 days, and 60% of respondents used Amazon to order groceries.

The infrastructure Amazon built pushed the entire e-commerce industry toward ever broader selection delivered ever faster.

In the mid-2010s, Amazon initiated a program called “hands off the wheel,” which replaced many of the functions of Amazon’s white-collar retail workers—those responsible for managing inventory and negotiating with sellers—with AI and automated systems

Amazon’s systems respond more quickly to increases in demand than humans could, but it also leads to breakdowns when they encounter unexpected shocks—e.g., a global pandemic

In the week ending March 28, Americans spent 47% more on consumer packaged goods purchased online when compared with the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen and Rakuten Intelligence.

Amazon has hired 80,000 additional workers in just the past few weeks, as part of its pledge to hire 100,000 new permanent workers. It has also raised its base wage from $15 an hour to $17, through April.

with more workers pouring into Amazon’s facilities, and more forced to stay by the lack of alternatives, there could be more protests by employees and more concessions from historically union-averse management

Already, the company has instituted double pay for overtime, paid leave for associates with confirmed or suspected cases of Covid-19, a tripling of its janitorial staff and audits of its own facilities to comply with these measures.

Consumers felt, in good times anyway, that “I can trust the item, I know it’s a good price, I have transparency on when I’m going to receive it, and if I have issues Amazon will work on my behalf,” he adds.

A big edge Amazon holds over competitors is that it can cover losses or scant retail margins with a combination of good will from investors and a cross-subsidy from its booming cloud business, Amazon Web Services.

Of all cloud providers, Amazon is the best positioned to benefit both in the long and short term from surging demand, Eric Sheridan, an analyst at UBS, wrote in a Monday note surveying the industry.

All this increased usage means more revenue for AWS and more profit for its parent company. In turn, that means more opportunity for Amazon to, as Mr. Bezos famously put it, turn its retail competitors’ margins into Amazon’s opportunity.

for Amazon, a company that may already be too big for its own good, it could lead to more of the regulatory scrutiny that its success was drawing even before coronavirus.

An ever greater variety of customers will view Amazon as a basic utility but, wary of overreliance, will explore alternatives, too. The bill for Mr. Bezos’ possibly Faustian bargain with the universe—that everyone loves an innovative and ruthless competitor, even when it becomes dominant—may finally come due.

One such illusion is that increasing racial proximity by integrating schools and housing is a good way to break down racial animosities and paranoias.

only by a devil’s bargain with Southern segregationist senators. Liberal social security systems perpetuated black exclusion until Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms of 1964.

Race has contaminated American solidarity, making it impossible for poor whites, threatened by job loss, globalization and the death of carbon-intensive industries, to make common cause with African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans and immigrants

“Unwilling to share the bounty of state with people of other races and creeds, heritages and colors, real Americans — the white ones — have prevented the erection of a welfare state at all.”

The great achievement of American liberalism — Franklin Roosevelt’s social security state — was passed

Empathy, Porter argues, has always waged an unequal struggle against the racial animus that courses through American history, poisoning both those who hate and those who are hated

“Johnson failed to grasp the scale at which inviting people of color into the network of rights and assurances created in the 1930s by F.D.R. to protect the well-being of white American workers would undermine support for the safety net altogether.”

he points out the tragic irony of a white working class, decimated by deindustrialization and wasted by substance abuse, focusing their hatreds on minorities and turning against the very social programs — Obamacare, for example — that might actually help them

“The America that built the most prosperous working class the world had ever seen collapsed into a heap of pathologies — deaths of despair — simply due to a lack of empathy. The greatest irony is that while the black and the brown suffered most intensely from the fallout, the collapse in social trust wiped away the American dream of working-class whites too.”

This is a powerful argument, but it has a couple of problems

it overestimates race and underestimates class and a free market political culture in explaining why America collects a far smaller percentage of national income in taxes compared with European countries that have more adequate public health, education and welfare services

Porter treats racial hatred as a fixed dose of poison coursing through the veins of the public and neglects politics, the systematic way in which Republican politicians from Richard Nixon onward fed the poison with envenoming rhetoric about “welfare queens,” “dysfunctional black families” and the shame of welfare dependency.

Racial polarization, Porter claims, has led to the collapse not only of “Americans’ support for the safety net,” but also of “their general support of public goods and the entire apparatus of government.”

Porter’s jeremiad makes it impossible to understand the equally tenacious history of American progressive government: from Roosevelt himself, through Truman’s integration of the United States military, the Supreme Court ban on racial covenants in housing in 1948, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the struggle to desegregate American schools and finally — an achievement barely mentioned in Porter’s story — the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

countless illegal rubbish dumps across the country. The waste, which was imported from abroad, was never recycled as the companies paid to do so failed to live up to their side of the bargain. Over the past ten years, rubbish imports to Bulgaria have risen twentyfold! And some journalists have reported that at times, waste is simply dumped under bridges or along motorways and then set alight.

In Romania and Bulgaria, just like in Italy, the waste disposal business is controlled by shady figures. High-ranking politicians are involved, corruption is rife, and environmentalists are vilified as radicals who are supposedly paid by western competitors to slow down the country's economic development.

The garbage crisis also has a symbolic dimension in that many eastern Europeans feel like second-class citizens on the continent.

Today, eastern Europe's garbage problem hurts the pride of people in Romania and Bulgaria — but also in Poland, Ukraine and Russia. They feel as if the rest of Europe, and even some developing countries, are using their countries as veritable garbage dumps.

The globalization of waste disposal illustrates how capital accumulates in wealthy parts of the world, while waste accumulates in the poor regions. Bulgaria's environmental minister Dimitrov has now attempted to slow down this process by closed several border crossing to waste imports. But critics have lamented that this breaches EU regulations, and pointed out that while waste disposal is a lucrative business it is also important for environmental reasons. How can Romania and Bulgaria be prevented from importing waste that harms their peoples' health just to make a quick buck? EU regulations and fines alone will not suffice. For years now, rubbish has been piling up in both countries — but many just seem to just shrug their shoulders and accept the status quo.

HMSHost, over the lack of coronavirus safety protections, which included continuing to hold anti-union captive audience meetings during the pandemic. A union election for workers to join Unite Here scheduled for late March was delayed and is currently being rescheduled due to the pandemic.

“To them, the union was a more important issue than the coronavirus. They made sure to give us papers about the union, but didn’t give us training or protective equipment for us in the stores.”

Citing the pandemic, the manager of Clark county, Nevada, unilaterally suspended all union contracts with the county.

The Teamsters union has filed federal unfair labor practice charges of unlawful termination against CORT furniture, a subsidiary of billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, accusing the furniture rental company of retaliating against workers for supporting unionization just as the pandemic broke in the US.

CORT furniture declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Amazon-owned Whole Foods is using a data-powered heat mapping tool to monitor unionization risks among its over 500 stores throughout the US, as workers have held sick-out protests in response to a lack of protections for workers during the pandemic. Workers at the online clothing retailer Everlane and the art logistics company Uovo have filed federal labor charges accusing the companies of firing workers during the pandemic for union organizing.

According to a December 2019 EPI study, in over 40% of union organizing campaigns an employer violates the law. “This is an extreme moment we’re in, but unfortunate

better pay and better health and safety provisions,” added McNicholas.

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he buried his Democratic opponent Walter Mondale in a landslide, winning 49 out of 50 states and 58.8% of the popular vote.

Bill Clinton's boast of building a bridge to the 21st Century rang true, although it was emergent tech giants such as Microsoft, Apple and Google that were the true architects and engineers. Thirty years after planting the Stars and Stripes on the Sea of Tranquillity, America not only dominated outer space but cyberspace too.

The Los Angeles riots in 1992, sparked by the beating of Rodney King and the acquittal of the police officers charged with his assault, highlighted deep racial divisions.

The American compact, the bargain that if you worked hard and played by the rules your family would succeed, was no longer assumed. Between 2000 and 2011, the overall net wealth of US households fell. By 2014, the richest 1% of Americans had accrued more wealth than the bottom 90%.

Although his presidency did much to rescue the economy, he couldn't repair a fractured country.

The political map of America, rather than taking on a more purple hue, came to be rendered in deeper shades of red and blue.

he gang-related mayhem in his adopted home of Chicago. The mess in Washington. The opioid crisis. The health indices even pointed to a sick nation, in which the death rate was rising.

There were chants of "USA, USA," a staple of the billionaire's campaign rallies - usually triggered by his riff on building a wall along the Mexican border.

here was also an 80s vibe about the telegenic first family, who looked fresh from a set of a primetime soap, like Dynasty or Falcon Crest.

Trump understood this, and it explained much of his success, even if his star power came from reality TV rather than Hollywood B-movies.

In many ways Trump's unexpected victory marked the culmination of a large number of trends in US politics, society and culture, many of which are rooted in that end-of-century period of American dominion.

The young have been on the sharp end of two economic shocks: the 2008 crisis, which squeezed living standards, and a technological revolution, which is doing for middle-class jobs what mechanisation did for working-class ones. Automation is hollowing out entry-level positions

It is getting ever harder for young people to get a foot on the property ladder or find somewhere decent to rent.

Browse the Facebook pages where young Corbynistas hang out and you do not find hymns of praise to the workers’ control of the means of production, but laments for the indignities of modern metropolitan life and jeremiads against baby boomers who grabbed all the cheap houses and got free university education into the bargain.

Far from democratising the bourgeois dream, Mr Corbyn’s policies would quickly kill it. Empowering trade unions would produce disruption, particularly of public services. Abolishing university fees would make it harder for Britain to compete as a knowledge economy. And drastically increasing public spending would damage international confidence and risk capital flight.

the political class as a whole ignores the deeper causes of Britain’s stagnation, from stalled productivity to a failure to produce high-growth companies. The most likely outcome is that Britain will add an experiment with hardcore socialism to its experiment with Brexit. Then, the relative deprivation suffered by Mr Corbyn’s middle-class fans will be the least of the country’s problems.

in the places where support for Mr. Trump runs the strongest, the proportion of the white population that didn’t finish high school is relatively high. So is the proportion of working-age adults who neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third-strongest correlation among hundreds of variables tested: the preponderance of mobile homes.

Trump counties include places that have voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and the strongest predictors of Trump support include how a county responded to two very different third-party candidates: Trump territory showed stronger support for the segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 election than the rest of the country, and substantially weaker support for the centrist former Republican John B. Anderson in 1980.

the economic problems that line up with strong Trump support have long been in the making, and defy simple fixes.

have any of the individuals commenting ever met or talked to the uneducated trailer dwellers referred to in this article. I think not. This poor pitiful underclass that we must now fix as true liberals has been making poor decisions for decades. Serial children withe serial mothers and resulting large child support payments. Job hopping and laying around the house all winter when laid off while waiting for the Wife to get home from work and make dinner. Gun purchases for thousands of dollars and 45,000 dollar trucks on an annual income of 35,000. Cashing in 401ks. To buy the latest 4 Wheeler. Oh and don't forget the biannual trips to Disney world or to hunt out west on credit cards. I sprang from uneducated people of another generation and the men by and large did not engage in self destructive behavior like this. sorry you make your bed and don't expect me to cry about it.

I think at least half of the American political class, the republican half, wants Americans to be ignorant. The ignorant are easily duped and manipulated. The GOP establishment clearly knows that, but they never expected someone like Trump to beat them at their own game. That explains why the GOP is generally unwilling to adequately fund public education and is content to punish the non-rich who seek higher education by burying them in debt.

Until now I had deceived myself into believing that I am a college educated hard working East coast Caucasian with moderate views and a penchant for reading a multi-faceted world class newspaper. However, the continued biased reports concerning Mr. Trump and his campaign are quite distasteful and have completely lost objectivity.Now, the journalistic attacks have moved toward his supporters and potential voters. Well, as with many of my fellow unintelligent white trash friends this only cements my unwavering support for the Trump campaign.

I have seen technology take jobs from people more than immigrants. It is a terrible feeling. Most of my peers and I are now working freelance jobs. Sometimes its voluntary but often times it is because we can't find full time jobs with benefits. For those of us over 60 it is the only work available. If you have never been independent you are in for a shock at how hard it can be to run a small sole proprietor business from scratch.

Enormous advances in technology have made the trans-oceanic distances disappear. Foreign-based administrative jobs are now transparent, meaning that "back-room" corporate jobs such as payroll, accounting and corporate management can be off-shored. Jobs in this category also include computer software development and computer system help-line support. The concept of the "virtual corporation", which maintains low levels of "project managers" can scale up or down, and only a small "corporate core" needs to be physically in the USA.

Trump has said that he hires people from other countries over American citizens and thinks Americans are already overpaid. So, why is he so popular with the angry voters who are living from paycheck to paycheck or were forced to retire? Trump is part of the problem, not the solution. The working class voters need wage insurance or a living wage solution and they need the government to step in and help them. Remember the WPA programs from the 30s? My guess is that Trump's supporters don't want to be the takers after years of thinking they were above that and were the makers. Surprise, we are all in the same boat.

there is a much bigger issue than creating jobs for these people. It is figuring out why so many are incapable of learning at a college level and beyond. I refuse to believe that it is nature dictating such a limitation. My money is on nurture; therefore, my money is on being able to solve that problem too.

Until we as a country stop treating intelligence as a disease and take steps to improve education across the board, this is what the fall-out will be. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out they could get to the White House by courting the angry white people vote.

among high school or less, 40% some college, but 33% among college graduates, and 19% among the post-graduates. In no election did Trump get the vote of the majority of college graduates or postgraduates. The education gap is consistent and steady. The gender gap is equally consistent.

The jobs engine the drove the US to its post war boom was the manufacturing sector. That has been gutted - by US consumer decisions.FDR did not practice racial identity politics.

Racism lurks - always - near the surface for ALL human beings. Don't believe me? Go take Harvard's Project Implicit tests (free) and learn about your own racist proclivities!By nature, all human beings tend toward tribalism; we are *wired* to notice and react to "difference". Civilization is the mass awareness of that proclivity towards shunning or rejecting "the other" and creating laws to stop it from becoming reality.When people become stressed, the veneer of civilization starts to break down - our more primitive, wired behaviors take over. That's what is happening now.We also have a huge propensity - as a species - towards cooperation. We have to somehow keep pursuing that "Better Angel of Our Nature" to keep the tide from turning permanently ugly.

As I read this article I began to confront an uncomfortable reality. We, as a society are to blame for Mr. Trump's support. Apparently we have ignored or overlooked the tragic plight faced by a sizable minority. Imagine the unemployed coal minor in West Virgina. His financial life is probably a shambles and he has no realistic prospect of recovering. He feels hopeless and abandoned. He sees publicized efforts to address problems of ethnic minorities and immigrants, yet he sits cold and jobless without anyone clamoring to address his situation. He starts getting angry and frustrated.Then, out of nowhere someone comes who appears to want to fight for him. Finally, someone who might champion his cause. Bring back jobs. Stop cheap labor from coming in.

Nationally, 23 percent of the 25-to-54-year-old population was not working in March, up from 18 percent in 2000. The areas where Trump is most popular appear to be at the forefront of that trend.

Don't people realize that technology, computers, automation and especially robots have replaced more manufacturing and more factories than all the illegal immigrants ever have? On many factory floors you hardly see any human beings at all. Every product is whisked along conveyor belts and assembled (or cooked), and then inspected, labeled, packaged and shipped with a minimum of human intervention. That's today's world. What are we to do? Protest against computers and robots.Also, American corporations have zero loyalty to the USA. Their loyalty is to their bottom line. They take advantage of every tax loophole they can; and if their product is labor intensive they would much rather pay 5000 workers a dollar a day with no benefits rather than stay in America and have to pay someone $18 an hour will vacation time, holiday time off, Soc Sec taxes and Medicare taxes.

This is the Party of Stupid the Republican carefully constructed through painstaking racism, defunding of public education, defunding of infrastructure, hate radio, Fox-Henhouse News and trickle-down poverty.Donald Trump's supporters are the direct result of the Republican's decades-long efforts at dumbing down a large swath of Americans.The Republican Party needs to take a giant proud bow as their electorate walks down the runway of nationally-assisted-suicide.

The irony of all this is that, yes, the world is shifting out from under the feet of the less-educated poor, but none of us face a really BIG or YUGE problem like slavery, Civil War, total war, a Great Depression, or even a gold/silver conflict. Yet Ken Lay and others can seriously muse over the possibility of secession from the union.The goals that so many of T's supporters are crying for are already in the process of being achieved -- the debt is too high but the national deficit has been cut in half under Obama. Millions now have health care that they didn't have before. "Taxed Enough Already" couldn't be more of an inept slogan.I wonder sometimes if the collapse of the USSR was such a good thing. Having a common enemy provided a kind of glue that held us together. Now some of us seem -- recklessly., hysterically, feverishly -- anxious to find an equally powerful enemy in our own ranks.

I can't count the number of my husband's uneducated white southern relations who have taken extensive advantage, repeatedly, of both state and federal programs, including unemployment, food stamps, occasional welfare, and (sometimes specious) "disability." (My husband's mother was one of 11 born to poor sharecroppers, and the only one to leave her subculture

Oh, and about the "myth" that opposition to Islam is only is by simplistic Islamophobes. Let me suggest for those who didn't get to it, this article about about the premier public intellectual of France: "Once Hopeful for Harmony, a Philosopher Voices Discord in France" It said that he has concluded that Islam is not comparable with 'Western enlightenment values."

It's obvious that the changing economy has structurally disadvantaged many less educated people across America. But, it is also true that economically distressed whites enjoy access to exactly the same programs that assist minorities. They just don't "feel" like this is true.

Truth be told, Trump is supported by numerous highly educated people who choose not to support known liars and/or socialists. These same people are tired of candidates who are bought and paid for by secret and evil Super PACs-- Trump is not controlled by these groups. Rubio, Kasich, Cruz and C;inton are.

The counties where Trump is most popular also have the lowest employment participation rates. Ordinarily, those folks would be expected to vote Democratic, which is more likely to continue the government spending that sustains them. Trump followers are willing to support him even though it is probably against their economic interest.So how to explain this? The strong correlation to previous support for George Wallace suggests it's about identity. A certain segment of the population does not accept diversity and change. They cling to white supremacy. The irony, as the article notes, is that these are the same folks who self-identify their heritage as "American," rather than, say "English" or "German." However, to me, they seem very un-American.

If policy hadn't been influenced by campaign funding, perhaps we would be in a better situation. Maybe congress would have paid more attention to improving the education system. It's a shame that most people don't understand that their only true weapon is voting for someone that isn't in debt to an industry. If we don't change our campaign finance system, nothing will change. Our voices will never be heard, our needs will never be met and policy will continue to favor profit, not people.

You are misinterpreting the analysis. This is a correlation analysis and what it says is that there is a moderately strong positive correlation between the % of people in a county that are white and have no high school and the % of people that support Trump. The 61 number is the correlation coefficient. The analysis does NOT show that folks in mobile homes vote for Trump.

There is only one interesting question regarding Trump: can he win Ohio and Florida in the national elections? Otherwise his campaign will turn into a footnote in American history like the campaign of many other unsuccessful candidates (Dukakis someone?). His voters, then, will be forgotten, as they usually are, until the next elections. That's the only time America's, winner takes it all culture, remembers those people exist.

However crude his message, on trade Trump has a legitimate point, which is that the US (not US companies, which don't care about international boundaries, but US workers) has got the short end of trade deals for decades. Whatever benefits the US has gleaned from these deals, they are minuscule compared to their utterly transformative effects on India, Mexico and especially China, which begs the question of why we couldn't have negotiated a better deal, one less devastating to old-line manufacturing. It often seems US negotiators are driven more by a religious belief in and devotion to free-trade principles, than by national self-interest. Trump may be unfit to be president, but I don't doubt he would have driven a harder bargain and come out with a better deal, if only because, unlike US negotiators, he'd be fully prepared to walk away from a deal he didn't like.

It's high time we re-engage in our communities with love and empathy. We need less talk of the theoretical economics underpinning trade deals and the credibility of climate science. It's not because these things are unimportant or irrelevant to governing in a complex world, but because our neighbors are afraid we've forgotten them in all our sophistication. They need to hear and see that we care about them. Our ideas about common efforts to improve their lives need to be less about class and more about community. We need to be clear that even the least among us are important to our common future

So many of the comments on this piece seem to fall into the category of subliminal rationales for long held prejudices that many of us have but don't understand.

this analysis didn’t show a particularly powerful relationship between the racial breakdown of a county and its likelihood of voting for Trump. There are Trump-supporting counties where very high proportions of the population are African-American and others where it was very low, for example.

There's a very powerful stigma associated with being poor in this country. Frankly, it makes it nearly impossible for an elite institution like the Times to write about poor populations without those same people perceiving a condescending tone. At the first mention of trailer parks--even if that is an apt descriptor for a type of housing--the words begin to cut and defenses rise. When spoken by a rich person, those words demean, even if they're not meant to by the speaker

The problem is that "Thug Trump," just so happens to touch on some truths, and existing bi-partisan defects that we ignore. Funny, as different as they are, Ralph Nader made the same point, that the major defects of our country are supported by both parties and thus untouchable. I guess the nature of a revolutionary is part misfit but also sensing the time is ripe for a drastic change. It may be better to look less at the person, and more that the endemic defects that he promises to change. From Huey Long to Norman Thomas, outsiders have had positive effects.

These relatives, who are very pleasant to talk to on a one-to-one basis, are the same people who send us rabid chain emails about how Obama hates America, how we need to "take back our country," etc. "The blacks" are "parasites and takers" and the real reason they invariably vote Republican. They see no relationship between their own "taking" and the "taking" by blacks and Hispanics.

Whether Trump can appeal to enough independent or even blue collar Democrats is problematic absent some sensational catastrophe in the economy or in government. But you never know. Recall the charge of "Rum, Romanism, and rebellion" late in the 1884 election. It changed history

I bought into that "it's the fault of freeloaders" shtick for years, until i was laid off at age 50. Suddenly, I was one of those "freeloaders" with a 30 year impeccable work history and it changed my mind drastically. I've run into people like me from all walks of life; people with degrees and skills who lost jobs and are cut out of returning to the world of employment. I found something eventually, but at half the pay with no benefits. I don't support Trump but he's tapped into the lives of people like me. Globalization has showed us that for those at the very top, the elites, our country and it's workers don't matter much as long as the money keeps flowing. Unfortunately, I can't see that Trump would do much to change that

racism in the US is complicated. Some people who say the right things do the worst things, and vice versa. What gets you in trouble is saying blue-collar stuff like "nappy-headed ho's" White liberals are the most politically correct and the most critical of crude speech. But white liberals often have less contact with blacks than any other whites. Bigotry is not easily identified.

One of the strongest predictors of Trump support is the proportion of the population that is native-born. Relatively few people in the places where Trump is strong are immigrants — and, as their answers on their ancestry reveal, they very much wear Americanness on their sleeve.

The point is that now, the entire middle class and working class have been fleeced by the Repubs AND the Dems, elected representatives who have shirked their duties and spent their time helping their billionaire puppetmasters.

Bernie supporters and Trump supporters have something big in common: their basic grievance, which is that the economy is rigged for the 1%. It's helpful to understand our differences, but then we should be finding common ground, not calling each other names. We're all people; we all deserve dignity and respect.

We are in the early throes of another revolution now, and this one will even more dramatically favor those with superior cognitive abilities and education over those with average or below average cognitive abilities and education. Yet all people at all levels need to eat, have shelter, and pursue lives of dignity and meaning. It remains unclear what kind of society will emerge from the current disruptions, but it is increasingly obvious that the transition will not be pretty.

In fact, Americans could be forgiven for wondering why North Korea is not already designated as a sponsor of terrorism.

Aside from the many stringent limitations a terrorism-sponsor designation imposes on a state, the label serves as a formal indication from the United States that any positive development of diplomatic relations is contingent on abandoning the financing and support of terrorism.

On Feb. 13, 2007, the State Department signed a deal with North Korea in pursuit of a grand bargain: exchanging Pyongyang’s promise of eventual denuclearization for Washington’s guarantees for full diplomatic recognition.

It used to be — and the story behind the decision to remove that designation nearly 10 years ago is the key to understanding America’s failed assumptions about North Korea, how they led to Pyongyang obtaining its nuclear arsenal, and why the United States needs to reverse its approach and relist Pyongyang immediately.

Standing in the way, however, was a decision President Ronald Reagan made nearly 20 years earlier, designating North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism largely in response to its complicity in a 1987 plane bombing that killed 115 people.

Indeed, the State Department linked Pyongyang’s ties to terrorist groups and its nuclear program as a rationale for maintaining the terror designation in 2005.

wo years later, Israel destroyed a nuclear reactor believed to have been built with North Korean help in Syria, a designated state sponsor of terrorism. Although all this was understood at the time, the United States elected to delist North Korea in 2008 — and in so doing, again fell back into its pattern of misunderstanding rogue regimes.

When North Korea reneged on its promise to forgo nuclear weapons in the early 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s administration put together the “Agreed Framework” that paved Pyongyang’s path to nuclearization. When North Korea’s leader at the time, Kim Jong-il, withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 2003, confirming that he intended to build a nuclear weapon, President George W. Bush pushed for the China-led six-party talks with North Korea.

When the country tested its second nuclear weapon in 2009, President Barack Obama opted for “strategic patience.”

“I think everyone is seeing through the P.R. at this point and focusing on both their economic and political power,” Sarah Miller, a critic of Amazon, said about the company. Ms. Miller, who runs the American Economic Liberties Project, an antitrust think tank, added, “I think the narrative is cooked now on their status as a monopoly, their status as an abusive employer and their status as one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Washington, D.C.”

“As it relates to progressive Democrats in general, we’ve been surprised by some of the negative things we’ve seen certain members say in the press and on social media,” he said. “If there’s a progressive company in this country, it’s Amazon. Find me another large company paying two times the minimum wage, providing great health benefits from Day 1, 95 percent education reimbursement, safe working environment, and so on. We really think we are an example of what a U.S. company should be doing for its employees.”

Amazon has made efforts to reach out to the new administration. Dave Clark, who runs the company’s consumer business, sent a letter to the White House in January offering to help with the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine and met virtually with Jeff Zients, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, to discuss the vaccine rollout.

Under Mr. Carney’s leadership, Amazon has taken steps to satisfy its liberal critics. In 2018, Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, attacked the company over its wages. Not long after that, the company announced that it would raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour and push federal policymakers to do the same.

The union organizers in Bessemer have increasingly attracted support from the White House and top lawmakers in Congress. Labor leaders spent weeks pushing Mr. Biden’s staff to have him weigh in on the election at the warehouse.

“We’ve got to protect every worker’s right to form and join a union, and to bargain collectively for better pay, quality health care, a safer workplace and a secure retirement,” said Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington

Mr. Sanders said he appreciated Amazon’s help on the minimum wage. “On the other hand,” he said, “to my mind, I find it hard to understand why Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the wealthiest guy in the world, worth about $182 billion, is spending millions of dollars fighting a union organizing effort in Alabama, where his workers are trying to organize for better wages and better working conditions.”

It recalled the message Amazon had waiting for a delegation of progressive lawmakers who met with union representatives in Alabama this month.At the warehouse, workers held up a large banner with text in bold letters: “CONGRESS: PLEASE MATCH AMAZON’S $15/HOUR MINIMUM WAGE!”