The World According to Amazon | Journeyman Pictures

Transcript

SPEAKER	TC IN	TC OUT	TEXT
1-MAN IN COWBOY HAT	10:00:29,999	10:00:54,291	I thought: this guy, he's drunk. You know, come out here and buy country, these ranches to put a space ship deal out here. He's gotta be drinking some kind of bad whisky or something. It's true! But I guess he's... he's got enough money to do it. Whatever he wants to do, he's got the money to play the game.
2-MAN DRIVING CAR	10:00:58,299	10:01:21,883	- From 10 miles outside of town to highway 62-180, it's 45 miles and he owns it, all of that, on both sides. They... they don't let anything out about it.
3-MAN DRIVING CAR	10:01:29,997	10:01:36,706	This is the entrance, but you have to have the key in order to get in.
4- COUNTDOWN	10:01:37,367	10:01:42,742	- T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six...
5- MAN DRIVING CAR	10:01:42,870	10:01:53,704	- Just like average, ordinary guy until you talk to him. And then you realize: this guy has got a lot on his plate and he knows what he's doing.
6- COUNTDOWN	10:01:53,825	10:01:59,034	- Five, four, main engines start, two, one...
7- FEMALE JOURNALIST	10:02:16,647	10:02:22,440	- Number one is Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. He is the first centibillionaire.
8- FRENCH JOURNALIST	10:02:22,565	10:02:27,232	(Translated from French) - Last Friday, the fortune of Amazon’s boss surpassed $100 billion.
9- JEFF BEZOS	10:02:30,024	10:02:44,525	- I'm using my resources to put in place heavy lifting infrastructure so that the next generation of people can have a dynamic entrepreneurial explosion into space.
10- NARRATOR	10:02:58,334	10:03:03,126	Is the Earth still large enough to satisfy the ambitions of Jeff Bezos?
11- NARRATOR	10:03:25,068	10:03:33,819	Amazon is the largest store in the world. It sends out 158 parcels per second, adding up to 5 billion each year.
12- NARRATOR	10:04:01,209	10:04:14,042	Its boss, Jeff Bezos, has a single obsession: to sell everything, instantly, everywhere, and to satisfy without delay his customers’ every desire.
13- NARRATOR	10:04:16,042	10:04:20,834	There are 300 million Amazon customers worldwide today.
14- NARRATOR	10:04:29,501	10:04:40,626	The multinational company is revolutionizing commerce and the way we consume. It has even succeeded in shrinking time and space.
15- NARRATOR	10:05:11,968	10:05:15,927	How exactly is Amazon taking over the whole planet?
16- NARRATOR	10:05:17,587	10:05:22,754	What does Jeff Bezos want that he doesn’t already have?
17- NARRATOR	10:05:24,511	10:05:29,053	What future does the multinational wish to impose on us, and at what cost?
18- NARRATOR	10:05:50,375	10:05:57,125	Our story begins in 1994, in a Seattle suburb.
19- NARRATOR	10:05:57,292	10:06:03,918	Jeff Bezos, a thirty-something Wall-Street expatriate, creates Amazon in his parents’ garage.
20- JEFF BEZOS - UNKNOWN MAN 1	10:06:07,417	10:06:14,168	- I'm Jeff Bezos. - And what is your claim to fame? - I'm the founder of amazon.com.
21- UNKNOWN MAN 1 - JEFF BEZOS	10:06:14,293	10:06:32,542	- Where did you get an idea for amazon.com? - Well, three years ago, I was in New York City working for a quantitative hedge fund when I came across the startling statistic that web usage was growing at 2300% a year. So I decided I would try and find a business plan that made sense in the context of that growth.
22- NARRATOR	10:06:39,117	10:06:41,325	- In the beginning, they were only three.
23- PAUL DAVIS	10:06:44,057	10:06:55,224	- One of the things that was really happening in Seattle at that time was grunge. So you had Nirvana and Pearl Jam and all of that kind of music. So there were plaid shirts on everyone.
24- PAUL DAVIS	10:06:55,308	10:06:56,349	Oops.
25- NARRATOR	10:06:56,464	10:07:01,464	- Paul Davis is one of the programmers who developed Amazon’s very first website.
26- PAUL DAVIS	10:07:01,589	10:07:13,672	- And Amazon itself was out in the suburb, really was very far from the city and clubs and any kind of scene that might be happening.
27- PAUL DAVIS	10:07:13,797	10:07:26,465	There were basically two programmers working hard at writing code and Jeff working hard on the sort of businessy side of... of the new company.
28- PAUL DAVIS	10:07:26,584	10:07:44,083	There wasn't this kind of really fuelled energy, you know. Like, Oh my God! You know, what's going to be our goal today? What are we going to take off today? Oh my God, if that isn't done isn’t done today, things fall apart. It was more just a case of methodically working as quickly as we could.
29- PAUL DAVIS	10:07:44,209	10:08:04,751	Books arrived, somebody was going to have to pack them up and ship them out. And so sometimes that would be Jeff. This is like the super early days, when it was really just still the three of us plus his wife working part-time. Sometimes, it would be his wife Mackenzie, sometimes it would even be Shel or I, if there weren't that many and we weren’t super tied up in something.
30- PAUL DAVIS	10:08:04,857	10:08:36,525	This was at a time where, you know, typically we were handling, you know, maybe less than 20 books per day or something. Jeff, clearly a very smart person. Clearly very energetic and, you know, filled with a vision of what he wanted to build. Filled with a huge amount of confidence as well. By confidence, I don't really mean certainty. I don't think he was certain that Amazon would work. But I think he was just absolutely confident that this is what he should be doing.
31- NARRATOR	10:08:47,083	10:08:58,459	- 25 years later, Amazon no longer sends 20 parcels, but 14 million a day. The company owns over 250 warehouses and delivers on five continents.
32- NARRATOR	10:09:19,999	10:09:38,501	Amazon’s success caught Stacy Mitchell’s attention. She heads the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a research center studying the evolution of the American economy. For the past ten years, she has been closely monitoring the growth of the beast.
33- STACY MITCHELL	10:09:39,626	10:10:45,085	- Amazon is like... it's like this invisible force. You know, it's got its tentacles in so many aspects of the economy. There's nothing that Amazon isn't trying to get into. They're now the biggest clothing retailer in the U.S. and they produce a lot of clothing. Hum, bookstores, toy stores, hardware stores. It's kind of grown invisibly. It doesn't get noticed or covered by the media in the same way because it's not physically present except in just a few places. Amazon is growing so rapidly, they are creating a lot of jobs, but as they grow, they are destroying a lot of jobs. And we found that for every one new Amazon job that had been created, there were two jobs that were lost at existing businesses. We've lost about 85,000 independent small businesses in the last 10 years. We've lost about 35,000 small and mid-size manufactures. You know, Amazon isn't the only cause but it's the top cause of those losses.
34- NARRATOR	10:10:52,459	10:11:07,334	- Stacy Mitchell investigates Amazon’s strategy of conquest. The company has recently launched a local service for busy city dwellers: food and grocery delivery in less than two hours.
35- NARRATOR	10:11:07,459	10:11:15,501	To maintain that pace, they replaced their large warehouses by smaller units located in city centers.
36- STACY MITCHELL - AMAZON EMPLOYEE	10:11:16,542	10:11:20,083	- I was just curious, is this Amazon's delivery center? - Yeah.
37- STACY MITCHELL - AMAZON EMPLOYEE	10:11:20,209	10:11:23,959	- Yeah. How many floors do they have? - Eleven, twelve...
38- STACY MITCHELL	10:11:24,083	10:11:35,999	- Eleven, twelve floors, wow! A lot of trucks going in and out. Yeah. That's interesting. Is that what this is for, it's to bring stuff to everyone who lives in this neighborhood?
39- AMAZON EMPLOYEE - STACY MITCHELL	10:11:36,083	10:11:45,125	- Yeah. - Right. Do you see a lot of different kinds of goods going on and off the trucks? - Mostly like food stuff, groceries.
40- STACY MITCHELL - AMAZON EMPLOYEE	10:11:45,417	10:11:56,126	- Hum-hum, a lot of food and groceries. Yeah. Hum. That's interesting. How long have they been here? - A while. - Hum-hum. Yeah. Thanks!
41- STACY MITCHELL	10:12:00,292	10:12:28,042	You know, there's a kind of balancing act that they seem to walk between slowly taking over everything or rapidly taking over everything and yet, not being so visible that people become alarmed. So in some ways, you know, the train has left the station. And as a society, if we are going to try to figure out how to bring that back, it's much harder to do now then it would have been ten years ago if we had noticed what was really happening.
42- NARRATOR	10:12:30,167	10:12:36,915	- In the United States, Amazon now controls half of all online commerce.
43- NARRATOR	10:12:39,791	10:12:53,248	The company leads online sales in clothing, electronics, books, DVDs, personal care, and beauty products.
44- NARRATOR	10:12:53,331	10:13:04,623	It also offers video-on-demand, online music streaming, video games, insurance, data storage, as well as drugs.
45- NARRATOR	10:13:04,747	10:13:14,955	Amazon also embodies a certain vision of America, progressive and liberal. Its acquisition of Whole Foods, leader of high-end organic produce, is a good example.
46- NARRATOR	10:13:15,065	10:13:31,983	Jeff Bezos is a complex character. He is a CEO as well as an investor, but in 2013, he personally acquired the Washington Post, one of the most prestigious newspapers in the U.S., a left-leaning publication fiercely opposed to Donald Trump.
47- NARRATOR	10:13:32,245	10:13:39,037	Step by step, the Amazon Empire extends its grip on the world.
48- ALLEN GILLESPIE	10:13:41,005	10:14:03,964	- Yeah, really it... Amazon, at this point, it represents the transformation of the American economy. I mean, the old saying when I first came to the Street back in the day was, what is good for GM is good for the country. Today, that’s largely Amazon as the largest market cap company. It’s it’s greatly intertwined with the entire American and global economy.
49- STACY MITCHELL	10:14:04,075	10:14:26,659	- Amazon essentially controls the marketplace. It's not really a market, it's a private arena. Amazon sets the rules. It gets to decide which companies get the best spots, which companies rank in the search rankings, who can even be there, what they are allowed to sell, how they can communicate with their customers. What they have to pay in order to be part of it.
50- ALLEN GILLESPIE	10:14:26,739	10:14:53,694	- When you look at Amazon, you look at their economic performance, you have to say it largely... If it The old saying is, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. So, Amazon looks like a monopoly, trades like a monopoly, makes money like a monopoly, behaves like a monopoly. So, when I looked at it, you have to use monopolies in the traditional sense to find a comparable type company.
51- STACY MITCHELL	10:14:53,819	10:15:32,486	- If you think about what a monopoly is, it doesn't just mean that there's only one company. Even though it has mono in the name, it doesn’t just mean that there’s only one company. The real definition of a monopoly is when you have the ability to control the terms by which other players can access the market. It’s when you have that kind of power to dictate what happens. And Amazon has that power. Amazon has become a kind of gatekeeper. And their strategy is very much about being the e-commerce platform for the entire world.
52- NARRATOR	10:15:38,813	10:15:59,314	- Amazon is conquering one territory after another. After the US, Jeff Bezos took control of England, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico and Australia. Today, the decisive battle for the company is taking place in India.
53- NARRATOR	10:16:13,561	10:16:23,728	In 2013, Amazon arrived in India with the intention of gaining control of a market estimated at $100 billion. Conquer or falter.
54- ANIL KUMAR	10:16:47,224	10:17:12,183	- What Amazon has been able to achieve globally is they’ve been able to win pretty much all major markets globally, right, whether it is in Europe or in the U.S. and some of the other Asian markets as well, outside of China. The only battlefield which is still open is India. So A, this is the only battlefield still open and B, there is a significantly large battlefield.
55- INDIAN CUSTOMER AND DELIVERY GUY	10:17:15,545	10:17:28,338	(translated from Indian dialect) - Who is this? - Amazon Now, sir. Good morning, ma'am. - Put it in front of the door. Put it in front. Just put this here.
56- NARRATOR	10:17:28,345	10:17:34,010	- India is the fastest growing economy in the world, with a 7% growth in 2017.
57- INDIAN CUSTOMER AND DELIVERY GUY	10:17:34,136	10:17:36,178	(translated from Indian dialect) - Okay, ma'am. Good morning. - Thank you.
58- NARRATOR	10:17:46,385	10:17:54,635	- In recent years, some 200 million Indians have joined the middle class, dramatically increasing the numbers of Internet users and eager consumers.
59- NARRATOR	10:18:04,633	10:18:10,173	As a result, Indian e-commerce is growing by 30 to 50% every year.
60- NARRATOR	10:18:11,959	10:18:34,168	Amazon is not the only company trying to tap into this growth. Competing with Jeff Bezos is Flipkart, the leader of the Indian market, founded by two ex-Amazon employees, and Paytm, a new start-up financed by Chinese giant Ali Baba. The three of them are waging a multi-billion-dollar commercial war.
61- NARRATOR	10:18:34,294	10:18:47,586	In his first year, Jeff Bezos invested $2 billion, and then two billions more the following year. To gain market share, Amazon has already invested $5 billion in India, without seeing a profit.
62- ANIL KUMAR	10:18:50,670	10:19:04,167	- All these three players are armed 'till the tooth, they have a lot of ammunition, a lot of funding, big guys backing up. So you don’t see anyone falling apart anytime soon.
63- NARRATOR	10:19:07,626	10:19:15,625	- The battle gets even more complex, as these multinational corporations are facing a very strong nationalist pushback in India.
64- NARRATOR	10:19:16,606	10:19:26,457	This is the case in Old Delhi, the commercial district of the Indian capital. Here, commercial structures have remained unchanged for hundreds of years.
65- INDIAN MERCHANTS	10:19:34,174	10:20:01,299	(translated from Indian dialect) - We have done nothing. Even if we are small as microbes, so what? We are treated as thieves and not as businessmen. We have not yet taken arms. We have not beaten anyone. Go build your business in your own house on your own floors! What is the need to build your business in others' houses? - I agree! I agree! Those who are here... who have been invited, who are present, I'd like you to listen to them. Then we can discuss. We're all sitting here together. - Listen... Nobody is revolting.
66- NARRATOR	10:20:01,435	10:20:14,601	- Sitting at this table are fifteen angry men. The largest group of merchants in Old Delhi. Each owns several shops in the neighborhood. They are the first to feel the impact of Amazon’s presence.
67- MERCHANT	10:20:14,709	10:20:36,543	(Translated from Indian dialect) - Remember before all this happened, when we were school kids. In grade 7, we learnt how India was colonized. was colonized. We learnt what really happened. The British came here supposedly to do business but then they slowly invaded India.
68- NARRATOR	10:20:46,323	10:20:53,365	The small shops of Old Delhi's crowded streets have been supplying a livelihood to its local merchants for generations.
69- NARRATOR	10:20:56,634	10:21:01,801	For 30 years now, Satyendra Jain has been the local scale expert.
70- SATYENDRA JAIN	10:21:01,926	10:21:15,218	- My father was also a businessman. Before me, he was looking after this business. And in the beginning, he was also assisting me. Now, I'm independent, with my son.
71- SATYENDRA JAIN	10:21:15,364	10:21:34,864	(Translated from Indian dialect) - Listen, the clients are coming. You can’t guess how many will come tomorrow based on how many came today. You can’t say how many will come. But the customers are there. Business is going on. We are not yet wiped out by these big companies.
72- NARRATOR	10:21:37,859	10:21:44,610	- The merchants of Old Delhi are worried, but they have a major asset to slow down Amazon’s rise.
73- NARRATOR	10:21:49,609	10:22:05,526	They form the electoral base of the BJP, the party in power in India since 2014. Its leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, promotes an exacerbated form of nationalism and defends a protectionist view of the economy.
74- NARRATOR	10:22:08,607	10:22:16,231	The support of the merchants helped him get elected, and so the party’s economic adviser seeks to protect their interests.
75- GOPAL KRISHNA AGARWAL	10:22:17,397	10:23:07,189	- We will not allow any kinds of Amazon or unhealthy competition being developed. We will take care of the interest of the manufacturers, we will take care of the interest of the small businesses. We will also take care of consumer preferences and consumer better service delivery to the consumers. There is a restriction on the gain to these ideas but if they beat those conditions with regard to at least 30% procurement from domestic manufacturers, then how they repatriate their incomes to their country of origin. If those concerns are taken care of, then they can very well establish that. But unless those regulations are met, it will not be possible.
76- NARRATOR	10:23:09,696	10:23:19,947	- The Indian government recently introduced a bill that could severely limit Amazon’s room to maneuver, notably by preventing it from undercutting prices.
77- NARRATOR	10:23:21,961	10:23:29,128	Jeff Bezos had to engage in a diplomatic game. He regularly meets with Prime Minister Modi.
78- ANIL KUMAR	10:23:31,884	10:23:55,385	- It’s a significant stake for Amazon and for the kind of investments which Amazon has been doing in Indian market is reflection of the point that how seriously they take this market. And if it feels to reflect bad in a global way for Amazon, it’s not a regional story, it’s a global story for Amazon.
79	10:23:55,637	10:24:18,176	(song in Indian dialect)
80- NARRATOR	10:24:18,259	10:24:24,091	- To counter the Americans, the merchants of Old Delhi plan to ensure the government does not forget them.
81	10:24:24,258	10:24:46,925	(song in Indian dialect)
82- INDIAN MERCHANT 2	10:24:50,164	10:25:10,623	- This will be hard. Because their plan is for five years or ten years down the lane. Because they have deep pockets, they can afford to sustain big losses. That is why they are coming to India. You can see any example in the world. Wherever they went in the past, in the first instance, they created their own market and again, then created their monopoly and that is war...
83- INDIAN MERCHANT 3	10:25:10,762	10:25:31,471	- All these companies, like Carrefour, they are selling in India goods less than manufacturing cost. They can survive selling goods cheaper for five years, seven years. But the small shopkeepers of India cannot survive for five months.
84- NARRATOR	10:25:36,501	10:25:43,584	- This bus will go around the country to alert other merchants and the population at large of the threat that looms over India.
85- INDIAN MERCHANT 4	10:25:45,957	10:25:53,124	(Translated from Indian dialect) - Arun, is the bus ready? Arun, go! Susheel?
86- NARRATOR	10:26:18,787	10:26:33,329	- In 2018, Amazon announced its intention to invest, yet again, another $ 2 billion in the country. Its operations in India have so far resulted in a net loss of $883 million.
87- NARRATOR	10:26:40,118	10:26:50,535	Investing massive amounts of money, often at a loss, in order to conquer market share, is the foundation of Jeff Bezos' global strategy.
88- NARRATOR	10:26:51,785	10:27:01,491	Despite this risky plan, Amazon’s boss still maintains the confidence of the financial markets: Amazon’s stock value rises constantly.
89- NARRATOR	10:27:03,491	10:27:08,408	In the last four years, it has increased fivefold.
90- STACY MITCHELL	10:27:12,033	10:27:48,236	- Amazon lost about $3 billion in its first six years in business, selling books at a loss. And it worked, you know. I mean, now Amazon is the dominant book retailer, with more than half the market. And they’ve consistently done that in one sector after another, where they go in, they lose money. Other companies that are not don't have the same backing from Wall Street, aren’t able to operate at a loss. They go out of business, Amazon takes over. You know, this is a company that’s... that is, you know, able to lose money like that in a way that no one else is.
91- ALLEN GILLESPIE	10:27:48,278	10:28:20,737	- Jeff Bezos, CEO, I mean, one of the things when you’re analyzing a company is management’s credibility. He spent time on Wall Street at a large hedge fund. So I believe he sort of intuitively knew what institutional investors were looking for and knew how to educate them about time frames. I mean, as an analyst, it’s not just about how much cash but you wanna know when that cash is expected to come in the door. That helps you build better financial models. And so, I believe he did a good job being able to speak the language to financial market participants.
92- STACY MITCHELL	10:28:20,775	10:28:54,567	- Jeff Bezos has been very astute at how he communicates what he’s doing to Wall Street. And he always talks about this idea that Amazon is for the long term. That he is not focused on the short term. That what he’s building is something much bigger and it’s over the long term. And Wall Street investors have very much bought into that idea and they have backed this company even in the years when Amazon lost a lot of money. Years when they made very little money. Wall Street continued to back this company.
93- NARRATOR	10:28:55,683	10:29:03,309	- Jeff Bezos was successful in imposing his long-term vision to an economy geared towards short-term profits.
94- NARRATOR	10:29:03,437	10:29:11,561	Having secured the confidence of Wall Street, he was able to make all of the world’s commodities available in one click.
95- NARRATOR	10:29:26,602	10:29:43,017	This ideal of accessibility was born 50 years ago in San Francisco, capital of the American counterculture. GAFA, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, are the unexpected heirs to these California hippies.
96- STREET POET	10:29:44,933	10:30:09,138	- A click, like that. Press your middle finger into your thumb, drag them apart snapping, like that, you can find adult pajamas with cat memes or typewriter's fashion manual. You can have insulin syringes and wallets, greeting cards even books, like that. You can have anything delivered to your door. A snap. And forever to consider why you did.
97- NARRATOR	10:30:16,972	10:30:25,804	- In the 60s, in California, thousands of young Americans turned away from industrial society, the Vietnam War and the atomic bomb.
98- NARRATOR	10:30:30,344	10:30:39,510	They decided to return to the land and live in communities based on new principles. This was the birth of the commune movement.
99- FRED TURNER	10:30:39,510	10:31:17,011	- They were anti-big technology. They didn't like bombs, they didn't like heavy industry. But they loved LSD, they loved automobiles, they loved VW vans. They loved the products, the kind of consumer products of industrial society. And what they wanted to do was take those consumer products and repurpose them. Turn them into the foundations of a new kind of society. A society built on shared experiences, personal ambition, hum, consumption. Consumption, for the communalists, was going to be the foundation of a consciousness-oriented society.
100- NARRATOR	10:31:19,090	10:31:29,716	- The Whole Earth Catalog was part of the movement. This publication was created by Steward Brand, a former biology student and a jack-of-all-trades.
101- NARRATOR	10:31:31,119	10:31:38,911	He wanted to help communalists find everything they needed to fend for themselves, by showing them where to buy all the necessary tools.
102- FRED TURNER	10:31:48,962	10:32:25,337	- It's so weird because, right, so these people are going to build farms, but what kind of tools do they take? Well, they take books. And that's because what people wanted in the communes was not just farm equipment, but consciousness equipment. They wanted to change their minds. Catalog is absolutely central to the counterculture and to the... to the commune movement of the late 1960s. But it's also central to Silicon Valley. They found this world and they began to reimagine computers as the kinds of tools that The Whole Earth Catalog had promised.
103- STEVE JOBS	10:32:25,583	10:32:56,916	- When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. On the back cover of their final issue were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself.
104- FRED TURNER	10:32:57,046	10:33:31,171	- You know, when you look at the Catalog, it is trying to give you access to goods that will transform your life. And it is trying to be whole. It is trying to literally be the whole world of goods. You can see that now in the Amazon world, on steroids. Amazon is, in many ways, trying to be the whole world of access to the things you might want to buy. In its structure, in its interconnections, in its... being a global information system to supply goods to make your life better, it's the Catalog. Online.
105- NARRATOR	10:33:32,663	10:33:43,581	- Thanks to the Internet, has Amazon globalized the ideals of the Whole Earth Catalog? But affinities between hippies and Wall Street stop here.
106- NARRATOR	10:33:48,949	10:33:59,781	Jeff Bezos is a libertarian advocating for small government. He values complete entrepreneurial freedom, unimpeded by laws and regulations.
107- FRED TURNER	10:34:02,822	10:34:42,531	- Amazon burned off this social vision that animated so many in the 1960s. The hope of a better world through consumption, through interconnected information systems, that's gone. At least it's gone for the consumers of Amazon. And it's gone along with my local bookstores. It's gone along with my local shops. It's gone! The civic world is not something that I see Amazon caring about at all. And I think that's a great shame. I think it's picked up on one of the core elements of The Whole Earth Catalog but it's lost whatever civic vision animated the catalog and that's a great shame.
108- ALEXANDER SCHREIBER	10:35:05,412	10:35:22,037	(Translated from German) My name is Alexander Schreiber. I grew up in Leipzig and I live here now. I am 41 years old. I have worked at Amazon Leipzig for about 7 years, I started in August 2011.
109- ALEXANDER SCHREIBER	10:35:25,379	10:35:41,837	(Translated from German) So over the years, I have seen a lot. And now I can work at all of the large departments; Receive, Stow, Pick and Packing.
110- NARRATOR	10:35:46,102	10:35:59,768	- Before joining Amazon, Alexander was a soldier in the German army. But in the warehouse, he was confronted with a ruthless work culture, where employees are treated like robots.
111- ALEXANDER SCHREIBER	10:36:03,499	10:37:01,874	(Translated from German) - Because how it usually works is that they create a position. Afterwards, the human contribution is inserted, like a piece of a puzzle. Not the other way around. At work, it is not about the single procedure of storing an item or picking up the item or packing it into a package. Rather, the challenge lies in the constant repetition. That you might do something 500 times a day, maybe 10,000 times a week, 500,000 times a year. And meanwhile, staying healthy in your body, physically, and in your mind, psychologically. Keeping the precision after 500,000 times, to still be doing it well enough.
112- AGNIESZKA MRÓZ	10:37:04,051	10:37:30,508	- You have a scanner then there's a line that link where you have to go. When you pack, you have to move the way where computer stands and the scanners and the managers and teachers and leaders teach you to make so-called equations of movement. So first, you take this hand, this hand, you pack like this and you pack and do the line and you really have to work... follow all these movements.
113- AGNIESZKA MRÓZ	10:37:32,317	10:37:55,609	There is something new in this sense. That you work as a machine but you are also controlled by machines. And this is something scary. If you don’t follow this rhythm of the that corporation pushes on you, you’re just not accepted. They tell you, If you don’t like working here, you just go. We don’t want unhappy workers.
114- ALEXANDER SCHREIBER	10:37:55,818	10:38:22,027	(Translate from German) - And also, when I have to do this 500,000 times a year, I don't get bored to an extent that causes "bore out syndrome". It has the same effects as a burnout, but it is characterized by constant intellectual underchallenge. That's the challenge. And that's the psychological requirement for the employees. The main one, in my opinion.
115- NARRATOR	10:38:25,070	10:38:37,696	- Long ago, one man saw that Amazon was heading towards dehumanizing work conditions. It's the reason Paul Davis, Amazon's first programmer, left the company after just over a year.
116- PAUL DAVIS	10:38:39,995	10:39:14,120	- I think the main feeling I had was that the company didn't really care very much about its employees at all. You know, if they got burnt out, who cared. There was another person waiting to come work there and enjoy Seattle and enjoy being in a cool new web commerce start-up thing. So I just felt that I felt like the company just didn't have to care. And I think Jeff didn't really have to care. You know, I think his take was: you know, my job is to bring in people, get as much as I can out of them. And if that causes them to burn out, well, you know, it causes them to burn out.
117- PROTEST ORGANIZER 1	10:39:14,623	10:39:17,790	(Translated from German) - Everyone, get over here!
118- NARRATOR	10:39:17,931	10:39:22,223	- In Germany, on Black Friday, the unions are calling for a strike.
119- PROTEST ORGANIZER 1	10:39:22,349	10:39:27,807	(Translated from German) - I am welcoming you to this strike against Amazon.
120- PROTEST ORGANIZER 1	10:39:31,523	10:39:36,232	(Translated from German) Give it up for Alex, who organized today's event.
121- ALEXANDER SCHREIBER	10:39:38,132	10:39:44,549	(Translated from German) - Thanks to those of you who helped me, it went well, good job!
122- NARRATOR	10:39:47,186	10:39:55,394	- In Europe, Jeff Bezos is facing strong states where social protections are especially important and where employees have more labor rights.
123- ALEXANDER SCHREIBER	10:39:55,521	10:39:59,063	(Translated from German) - … after individually getting to Augustusplatz.
124- NARRATOR	10:39:59,190	10:40:07,482	- For the last 5 years, Verdi, the main German union, has been organizing strikes in the country’s 11 Amazon warehouses.
125- ALEXANDER SCHREIBER - DEMONSTRATOR 1	10:40:07,594	10:40:15,012	(Translated from German) - Did you sign up for the strike with your phone and e-mail? - Done. - Good.
126- NARRATOR	10:40:15,141	10:40:28,308	- The workers are mainly asking for wage increases. Thanks to these mobilizations, the Leipzig warehouse workers have successfully increased their wages by 11.2% in the last 5 years.
127- ALEXANDER SCHREIBER	10:40:28,428	10:40:31,594	(In German) - See you tomorrow then, thank you!
128- NARRATOR	10:40:45,807	10:40:55,016	- April 2018. The major German media group Axel Springer is about to award Bezos its prize for most innovative person of the year.
129- NARRATOR	10:41:00,480	10:41:05,273	Verdi has called on workers from all over Europe to come protest in front of the building.
130- NARRATOR	10:41:07,794	10:41:15,878	Standing alongside the Germans today are Polish, Italian and French workers: they are one thousand strong.
131- MASKED DEMONSTRATOR	10:41:29,495	10:41:34,079	(Translated from German) - Why don't you buy something at Amazon? A can of dogfood maybe.
132- GERMAN JOURNALIST - JEFF BEZOS	10:42:05,418	10:42:32,668	- Welcome to Berlin. - Thanks. It's great to be here. - Today, Amazon is employing 566,000 people. You're probably the biggest job creator of recent times. At the same time, you are aggressively criticized by unions and by media for paying low wages, for inappropriate working conditions. How do you deal with these accusations?
133- JEFF BEZOS	10:42:32,773	10:42:45,940	- When you do anything new or innovative, you have to be willing to be misunderstood. If you cannot... If you can't afford to be misunderstood, then for goodness’ sake, don't do anything new or innovative.
134- DEMONSTRATOR 2	10:42:46,066	10:42:48,984	(Translated from German) - We no longer tighten our belts, we raise our fists!
135- JEFF BEZOS	10:42:49,099	10:42:53,641	- I'm very proud of our working conditions and I'm very proud of the wages that we pay.
136- DEMONSTRATOR 3	10:42:53,767	10:42:57,847	(Translated from German) - Even if Jeff Bezos doesn't like it, we will continue!
137- JEFF BEZOS	10:42:57,931	10:43:06,724	- In Germany, we employ 16,000 people, we pay at the high end of the range for any comparable work.
138- DEMONSTRATOR 4	10:43:06,862	10:43:13,238	- We demand wages and benefits that allow us to work less so we can live more!
139- JEFF BEZOS	10:43:13,363	10:43:22,571	- We have very good communications with our employees so we don't believe that we need a union to be an intermediary between us and our employees.
140- DEMONSTRATOR 4	10:43:22,712	10:43:27,004	- Solidarity to Germany, Poland and Spain, to all the Amazon workers.
141- GERMAN JOURNALIST - JEFF BEZOS	10:43:29,996	10:43:38,455	- ... congratulate you for all you have achieved. Congratulations. - Thank you. You're very nice. Thank you. That was great. Thank you. Thank you guys, thank you.
142- NARRATOR	10:43:39,803	10:44:01,387	- In 2017, Amazon made $178 billion in total revenue. The multinational is crushing all its competitors in online sales. But Amazon is also the leader in another area. It has nothing to do with parcels or material goods, but it is of strategic importance.
143- NARRATOR	10:44:01,989	10:44:14,448	The cloud. An online data storage infrastructure. Entire databases and web services are physically hosted in Amazon’s data centers, huge buildings filled with servers.
144- NARRATOR	10:44:24,262	10:44:39,554	You have to be a bit of an artist and a geek to find the cloud interesting. Like Ingrid Burrington. For the past 3 years, the journalist has been investigating Amazon's least known division: Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud service.
145- INGRID BURRINGTON	10:44:46,944	10:45:12,736	- Once you start kind of digging into it, you realize, like, so many of the products that are part of online life have some piece of their infrastructure on Amazon’s infrastructure. You’re booking a flight through Expedia, that’s an Amazon Web Services’ client. You are, like, reading the New York Times or... like Vogue or something, it's like, that’s using Amazon Web Services.
146- NARRATOR	10:45:16,004	10:45:35,671	- Roughly a third of the information available on the cloud is hosted on Amazon-owned servers. For fear of hackers, the company tries to remain discreet and does not reveal the location of these data centers. To find their address, Ingrid Burrington connects the dots by finding any available clue on the web.
147- INGRID BURRINGTON	10:45:37,103	10:46:48,436	- Data centers, they have to get permits to have like diesel generators and stuff. Or they have like... basically like kind of arrangements for like tax breaks that like governments are required to kind of put this stuff somewhere online. They don't necessarily make it super easy to find but, like, if you just kind of look for like any PDF file that might have these words, Google crawlers can do the rest for you. This is a Virginia Department of Environmental Quality document that, ah, is basically telling the person who is kind of the manager of a data center in Northern Virginia that like basically... like, they have a... This is actually amending a permit that they already had for having diesel emergency generators at the data center. This is their business address and they're authorized to conserve and operate diesel emergency generators at this location. And that's the location of a data center! It's sort of like... it's like a treasure hunt. With like really boring treasures.
148- NARRATOR	10:46:56,542	10:47:03,751	- Today’s treasure hunt leads Ingrid to Virginia. In this State, she has spotted 5 data centers belonging to Amazon.
149- INGRID BURRINGTON	10:47:07,842	10:47:34,635	- 70% of the world's Internet travels through Northern Virginia, on a daily basis. Like, if you... And, you know, it's probably like, especially if you are like connecting to the Internet from, like, across the Atlantic and you're going to anything that has a server in the United States, it's very likely that your connection is going to bounce through Northern Virginia.
150- GPS VOICE - INGRID BURRINGTON	10:47:39,559	10:47:44,601	- (GPS): Take the next right, then you'll arrive at your destination. - We're at the destination. Be quiet, computer!
151- INGRID BURRINGTON	10:47:52,672	10:48:00,964	Welcome to the cloud! It... it looks like this. It's very square. It's not very fluffy.
152- NARRATOR	10:48:05,826	10:48:21,577	- Amazon owns 120 data centers like this one, spread around the world. In 2017, Amazon Web Services accounted for 12% of its turnover but 60% of its profits.
153- STACY MITCHELL	10:49:04,799	10:50:13,300	- Amazon, a lot is a retailer, but it's really... it's a mistake to think about Amazon that way. Amazon is a company that really wants to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy. So it wants to be the platform on which all buying and selling happens. It wants to be basically the interface between all buyers and sellers. It is a major part of the cloud. Its Amazon Web Services controls about a third of the world's cloud computing capacity. And increasingly, it's moving into shipping and package delivery. There isn't anything in History that's quite like Amazon. I mean, it's completely a new thing. We've never really encountered anything like this. But you can think about it in some ways like a railroad in the sense that that's what Amazon controls and lots of other companies need access to that in order to get to market. That's an incredibly powerful position. I don't think Amazon has any other competitor that could potentially challenge it. I think the only thing that could stop Amazon today would be government intervention.
154- NARRATOR	10:50:15,197	10:50:46,947	- Amazon wishes to keep governments at bay when it comes to regulation, but not when it comes to winning data storage contracts. The Quebec government announced that it will store its public data on Amazon’s cloud. Hydro-Quebec offered the company a preferential energy rate in a confidential contract. Canadian professor and author Fenwick McKelvey has been following the evolution of the web industry and has just learned, by chance, the location of an Amazon data center near Montreal.
155- FENWICK MCKELVEY	10:50:48,733	10:51:10,609	- So we're just going down this dirt road, which should be the entrance to the Amazon data center. And we can see some big building on the horizon over here that seems to be close to all the power lines. Which would make sense. And... there's a gate here.
156- FENWICK MCKELVEY	10:51:16,928	10:51:40,762	Montreal is actually at a really attractive place to build a data center. Quebec has historically lower power rates than other parts of the world. It is also trying to bid in more government contracts, so there is a need to kind of store data nationally. And so, this is a way that they can say that the data is not going to leave the country. And it's really close to all these Montrealers using their phones and their servers.
157- FENWICK MCKELVEY	10:51:43,691	10:52:05,233	Amazon really had to build up the best, most reliable infrastructure in the world to cope with, say, all the people coming to their website on Black Friday. And that huge load creates all this capacity, and so Amazon Web Services started around 2006 and it became one of the dominant players.
158- FENWICK MCKELVEY	10:52:07,514	10:53:22,932	Amazon realized that for every hundred milliseconds of delay, it cost them 1% of their web traffic. And we know that these cloud providers have a real power in creating the most efficient, the fastest because it sets consumer expectations. And that’s, I think, the brilliance of Google and Amazon in many ways, is that they have created a very, very open communication system where everybody can participate, but yet they remain at the center of it and hugely influential in that open system. And so that’s really creating this problem because how much opportunity is there for new service providers to succeed when at any point Amazon could decide that’s a profitable business and move into it. We know Amazon is now moving into advertising, so the purchases that we make on Amazon and the fact that we know those purchases are connecting to servers here, so they know where different people are located, what they are buying, it's a really effective way of micro-targeting. In some ways, the size, the profitability of this company is really dwarfing any of our understanding and like as a country like Canada, it’s just a bit player in the hands of this giant global company.
159- FENWICK MCKELVEY	10:53:24,541	10:53:55,334	And it becomes a real influence on the structure of the Internet, and as a result, the structure of our society. And to me, that is really one of these important questions, is that, if everything we do is connecting to these servers, I mean, is that too much power to have in the hands of one company? It’s just kind of a moral question at this point, you know. How much wealth do you need in this world? And whether, you know, that wealth comes at the expense of other people.
160- NARRATOR	10:54:01,036	10:54:23,745	- Aware of the risk, Amazon is increasingly nurturing its relationships with governments. In 17 years, its lobbying expenses exploded: in the United States they have gone from 492,000 dollars in 2000 to 13 million dollars in 2017. In Europe, they add up to at least 2 million euros.
161- NARRATOR	10:54:35,544	10:54:40,212	Will Jeff Bezos use this money to counter a less-than-accommodating Europe?
162-NARRATOR	10:54:41,711	10:54:54,504	In 2017, for the first time, the European Commission decided to attack the company. Margaret Vestager, European Commissioner for Competition, sanctioned Amazon for its tax arrangements.
163- MARGARET VESTAGER	10:54:57,596	10:55:37,264	- The Commission has today adopted a decision that Amazon's tax benefits are illegal on the EU's stated rules. A tax ruling granted by Luxemburg has reduced Amazon's tax bill in more than 8 years between May 2006 and June 2014. It was not justified. Amazon now has to repay the tax benefit worth around 250 million euros, plus interests.
164- NARRATOR	10:55:38,097	10:55:50,764	- Amazon paid the 250 million but Luxembourg appealed the decision. Not all states endorse the Commissioner's approach – nor do they all support other measures that promote tax fairness.
165- MARGARET VESTAGER	10:55:55,030	10:56:42,947	- The thing with Amazon, and we know that from the tax case, is that you don't necessarily make profits, but you create value. So you create value on the stock exchange, but you don't make profits in your business. So, people make money by buying and selling stocks instead of making money by having a profit coming out of the business in itself. And one of the reasons why we're so eager also to have a sort of broad European digital taxation is to make sure that we get it right. Because digital companies on average pay 9% in tax, where ordinary businesses on average pay 23% in tax.
166- NARRATOR	10:56:44,419	10:57:01,044	- Europe is trying to put in place a new tax that specifically targets GAFA, including Amazon. This new tax would levy their revenues and not their profits, since these web giants usually store away their profits in countries with low tax rates.
167- NARRATOR	10:57:03,872	10:57:07,706	France is alone in defending this initiative.
168- FRENCH JOURNALIST 2	10:57:10,362	10:57:38,029	(Translated from French) - On the family portrait commemorating the Eurogroup’s 20th anniversary, he tries to keep his smile on, but he knows he has lost the battle. Bruno Le Maire needed a unanimous European agreement. Ireland and the Nordic countries turned him down while Germany, wanting a broader agreement, opposed a polite refusal. In short, it is urgent to wait.
169- NARRATOR	10:57:39,502	10:57:48,253	- Europe is powerless in its ability to successfully tax Amazon. But it did not take long for Margaret Vestager to try a different approach.
170- MARGARET VESTAGER	10:57:50,720	10:58:40,887	- Now, we are looking into the use of data. Because, of course, it's a good thing if you are a small guy and you want to start to do e-commerce that you can be hosted with Amazon. Because they can give you services with package delivery, payment options, all good things that you need in order to get started. But the problem arises if the data they get from watching over your business is being used for them basically to take over your business. We've sent out 1,500 questionnaires to retailers in Germany and France and now the answers start to come back and we start analyzing it. And of course, we would never be so open about it if we didn't have, you know, a concern that something is not right.
171- NARRATOR	10:58:41,013	10:58:46,764	- In Europe, just like in America, Amazon’s stranglehold worries suppliers.
172- STACY MITCHELL	10:58:50,060	10:59:46,102	- We've heard from people who make toys, who make apparel, who make shoes. All kinds of companies. And they want to talk to us because, you know, they can't talk publicly. Because they’ll be retaliated against, you know. They know that this is a company that will crush them if they speak up about what's happening. Amazon is their biggest customer. Amazon is their biggest competitor. Amazon is this platform that they have to operate on. Amazon is this platform that hosts other sellers that buy from them. Amazon is all around them. And it’s as though, you know, now Amazon can strong-arm them, but it has like multiple arms they can strong-arm them with. You know, it's able to use all of these different roles to like box them in and extract more and more of their revenue for itself.
173- MARGARET VESTAGER	10:59:46,270	11:00:09,146	- We have all had a wake-up call to say, yes, technology is fascinating and it produces great things that we can do, but oh! there's a bad side to everything. There's a threat to our democracy, there's a threat to the way we do business, there's a threat for us as consumers to be respected in the marketplace. We need to get in control of that.
174- NARRATOR	11:00:11,564	11:00:15,981	- Will legislators succeed in regulating the Amazon steamroller?
175- NARRATOR	11:00:18,105	11:00:24,897	These regulations and laws that Jeff Bezos hates so much, will they contain the influence of the multinational?
176- NARRATOR	11:00:27,067	11:00:31,651	What happens when governments themselves become Amazon customers?
177- NARRATOR	11:00:59,734	11:01:16,690	In the summer of 2017, Jeff Bezos tweeted a picture where he appeared alongside General Mattis, Donald Trump's then Secretary of Defense. A very timely meeting: the Pentagon was preparing a gigantic call for tenders. Code name: JEDI.
178- NARRATOR	11:01:18,840	11:01:24,382	Since then, Washington's hushed world of power and lobbyists is bursting with rumors.
179- NARRATOR	11:01:28,481	11:01:39,938	One of the foremost experts of this universe is John Weiler. He leads a lobby group that advises the government on IT strategy.
180- JOHN WEILER	11:01:41,285	11:02:22,702	- The United States government buys about $200 billion of information technology a year. So it’s the richest market, the largest market globally. No one buys more. So JEDI is a contract that the Department of Defense has initiated under the Secretary of Defense, General Mattis, to replace all the legacy infrastructure for the entire department. So basically every function of the Department of Defense from people and operations, weapon systems, war preparation, is all in these existing legacy computers. And this is what they are planning to put on this JEDI contract.
181- JOHN GIBSON	11:02:23,206	11:02:37,998	- Leveraging the commercial cloud is one IT area that we believe will achieve operational, financial and security benefits of which the JEDI Cloud contract is a great example.
182- JOHN WEILER	11:02:38,292	11:02:58,333	- And that contract has been valued at $10 billion and would last 10 years. More importantly, unlike all other major acquisitions the Department of Defense has, under Congressional directive, is saying, We’re only going to allow one contractor to control all cloud in the Department of Defense. This is unheard of.
183- NARRATOR	11:03:00,550	11:03:09,842	- Summer 2018. Amazon’s two most serious competitors for the JEDI contract, Oracle and IBM, both throw in the towel.
184- NARRATOR	11:03:16,283	11:03:23,075	They criticize the fact that the bidding process seems to favor a single company, though they do not name it.
185- NARRATOR	11:03:29,361	11:03:34,944	According to John Weiler, a game of influence was played in the Secretary of Defense’s entourage.
186- JOHN WEILER	11:03:35,915	11:04:01,207	- Two people came into into the Pentagon as very, very, very senior executives, the Chief of Staff to General Mattis and the Deputy Chief of Staff who were employed by Amazon as lobbyists. Sally Donnelly is one of those people. And the other person is Tony D. Martino, her partner.
187- NARRATOR	11:04:04,243	11:04:12,785	- Prior to joining the Pentagon, Donnelly and DeMartino headed a lobbying firm hired by Amazon to help establish itself in Washington.
188- NARRATOR	11:04:15,155	11:04:37,906	Did they seek to help their former client after beginning their mandate with the Secretary of Defense, or is this accusation just one of these dirty tricks that regularly agitates the US capital? All of the actors involved in this case declined to comment. However, the case is serious enough for two US congressmen to have formally requested an internal inquiry into this call for tender.
189- NARRATOR	11:04:58,785	11:05:12,910	If Amazon wins the contract, the private company will host the most sensitive data of the world's leading power. Since 2014, it already counts the CIA amongst its clients.
190- NARRATOR	11:05:13,036	11:05:28,536	So here it is, the world according to Amazon, a world where a single company controls the distribution of all our daily products, the infrastructure of our economy, but also the data that makes it possible to wage wars.
191- PAUL DAVIS	11:05:33,721	11:06:06,721	- When I'm buying stuff on Amazon or receiving packages or have friends who are doing it, I’m like, Yes! Awesome!, you know. Man, that's a great thing that that we built. But as I said, if I put on my other hat... hat of being a citizen, then I'm a lot more questioning of whether I really feel any pride in that. I think most of the time, I feel almost the opposite, really. That I helped to create something that may not turn out to really be a net good in the world.
192- STACY MITCHELL	11:06:11,728	11:06:19,396	- The issue is who shapes the future of our country, is it us or is it Amazon? You know. That's the question.
193- NARRATOR	11:06:22,605	11:06:27,314	- On the Pacific coast, in Seattle, that question has already been answered.
194- NARRATOR	11:06:35,139	11:06:39,931	Here, Amazon is already imposing its vision of the world of tomorrow.
195- NARRATOR	11:06:43,883	11:06:51,092	At first glance, it's an ideal world. The company’s headquarters are located in this building called Day 1.
196- NARRATOR	11:06:56,180	11:07:12,680	At its feet, the brand-new structure wanted by Jeff Bezos. A series of glass balls sheltering rare tropical plants, like a biotope 2.0 where Amazon employees come to work in harmony with a domesticated nature.
197- NARRATOR	11:07:19,495	11:07:24,537	In total, 20% of Seattle’s downtown area is occupied by Amazon.
198- NARRATOR	11:07:34,351	11:07:41,684	In the last 8 years, 40,000 new executives from around the world have joined the ranks of the American giant.
199- NARRATOR	11:07:43,765	11:07:53,057	Often young, and very well paid, they can take full advantage of the Amazon way of life and can preview much of the company's innovations.
200- NARRATOR	11:07:55,998	11:07:59,624	Lockers where you can pick up your packages at any time.
201- NARRATOR	11:08:03,739	11:08:14,156	Or Amazon Go, supermarkets where no checkout is required. Customers enter with their smartphone and the computer automatically charges their account.
202- NARRATOR	11:08:18,468	11:08:30,468	To welcome these newcomers, luxurious buildings are constantly being constructed. Thanks to Amazon, Seattle has become a favorite city for the American executive class.
203- NARRATOR	11:08:37,087	11:08:41,421	But at night, Seattle becomes a completely different city.
204- NARRATOR	11:08:48,652	11:08:56,528	Since Amazon's arrival, with its numerous hires of senior executives, rents in Seattle have been rising by 10% each year.
205- NARRATOR	11:09:01,328	11:09:06,037	The poorest can no longer find housing, even if they have a job.
206- NARRATOR	11:09:11,891	11:09:17,225	Here, 30% of the homeless population is employed.
207- MAN FROM CITY HALL	11:09:22,247	11:09:42,455	- Good afternoon. Yesterday I signed a proclamation declaring a civil state of emergency in response to the growing homeless crisis in our city. Today I'm signing Council Bill 118554, which authorizes emergency funds to prevent homelessness and carry out provisions of yesterday's declaration.
208- NARRATOR	11:09:48,800	11:09:56,134	- At City Hall, Seattle's youngest city councillor, Teresa Mosqueda, made housing the priority of her mandate.
209- TERESA MOSQUEDA	11:10:02,512	11:10:49,055	- We saw about a 600% increase in homelessness and we saw twice the amount of people who are living in RVs become homeless. That number is immense. You can see the crisis of poverty and homelessness on the street. However, here in Seattle, we have a higher rate of homelessness per capita than cities like Los Angeles, which is a call for action and it's imperative that we do something. We have a thousand people who are moving to this region a week. Which means that if we are not building housing, the cost of housing increases, people who were in otherwise affordable rental units really have nowhere to go. They are falling into the street or they are getting displaced and pushed out of Seattle. So that's part of the problem. We have not built enough housing, we have not built enough affordable housing, we haven't built housing across the income spectrum.
210- NARRATOR	11:10:49,181	11:11:04,140	- Spring 2018. City Council proposes the creation of a new tax: the biggest companies in Seattle, including Amazon, will have to pay 500 dollars per employee per year, in order to finance the construction of social housing.
211- TERESA MOSQUEDA	11:11:04,266	11:11:51,891	- We had initially proposed a tax that would have brought in $75 million a year, which is a drop in the bucket of what we actually needed. We ended up with $47 million per year, which Amazon agreed to. The... proposal was passed unanimously, unanimously by the council and signed by the mayor. Within 24 hours of Amazon agreeing to that amount of taxing each corporation $275 per head for five years for just the largest companies, after they agreed to that, within 24 hours, they changed their minds, they funded the opposition and ran a campaign to undermine it.
212- DEMONSTRATORS	11:11:52,017	11:11:56,893	- No head tax! No head tax! No head tax! No head tax! No head tax!
213- NARRATOR	11:11:57,029	11:12:10,112	- Amazon initiated a power struggle to push back on City Council. The company financed a PR campaign, claiming to want to defend jobs, and launched a petition demanding the withdrawal of the tax project.
214- NARRATOR	11:12:12,741	11:12:20,075	Seattle was divided. To counter the multinational's campaign, citizens mobilized for social justice.
215- DEMONSTRATORS	11:12:20,201	11:12:26,576	- No Bezos drunken deal! No Bezos drunken deal! No Bezos drunken deal!
216- NARRATOR	11:12:28,535	11:12:44,869	- Amazon won the battle of opinion. Its petition gathered over 45,000 signatures. On June 12, 2018, the Seattle City Council decided to hold a new vote on the tax, in front of supporters of both sides.
217- DEMONSTRATORS	11:12:46,907	11:12:55,074	- We are ready to fight! Housing is a human right! We are ready to fight! Housing is a human right!
218- NARRATOR	11:12:55,200	11:12:59,534	- Red against green, pro-tax, against anti-tax.
219- DEMONSTRATORS - WOMAN ON CITY COUNCIL	11:12:59,701	11:13:01,952	- Stop the deal! - Herbold...
220- NARRATOR	11:13:02,085	11:13:06,210	- Quickly, the City Council voted to reverse its new taxation policy.
221- NARRATOR	11:13:09,502	11:13:14,753	Only two council members, including Teresa Mosqueda, voted against the repeal of the tax.
222- WOMAN ON CITY COUNCIL	11:13:14,878	11:13:22,712	- Mosqueda, vote for nay. O'Brien, vote for aye. Seven in favour, two opposed.
223- MAN ON CITY COUNCIL	11:13:25,799	11:13:28,841	- So the bill passes and the chair will sign it.
224- NARRATOR	11:13:34,520	11:13:39,438	- Three months later, Jeff Bezos announced the launching of his own housing policy.
225- NARRATOR	11:13:42,982	11:13:49,107	A 2-billion-dollar private fund to help poorly housed families across the country.
226- TERESA MOSQUEDA	11:13:50,181	11:14:18,140	- Now I want to make sure that public policy is driven by those who are elected to pass public policy. Not by the whims of one CEO or one corporation who, on one day, decides to donate money. I think it's a real warning signal to the entire country that we have got to be able to govern and do so with integrity to make sure that our most vulnerable are being protected and invested in. We need public policy to be passed by those who have been elected to do so.
227- NARRATOR	11:14:32,832	11:14:42,499	- Every night, in Seattle, city hall opens its doors to provide a place to sleep - on the floor - to those who have nowhere else to go.

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Film: The World According to Amazon

http://www.journeyman.tv/film/7758

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