SHOUTING FIRE: COVID-19 AND GLOBAL WARMING, AN INFLAMMATORY MIX
We speak with Steve Horn, climate reporter for the Real News Network, about the triple wildfires now burning in Arizona. The fires cover hundreds of thousands of acres, more land than Washington, DC, San Francisco, Baltimore, Chicago , Miami, Minneapolis, and Manhattan combined. And the scope and frequency and impact of these fires are increasing as climate change spirals further.
In addition, these wildfires are colliding with the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus is more likely to kill people (morbidity) where the air quality is diminished by smoke from the wildfires. Likewise, the probability that people will get sick with COVID-19 – and the harm to their health if they do – is worse in locations where wildfires are raging. The compounding effect is similar to what happens when a person has one or more of the pre-existing conditions and other health risks is facing the coronavirus pandemic.
How can we prevent or minimize the harm from these fires? Can we reverse the trend of fires that last longer, are more intense, and destroy more life and property?
Part Two:
AMAZON IS ABUSING ITS MONOPOLY POWER
We have an engaging, energizing conversation with Ron Knox, senior researcher for the Independent Business Initiative and member of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). We discuss his article in The Nation magazine entitled “How Amazon Used the Pandemic to Amass More Monopoly Power.”
After years building its dominance as a platform for third-party retailers – to the point where, instead of saying that we’re “going shopping,” we now simply say we’re “going on Amazon” – Amazon has made every effort to grow its market power in the logistics and delivery industry.
That is, after taking orders for a product, Amazon steers away from shipping the product through competing logistics companies like UPS, FedEx and the USPS. Instead Amazon has built Amazon Prime as its go-to system for “purchase fulfilment”: packing and warehousing products, then loading, shipping and delivering them to the final customer. Amazon has offered strong incentives to its shopping customers to persuade them to join Amazon Prime and then to click on Prime to ship the product they’ve bought.
Now during COVID-19, when everyone is shopping on Amazon to meet all their needs, Prime is not quite prepared to deliver products in timely fashion. Did Amazon offer its customers the choice to get faster delivery by using FedEx or another competing logistics company? No. Amazon chose to use its monopoly power to hold customers to its “Prime” delivery system even though they’ll have to wait a long time.
Is this kind of dominant market power what we want our economy to look like? It certainly is not what we’ve traditionally meant when we’ve thought about a “free market economy.”
