Public Citizen:
"Amazon is price gouging customers on a wide range of essential goods – jacking up prices on face masks, toilet paper and antibacterial soap by up to 1,000% – as shown in a Public Citizen report released today. The report documents a pattern of outrageous price increases for products listed as 'sold by Amazon' as well as those sold by third parties.
'Amazon has fundamentally misled the public, law enforcement and policymakers about price increases during the pandemic,' said Alex Harman, competition policy advocate for Public Citizen and author of the report. 'Amazon has publicly blamed third-party sellers for price increases while continuing to raise prices on its own products and allowing those sellers to increase their prices. The facts demonstrate the need for a federal price gouging law and for Amazon to implement major reforms to its pricing and product listing practices.'
This report details 15 essential products that have been sold by Amazon during the COVID-19 pandemic with markups over the recent price on Amazon.com or other national retailers ranging from 76% to more than 1,000%, and 10 additional essential products sold on Amazon by third-party sellers during the same period with markups ranging from 225% to 941%."
https://www.citizen.org/news/amazons-pandemic-price-gouging-shows-need-for-new-federal-law/
-->The NYT did run an article back in March about price gauging, but there was little said about Amazon or the possible legislation being proposed.
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Common Dreams:
"Illustrating the intensifying inequality that has defined life in the United States for the past four decades—spotlighted throughout the coronavirus crisis—the total amount of wealth gained by the nation's 650 billionaires since March surged past $1 trillion amid Tuesday's record-breaking day on Wall Street, which coincided with reports that 26 million Americans are experiencing hunger.
'During the pandemic that has taken everything from millions, U.S. billionaires have now collectively gained over $1 trillion,' the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a progressive think tank, said Wednesday.
'The increases in billionaire wealth continue to defy gravity in the real economy where millions have lost their jobs, health, and livelihoods,' said Chuck Collins, a scholar of inequality at IPS who has been tracking the evolution of billionaire wealth throughout the coronavirus crisis, in a statement on Wednesday."
-->The NYT didn't even cover this article from the Institute for Policy Studies. Our "newspaper of record" is mostly written to please the oligarchy.
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The Brookings Institute:
"Prior to Election Day, Brookings Metro asked if working-class white voters in struggling Midwestern swing state communities would decide the winner of the presidential race, as they did in 2016.
As a recent Brookings Metro piece on the election noted, Biden’s base resides in more populous, educated, and prosperous communities that are home to the lion’s share of today’s economic action. This pattern certainly held in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Biden won in the most prosperous cities and their suburbs, while Trump held on to the states’ rural areas.
As in 2016, Trump also won numerous struggling older industrial city-regions, which used to be Democratic, blue-collar strongholds. Meanwhile, Biden carried a number of older industrial communities that had turned an economic corner—some that were once squarely Republican."
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/11/23/where-midwesterners-struggle-trumpism-lives-on
-->The NYT ignored this report and its class analysis. Yes, poverty and the huge gap between the ultra rich and the poor both lead to right wing, Trump voters. And if Biden gives us another four years of neoliberalism, we will be back to looking at a possible fascist takeover of our country.
