When Recorded Mail To: - California Resources Agency - State: Fill & Download for Free

What you can do is grow a pair and step up to the plate.First of all, ignore the drama queens who suggest involving the police. The police couldn’t care less about your problems with your parents. Then there is the pesky little fact that theft of a US passport is a federal offense. Good luck getting the FBI or any other federal law enforcement agency interested in dealing with a basic family problem. They barely have the resources to investigate real crimes.If by some miracle you can get the police involved, all your parents have to say is, “Oops, we lost it. We were saving it for him to come and pick up, but now we don’t know where it is.”What a real grown-up would do is simply get a new one. Some have suggested you may not have a copy of your birth certificate or Social Security card. Those, several drama queens have suggested, are incredibly difficult, if not altogether impossible, to obtain without ID to begin with. You can safely ignore them.You can obtain a SS card online. Create and / or log into your Social Security online account. During the process it will pull identity verification questions from LexisNexis that you must answer correctly to prove your identity. One of the questions it asked me was, “In which of the following states did you live from 1980 - 1986?” There will be from 3 to 6 questions. After your account is created, you can request a replacement SS card mailed to you. You can also easily accomplish the same thing on the phone.You can obtain a copy of your birth certificate online, too. Some have stated that in, for example, Indiana, it’s not possible to obtain your birth certificate online. They are lying. Virtually every state has a contract with a LexisNexis company called VitalChek which allows you to obtain your birth certificate online. Proof of identity, if required, is in the form of ID verification questions. They mail the birth certificate to the address you provide.Take the birth certificate and SS card to DMV and apply for a state ID card. The only other documents you will need are proof of residency. California, for example, requires two which can include school, bank, church or income tax documents.Get your state ID card and apply for a replacement passport.EDIT: Due to increased worthless claims that "stealing a passport is a serious federal offense", it's time we examined just that. Now I know some folks have issues with reading skills, so, let's dumb it down a bit. Unless you can pull out of your ass one of those specially-issued solid gold passports issued every February 31st, your passport is worth about $150.You: "Hello, FBI? I want to report my passport was retained by my parents and they reuse to give it to me. Come and arrest them immediately! Put them in prison! Get my passport back for me!!"FBI: "In about ten years when we have nothing better to do, we will be right there to investigate. But first you have to send us documentation that you dried your crocodile tears and sewed your ballsack back on. If you need immediate assistance, call 911. Click."911: "Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahaha." "Yeah, we are definitely going to arrest your parents for a misdemeanor that is almost impossible to prove unless they confess." "Hahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahha."18 U.S. Code § 641. Embezzlement and theft of public money, property or records.Whoever embezzles, steals, purloins, or knowingly converts to his use or the use of another, or without authority, sells, conveys or disposes of any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States or of any department or agency thereof, or any property made or being made under contract for the United States or any department or agency thereof; orWhoever receives, conceals, or retains the same with intent to convert it to his use or gain, knowing it to have been embezzled, stolen, purloined or converted—Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; but if the value of such property in the aggregate, combining amounts from all the counts for which the defendant is convicted in a single case, does not exceed the sum of $1,000, he shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.The word “value” means face, par, or market value, or cost price, either wholesale or retail, whichever is greater.

I have few friends in Amazon at Seattle WA and few in AWS at Dallas TX & Herndon VA.This answer is based on their experience as most of them don’t want to come forward and answer it(managers look at the social media activity of their team members). It’s been widely covered in the news media also about the overall working conditions at Amazon. Amazon’s culture is well known to outside world now, thanks to article like thisOutside world experience is not valued.Amazon as such doesn’t care about your outside experience. For example in AWS, they only care about AWS and nothing else. Managers just believe in numbers, they want you to do the certification - even AWS cloud practitioner. Some folks have 4–5 certifications but good for nothing. If any real customer problem do occur, these certification folks who just mugged the contents can’t help at all.Why not AWS Solutions Architect - Professional certification has some phases? Like first one just objective type questions, then some real life assignment to be done without referencing anything and then interview? It’s not real certifications.If AWS Solutions Architect - Professional certification is so good then why don’t these folks are ready to work in AWS Professional services?Squeezing the employees. Real long working hours. Amazon pays well but will extract almost 150%-200% for that salary.Let the team has infighting. Coworkers bitch about each other. Managers use coworkers against each other. Coworkers are encouraged to provide feedback about each other to the managers. Even in the departments which are doing highly technical work - hierarchy of manager is kept. These managers love that coworkers are having issues with each other so that their role is relevant.No place for old men. Amazon wants only younger employees. Average age of employee is 31 years. They look for ways to kick out older workers. Amazon is always monitoring the employees when they are at work and also outside of work. You will be shocked to hear that every employee’s insurance is also monitored. It won’t be a mere coincidence that employee’s who have very high insurance expenses are booted out as Amazon want to keep it’s contribution to employee health insurance the minimum. Employees who take more vacations are also prone.No place for injured or disabled or sick employees. Amazon is a fine weather friend. The moment somebody is injured due to work place injury there is every possible effort to deny the worker’s compensation and then lay off the employee for any other reasons. Only on paper amazon states that we accommodate employee’s work restrictions. Don’t believe what i am saying then refer this Nicholas Stover, Fired Amazon Worker With Crohn's Disease, Files Suit Over Bathroom BreaksRather than firing make them leave. Amazon doesn’t fire but believe in constructive discharge. Amazon top management(supervisor) with the help of HRBP will make your life miserable so that you leave that place.Benefits as bad as policies. Worst benefits. For very first year - only 2 weeks of vacation and 1 week of personal days. In Texas, they dropped the Worker’s compensation and got Amazon TXCare - which is the worst workers compensation. Texas state allows employers not to offer workers compensation or offer a worker’s compensation plan which is not following Texas Department of Insurance. Amazon read this rule very well and introduced Amazon TXCare which is funded and administrated by Amazon only in order to save money(and to make Jeff Bezos even richer). The rules are all made for Amazon. When employees sees that this kind of policies are there, they would prefer to leave. Amazon TXCare has limited number of providers - only triage based diagnosis at urgent care center. No specialist. Aim is to say no to the employee’s work injury. There is no real appeal process. Now way employees can reach out to Texas Department of Insurance and can get an attorney. This makes it easy for Amazon in Texas and that’s why due to these kind of policies they are growing at Texas. No Amazon Prime for employees. Only $100 discount for the first $1000 shopping for the items sold by amazon.com(not 3rd party). Medical, Dental, Vision plans are not at all in line with Microsoft or Google etc.. Heard that during vacation also employees are working.Diversity numbers sucks. Lack of diversity. Apart from lack of diversity, there are often discrimination and unfair treatment by supervisors to employees. HRBP, Employee relations, SVP Beth, CEO doesn’t listen or come for the rescue of the employees. Overall treatment for a non white non American origin employee is bad. Employee relations investigations are good for nothing - mere cover up to collect data to avoid lawsuit in future.Lack of diversity. Either too many white men or Asian Indians. Other races and national origin are almost missing.Long working hours. Too much working hours. Almost 11–15 hours of work per day is very normal in Amazon.Don’t count on stocks. Stock options are given in such a way that very first year - 5%, 2nd year - 15%, then every 6 months 20% vesting. 401K vesting is 3 years. Amazon just contributes 2% to the employee’s contribution. One can understand that Amazon is using AWS Sagemaker or Forecast to observe that most of the employees leave before 1 year so the rules are made this way only. Only shareholders and Jeff Bezos is becoming rich and everybody else is getting poorer. Will Amazon be okay if sellers just pay for any item they were able to sell and only pay 5% price in first year, then 15% in next year and then 20% for every 6 months? So how the stock vesting is justified then? You can compare the stock vesting of Apple, Google, Salesforce and others…they vest 25% stocks every year. They want employees to stay and don’t punish the employees who are leaving early. Amazon on the other hand knows very well that due to bad policies and bad treatments - more than 50% employees will leave in the very first year so cap the stock vesting to only 5%. And worst thing, if anybody goes for parental leave or short term disability or long term disability then the stock vesting and 401K vesting stops. So there is no empathy for any sick employee or employee taking care of sick.Why first year only 5% stock vesting? As amazon knows very well most of the employees(around 55%) will leave in the very first year. Other companies like google, apple etc….has 25% stock vesting every year not like 5% in first year then 15% in 2nd year and then 20% each 6 months.Leadership principals. Amazon has leadership principals like frugality(being cheap), disagree and commit etc…but they don’t have any leadership principals which talks about ethics, morals, integrity, honesty etc…Poor quality hires. In AWS I heard that good number of US Masters degree Asian Indians has joined the company. All these folks were not good when they did undergraduate in India(from private engineering colleges as their parents bought that degree for them and even after that they were unemployed) so came to USA for 2nd chance. Amazon took them even if they were doing MS from mediocre schools. You won’t find bright folks in AWS Enterprise support. It’s very political organization. Employees who are honest and outspoken are simply kicked out of the organization. There is a great culture to boot lick the manager in AWS Enterprise support.Connections surveys are monitoring the individual employees. There are connections survey every day. In this survey manager is getting feedback from the team and team get the overall feedback. It’s about checking the pulse of the 2 pizza size team. None of my friends has ever heard of the bad ass manager being terminated due to this connections survey. In fact connections survey knows which team member answered what option and records the IP/MAC address. Team members are constantly watched based on their responses and other activity. It’s very much prison kind of situation.Large number of lawsuits against Amazon. Amazon is sued multiple times by employees, vendors, customers, partner every day. Though amazon talks about customer obsession. Jeff Bezos simply forgot that if you take care of employees then employees will take care of the customers. Some EEOC lawsuits against Amazon are:Amazon Class Action Says Company 'Thins the Herd' with Age Bias | Top Class ActionsThree Amazon workers allege discrimination at Shakopee warehouseAmazon Sued for Employment DiscriminationNicholas Stover, Fired Amazon Worker With Crohn's Disease, Files Suit Over Bathroom BreaksOne of the current lawsuits Fired Amazon worker sues over pandemic working conditionsManager is always right. Rather than doing any action against the bad manager, it’s always the employee which is beaten up and asked to leave. Hardworking employee can find a job elsewhere and he/she receives few months of severance. In the end Amazon is slowly and slowly increasing number of it’s enemies.More than 50% employees leave during the very first year. At an average more than 50% employees leave amazon within the very first year. They don’t care about the stocks or the reminder of the year sign on bonus.In Amazon it’s not important what you know but whom you know is very important.Raise the bar. During the interview process, Amazonians always tries to find someone who is better than 50% of the existing work force. They call it as “raise the bar”. As per the guidelines, interviewers should treat everyone respectfully as some way or the other, everybody is the customer. But that’s not the case. During my AWS TAM position interview, I got questions only on networking. I have rated myself 2/10 on networking and rated 6 or 8 in other areas. Then why can’t they have the right interviewer for me? Later when i asked my friends who are already working they stated that almost 80% AWS TAMs are from networking, hardware, infrastructure, System Administration or DevOps background(not from Software OR Product development) and that is the reason why the interview process is so screwed up. I can witness the same in all the AWS certifications - one need to have broad level knowledge not in-depth of anything. I was not told about my interview results even after 6 months. Moreover if you are hiring better than reminder of the 50% - then why these folks leave or asked to leave within the very first 1 yr?Amazon is very centralized. More than 600K employees world wide. They should divide the company in more meaningful entities. But they are not doing it. Some reasons - Jeff Bezos want to have control. Even after his divorce, he kept the voting rights with him. Other reasons - to gain benefits in taxes, still be called H-1B independent employer in USA (less than 15% workforce on H-1B - it’s false as AWS has more than 15% workforce on H-1B visa) etc… It’s the real problem like USSR in late 70’s - too big to manage.Too much dictatorship from top management-every effort to suppress worker unions. Jeff Bezos never let Amazon employees form a union. Every attempt is done by management to suppress unions. Managers are tyrant. Employees should feel lucky if they are having good manager. There is no appeal process for any bad treatment by managers. Ethicspoint is a total joke - it’s just a way for the company to collect data from the employee so that company can prepare itself for future lawsuit. Bad managers are rewarded. Now when Joe Biden is going to be the president - there are high chances of worker unions as in the case of google - where Tech workers formed the union. Now think of forming a union in IT department of Amazon or AWS -where employer/managers encourages in fighting among the employees - they want employees to rip each other out. When amazon warehouse workers initiated union process in USA, amazon is creating obstacles like in-person voting during COVID-19 to some how delay the entire process. And to suppress Alabama unionizing efforts - they are influencing workers to vote against the unions. Influencing workers to vote against the union. Even before a single vote was cast, the union push had garnered national attention and support from figures ranging from Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to a group of 50 Congresspeople who sent a letter Friday urging Amazon's outgoing CEO, Jeff Bezos, to "treat your employees as the critical asset they are, not as a threat to be neutralized or a cost to be minimized."Amazon want to do things at very fast rate but with lots of flaws. Just 3 months back AWS datawarehouse offering Redshift has some major bugs. Google about Redshift bugs. AWS is too much hype - they tell everything in the world about a particular offering even when it’s not ready. Sagemaker is right now having a demo project of fraud detection which was done by every onPrem Hadoop vendor 4 years back. Result of this quick and dirty work - too much support work that requires lot of co-ordination and documentation. Engineers don’t like this kind of environment and thus leave.AWS never tells about profit margin - no transparency. Every AWS Enterprise Support customer pays at least $15K per month to get the support from AWS(very junior support engineers from South Africa, India and other geographies are working for them). AWS is never willing to share the profit margins with any enterprise customer about the AWS enterprise Support. Unnecessary organization hierarchy is being created on the AWS enterprise support due to this high margins. This unnecessary organization hierarchy rather than helping or supporting the engineers sometimes misuse their authority to satisfy their king size ego. The top level managers travel a lot for their airlines mileage points while not ready to provide basic amenities to the engineers. As good number of these engineers are on OPT or H-1B visa, they are stuck at AWS otherwise the attrition may be even higher. Does AWS ever provides their customers - what is the profit margin? All the enterprise support cases are handled by CSE or even by CSA(without any monitoring of CSEs)Silent Layoffs More than half dozen TAMs/Sr. TAMs are being laid off from AWS Austin TX during year 2019. Why? Because supervisor was not liking their personality. Rather than laying off 6+ TAMs/Sr. TAMs why not lay off the culprit supervisor? Amazon says that we don’t fire or layoff the workers but ask them to leave. Asking them to leave is worse than laying off and firing the employees as such a bad situation is created so that employee can’t even survive in the company.Supervisor and HR has own interpretation of Employee policies Employee Handbook/Policies are ever changing and everybody has their own interpretation. HR and Supervisors keep on using these words about policies and guidelines “it depends”, “it will be dealt case by case basis” etc…When somebody questions then Supervisors will quote the Leadership principal “disagree and commit”.Good for nothing ERC. Any benefit related issues, it’s ERC(Employee Resource Center) which is dealing with that. ERC is all outsourced work force in India. They start working from your 11 pm EST time and have no objectives at all. ERC hires worst quality of resources in India who has no knowledge of Global laws and definitely no ownership or accountability.Wrong doing but not admitting. When a supervisor is against the employee and want to do the constructive discharge. That supervisor uses all the might to get help from HR, Employee relations, top management etc…All these folks keep on telling lies but they believe that if “1000 people tells a lie it becomes truth”. This is how any dissent or dissatisfaction among the employees is dealt with. Result employees leave for ever. They tell others and anybody still joins Amazon, they are only interested in making money, get the tag and then leave.Overall quality of work is very bad. Please refer AWS samples and AWS Labs. Only on paper everything is working. Tryout any solutions from them which were released just a month back. Most of the times, it won’t work. Refer to # of issues and pull requests, there is no action for them. Only to get name and fame, some of the folks publish these repositories with no ownership after that.Amazon growth but in negative direction. How many folks are aware that Amazon tried to launch a search engine as well as Smart phone. Both are major flops. Now CEO is trying to compete with Elan Musk’s SpaceX and going to waste all the money. Why not the same money is being used to make better conditions for warehouse and other workers who are toiling so hard?HR cannot be trusted. One of the my friend who left Amazon told me that never ever trust HRBP and Human Resources Employee relations in Amazon. These folks are agents of evil supervisors.Very less vacations. Amazon Corporate has only 6 holidays. They provide 6 personal days and advertise it a lot. Essentially it’s just 2 personal days(10–6 = 4 national holidays). During the very first year there are only 2 weeks of holidays.Is it day one or year one? Jeff keeps on stating it’s day one culture. But essentially it’s year one culture. Most of the rules in Amazon are kept such a way that any employee who left in the first year is a total loser. He/she gets only 5% stock vesting, no 401K vesting, not the bigger vacation chunk. Remember Amazon doesn’t pay you for personal days(if not used) when you are terminated. All the policies are made in favor of the employer and Amazon know very well more than 50% people are not going to stay beyond 1st year.Very bad treatment after termination. How good or bad a company is, it depends a lot how they treat you on the last day/week? Trust me not even a single Amazon employee I have come across was treated fairly - no matter the employee was good or bad? Employees are human beings and not some items in the shopping cart that Amazon is comparing one line item with another and removing/adding into the cart.Wages not being paid, employees has to earn it via lawsuits. Somebody posted in one of my questions that Amazon and it’s subsidiaries doesn’t even pay their employees. Look at various state department of labor websites. Somebody who complained stated that rather than paying the back wages for the employee, AWS hired private attorney who might be paid 5X or 10X times of the actual back wages amount. Just to save false ego, Amazon can go to any extent.More than 79% amazon employees don’t like the HR. And this is the official survey about Amazon’s HR. Yes, Connections results are conducted every day but it’s not to take action against the bad supervisors and bad policies but to finger point the employees who are providing real feedback(to boot them out). Every connection survey records the MAC ID and other details which can help to identify which employee stated what?Leadership principals are interpreted by supervisors and HR in their own way. If “disagree but commit” is a valid leadership principal then why terminate the employees and put them into pivot? Manager and HR should commit for long term relationship of employee and employer even when they disagree(that employee is not perceived to be doing good which is not true in most of the cases). Internal reports states that once somebody is put on performance improvement plan or pivot - more than 99% cases they are booted out. There is no appeal process.Forcing workers to work even during the COVID-19 crisis just for profitabilityExtreme retaliation against the workers who raises their voice. Chris Smalls and several others.First discrimination followed by retaliation. It’s very common in Amazon and it’s subsidiaries that first the company would like to discriminate for whatever reasons. Expectation from the employee is to tolerate it. But if the employee speaks up then retaliation will start. Many such cases like thisKilling the competition. And this is how Amazon kills the competition. When Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more Inc.’s venture-capital fund invested in DefinedCrowd Corp., it gained access to the technology startup’s finances and other confidential information. Nearly four years later, in April, Amazon’s cloud-computing unit launched an artificial-intelligence product that does almost exactly what DefinedCrowd does, said DefinedCrowd founder and Chief Executive Daniela Braga. So literally they are following the HBO’s silicon valley serial where some crooked company steals the secret from others while asking for the presentation.Stack Ranking, Pivot, the Dev List, Performance Improvement plans, forced attrition, and being managed out. These are the real reasons. I’ve personally heard horror stories from top employees who have had their managers create document-able lies about their performance, force them into unattainable performance reviews, and essentially create a hostile work environment which forces them to quit. This is 100% illegal. Amazon knows it and settles these cases all the time. Hiring managers and talent scouts need to be more up front about the risks associated with working with Amazon. Employees are pitted against each other. Employees vent out on each other on the daily basis. Refer this about the devlist. Employees are not even aware that they are on devlist. Generally managers deliberately put the employees on devlist whom they believe could leave the group. This way manager blocks the employee to get into some other group. Then this manager squeezes this employee(on devlist) like anything. This is called modern day slavery.Mediocre Employees being hired. In fact if you go thru all the profiles of folks working in AWS. You will find a pattern:Majority of them in USA are Asian Indians with Masters. These folks were kids of rich parents who bought them Engineering degrees from mediocre private engineering colleges on payment seats. Later these folks did MS only for 20K H-1B quota. They were not interested in Masters or Advanced degree but just eyeing for H-1B visa.As they are on H-1B, they will stay as Amazon is the largest Green card sponsor company in USA now. They don’t like Amazon but they will stay here just for their green card processing.All these folks had a very short term tenure in their prior jobs like not even a single company where they had worked for 2, 3, 4 or 5 years. But in AWS they are sticking for more time. What one can derive from this?and it’s a vicious cycle - first H1B visa(1st year), then Green card processing(2nd year) and then wait till the 4th year for stock vesting. See what Ronil Hira testified in front of the senate committee about H-1B visa and L-1 visa displacing US workers. It’s multi generation Asian Indian talking about how H-1B and L-1 are systematically replacing US workers and companies save millions of $$$. Needless to say AWS is on the brink of “H-1B dependent employer” as they have 12% of their work force which is H-1B visa.they are not here for any Amazon’s leadership principal like customer obsession or working backwards but simply for their own personal gains.Hearty welcome when you come in and we will show you our colors when you want to go out. When employees get in - they are made to realize that you are lucky to get a job out here. But when the employees are kicked out - they receive the worst possible treatment. Same is the case how Amazon and AWS behaves when dealing with others. For example it’s very difficult to get out of amazon prime membership and return the items once you bought from amazon.com . Similarly AWS is very nice when you are bringing your workload and data to them but when you want to go out of AWS - they will rip you off.Amazon management keeps an eye on the workers always. Do you know that if you are using Kindle(device or app on Windows or Android or IoS platform) Kindle collects all the data and send it amazon? why? Well Amazon has the answer - we are collecting data for some statistics. Same with Alexa in your home. And you wonder if Amazon is trying to keep an eye over the consumers - well they were doing this for decades in the work environment also. Just to suppress unionizing and other efforts, amazon had surveillance.Even after leaving Amzon - the company will haunt you. Read this. AWS/Amazon constantly harassed him. It’s employment at will in USA and amazon often uses this to fire employees. But employee leaves them they have an issue. Amazon truly believe in modern day slavery. Shit always flows from top. This is what Mr. Jeff Bezos did once he was caught cheating with his wife.Opposing unionization at all cost. Just to oppose unions, Amazon made sure that there are in-person voting for Alabama union election even during COVID-19/pandemic era. Management in fact reached out to the workers to stay out of union by voting against it.Stealing wages from the workers. FTC recently found Amazon intentionally took money from drivers paycheck and then fined Amazon regarding the same.Fighting with others - all over the world. In India(2nd biggest market after China), Amazon is using all it’s war machine to defeat Reliance by hook and crookAmazon fight with almost all the state/federal agencies even when most of the time they are wrong. For instance in case of US Alabama warehouse workers, amazon deliberately insisted on in-person voting during COVID-19. At one side Amazon writes to new president elect Joe Biden to have Vaccines their employees and distribute the vaccines which may look at the external world and their ignorant employees that they do care about the employees but it’s just the opposite. If Amazon really cares about the employees why they are so dogmatic in terms of in-person voting for Alabama warehouse workers and which was finally refused by NLRB. Is Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy going in-person to their office? Then why ask the warehouse workers for in-person voting? NLRB understood these dirty tricks of Amazon’s management and realized that it’s nothing but to thwart unionization of the workers and allowed mail in votes by workers during COVID-19.That’s show the overall double standards of Amazon.New York Attorney General sues Amazon, alleging 'deficient' Covid-19 response. How well Amazon handled spread of COVID-19 in Amazon? Even New Attorney General’s office has to sue amazon for that. These kind of agencies generally try to avoid suing others.Amazon can go down to any extent to suppress worker’s dissent. In order to suppress Unionization in Alabama, Amazon changed traffic light timing during union drive As part of its ongoing fight over an Alabama warehouse’s efforts to unionize, Amazon reportedly changed the timing of a traffic light outside the warehouse, according to reporting by More Perfect Union. Union organizers at the site had previously accused the company of altering the timing so that pro-union workers would not be able to canvass workers while stopped at the light. Until recently, the altered timing on the traffic light outside the factory had been dismissed as a rumor. But More Perfect Union confirmed with Jefferson County officials that last year, Amazon notified the county of traffic delays during shift changes and asked for the light to be changed. On December 15th, the county increased the green light duration in an effort to clear workers off the worksite faster. There’s no indication that the county was aware of the ongoing organizing drive or any effect the traffic light changes might have on the effort.Who is worse - President Trump or Amazon? Look at the article at nytimes . Just the way President Trump tried to undermine voting in the 2020 elections, same is the approach of Amazon regarding union elections in Alabama.Amazon going to any extent to stop the unionization effort. Refer to this article which talks about why unions are necessary in large employers like amazon which does everything to exploit the workers. Amazon is running a website to sabotage the unionization efforts.Amazon is putting cameras in its delivery vans and some drivers aren't happy. Delivery driver's work environment is set to change as Amazon announced this month that it has begun to roll out cameras inside its delivery vehicles that monitor both the road, and its drivers."If one thing messes up, I'm going to freak out," Elizabeth told CNN Business. "That's my job, it's over. They're going to see it on camera." Amazon is going further and embracing cameras consistently pointed at drivers, which rely on artificial intelligence to voice real-time feedback. Drivers will get real-time warnings if they run a stop sign, tailgate, or are distracted.Amazon drivers say negative experiences with the company's existing driver monitoring system contribute to their concerns.Victor Fuentes, an Amazon driver in California, has said on YouTube that he hates the cameras, as he sometimes needs to bend or break rules to get his work done quickly. For more, refer this. The decision sparked some backlash, and one driver told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the policy change had driven him to quit, calling it an invasion of privacy. In the report about a driver quitting as a result of this new system, the former employee saw the system as a "sort of coercion." Amazon has faced controversy over claims of surveillance in the past. In January of this year, more than 200 workers signed a petition sent to the CEO Jeff Bezos asking for an end to what the employees called "labor surveillance" ahead of unionization efforts.Amazon Executive Fired After Upgrading Flight. It's very common for any long hours flight(if it is more than 8 hours duration) to fly in business class or something more than a bare minimum economy class. But Amazon fired it's executive, Marc Sadeghi(Global head of visual effects for Amazon Studios) when he upgraded his 14 hours long flight to New Zealand. After return from his trip, HR told him that his assistant had made complaint against him for something that he is not even aware of(of course HR in Amazon is really good in making up the things) and fired him. Just think of this company Amazon, if they can fire Global head level executive, how they are treating other low level workers who have no voice or recourse or access to legal system. Amazon Executive sued amazon after this. Recording some other employee in Amazon is not allowed as per the policy but here HR used the recording from the assistant to make a case against this executive. Every terms and conditions are twisted by Amazon in it’s own favor.AMZN’s work culture is atrocious. Boys club, PIPs out the wazoo, and general penny pinching. If Bezos could treat the VPs and Engineers the way he treats warehouse workers without mass quitting, he would.The NYT article from a few years ago is accurate and nothing has changed.Not good for Blacks or African American communities. More than a dozen current or former employees at Amazon's corporate headquarters say they witnessed systematic disadvantages for Black and underrepresented workers, according to Recode. The tech news website quoted an Amazon diversity manager, who said: "We struggle to bring [Black] folks in because there's not a whole lot of desire, in my opinion, to go outside of our normal practices." Once inside the company, those employees sometimes had difficulty advancing, the manager told the outlet. For more information, please refer thisAmazon hit with federal suit alleging race and gender discrimination. The suit was filed by Charlotte Newman, a Black woman who joined Amazon four years ago as a public policy manager and currently works as head of underrepresented founder startup business development at Amazon Web Services.The suit says Newman originally applied for a higher-level job but was hired on as public policy manager.“Within months of starting at the company, she in fact was assigned and doing the work of a senior manager-level employee while still being paid at and having the title of the manager level. To make matters worse, and in defiance of the anti discrimination laws, Ms. Newman was paid significantly less than her white coworkers, particularly in valuable Amazon stock," says the suit. For more info, refer thisFinally Jeff Bezos will be paying some income taxes but look at the overall income disparity in Amazon. Jeff Bezos would owe $5.7 billion in taxes for 2020 under the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act proposed by a group of Senate and House Democrats and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Sanders, I-Vt., and others unveiled their proposed wealth tax, saying it would raise trillions in much-needed revenue and help reduce a wealth divide that has only grown wider during the pandemic. The tax would be a 2% annual levy on wealth over $50 million and 3% on wealth over $1 billion. Think how much Jeff Bezos is earning compared to what average Amazon worker earns(less than $15 per hour). Now Mr. Bezos will use his ditty tricks department to somehow not to pay this tax.Richest man but still the greediest. Now look at what happened to this lawsuit. Obviously anybody who is going to sue Jeff Bezos won’t be having this much money what Jeff Bezos is having. This greedy CEO asked for too much in damages. Even the Judge found that it’s unreasonable. Jeff Bezos wanted $1.7 million in legal fees from his girlfriend’s brother for successfully fighting off his defamation lawsuit. He got much less. A Los Angeles judge awarded the world’s richest man $218,385, saying Amazon’s founder needlessly put too many lawyers on the case. Even though the defamation fight was more complicated than usual, more than 2,070 hours billed in the case were “not reasonable,”Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge John Doyle said in a ruling on Friday.“This was not a matter that required seven partners and 11 associates,” Doyle said. Read hereAmazon expands gamification program that encourages warehouse employees to work harder. Amazon is expanding an existing program that gamifies warehouse work to encourage its fulfillment center employees to improve their efficiency and compete against others for digital rewards like virtual pets, according to a new report from The Information. The program is called FC Games, and it includes as many as six arcade-style mini-games that can be played only by completing warehouse tasks in the workplace. It’s been known since at least 2019 that Amazon uses gamification in the form of workstation games to try to incentivize employees to improve productivity, but The Information reports that Amazon is now expanding those methods to warehouses in at least 20 states throughout the country. Many of the games tend to be simple virtual representations of how fast the worker is completing a task. One, called MissionRacer, moves a car around a track while a picking employee sorts products into appropriate boxes, as reported by The Washington Post at the time. But how dare they trick their employees into having fun?Amazon employee testifying in US Senate to speak the truth about the working conditions at Amazon. An Amazon warehouse employee testified before the Senate Budget Committee on Wednesday about the "grueling" working conditions that led her and others to organize the milestone union election currently underway in Bessemer, Alabama. "Amazon brags it pays workers above the minimum wage. What they don't tell you is what those jobs are really like," said Jennifer Bates in her testimony. "We have to keep up with the pace. My workday feels like a nine-hour intense workout every day. And they track our every move -- if your computer isn't scanning, you get charged with being time-off-task," said Bates, a learning ambassador who helps train other workers at the facility and who has been a vocal organizer behind the union push. "From the onset, I learned that if I worked too slow or had too much time-off-task I could be disciplined or even fired." Amazon spokesperson denied Ms. Bates comments as usual. Mr. Jeff Bezos was also invited but he prefer to run away—he is bigger than Almighty God it seems.Black employees are paid less and have to wait more for promotion, another AWS employee sued Amazon. An Amazon employee filed a lawsuit Monday accusing the tech giant of deliberately paying her and other Black employees less than their White counterparts, becoming the latest on a growing list of current and former Amazon workers to accuse the company of systemic racism. In her complaint, Charlotte Newman, a 38-year-old Black woman who lives in Washington DC, said Amazon Web Services hired her four years ago to work as a public policy manager even though she had applied for and said she was qualified to work as a higher-level senior manager, a practice Newman suggests is routine."Many of Ms. Newman's colleagues observed a consistent practice of paying Black employees less than similarly situated White employees, and a near-total lack of Black representation in and very few women in the upper echelons of the group's leadership," Newman's attorneys wrote in the complaint, filed in federal court in Washington, DC.The complaint also accuses the company of "de-leveling" Black employees when they are hired — "dropping them a level below the job they applied and were qualified for or will be performing." This high profile case is right now in Federal court with jury trial.Another black employee left Amazon due to sad state of affairs. When Chanin Kelly-Rae started working at Amazon in 2019 as a global manager of diversity in the company’s cloud computing division, she had big ambitions for her new job. She had nearly two decades of experience leading diversity and inclusion efforts inside important institutions, like Washington state’s governor’s office, but she’d never worked at an influential global business leader like Amazon.But less than a year later, Kelly-Rae quit. Her tenure inside the company convinced her that Amazon’s corporate workplace has deep, systemic issues that disadvantage Black employees and workers from other underrepresented backgrounds. And she was dismayed by her perception that Amazon leadership was unwilling to listen to internal experts about how to identify and fix these problems. “Amazon was not doing things in a way that represents best practices that would advance diversity and inclusion in any way that is meaningful and thoughtful,” she told Recode. “Let me add: Amazon appeared to be taking steps backward instead of forward.”Amazon workers go on strike in Italy over labor conditions Amazon warehouse and delivery workers in Italy have gone on a 24-hour strike to call on the company to make changes to workloads, shifts and benefits. Trade unions FILT-CGIL, FIT-CISL and Uiltrasporti said it’s the first strike to affect Amazon’s entire logistics operations in Italy.The strike comes as tensions have grown between Amazon and its front-line workforce in Europe and the U.S. amid the coronavirus pandemic. Warehouse workers in Italy and other parts of Europe went on strike last year to call on Amazon to implement greater coronavirus safety measures. Workers across the U.S. also participated in walkouts and protests last year to highlight similar concerns.Amazon delivery drivers have to consent to AI surveillance in their vans or lose their jobs. But after installing machine learning-powered surveillance cameras in its delivery vans earlier this year, the company is now telling employees: agree to be surveilled by AI or lose your job. As first reported by Vice, Amazon delivery drivers in the US now have to sign “biometric consent” forms to continue working for the retailing giant. Exactly what information is being collected seems to vary based on what surveillance equipment has been installed in any given van, but Amazon’s privacy policy (embedded below) covers a wide range of data.The data that drivers must consent to be collected includes photographs used to verify their identity; vehicle location and movements (including “miles driven, speed, acceleration, braking, turns, following distance”); “potential traffic violations” (like speeding, failure to stop at stop signs, and undone seatbelts); and “potentially risky driver behavior, such as distracted driving or drowsy driving.”Amazon removes workers from an internal directory as part of union busting. The new controversy centers on Amazon deleting the profiles of hundreds of thousands of entry-level warehouse employees.Last week, Amazon made changes to its internal online staff directory, deleting hundreds of thousands of entry-level warehouse workers’ profiles from a tool that allows any company employee to view the full names and photos of other employees.The employee directory in question is known as the Amazon Phone Tool, which allows employees of all levels to do things like search for other employees anywhere in the company, see where they work, and view the hierarchy of managers all the way up to Jeff Bezos. The tool also allows employees to create or accumulate virtual awards and icons for everything from making it through the peak holiday shopping season to acing a quiz about the company’s leadership principles. Previously, all entry-level warehouse workers — known as Tier 1 associates in Amazon parlance — had profiles in this directory and would turn up in search results. But as of last week, Amazon removed them.In Trumpian move, Jeff Bezos reportedly orders Amazon chiefs to hit back at critics and they are hitting back at elected representative like Senators also.The behavior of the Amazon News corporate account and of executive Dave Clark on Twitter over the past week, lashing out at prominent critics in an uncharacteristically spiteful and petty manner, calls that seemingly obvious proposition into question. Turns out there may be a good explanation for that. The boss may have taken matters into his own hands. As reported by Recode, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, with enough money to do anything he could ever imagine besides this, appears to be behind the change in tone. And it’s not just the pugnacious style of the tweets that have a distinctly Trumpian echo, it’s also the motivation behind them: he doesn’t think the company is punching back hard enough at its critics.German union calls four-day strike at Amazon sites ahead of Easter. The trade union Verdi has called for workers at six Amazon sites in Germany to go on strike from Sunday evening for four days in the latest attempt to try to force the U.S. e-commerce group to recognize collective bargaining agreements.Amazon’s aggressive PR campaign ahead of union vote shows how worried it is, labor and antitrust experts say. Amazon is playing an aggressive defense against its critics as it stares down a historic union vote at one of its warehouses in Alabama. In recent days, Amazon has sparred with a handful of high-profile lawmakers on Twitter over its working conditions, tax policies and threats to break up Big Tech. The jabs came from Amazon’s official social media account, which counts close to 175,000 followers, and Dave Clark, the company’s consumer boss.Amazon Recruited Twitter Army to Defend Company and CEO Jeff Bezos, Leaked Document Reveals A leaked document reveals how Amazon recruited a number of ambassadors to defend the online reputation of the company and its CEO, Jeff Bezos. The Intercept published the internal document uncovering the secret project, which Amazon allegedly conceived in 2018 under the codename "Veritas." The 10-page dossier shares details of how the company handpicked employees, specifically those with a "clean HR record" and "great sense of humor," and then trained them to confront critics on social media and online forums in a "polite, blunt way.""To address speculation and false assertions in social media and online forums about the quality of the FC [Fulfillment Center] associate experience, we are creating a new social team staffed with active, tenured FC employees, who will be empowered to respond in a polite—but blunt—way to every untruth," reads the program summary. "FC Ambassadors ('FCA') will respond to all posts and comments from customers, influencers (including policymakers), and media questioning the FC associate experience." So much money to waste on army of attorneys and liars, why not amazon looks for ways to treat employees well and compensate them for their hard work?Amazon finally acknowledges delivery driver bathroom problem. Amazon acknowledged Friday that it has a looming problem.The web giant fessed up that its delivery drivers have limited access to bathrooms, meaning that accusations of them urinating in bottles or elsewhere in public are likely to be true.“We know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes,” the online retail giant posted on its AboutAmazon portal. “And this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed.” The admission comes following a Twitter spat with Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.) last month in which the congressman accused Amazon of being a union-busting operation that will “make workers urinate in water bottles.” So even now when Amazon acknowledged the issue but Amazon is still blaming COVID-19 which made Amazon and Jeff Bezos ultra rich.'Harsh' and 'Heartless': Amazon's Automation Is Causing a Spike in Employee Lawsuits An inability to reach an agreement with the company on accommodation of a work-related injury or health issue is a common thread in many of the Amazon suits. Lawyers who’ve litigated against Amazon said a recurring issue in the employment litigation is the anonymous, bureaucratic face the company presents in its dealings with employees who seek answers on such workplace issues as disability leave. And that’s due in part to the high level of automation in the human resources department, those lawyers said.The National Labor Relations Board found Amazon illegally fired workers who criticized warehouse conditions. The National Labor Relations Board has reportedly determined that Amazon last year illegally fired two employees who spoke out publicly against warehouse conditions and pushed the company to address climate change. The agency told the employees, Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, that it would accuse Amazon of unfair labor practices if the online retail giant doesn't settle the case, reported The New York Times on Monday, citing correspondence shared by Cunningham. Amazon fired the two tech workers in April 2020 after they spoke out publicly against warehouse conditions during the coronavirus pandemic. User experience designers Cunningham and Costa, both active members of the advocacy group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, had offered match donations up to $500 for warehouse workers, citing insufficient protections.Unfair labor practices by Amazon. Amazon pressed USPS to install a mailbox outside the warehouse to defeat union move. The union has complained about the mailbox, which the Postal Service installed just before the start of mail-in balloting for the union election in early February. It has argued that the mailbox could lead workers to think Amazon has some role in collecting and counting ballots, which could influence their votes.Worker died then Amazon lied. Jody Rhoads was a 52-year-old mother and breast cancer survivor in Carlisle, PA. Her neck was crushed by a steel rack while she was driving a forklift in an Amazon warehouse, killing her. “We do not believe that the incident was work related,” an Amazon manager reported to the federal government, falsely suggesting her death was from natural causes. Refer Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillisAmazon wrongly brags about minimum wages and responsible for economic inequality. MacGillis tells the story of three generations of Bodani men who worked in the Sparrows Point steel mill, near Baltimore. The youngest, William Bodani Jr., was making $35 an hour in 2002 (about $52 in today’s dollars), along with bonuses. That’s enough for a solid middle-class income.With the steel mill gone from Sparrows Point, Bodani instead took a job at the Amazon warehouse that occupies the same land. He was in his late 60s at the time and was making a fraction of what he once had. Refer Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillisEven Jeff Bezos addressed concerns about the firm's treatment of its workers.In his final letter to shareholders as the company's chief executive, he addressed concerns about the firm's treatment of its workers.This is how Amazon won the rigged union election.Amazon "created the impression of surveillance" of the mailbox because it maintains security cameras in the parking lot, the filing states. Beyond the mailbox, the union alleged that prior to the start of the election, which began in early February, Amazon "agents" threatened that workers could lose benefits, including health insurance, or that the warehouse may even close if the union effort were successful. The company also allegedly emailed employees that it would have to cut thousands of workers because of the union. In its filing, the union also alleged that Amazon attempted to stifle some of its workers and union organizers through a variety of tactics, including selectively enforcing social distancing policies to crack down on employees discussing support for the union, and terminating a union-supporting worker for passing out union authorization cards in non-working areas. The union alleged this "had a chilling effect on support for the union." We won't let Amazon's lies, deception and illegal activities go unchallenged, which is why we are formally filing charges against all of the egregious and blatantly illegal actions taken by Amazon during the union vote," the statement said.AMZN board of directors want to hide most of the stuff about Amazon from general public. If you have any AMZN stock, you might be getting a voting email. Open that and you will find that Board of Directors(mostly white americans) want to hide most of the stuff about Amazon from general public. SHAREHOLDER PROPOSAL REQUESTING ADDITIONAL REPORTING ON GENDER/RACIAL PAY; SHAREHOLDER PROPOSAL REQUESTING A REPORT ON PROMOTION DATA; SHAREHOLDER PROPOSAL REQUESTING A DIVERSITY AND EQUITY AUDIT REPORT; SHAREHOLDER PROPOSAL REQUESTING AN ADDITIONAL REDUCTION IN THRESHOLD FORCALLING SPECIAL SHAREHOLDER MEETINGS; SHAREHOLDER PROPOSAL REQUESTING ADDITIONAL REPORTING ON LOBBYING; SHAREHOLDER PROPOSAL REQUESTING A REPORT ON CUSTOMER USE OF CERTAIN TECHNOLOGIES.Amazon and Jeff Bezos are bad losers just like Donald Trump. Jeff Bezos questioned when Department of Defense went to Microsoft Azure because MS Azure has better in built security and integration with the existing technologies/Infrastructure used by Department of Defense. Now Jeff Bezos' rocket company protests SpaceX's latest NASA contract. Blue Origin is pushing back on NASA's decision to hand a $2.9 billion contract to SpaceX to build the vehicle that will land the next astronauts on the moon. The move adds to a years-long battle between rocket companies owned by the world's two richest men: Jeff Bezos, who founded Blue Origin, and Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX. The dispute centers on NASA's Human Landing System, or HLS, program, which originally aimed to have at least two private-sector companies compete to build the spacecraft that will ferry astronauts to the lunar surface for the space agency's Artemis moon landing missions. But earlier this month, NASA made the surprise announcement that it would move forward with SpaceX as the sole contractor for the project, citing costs as a primary reason for the decision.Amazon.com: FULFILLMENT Winning and Losing in One-Click Americahttps://www.amazon.com/s?k=FULFILLMENT+Winning+and+Losing+in+One-Click+America&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

Thing?Try several things.The Electoral College is still brokenI’ll be clear: the College is the single most insane system that I’ve ever come across.And I’ve dealt with some pretty insane systems in my time.I cannot, I just cannot, believe that we were terrified of an outcome where the lead candidate was 3,000,000 votes ahead. Secretary Hillary Clinton should have won the 2016 election under ANY other system, having a full 2,868,686 votes to levy against Donald Trump (I don’t have to call him ‘President’ anymore, thank God!).This isn’t always going to happen.The College isn’t always going to respect democracy.I would be saying this if the results were flipped the other way, too. If Trump had won the election this time around, the College would still be broken as a system. And even though President-Elect Biden won, there’s still the possibility of a faithless elector; very little penalty awaits such a stain on democracy should they feel strongly enough to disregard the will of the people! Sure, there’s a penalty, but if you’re prepared to pay that, if you’re happy to part with your money and time, then the College will not try to stop you.The British system of First Past the Post isn’t perfect by a long stretch. It tends to favour the winning party exponentially more than the proportionate votes should have. Here’s an example of how the Scottish votes have gone:I’m no fan of the blue wedge (that’s our Conservatives, not quite as extreme as the Grand Old Party but pretty damn right-wing by European standards!), but I couldn’t look you in the eye and tell you that the representation that First Past the Post offers to them as opposed to the yellow (Scottish National Party) is fair.And yet, the Electoral College, with its seats and faithless electors, surpasses the stupidity of First Past the Post in every conceivable way.Albert Camus once said of the absurd man’s actions:All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up.I consider myself an absurdist at the best of times, and I accept that the absurd man (or woman or non-binary!) would have to acknowledge that they are bound up in consequentialism. But I consider Camus to be naïve here; I think that morality is more than just consequence assessment. It can be based on personal belief as well, which is essential to deciding whether or not a set of consequences do legitimise or cancel. The consequences linked to an act of eating a baby (pain, shrieking, emotional distress for onlookers) doesn’t dictate the morality of the act; my morality comes from my belief that pain, shrieking, and emotional distress as consequences should be minimised in favour of other consequences that I believe to be more appropriate.In this sense, law is in part an amoral system of rules and regulation. Law does not believe; its writers believe, but it does not. One’s external morality can influence law’s creation and application in legislatures and courts, and moral criticisms can sway new law into existence. But as an inert, dormant, untriggered force, directed solely at hypothetical consequences, law is amoral.Along those lines, should an elector have both a belief in the value of breaking their democratic word and an acceptance of the consequences that will befall them should they break that trust, they can be absurd in the absurd system. The Electoral College, as part of law, is indifferent to the injustices it creates; it holds no beliefs! The College won’t suddenly come to life and bitch-slap faithless electors and those engaged in gerrymandering! Therefore, those who hold beliefs must rein in the College and faithless electors, who otherwise find a perfectly absurd home in one another.The College is pure political pantomime which should have been rendered obsolete by the Internet and cars and transport and phones, but it was retained all the same. It’s past time to uproot it and replace it with a real, functioning democracy.The system respected democracy this time.It might not do so next time.Joe Biden is far from perfectThe kid gloves can come off now that he’s President-Elect Biden.We needed to get away from the Trump administration. President-Elect Biden wasn’t anywhere near close to my first choice, but the Democratic Party isn’t exactly known for sharp lurches to the left. So I got behind him as the lesser of the two evils on offer, and supported his campaign to overthrow Darth Cheeto.Now that we have President-Elect Biden, we have to be critical of him.His legendary mess of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act 1994 was one of Trump’s biggest guns with which to attack the new President-Elect, and it was one hell of a power move. The Act was dredged up as a point against his campaign, and the truth is that while the Act was part of a wider context of rising crime (not to mention the support from the black community to begin with, in that 58% of those polled supported the Act), it causes a great amount of upset in the current era.According to the website Vox:Biden reveled in the politics of the 1994 law, bragging after it passed that “the liberal wing of the Democratic Party” was now for “60 new death penalties,” “70 enhanced penalties,” “100,000 cops,” and “125,000 new state prison cells.”The law imposed tougher prison sentences at the federal level and encouraged states to do the same. It provided funds for states to build more prisons, aimed to fund 100,000 more cops, and backed grant programs that encouraged police officers to carry out more drug-related arrests — an escalation of the war on drugs.And Brookings:But one thing is clear: the 1994 bill interacted with—and reinforced—an existing and highly problematic piece of legislation: The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which created huge disparities in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine. Under this bill, a person was sentenced to a five-year minimum sentence for five grams of crack cocaine, but it took 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same sentence. Because crack is a cheaper alternative to powder cocaine, it is more prominent in low-income neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are more likely to be predominately Black and in urban areas that can be overpoliced more easily than suburban or rural areas. While the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, enacted under the Obama-Biden administration, reduced the crack/powder cocaine disparity from 100:1 to 18:1, the damage had been done, and its effects continue to this day.Truly, astonishingly bad optics, mate!He has since apologised for his role in this movement to be “tough on crime”, proposing new legislation to decriminalise marijuana for instance, but there’s not a lot of way back from that record. It is enough to cast serious doubt on his judgement from several communities, and a close eye should be kept on him. It was enough to be “Not Trump” on the ballot, but now that he’s in power, this attitude will haunt President-Elect Biden for a lot his time in the White House.He also has a slight tendency towards corporate favouritism, as noted by the Jacobin:The most well-known case is Biden’s relationship with MBNA, a major credit card company based in his home state that was his largest single donor between 1989 and 2000. By sheer coincidence, Biden voted against a measure requiring credit card companies to warn consumers of the consequences of making only minimum payments and voted four times for an industry-supported bankruptcy bill that made it harder for financially strained borrowers to get protection from creditors. Another coincidence: MBNA hired Biden’s son, Hunter, as a lobbyist straight out of law school, and later hired him as a consultant from 2001 to 2005 — the same years Biden was helping to pass the bill.The “Hunter’s laptop” bullshit was a Republican ploy to discredit President-Elect Biden which thankfully failed, but he’s got more than a little bit of dirt on him through this. In a connected matter, he has a spotty history with bankruptcy issues, as noted by GQ on the dirt surrounding him on the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, an Act that he had been pushing to get through for years and which led him to clash with Senator Elizabeth Warren ever since:Biden was one of the bill's major Democratic champions, and he fought for its passage from his position on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He had pushed for two earlier bankruptcy reform bills in 2000 and 2001, both of which failed. But in 2005, BAPCPA made it through, successfully erecting all kinds of roadblocks for Americans struggling with debt, and doing so just before the financial crisis of 2008.[…]As political writer Alexander Cockburn once wrote, "The first duty of any senator from Delaware is to do the bidding of the banks and large corporations which use the tiny state as a drop box and legal sanctuary. Biden has never failed his masters in this primary task. Find any bill that sticks it to the ordinary folk on behalf of the Money Power and you’ll likely detect Biden’s hand at work."And from Prospect:[Biden] voted against three amendments to ease bankruptcy requirements for consumers whose financial troubles stem from medical expenses. He voted against an amendment that would have helped seniors keep their homes. He voted against exempting servicemembers and widows of servicemembers killed in action from the law’s eligibility restrictions. He voted against an amendment to exempt women whose financial troubles stemmed from deadbeat husbands’ failure to pay child support or alimony. And Biden even voted against an amendment that would have ensured that children of debtors could still be given birthday and Christmas presents. Biden also voted against allowing debtors to pay their union dues during bankruptcy, potentially imperiling their employment and ability to achieve financial rehabilitation.[…]It’s not as if Joe Biden was opposed to all amendments to the legislation. He voted to enshrine a “millionaire’s loophole” that allows wealthy, well-counseled debtors to shield their assets from creditors by placing them in asset-protection trusts. Nor did he act to cut off the loophole that shields assets placed by wealthy families in “dynasty trusts,” such as are offered by Delaware.Most recently, we have to reckon with President-Elect Biden’s… slips of the tongue. “You ain’t black” being the most famous, though by no means the only one. He’s got his heart in the right place when it comes to race and LGBT+ relations (these days), but his rhetoric is curiously tone-deaf, which is risky in a time like this wherein the Black Lives Matter is ramping up its campaign to expose America’s racist core.And then, we have Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris.A historic win for women!A historic win for black people!I mean this wholeheartedly, I am pleased for her. Her stances on Medicare and providing access to college education for students from poorer backgrounds is highly commendable, as is her desire to abolish the death penalty.Except, we do have to remember her record as a prosecutor, which left her wide open to the likes of former Presidential candidate Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s critiques, as documented from the Rolling Stone magazine:Gabbard particularly zeroed in on Harris’s record on drug-related offenses: “She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” Gabbard said, referring to an interview Harris gave to The Breakfast Club in which she joked about smoking pot in college.[…]Perhaps most damningly, in 2019 a Washington Free Beacon investigation found that between 2011 and 2016, while Harris was attorney general, at least 1,560 people were sent to California state prisons on marijuana-related offenses. Although the number of low-level marijuana offenders sent to state prison significantly declined after 2011, that was attributed to a state-wide initiative to curb state prison overcrowding and divert lower-level offenders to county jails.The claim is somewhat misleading given that Vice President-Elect Harris didn't prosecute all of those cases, and many factcheckers like APN note that Facebook memes added a racial element to the marijuana convictions that was never there initially. But it's a clear optics U-turn from prosecution to her current position on decriminalisation (another of her positions that I support).A lot of the criticisms of Vice President-Elect Harris leave out that she was not herself personally involved in a lot of the issues. She manned large offices with lawyers who made some of the gaffes that are now attributed to her, such as the 2014 incident when she was Attorney General wherein some of her lawyers argued that non-violent offenders should be forced to combat wildfires. It’s easy to conflate Vice-President Elect Harris’ actions with those of her underlings, but in this context she was not, so to speak, responsible for forcing offenders into forced labour in California.However, it’s harder to distance herself from her record on this next issue, in which 1,000 drug tests had to be dismissed under her tenure in the District Attorney’s office, as reported in the Sacramento Bee:The San Francisco drug lab was shut down after a lead technician, who testified on behalf of prosecutors on drug cases, was found to have systematically mishandled the drug samples seized from suspects, even consuming some herself.While the San Francisco Police Department was responsible for running the lab, not Harris’s district attorney office, a court ruled in 2010 that the district attorney’s office violated defendants’ constitutional rights by not disclosing what it knew about the tainted drug evidence.Vice-President Elect Harris also has a poor relationship with truancy laws. While she later expressed regret for the effects, the Lost Angeles Times details what happened:Harris took that advocacy statewide, sponsoring a 2010 law to make it a misdemeanor for parents whose young children miss more than 10% of school days a year without a valid excuse. Parents could be punished with a maximum $2,000 fine, up to a year in county jail or both. Violators of the law could defer judgment by participating in regular meetings with school officials and improving their children’s attendance.[…]Harris and her allies have said the law’s purpose was to prod school districts to provide resources to families of truant children, not to lock up parents. But the Huffington Post reported that several counties in California arrested, charged and sometimes jailed parents under the law backed by Harris.To some, she might appear to flip-flop on issues; it's not unusual for a Presidential candidate to do this, but it's ammunition against her for Trumpistas who are looking for anything they can find to catch her out. Her team’s denial of DNA testing for Kevin Cooper as Attorney General in 2004 is also a flip-flop strike against her; she now supports the testing, but is that too little, too late? There's yet more fuel for their hatred to be found, given that she's female and black. Vice President-Elect Harris is going to have a very interesting time between defending her record and fending off racism and sexism alike.Look, maybe the pair of them have grown naturally into their newfound positions. At least they’re better than Trump. But we cannot be blind to their records. They have to deliver the goods now, and the test of their commitment to the values they espoused on the political trail will be how they conduct themselves in office.And we should be honest with ourselves.Trumpistas like to paint them as radical liberals, but America as it stands has no left-wing party. It has left-wing politicians, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but there’s no unified left wing. President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Harris are about as centre as it gets for the American system, which translates as still pretty bloody right wing on the rest of the world stage.Democrats as a party only look like the left wing because of what they’re compared to in the Republican Party, which is the gold-standard for the Western far-right:Also bear in mind that the Democratic Party was shifting leftwards while the then-President Obama was conducting mass surveillance via the National Security Agency and playing with drones, as noted in the Guardian:Barack Obama has claimed that drone and other airstrikes, his favored tactics of war, have killed between 64 and 116 civilians during his administration, a tally which was criticized as undercounted even before Friday’s announcement.[…]Yet the count is also incomplete, leaving out the civilian toll from drone strikes in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Nor did the administration go into detail about where the strikes occur, citing what an official told reporters on Friday were “diplomatic sensitivities”, even as it presented the assessment as a significant advance in transparency. The Guardian has filed a freedom of information act request for records relating to the civilian-death assessment in the US bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria, where thus far the US military has concluded it has killed 36 civilians since summer 2015.The upper limit of the civilian death toll from drones stands at more than 800 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, during the time period Obama’s drones tally covered.Don’t be fooled by the Trumpistas.These are not the progressive heroes that people like myself would be hoping for. My standard of leftism as a Scot would terrify most Americans, but we can agree that there have been poor shows from across the board. The new President-Elect duo are not angels: hell, no politician is! President-Elect Biden is going to be remembered for a while as “The man who beat Trump”, but that reputation isn’t going to last forever. His and Vice President-Elect Harris’ records will be coming into more focus now that the Presidency is theirs (that is, if Trump loses the SCOTUS case that he’s building).Learn this lesson; progressives have succeeded in getting rid of Trump. but they’ve appointed a neoliberal in his place. It’s better by far, and the Atlantic has some warm words for President-Elect Biden even against this backdrop:Biden didn’t extol neoliberalism in the language of a true believer and came to publicly regret his vote to ease banking rules. He wasn’t prone to abstractly celebrating the virtue of free markets. His analysis was always earthier, without hints of the technocratic tendency to trumpet the efficiency. He urged the party toward centrism, because it was the basis for electoral victory. “It’s where the American people are,” he told a journalist in 2001.Even so, there is plenty of reason to worry about the pair of them. Between the above and criticisms of President-Elect Biden’s odd history with interventionism—Overall, Biden’s reflexes are to provide little political assistance to countries in transition. That is a recipe for failed states, and failed states produce not only terrorists but also refugees, and they invite foreign intervention by neighboring states and aspiring hegemons.This half-in-half-out approach to military intervention also strips U.S. foreign policy of its moral element of making the world a better place. It is inadequate to the cause of advancing democracy and human rights.—wording courtesy of the Atlantic, there’s scope for this victory to go all wrong.If we haven’t learned this lesson already, we’ll learn it soon enough.Politics, for some, is a jokePoor, poor Kanye.The Presidency is to narcissists what a lamp is to a moth. They can’t resist the allure of power. And Kanye West, well-documented narcissist, flew into it.At a rally in July, he not only decried Harriet Tubman (an enslaved black woman who freed herself and other slaves and then became a suffrage activist), but broke down crying over abortion. I get it. I really do. The thought of abortion is a hard one for me to swallow, even as I accept that the woman’s decision is the final one. It’s not me who carries the kid, it’s not me who will have their life on the line upon complications. Hell, men couldn’t even suck it up and accept the negative side effects from male contraception, which we’ve been expecting women to endure through their pills for decades!I know why West is upset over abortion. Even as a liberal, I do understand it. I come from a religious background, so I have heard the anti-abortion arguments for long enough to hold sympathy without agreement. Indeed, I support limits on abortion based on time and science to determine foetal potential for pain and to curb any eugenics temptations. Ideally, I’d love to have a world wherein abortion was no longer necessary, in that we provide for people and give them the resources and health provisions to have a baby safely and carry it to term intact.But this isn’t a perfect world, and the act of carrying a baby and later birthing it is a supreme nine-month long labour for a woman. Many can’t even actually afford to look after the child, and the argument of “just give the kid to an orphanage” negates one simple fact: it fucking hurts to birth a kid. Comedian Carol Burnett once said that childbirth “is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head”; if a God designed that system for the reproduction of life, just because Eve ate one piece of fruit, and pre-programmed us to be horny, then He’s a sadistic monster.If that level of pain, not to mention the nine months of actually carrying the child to term, is not a woman’s choice to undertake, freely and gladly consented to, then we’re kidding ourselves that women have any equality to men. We give corpses more bodily autonomy when it comes to harvesting their organs than we give to women when we deny them the chance to abort their pregnancies in a humane manner (balancing scientific knowledge of pain and nervous system growth with the needs of the woman). Our entire existence is built on the extraordinary pain of women; I would not blame a single one of them if they all collectively said “enough”.Understanding West is different from agreeing with his views.But in his narcissism, he ran for President with no workable plan for his chosen issues. He appeared before the crowd, and his solution to abortion was this doozy:The maximum increase would be everybody that has a baby gets a million dollars or something in that range… If you had opportunity to be given a million dollars, just for being pregnant, would you have considered it? And then everybody would start having children, the greatest gift of life.America has 166,700,000 women.Let’s be generous to West and assume that maybe 1/3 will fall pregnant at some stage in their lives. Likely more will deliberately fall pregnant with the financial incentive in place, but we’ll be generous so as to not break the bank. That’s about 55,566,667 women. And each gets $1,000,000 for every pregnancy.55,566,667 * $1,000,000.You get from that $5.5566667e+13.If you’re playing at home, that’s $55,566,667,000,000.For comparison, US expenditure on the military in 2019 was $718,690,000,000.And that’s not even accounting for women having more than one kid.The takeaway is clear: the government would be financially crippled in a week. The sperm banks would be raided by women who wanted babies (read: $1,000,000: poverty will make most anyone take a crazy bet to survive), and then what happens to the baby? Will it be loved and cared for, or will it be tossed into the American hyper-capitalistic society without so much as a care in the world?Some will luck out.Some won’t.And that, my friends, is why ‘pro-life’ is only ‘pro-birth’, with no thought to what happens before, during, or after. Surprise, surprise; the narcissist hadn’t thought anything of his abortion-curbing plan through.And yet, despite this unworkable lunacy, he got a few voters!WHAT THE HELL?!The Presidency attracted Donald Trump in his egomania, and he ran it like a business at the expense of the human lives he was supposed to govern.The Presidency attracted Kanye West in his egomania, and he wanted to implement insane policies that would destroy the bank in his self-assured zeal.To counter this unqualified egomania that’s seeping into the election discourse, with even Dwayne Johnson “entertain[ing] the thought” (even if he’s not serious), things have to change. Even the phenomenon of unqualified individuals jesting about their chances, when married to a system that would do nothing to stop them if they made an effort to run, is very worrying to say the absolute least.What have we learned?Some people run on a narcissistic high.Some people vote for them as a stupid joke.Others are so disillusioned by the non-options from the major parties that they side with these jokesters and clowns; the same attitude got us Trump.And politics is fractured as a result of this joking around.Now, the current limits on who can become President are the following:Be a natural-born citizen of the United StatesBe at least 35 years oldHave been a resident of the United States for 14 yearsThese need tightened, and quickly.Celebrities can fundraise for political causes, but they cannot run for the Presidency without a minimum of experience in political office. At the very least, I’d be expecting to see a degree in a relevant field; this requirement can be interpreted widely, since anthropology is the study of humans one governs, history covers several areas of legal development through the ages, criminology and sociology would give incredible insights into the treatment of criminals and society. Experience and higher education can cancel one another out in some cases (say a candidate has thirty years of Senate experience but they didn’t go to university? Weigh it up on its merits!) but this current system of allowing simply anyone through the door needs to be reconsidered.And yes, I am biased in favour of the elite experts.Thank you, next.The age point needs to be looked at, too. All well and good to have a minimum at 35 years of age (I’d set it at 30 personally, but there you go), but what about the maximum? We had Trump and President-Elect Biden, 74 and 77 years of age respectively, in this election. Much was made over who would die first, who looked the most ill, who had what dementia or cognitive decline. As much as it saddens me to say this, such a policy would likely exclude 79-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders and 71-year-old Senator Warren, but we cannot have a repeat of this madness.Consistency is key here.This makes a problem for the re-election of older office-holders, but I don’t think this maximum should be breached. Say we set the limit at 70 years, and the minimum at 30? That gives a candidate forty years to get into the position of the President. That’s not overly restrictive in the slightest. To those crying that this is a burden on older people seeking the Presidency and is thus a restriction on freedom, I’m chill with that.Within forty years of four-year Presidencies, that’s (depending on the year you were born) ten opportunities to get into the hot seat.Ten opportunities.Most people don’t have the funds to get one opportunity.Besides, while there’s implicit bias against the less wealthy, there’s already explicitly worded discrimination against non-natural citizens. Gee, for the land of opportunity, it’s sure withholding the Presidency from a fairly sizeable chunk of the population, no? But this is a limitation that has been enshrined and accepted.A few more to strengthen the office wouldn’t hurt.We can disagree and be friends on some things, but not on everythingI’d like to tell you a story, if I may.I have this friend. We’ll call him Craig.Craig is gay. I am (at this stage in my life) an evangelical Christian (the kind who gives you Biblical literature as a Christmas present) and am in impressive denial over my bisexuality. We meet at university. We sit next to one another in the law lectures, and we get chatting. He’s quite awkward, but I like him a lot, and we get chatting.He and I go for coffees and hot chocolates. I don’t know that Craig is gay, and I don’t think to ask him anything about his sexuality. But we chat about gay issues sometimes, and a lot of my then-values come flooding out of my stupid horrible mouth.Craig doesn’t retaliate.He remains my friend throughout it.He doesn’t even tell me that he’s gay until later on in our friendship.But then I meet another friend. We’ll call her Jessie. She no longer speaks to me, so I can’t tell her how much of an impact she had on my life. We meet in my Spanish class. She’s a typical university SJW, the hipster-chic kind who’ll correct your speech if you don’t say “they” in just about every instance. Scotland has very few of those, thankfully. But I have to give it to her; she taught me a pretty important lesson.We get chatting about gay issues, and I do my best to flirt with the issue. “Oh, I don’t have the right to judge!”, I try, leaving out the part that I was on an anti-gay mailing list at the time from a ‘pro-marriage’ organisation. She presses and presses; she doesn’t give me an inch. I do the whole cool-as-a-cucumber approach, the suave Ben Shapiro rational veneer of oily semantics juggling, and she’s only getting angrier and angrier with me until I outright tell her that I don’t believe in gay marriage.She then takes her bag and her oversized glasses and leaves our table. I have the sheer, unmitigated cheek to tell her to have a nice life.That day, she is absent from Spanish class.She transferred classes to get away from me.I don’t blame her now, but I did back then. Touchy liberals, I think! I kept my cool, I didn’t storm off! I have won the argument, because I was civil and polite! I find Craig, not knowing that he was gay, and I COMPLAIN ABOUT HER TO HIM.Craig doesn’t retaliate.He remains my friend. God knows how.He helps me see what she was thinking and why.I don’t think that I would have broken out of my rut had it not been for Craig and Jessie. They were two of the best things to ever happen to me. Jessie helped me to see Craig’s perspective, and Craig allowed me to come to my senses in my own time by being there for me. In this, I even manage to come to terms with my bisexuality, and I realise that feeling this way about guys and girls is not an immoral thing. I owe them both a debt that I don’t think I can ever wholly repay.Craig was amazing about these issues when I talked to him, and when I began to lose my faith. Jessie doesn’t know that I made the change; she stayed away from me for as long as she was at university. I never saw her again. Again, who could blame her? I held values that ran contrary to her life! But here’s the thing; while Craig was the gentle, kind type who guided me away from hate, I first of all had to want to be guided. I only understood Craig’s perspective after Jessie had forcibly rejected my worldview and made me see how wrong it was to view some human beings as an underclass, no matter how nicely I smiled at them. For me to listen, I had to first see the harm that I was causing.Since then, I learned that another gay friend (his name for our purposes will be Stanley) had been afraid of coming out to me because he thought I would be homophobic. I can’t remember if I was still transitioning away from homophobia or if I was more or less totally accepting by that stage. Regardless of the stage I was at, though, Stanley was perhaps the tipping point in all of this. This was compounded with learning that another friend Morgan had gender dysphoria and was considering changing names to match their gender identity (“their” being used for anonymity).I had guidance from Craig, rage from Jessie, sadness from Stanley, and a realisation of just how many people were hiding from people like me from Morgan. Those four things brought me back from my hatred masked as kindness.Here’s the issue.Without those four together, I wouldn’t have changed.It’s beyond shameful, but that’s what it took.We have to be prepared to show all four. Like Jessie, we have to be prepared to fight tooth and nail for our rights, against the QAnons and the Confederates and the Neo-Nazis and the alt-right and UKIP and National Front and the Ku Klux Klan. Where one group isn’t targeting us, like the Klan is more interested in harassing people of colour than gay people, their fight is still our fight. We fight on behalf of our shared humanity. Like Stanley, we have to be open about how their hatred makes us feel in our calmer moments; it might not sway them, but it might sway those on the fence. Like Craig, we have to be there for those who come back from that edge, back to kindness. And like Morgan, we have to realise just how the people we love are suffering.Being nice isn’t enough anymore.Being respectful isn’t enough.Not on their own.Bigots have been globally legitimised under Trump, and they aren’t going down easily. Not even with their orange führer taken out of the picture.So when a Republican or such tells you to be nice to them, that you should be kind to them in the wake of this election result, that you need to let them process their feelings, it’s up to you whether you want to use the Craig, Jessie, Stanley, or Morgan mask to deal with them and the wider mess that Trump has left in the West.If you cannot help them, after having given it your best effort, then there’s nothing left for you to do. Others can give it a shot, but know your limits, and know what you need for your own safety. Know when to be a Craig and when to be a Jessie; being a Jessie all the time will anger everyone around you, but being a Craig will lead to a much slower burn which we don’t have a lot of time for in the current climate. And yet, both are needed in the equation, as a balance.We cannot be friends with people who dispute our existence and rights, who refuse to change their small minds with all the evidence in the world put before them. People are capable of changing, but they have to be exposed to both kindness from those they’re hurting and their fury alike. We can chat as Craigs once the other side is listening about the best way to further our rights to the benefit of all (there’s a genuine worry about letting male sexual predators who fake trans identities into women’s prisons!), but if one side is demanding that our entire corpus of rights should be on the table, we have to be able to put on our Jessie masks and demand that we be acknowledged in the first place.If you think there’s hope, like Craig thought there was hope for me, talk.If you don’t, then your first priority is to your own safety.According to the current figures, 70,686,229 Americans decided at the very least that the danger to our corpus of rights was not a deal-breaker. Be it through oily Shapiro semantics twisting (“Oh, we don’t just oppose same-sex… stuff, the rules are the same for unmarried couples too!”) or pure outright hatred (“FUCKING FAGGOT [I’m bi] N*****S NEED TO GO DIE, HELL YEAH FILTH!”), the effects are the same.Seems like Jessie might need to stick around for a bit.No demographic is immune from bigotryYou know how we always hear that strong women will save us?Or the gays and trans people?Or the people of colour, like some rainbow of good?There’s some truth in that (indeed, many are praising former-Representative Stacey Abrams, a black woman, for mobilising support in Georgia to oust Trump through her Fair Fight campaign), but don’t be wholly taken in by the numbers.Inexplicably, 28% of LGBT+ people voted for Donald Trump this year, DOUBLING from the 2016 election. September exit polls indicated that 45% of queer men were lining up to give Trump their vote. This is in the face of the man who tried to reject transgender people from the US military to save on pointless expenses, whose administration halted visas for the same-sex partners of diplomats and UN ambassadors (limiting access on the basis of marriage alone), who rolled back trans healthcare provisions in the Department of Health and Social Services.A lot of Trump’s attacks were launched against our trans guys and gals and non-binary pals, but some members of the overall umbrella community did not have their backs. They cared more about their taxes, or their comfort, or their voting habits, or for their ability to “pass” as straight and cisgender to their own advantage.As for women, 55% of white women polled sided with Mr “Grab Them by the Pussy”. That’s an increase of 2% from 2016. This is a massive problem for modern day feminism, wherein people say the right things and then vote in an uber-misogynist who seeks to remove the right of all women to receive a safe abortion should they need it. But since some women will never need that abortion, there’s a divide between the haves and the have-nots. Once again, what we see is a failure of empathy.The Latino and Black vote for Trump also rose by a few percent. HOW?! This is the man who has such a clear history of racism, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything good that he’s done! Now, to give them their dues, perhaps they were put off of President-Elect Biden thanks to the above-mentioned issues, but it’s literally a choice between that and an orange wannabe fascist who unashamedly despises you!It comes down to the degree of harm being wrought, both past and present. We have one candidate who, in the past, did many racist things (such as the aforementioned policing law) but then served under Barack Obama (who again, remember, I do not care hugely for save for on balance with the alternatives running under the Libertarian and the Republican banners) and ran to dethrone a tyrant in the present. On the other side, we have a bastard who called peaceful black protestors “sons of bitches” in recent, living memory, who calls African nations “shitholes”, and who repeatedly evades questions on white supremacy so that he would not be in danger of losing the Confederacy vote from his supremacist buddies. This is, of course, on top of all of the racist comments and actions he has perpetrated in the past.Trump, asked if he has concerns that he's using the language of white supremacists and many view his tweets as racist, says: "It doesn't concern me because many people agree with me." pic.twitter.com/C0ranRv6vg— Manu Raju (@mkraju) July 15, 2019You don’t get into bed with Steve Bannon and avoid such supremacist claims.One candidate did racist things and took his time to grow up, but he did grow up.The other did not grow up.It’s the lesser of two evils (see my section where I evaluate the new President-Elect and Vice President-Elect), but President-Elect Biden is the less bitter pill by far.Polled white men were in the majority of Trump’s supporters, coming in at 58%. As if there was any doubt that that would be the case. This dipped from last time, but it’s over half. If this is representative of America as a whole, white men and women left to their own devices would have voted in Donald Trump. As a white man who is bisexual, I feel significantly let down by the social demographics I belong to. I’m especially disappointed with the LGBT+ community; we are fragmented and divided, and over a quarter of us voted for a bigot who would have ruined so many lives, who would leave millions to the mercy of COVID-19 while withholding financial and health provisions. They are the torch-bearers for Trumpism, even without Trump present in the White House.He is a spectre who will forever haunt democracy, and they bear him.We bear him.I’m not happy about that.Frankly, I’m utterly ashamed of us.Still, let’s celebrate while we can. We can start by thanking Stacey Abrams.The Supreme Court is a political institutionOne could have argued that the SCOTUS wasn’t a political institution, even after Bush v Gore. They applied the law to the case and did what they could. I hold that their decision in that case was held back by a lack of imagination; take the dissenting words of Justice Stevens, who said the following of the case:…nothing prevents the majority, even if it properly found an equal protection violation, from ordering relief appropriate to remedy that violation without depriving Florida voters of their right to have their votes counted. As the majority notes, “[a] desire for speed is not a general excuse for ignoring equal protection guarantees.”In Justice Stevens’ view, the court had made a decision to find in Bush’s favour. One that was based on expediency, but a decision all the same.This encapsulates much of constitutional law, and a lot of administrative law too. How one interprets the highest laws of the land is a consciously-made choice, not merely a seeking of truth. In some cases, truth doesn’t exist before a judge makes their call on novel cases. What of gay marriage? SCOTUS had to decide that ‘dignity’ encompassed a person’s right to marry whoever they liked in terms of being equal! The Affordable Care Act? Justice Roberts had to decide to read the tax penalty as taxation to allow it to persist! Abortion had to be decided as a matter of privacy between doctor and patient, but on another day, the Justices could have easily overridden privacy by deciding that an unborn child constituted ‘life’ and that the SCOTUS (as part of the State) would be depriving ‘life’ against constitutional guarantees.That's the way the Polish Constitutional Court went with their analysis of the abortion debate, and even liberal bastion Justice Ginsburg was wary of the way Roe was decided (while still supporting a woman's right to abortion)!I fall on the side of protecting abortion rights and same-sex marriage. I’ve decided that that is how I’m going to read and interpret their relevant clauses. Others refuse, and decide to read it along their own biases and interpretations.You see how Supreme Courts work?They decide.They don’t just fact-find. They find facts, which lead to multiple possible (and legally plausible) outcomes and interpretations, and they apply the ones that they decide fit best. They hear out the counsel, and they deliberate on the strength of the arguments within the legal setting. The more novel the case, the more discretion is made open to the judges, the more politically contentious the topic (say, abortion when it was first brought to SCOTUS), the more a judgement becomes a decision-making exercise as opposed to fact-finding alone. This isn’t contract law, this isn’t private property: those fields are pretty fixed.But constitutional and administrative law?By virtue of being tied to politics and principles, they’re doomed to be in flux forever.And SCOTUS is, for all intents and purposes, a Constitutional Court.So let’s go back my opening line. One could argue that SCOTUS wasn’t a political institution, even after Bush v Gore, but it was a deciding institution. It decided on matters. Sometimes for good, and sometimes for ill. This whole nonsense that the SCOTUS doesn’t make law is absurd, no matter what an originalist would tell you; their members are brought in by the President’s nomination and their later confirmation, and a President is voted for by the people. They know that, should a chair vacate, it will then be filled by the President they have voted for.It’s political by default of its makeup.But after Bush, that political element was thrust into the limelight. No longer was it just deciding the law based on law that was already present. It was making political decisions. One could argue that even before then, Loving v Virginia and Brown v Board of Education of Topeka were politically-fuelled decisions based on concepts of the good which could be extrapolated from the legal language to suit the Justices’ needs. As the sides of the political aisle become more and more divided on human rights, such decisions become political statements. Even a person who declines to say anything on the case before them, who says that their hands are tied, has decided to say nothing: qui tacet consentire.Those who are silent are presumed to be in full agreement.That includes the originalist who says “I couldn’t possibly comment.”(For anyone who wants to review this topic in more detail, Philosophy Tube delivered an incredibly in-depth discussion on originalism and deciding vs fact-finding, which I include here for your convenience. Ignore the horse.)Enter Justice Amy Coney Barrett.Republican Party official Harmeet Dhillon had this to say on Fox:We're waiting for the United States Supreme Court - of which the President has nominated three justices - to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through and pick it up.If the SCOTUS wasn’t political before (and we’ve clearly established that it is a political institution anyway due to its very makeup), it sure as hell is now.I’m still hoping that Justice Barrett will have enough moral fibre to allow the people of America to have their say in the election. I think very little of her voting record and stances; I find her originalism blind and her reading of the law restrictive to the point of sheer malice. Her unwillingness to acknowledge climate change as a real and present danger when directly asked is particularly worrying. However, for all I know, she might be entirely innocent in any political discourse. Maybe Trump nominated her in the hopes that she would come through, without explicitly giving her orders.But the SCOTUS is currently Trump’s biggest weapon in his arse(nal). Justice Samuel Alito recently decided to enforce vote segregation orders by date in Pennsylvania. He went on a massive rant to the Federalist Society about gay rights and ‘political’ COVID-19 lockdowns. Whatever the outcome of the case that Trump’s lawyers bring, the Justices are getting ready to hear it out. They’re gearing up. And even if the case presented is a flimsy one, it’s gonna be a tempting option for six sitting arch-conservatives.SCOTUS is not neutral to law and Presidents.And it is very, very political.What comes next?You’ve been freed, do you know how hard it is to lead…?This is far from over.Trump is going to do all that he can to invalidate this result.His fanbase is already crying fraud.The courts are getting involved.America, you’re in for a rough few weeks, maybe even months. President-Elect Biden will come out of it hopefully unscathed, but to become complacent is to give ammo to the other side. Not that their heavily-armed goons need any more.And after that, President Biden takes power. He has to be held accountable. He no longer has the excuse of “I’m not Trump!”; he has to lead, and lead properly. That means policies, healthcare, bipartisan agreements, international affairs. He has to deal with a Britain whose Boris was gearing up to trade with a Trump administration, a Russia whose Putin was getting more and more testy with Trump, a China whose Xi Trump has tried to rattle and blatantly failed, a North Korea whose Kim was barely being held in check.Americans can’t even decide on the distinctions between capitalism and socialism without launching at one another’s throats these days.You’re without Trump.Awesome.Wow!Do you have a clue what happens now?How is the new administration going to handle domestic affairs? The Black Lives Matter movement, incensed by Trump and his tear gas, will be watching President-Elect Biden with steely eyes. The LGBT+ community have been living in great concern under Trump, so he will need to restore their faith in government. Women need assurances that their bodies are their own, and not merely incubation chambers for sperm and eggs. A deadly virus is still ripping through the States; stimulus packages are essential.This is one of the most politically fraught times of our lives. At a time when allies are a must, most of the world looks to the US with great suspicion. On the global stage, there’s no way to move forward without help and support from other countries.Phase One has to be settling the country at home and saving lives.Phase Two has to be the renewal of international affairs.Phase Three is maintaining that peace, if it’s even possible to achieve now.But it’s fine for me to just say all of this; President-Elect Biden actually has to do it.Let’s see how he does.But just remember one last thing: President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris might not have won without Dr Jo Jorgensen of the Libertarian Party splitting the vote from disaffected Republicans.I got very angry during the more tense moments in the Georgia counting, during which Dr Jorgensen was holding the ~1% that President-Elect Biden needed to overtake Trump. I made an illogical post on Facebook lamenting this. I complained that she was stealing Biden’s votes, why couldn’t the Libertarians have thrown support his way, it’s their fault that Biden’s not the clear and decisive winner yet! It was a fairly childish move, but I was panicking, and logic wasn’t really my strong suit at the time. Like a good little nerd, writing things down helps me to keep calm when I’m stressed.Plus, I wanted to believe the best in our Libertarian friends, that they might have been tempted to vote for Biden too, that they had a shred of decency!However, a dear friend of mine provided me with solid evidence from Libertarian online hideouts (not that he is one, of course!) that the American Libertarians were furious with their own and Dr Jorgensen for splitting the votes away from Trump. In their eyes, Dr Jorgensen and her supporters were actually the reason that Biden could keep his lead, because those Republican Never-Trumpers actually had somewhere to go that allowed them to avoid their skewed perceptions of socialism and communism without throwing their support behind Trump himself. A worthless protest vote, in other words.Apparently 4chan had a meltdown over this?Here’s a selection of some of their spicy memes:Evidence must always take precedence over sentiments and optimism.And so, I had to concede the point to my friend.That opens up one more problem, though.Had it not been for that Libertarian split, Trump just might have won.I'm fairly certain that she had Biden-leaners along with her. Dr Jorgensen's open border policy, her rejection of Trump’s famous wall, and her vocal support for Black Lives Matter would have turned many Trumpistas away from her. But plenty of her other policies, such as free market healthcare, slashed taxes, and a strong advocacy for the Second Amendment, skewed to the right’s terror of socialised anything, welcoming in disaffected Republicans who didn’t like Trump but would have held their noses to vote for him had there been no third party alternative open to them.Without that ~1% buffer, Trump would have had a much better shot in a lot more of the swing states. Those where the vote ended up as 49.x% : 49.y%. Yes, many people wanted Trump to lose the election, well over half of the country wanted him out!But without Dr Jorgensen splitting the vote from both sides and taking 1,735,372 votes for herself, Trump would have had a much clearer path to winning the likes of Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. There was less than 1% of the in the balance in all four of those states, and she held it each time. We’ll never know for sure, but had enough of those votes gone to Trump, those four states alone would have afforded Trump an additional 57 electoral votes; that would have set Trump from the 214 he currently holds up to 271, with North Carolina (15) and Alaska (3) giving him another 18 votes once their voting is finished (which are looking ruby-red right now).Each of those states voted for Trump in 2016.And while Arizona may be exacting vengeance on Trump over his treatment of their beloved Senator John McCain, that's a loss that could have easily been softened through a coalition between those other historically red states.Many people argue against the idea that Dr Jorgensen lost Trump the election. They say that no Libertarian owes their vote to anyone. This is true, but there’s a simple empirical test; simply take away Dr Jorgensen from the equation, and then see what happened to the scores. Would more voters have abstained from voting? Would they have swallowed their pride and voted for President-Elect Biden?Or maybe enough nutters would have gone for Trump.Had every hard-right Libertarian voter followed their twisted internal logic and tactically voted for Trump over Dr Jorgensen (a candidate I respected while disagreeing with her on matters to do with civilian arms, taxation, and her excessive deference to free market economics), Trump would have walked away with 289 electoral votes.This is before we account for the fact that, had the Democrats chosen anyone other than boring old neoliberal President-Elect Biden as their Presidential candidate, had they gone with real progressives such as Senators Sanders and Warren, they would have lost the election in a landslide, even when opposing Donald J. Trump.Just food for thought.Maybe enough of her voters would have shuffled off to President-Elect Biden. Much of her platform would have been appealing to them; hell, if she’d loosened up on my aforementioned issues with her stances, I would have been sorely tempted if I were an American! But in a world of identity politics, with Republicans running wild in their hatred for any form of social provision, the Libertarian ballot might have called out to those who wanted a break from Trump while still harbouring traditional GOP support in their core.For all of the work done against him, faced with all of the tragic deaths from COVID-19 and beautiful voter re-enfranchisement from Fair Fight movements, Trump might have lost the 2020 election on a Libertarian miscalculation alone.That's a really sobering prospect.