How Amazon Wins: By Steamrolling Rivals and Partners

December 27, 2020 by staff

By Dana Mattioli
First published in The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 23, 2020

Jeff Bezos built Amazon.com Inc. from his garage with an underdog’s ambition to take on the establishment. He imbued staff with an obsession to grow fast by grabbing customers using the biggest selection and lowest prices. Today, he has more than 1.1 million employees and a market valuation around $1.6 trillion.

But Amazon never really grew up. Mr. Bezos still runs it with the drive of a startup trying to survive.

That ethos helps keep Amazon booming. Aggressive competition—including wresting market share from rivals—is often a hallmark of a successful business. It’s also why the tech-and-retail giant is the target of rivals, regulators and politicians who say its tactics are unfair for a company its size, and potentially illegal. As the company has grown, so has its capacity to take on an ever-growing array of competitors.

Bull Market
To keep customers happy, which Mr. Bezos has long said is Amazon’s fixation and growth strategy, executives behind the scenes have methodically waged targeted campaigns against rivals and partners alike—an approach that has changed little through the years, from diapers to footwear.

No competitor is too small to draw Amazon’s sights. It cloned a line of camera tripods that a small outside company sold on Amazon’s site, hurting the vendor’s sales so badly it is now a fraction of its original size, the little firm’s owner said. Amazon said it didn’t violate the company’s intellectual-property rights.

When Amazon decided to compete with furniture retailer Wayfair Inc., Mr. Bezos’s deputies created what they called the Wayfair Parity Team, which studied how Wayfair procured, sold and delivered bulky furniture, eventually replicating a majority of its offerings, said people who worked on the team. Amazon and Wayfair declined to comment on the matter.

Amazon set its sights on Allbirds Inc., the maker of popular shoes using natural and recycled materials, and last year launched a shoe called Galen that looks nearly identical to Allbirds’ bestseller—without the environmentally friendly materials and selling for less than half the price.

“You can’t help but look at a trillion-dollar company putting their muscle and their pockets and their machinations of their algorithms and reviewers and private-label machine all behind something that you’ve put your career against,” said Allbirds Co-CEO Joey Zwillinger. “You have this giant machine creating all these headwinds for us.”

An Amazon spokesman said the company’s shoe didn’t infringe on Allbirds’ design, adding that the company has previously said: “Offering products inspired by the trends to which customers are responding is a common practice across the retail industry.”

This year, Amazon has zeroed in on Shopify Inc., a fast-growing Canadian company that helps small merchants create online shops. Amazon has established a secret team, “Project Santos,” to replicate parts of Shopify’s business model, said people familiar with the project.

Amazon executives often initiated efforts like these on their own, though in some cases examined by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bezos himself was involved, according to former Amazon executives and internal emails.

From its start as an online bookstore 26 years ago, Amazon has expanded into an online retailer with a presence in nearly every major category. It is also the leading provider of cloud-computing services, a gadget maker, a major entertainment player and a rival to United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp. Mr. Bezos is the world’s richest man, with a net worth Forbes estimates at $187 billion.

He still exhorts employees to consider Amazon a startup. “It is always day one,” he likes to say. Day two is “stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death.” Mr. Bezos originally considered calling his company Relentless, and www.relentless.com still redirects to Amazon’s site.

Mr. Bezos declined to be interviewed. Amazon declined to provide an overall comment on the topic of this article and responded only to specific examples.

Some rivals and partners say Amazon’s competitive zeal looks like unfair practices. The Journal this year reported that Amazon employees used data about independent sellers on its platform to develop competing products and that it has used the investment and deal-making process in ways that entrepreneurs and others said helped it develop products that competed with its would-be partners. Journal reporting showed how Amazon has limited some competitors’ ability to promote rival streaming devices and other gadgets on its dominant e-commerce platform.

Mr. Bezos in July testimony to the House Antitrust Subcommittee about the Journal’s private-label article, said: “I can’t guarantee you that that policy has never been violated.” The Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it in the mergers-and-acquisitions and venture-capital processes to build competing products. Amazon didn’t directly address the question of whether it hobbles rivals’ marketing, saying it is common practice among retailers to choose which products they promote.

The Justice Department last year launched a broad investigation of the market power of large technology companies including Amazon, and the Federal Trade Commission has oversight of Amazon as part of a broader look into the business practices of big tech. Europe’s antitrust regulators last month charged Amazon with violating competition law. Amazon said it disagreed with the allegations and would continue to engage with the commission.

In October, the House Antitrust Subcommittee concluded a 16-month investigation into tech companies with a report accusing Amazon of exerting “monopoly power” over sellers on its website. “It’s very clear that they use the enormous market power that they have to maintain dominance,” Rep. David Cicilline (D., R.I.), chairman of the subcommittee, said in an interview.

Amazon has denied exerting monopoly power. In response to the investigation, it published a blog post saying that “large companies are not dominant by definition, and the presumption that success can only be the result of anti-competitive behavior is simply wrong.”

Amazon’s version
At its height about a decade ago, Pirate Trading LLC was selling more than $3.5 million a year of its Ravelli-brand camera tripods—one of its bestselling products—on Amazon, said owner Dalen Thomas.

In 2011, Amazon began launching its own versions of six of Pirate Trading’s top-selling tripods under its AmazonBasics label, he said. Mr. Thomas ordered one of the Amazon tripods and found it had the same components and shared Pirate Trading’s design. For its AmazonBasics products, Amazon used the same manufacturer that Pirate Trading had used.

Amazon priced one of its clone tripods below what Mr. Thomas paid his manufacturer to have Pirate Trading’s version made, he said. He determined it would be cheaper to buy Amazon’s versions, repackage and resell them than to buy and sell them on the terms he had been getting; he decided not to do that.

Amazon suspended Pirate Trading camera tripod models that competed with the AmazonBasics versions repeatedly, Mr. Thomas said, alleging his tripods had authenticity issues. Amazon rarely suspended the tripod models that didn’t compete with AmazonBasics versions, he said. In 2015, Amazon suspended all Ravelli products, he said, and even though the suspension ended, his company’s tripod business is now a fraction of the size it was. Mr. Thomas said he found being a seller on Amazon too risky and has largely pivoted to real-estate investing.

Several Amazon sellers said they have received notifications from Amazon, which has been battling fraud and fake goods on its platform, that say their products are used or counterfeit. Amazon suspends their selling accounts until they can prove that the products are legitimate, which can cause big sellers to lose tens of thousands of dollars each day, they said.

To turn their accounts back on, Amazon often requests that the sellers provide details on who manufactures their product along with invoices from the manufacturer so that Amazon can verify authenticity. Several sellers told the Journal they provided those details to Amazon to get their accounts reinstated, only for Amazon to introduce its own version of their products using the same manufacturer.

The Amazon spokesman said the company requests invoices when there is a counterfeit claim and doesn’t use information it requests about a seller’s manufacturer to procure private-label products.

CJ Rosenbaum, a lawyer who works on behalf of Amazon sellers, said some of them use intermediary “black box” factories to hide suppliers’ identities from Amazon: “They get the finished goods and ship them to a black-box factory who will ship their products to Amazon.”

‘Held as a prisoner’
More than half of all product searches start on Amazon’s search bar, according to some estimates, making it the de facto place for product discovery. For many sellers, Amazon represents the majority of their revenues.

“It’s literally like being held as a prisoner with Amazon,” said Billy Carmen, a Holly, Mich., seller of patio products, “and because of that there’s no place else companies like us can go to sell our products. Amazon uses that against us.”

The 62-year-old in late April sent Amazon invoices from his manufacturer because his account was under threat of suspension for counterfeit claims, even though he makes the product in question. He worries about the level of information Amazon has about his supply chain, though so far he hasn’t seen any Amazon-branded imitations on the site.

Mr. Bezos set out to make Amazon a destination where consumers can find everything they want and continues that push. “If a company is offering something that Amazon thinks they can do better, or can do less expensively, then they will try to do it,” said Patrick Winters, an Amazon Prime Video manager who left this summer to work for Albertsons Cos. after more than a decade at Amazon.

“That was Amazon’s philosophy from the start,” Mr. Winters said, “to basically have everything a customer wants even if it’s something only a few customers want.”

Quidsi, parent of Diapers.com and Soap.com, became a target a decade ago, when Amazon set up a team to focus on it, according to emails released as part of congressional hearings. Amazon wanted to know how the New Jersey e-commerce company could deliver bulky packages of diapers so quickly, said people familiar with the matter.

Diapers.com had an avid following, and Amazon had been wooing those shoppers, who tended to be loyal to vendors they liked and often expanded their diaper orders with higher-margin products such as baby formula.

Amazon in 2009 developed a 12-step plan to take on Quidsi, according to the emails released by Congress. Action items in emails included “Beat or meet Diapers.com’s delivery speed” and “Beat or meet Diapers.com’s 6PM order time cutoff.” An internal email that year from a top Amazon retail executive called Quidsi “our #1 short term competitor,” and said: “we need to match pricing on these guys no matter what the cost.”

In a June 2010 email chain that included Mr. Bezos, a senior executive laid out tactics, saying “We have already initiated a more aggressive ‘plan to win’ against diapers.com in the diaper/baby space,” a plan that included doubling Amazon’s discounts on diapers and baby wipes to 30% off, and a free Prime program for new moms.

When Amazon cut diaper prices by 30%, Quidsi executives were shocked and ran an analysis that determined Amazon was losing $7 for every box of diapers, former Quidsi board members said. Senior Quidsi executives were even more surprised when, the day of the price cuts, Jeff Blackburn, a top lieutenant to Mr. Bezos, approached a Quidsi board member saying the company should sell itself to Amazon, said a person familiar with the matter. At that point, Quidsi wasn’t for sale and had big growth plans.

Editor’s Note: What’s described here — selling at a loss to eliminate a competitor is illegal, but. Like most corporate crime, has been ignored by Democratic and Republican administration’s alike. (Individual prosecution decisions theoretically are made by non-partisan civil servants.) Remarkably, the website of the Federal Trade Commision claims “Instances of a large firm using low prices to drive smaller competitors out of the market in hopes of raising prices after they leave are rare.” And racism no longer exists, either.

While the reporting here is excellent overall, we should ask why the media almost never seeks statements from those whose job it is to prosecute such crimes and ask their reasons for not enforcing the law).

Quidsi started to unravel after Amazon’s price cuts, said Leonard Lodish, a Quidsi board member at the time, missing its internal monthly projections for the first time since 2005. The company felt it had no choice but to sell itself because it couldn’t compete with what Amazon was doing and survive. Amazon bought Quidsi in 2010 for about $500 million. It shut down Diapers.com in 2017, saying it was unprofitable.

“What Amazon did was against the law. They were selling diapers for below cost,” said Mr. Lodish. “But what were we going to do? Sue Amazon for antitrust? It would take years and tens of millions of dollars and we’d be bankrupt by then.”

The Amazon spokesman declined to comment on the specifics of the Quidsi acquisition, saying Diapers.com wasn’t profitable when Amazon acquired it. Mr. Blackburn declined to comment.

Wayfair Parity Team
In 2016, Wayfair was an online retailer of furniture such as coffee tables and nightstands with $3.4 billion in revenue that year, compared with Amazon’s $136 billion. Amazon had less furniture selection than Wayfair, and its so-called S-team of senior vice presidents—some directly under Mr. Bezos—made the market a priority, said the people who worked on the team.

That year, Amazon launched its Wayfair Parity Team, which analyzed Wayfair’s business with the goal of eventually selling on Amazon 90% of furniture Wayfair offered, the people said. The team grew to around 100 people. It struggled to find Wayfair’s suppliers. Wary of competitors, Wayfair was buying items from manufacturers and rebranding them to mask their identity, said the people.

The team eventually identified the manufacturers by ordering Wayfair products to check manufacturing information and by going to trade shows to find Wayfair’s suppliers, they said.

Images from court documents show the West Elm Orb chair listing, left, and the Amazon Orb

In March 2018, Amazon began selling an “Upholstered Orb Office Chair” under its Rivet brand.

Amazon didn’t stop Wayfair’s growth. The smaller company increased its share of online furniture sales in the U.S. to 25% last year from under 18% in 2016, according to market-research company 1010data—although Wayfair’s net loss also widened during the period. Amazon’s market share stayed steady, at just over half of online furniture sales, including its direct sales and those of outside vendors on its platform.

In the most recent quarter, Wayfair’s revenue grew 66.5% and the company posted its second consecutive quarterly profit after straight quarterly losses since its 2014 market debut.

The Amazon spokesman, while declining to comment on the Wayfair Parity Team, said part of earning customer loyalty is making selection and pricing as good or better than competitors’.

Williams-Sonoma Inc. successfully fought back against Amazon, which it claimed had copied a chair sold by its West Elm brand, known for its midcentury-modern furniture style. West Elm’s distinctive-looking orb dining chair was a particular hit, with more than $2 million in sales in the first 10 months of 2018, according to a complaint Williams-Sonoma filed in a lawsuit against Amazon over the incident, alleging patent infringement. In 2017, West Elm had filed a patent for the design of the chair.

The “Amazon Orb Chair is so highly similar that the ordinary observer would be confused by the imitation,” said the complaint. Williams-Sonoma’s complaint identified other furniture items that Amazon’s private-label team launched that looked nearly identical to designs it began selling earlier, including a coffee table and a few lamps.

Amazon removed the items from its website and settled the lawsuit in October, with a favorable outcome for West Elm, according to people familiar with the matter. Amazon and Williams-Sonoma declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Powerful tool
In targeting competitors, Amazon’s private-label team has access to a powerful tool: Amazon’s database of search terms customers frequently use. The team can add those terms to their product descriptions and detail pages to gain a boost on Amazon’s search engine, some former Amazon private-label employees said.

When employees on Amazon’s private-label team in 2017 launched its Goodthreads line of apparel such as military jackets and chino pants, they sought to create an aesthetic similar to that of J.Crew, one of the former employees said. Parent company J.Crew Group for years avoided selling on Amazon. J.Crew’s then-Chairman Mickey Drexler in a 2017 conference said he wouldn’t sell on Amazon because: “No. 1, they own the customer” and would “take every bestseller and put it into their private label collection.”

So the Goodthreads managers took steps to help searches for “J.Crew” show results that included Goodthreads, according to the person. Goodthreads is now one of Amazon’s top 10 private-label brands, according to e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.

The Amazon spokesman said Goodthreads targets an aesthetic common among multiple brands and isn’t unique to J.Crew. J.Crew declined to comment.

Shoe seller Allbirds, too, refused persistent Amazon efforts to get it to sell on the tech giant’s site, said Mr. Zwillinger, the co-CEO. The San Francisco startup launched its first shoe, “Wool Runner,” in 2016. It was the product of three years of research and development, using fabric from an Italian mill and a sole that was “carbon neutral,” produced with a Brazilian chemical company.

The lightweight shoe became an instant success. Amazon consistently contacted Allbirds between 2017 and 2019 to sell on its site, said Mr. Zwillinger. Allbirds always declined.

Allbirds’ team in mid-2017 began noticing that, on Google’s search engine, the top results for “Wool Runner” were knockoffs from outside vendors on Amazon, Mr. Zwillinger said. Allbirds believed Amazon was buying advertisements on Google to siphon demand for the shoes to itself, he said.

Mr. Zwillinger said it isn’t possible to track the damage to his company, but that “to see a company with the deep pockets of Amazon try to siphon off demand and give it to copycats is really frustrating.”

Then came the Galen shoe. Mr. Zwillinger said he believes search data guided Amazon’s decision to clone his hit product, which he said looks “eerily similar” to his shoe.

“I’m not saying whether they did or didn’t infringe. We didn’t get a lawyer involved,” he said. Because of Amazon’s size, he said, “it seems like that’s going to be an uphill battle that’s not worth fighting.”

Amazon’s Galen shoe.
The Amazon spokesman said that the company didn’t target Allbirds on Google advertising and that it was obvious wool shoes were trending.

Now, Amazon is targeting one of the biggest pandemic beneficiaries, Shopify, a platform that helps bricks-and-mortar stores set up online shops. With the coronavirus causing store shutdowns, many smaller retailers have invested in creating online stores using Shopify’s technology.

Small retailers on Shopify had aggregate sales of $5.1 billion over Black Friday weekend, topping Amazon’s $4.8 billion from its third-party sellers. Amazon won’t disclose how much it made in sales from its first-party business where it buys inventory and resells it. The 14-year-old Shopify’s share price has roughly tripled over the past year.

Amazon had largely dismissed the Canadian company internally, said employees on and off the project, but that has changed over the past year now that it looks like a significant threat. “It’s super high on our radar,” said one of the people.

At roundtables with its sellers, the people said, Amazon has learned that many had been defecting to Shopify because of increasing fees from Amazon, which on average collects 30% of each sale on its platform from outside vendors, up from 19% five years ago, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Shopify collects 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction.

Earlier this year, Amazon created a top-secret task force dedicated to studying the Canadian company and copying parts of it, said the employees. To lead the team, Amazon tapped Peter Larsen, a longtime executive and vice president, consumer. Mr. Larsen recruited dozens of executives, who have signed nondisclosure agreements to work on the project. Internal chat boards are filled with other Amazon employees digging for information on “Project Santos,” the employees said.

Amazon and Mr. Larsen declined to comment on Project Santos. Shopify didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In October, the team presented its work to Mr. Bezos, who was enthusiastic that the project could help stem the defection of sellers to its Canadian rival, said the employees. Amazon hasn’t launched the project yet, they said.

Mr. Larsen’s direct reports have cryptic descriptions in their LinkedIn profiles about what they are working on. One lists “new things on the horizon,” while another writes “Good things are happening.”

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Part-time research, editing, and web assistance sought

November 11, 2020 by staff

Reclaim Democracy! Is a national Bozeman-based organization that is reemerging after a decade of dormancy. We work to:

Create a constitutional right to vote as a means to halt many forms of voter suppression and institutional roadblocks to democracy
Strengthen grassroots democracy by revoking the power of corporations and the wealthy to control civic society and government
Reverse the rise of fascism, racism and anti-immigrant hate, both nationally and within Montana

We seek a local resident to assist with research for articles, copy editing, and light website publishing/updates.

Knowledge of WordPress and Google Docs is essential. Knowledge of voting rights issues, campaign finance and corporate personhood are helpful. Persuasive writing and copywriting ability also are helpful.

This is contract work that can be performed on your schedule and will range from 3 – 10 hours per week at a pay rate of $15 – $20 to start. You can perform most work from your own home or office. A motivated person will have the opportunity to expand the position if they desire. Please send your resume with a brief note of interest highlighting your relevant skills, knowledge and interest to info@ReclaimDemocracy.org

Ohio’s Chief Justice Rips Republican Attempts to Undermine Judiciary

September 16, 2020 by staff

Statement by Justice Maureen O’Connor (Republican), Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio, on September 16, 2020

I condemn in the strongest possible terms both the statement released by the Ohio Republican Party on September 15, 2020, and its unsigned authors. The statement disparages the integrity of Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Richard Frye. The publication accuses Judge Frye of colluding with the Ohio Democratic Party and labels him a “partisan judge.”

Every one of Ohio’s 722 judges, 800 magistrates, and numerous active-retired judges should be greatly concerned and voice their dismay at the irresponsible Republican Party allegation that politics controlled the judge’s decision. This is a blatant and unfounded attack on the independence of the Ohio judiciary. Contrary to the statements in this, disgraceful, deceitful piece, judges don’t decide cases based on partisanship. That would be easy. It is also a mistake to say that there is not a legitimate case in controversy. The only thing clear about this matter is that the law is not clear, and it remains to be seen what the ultimate interpretation of the statute will be.

To accuse a judge of deciding the matter before him on partisan politics and further accuse the judge of “obstruction of his judicial responsibility” is without merit and is meant to further the false narrative that judges have no conscience, no legal responsibilities, and no capacity to decide what the law is beyond the raw politics of the issue.

The Republican Party’s statement should be seen for what it is: part of a continuing string of attacks against any decision that doesn’t favor a political end, regardless of party, even if that decision may be legally correct and indeed legally required. I will not address the merits of the lower court’s decision. The case may very well find its way to the Supreme Court of Ohio, and I would be asked to weigh in then. I will retain my independence and sit on the Court to hear the matter if it does. Attacks on the judiciary only serve to undermine the public’s confidence in the courts. Attacks such as these, no matter the source, reflect poorly, not on the judiciary, but on the leadership of those who would perpetrate them.

Below is the attack by the Ohio Republican Party to which Justice O’Connor responded.

Trump knew coronavirus was deadly and highly contagious while intentionally misleading Americans

September 9, 2020 by staff

By Robert Costa
First published September 9, 2020 in The Washington Post

President Trump’s head popped up during his top-secret intelligence briefing in the Oval Office on Jan. 28 when the discussion turned to the novel coronavirus outbreak in China.

“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”

Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed. He told the president that after reaching contacts in China, it was evident that the world faced a health emergency on par with the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.

Ten days later, Trump called Woodward and revealed that he thought the situation was far more dire than what he had been saying publicly.

“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a Feb. 7 call. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”

“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.

At that time, Trump was telling the nation that the virus was no worse than a seasonal flu, predicting it would soon disappear, and insisting that the U.S. government had it totally under control. It would be several weeks before he would publicly acknowledge that the virus was no ordinary flu and that it could be transmitted through the air.

Trump admitted to Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said.

Aside from exploring Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” covers race relations, diplomacy with North Korea and a range of other issues that have arisen during the past two years.

The book also includes brutal assessments of Trump’s conduct from former defense secretary Jim Mattis, former director of national intelligence Daniel Coats and others.

The book is based in part on 18 on-the-record interviews Woodward conducted with the president between December and July. Woodward writes that other quotes in the book were acquired through “deep background” conversations with sources in which information is divulged and exchanges recounted without sources being named.

“Trump never did seem willing to fully mobilize the federal government and continually seemed to push problems off on the states,” Woodward writes. “There was no real management theory of the case or how to organize a massive enterprise to deal with one of the most complex emergencies the United States had ever faced.”

Woodward questioned Trump repeatedly about the national reckoning on racial injustice. On June 3, two days after federal agents forcibly removed peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square to make way for Trump to stage a photo opportunity outside St. John’s Episcopal Church, Trump called Woodward to boast about his “law and order” stance.

“We’re going to get ready to send in the military slash National Guard to some of these poor bastards that don’t know what they’re doing, these poor radical lefts,” Trump said.

In a second conversation, on June 19, Woodward asked the president about White privilege, noting that they were both White men of the same generation who had privileged upbringings. Woodward suggested that they had a responsibility to better “understand the anger and pain” felt by Black Americans.

“No,” Trump replied, his voice described by Woodward as mocking and incredulous. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”

As Woodward pressed Trump to understand the plight of Black Americans after generations of discrimination, inequality and other atrocities, the president kept answering by pointing to economic numbers such as the pre-pandemic unemployment rate for Blacks and claiming, as he often has publicly, that he has done more for Blacks than any president except perhaps Abraham Lincoln.

In another conversation about race, on July 8, Trump complained about his lack of support among Black voters. “I’ve done a tremendous amount for the Black community,” he told Woodward. “And, honestly, I’m not feeling any love.”

They spoke again about race relations on June 22, when Woodward asked Trump whether he thinks there is “systemic or institutional racism in this country.”

“Well, I think there is everywhere,” Trump said. “I think probably less here than most places. Or less here than many places.”

Asked by Woodward whether racism “is here” in the United States in a way that affects people’s lives, Trump replied, “I think it is. And it’s unfortunate. But I think it is.”

Trump shared with Woodward visceral reactions to several prominent Democrats of color. Upon seeing a shot of Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California, now the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, calmly and silently watching him deliver his State of the Union address, Trump remarked, “Hate! See the hate! See the hate!” Trump used the same phrase after an expressionless Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) appeared in the frame.

Trump was dismissive about former president Barack Obama and told Woodward he was inclined to refer to him by his first and middle names, “Barack Hussein,” but wouldn’t in his company to be “very nice.”

“I don’t think Obama’s smart,” Trump told Woodward. “I think he’s highly overrated. And I don’t think he’s a great speaker.” Trump added that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un thought Obama was “an asshole.”

“Rage” includes the first-reported excerpts of letters Trump exchanged with Kim, and quotes Trump in his interviews with Woodward using expletives to defend their pen-pal relationship. Even as U.S. intelligence chiefs warn that North Korea is unlikely to ever surrender its nuclear weapons and that Trump’s approach is ineffective, the president told Woodward he is determined to stay the course and dismissively says the CIA has “no idea” how to handle North Korea.

“I met. Big fucking deal,” Trump told Woodward, waving off criticism of his three face-to-face meetings with Kim. “It takes me two days. I met. I gave up nothing.”

Foreign affairs experts say Trump gave up much — including by postponing and then scaling back the U.S. joint military exercises with South Korea that had long angered North Korea, as well as by granting Kim the international stature and legitimacy the North Korean regime has long craved.

Trump told Woodward he evaluates Kim and his nuclear arsenal like a real estate target: “It’s really like, you know, somebody that’s in love with a house and they just can’t sell it.”

Kim welcomed Trump’s overtures with over-the-top prose in letters. Kim wrote that he wanted “another historic meeting between myself and Your Excellency reminiscent of a scene from a fantasy film.” And he said his meetings with Trump were a “precious memory” that underscored how the “deep and special friendship between us will work as a magical force.”

In another letter, Kim wrote to Trump, “I feel pleased to have formed good ties with such a powerful and preeminent statesman as Your Excellency.” And in yet another, Kim reflected on “that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched with great interest and hope to relive the honor of that day.”

Trump was taken with Kim’s flattery, Woodward writes, telling the author pridefully that Kim had addressed him as “Excellency.” Trump remarked that he was awestruck meeting Kim for the first time in 2018 in Singapore, thinking to himself, “Holy shit,” and finding Kim to be “far beyond smart.” Trump also boasted to Woodward that Kim “tells me everything,” including a graphic account of Kim having his uncle killed.

Trump did not share his letters to Kim — “those are so top secret,” the president said — though Woodward writes that Trump sent Kim a copy of the New York Times featuring a picture of the two men on the front page. “Chairman, great picture of you, big time,” Trump wrote on the paper in marker. (Trump falsely boasted to Woodward, “He never smiled before. I’m the only one he smiles with.”)

Trump reflected on his relationships with authoritarian leaders generally, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,” he told Woodward. “You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”

In the midst of reflecting upon how close the United States had come in 2017 to war with North Korea, Trump revealed, “I have built a nuclear — a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before. We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody — what we have is incredible.”

Woodward writes that anonymous sources later confirmed that the U.S. military had a secret new weapons system, but they would not provide details, and that the sources were surprised Trump had disclosed it.

The book documents private grumblings, periods of exasperation and wrestling about whether to quit among the so-called adults of the Trump orbit: Mattis, Coats and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

Mattis quietly went to Washington National Cathedral to pray about his concern for the nation’s fate under Trump’s command and, according to Woodward, told Coats, “There may come a time when we have to take collective action” since Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.”

In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats, “The president has no moral compass,” to which the director of national intelligence replied, “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

Woodward describes Coats’s experience as especially tortured. Coats, a former senator from Indiana, was recruited into the administration by Vice President Pence, and his wife is quoted as recalling a dinner at the White House when she interacted with Pence.

“I just looked at him, like, how are you stomaching this?” Marsha Coats said, according to Woodward. “I just looked at him like, this is horrible. I mean, we made eye contact. I think he understood. And he just whispered in my ear, ‘Stay the course.’ ”

Pence was the president’s one constant booster publicly and privately in Woodward’s book. When Coats considered resigning because of Trump’s handling of Russia, Pence urged him to “look on the positive side of things that he’s done. More attention on that. You can’t go.”

The loathing was mutual. “Not to mention my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals,” Trump told White House trade adviser Peter Navarro at one point, according to Woodward.

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, is quoted by Woodward as saying, “The most dangerous people around the president are overconfident idiots,” which Woodward interprets as a reference to Mattis, Tillerson and former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn.

Kushner was a frequent target of ire among Trump’s Cabinet members, who saw him as untrustworthy and weak in dealing with heads of states. Tillerson found Kushner’s warm dealings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “nauseating to watch. It was stomach churning,” according to Woodward.

Kushner is quoted extensively in the book ruminating about his father-in-law and presidential power. Woodward writes that Kushner advised people that one of the most important guiding texts to understand the Trump presidency was “Alice in Wonderland,” a novel about a young girl who falls through a rabbit hole. He singled out the Cheshire cat, whose strategy was endurance and persistence, not direction.

The book charts the Trump administration’s failings and missteps on the pandemic, including the decisions and actions of Pottinger, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci and others.

Fauci at one point tells others that the president “is on a separate channel” and unfocused in meetings, with “rudderless” leadership, according to Woodward. “His attention span is like a minus number,” Fauci said, according to Woodward. “His sole purpose is to get reelected.”

In one Oval Office meeting recounted by Woodward, after Trump had made false statements in a news briefing, Fauci said in front of him: “We can’t let the president be out there being vulnerable, saying something that’s going to come back and bite him.” Pence, Kushner, chief of staff Mark Meadows and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller tensed up at once, Woodward writes, surprised Fauci would talk to Trump that way.

Woodward describes Fauci as particularly disappointed in Kushner for talking like a cheerleader as if everything was great. In June, as the virus was spreading wildly coast to coast and case numbers soared in Arizona, Florida, Texas and other states, Kushner said of Trump, “The goal is to get his head from governing to campaigning.”

Woodward writes that Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) suggested former president George W. Bush speak personally with Trump about global vaccine efforts, but that Bush demurred.

“No. No,” Bush told Graham, according to Woodward. “He’d misconstrue anything I said.”

In their final interview, on July 21, Trump vented to Woodward, “The virus has nothing to do with me. It’s not my fault.”

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The Shrouded Weapon of Patriotic Correctness

July 21, 2020 by staff

August 22, 2020

Displaying his signature blend of victimhood and vitriol in a recent speech, President Trump accused political protesters of pushing a “cancel culture — driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.”

Put aside the hypocrisy of those words coming from a man who’s called for dozens of people to be fired for expressing opinions he dislikes. The more serious issue is the popular claim that “political correctness” presents a great threat to our freedom. In truth, its counterpart — patriotic correctness — suppresses dissent more widely and imposes greater consequences.

Take the story of country music stars The Dixie Chicks. The three women band leaders never faced notable criticism of their Confederacy-friendly name. Yet the band downsized their name to The Chicks for their just-released album, Gaslighter, simply announcing, “we want to meet this moment.”

Contrast that to 2003, when the band stepped out of line with country music political orthodoxy.

Days before the invasion of Iraq, vocalist Natalie Maines told a London audience, “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President [G.W. Bush] is from Texas.”

The backlash was immediate and savage as thousands of country music radio stations forbid DJs from playing The Chicks, slashing their record sales. Some groups staged events destroying recordings by The Chicks and band members received numerous death threats.

The Chicks nearly vanished for years, but several multi-platinum albums granted them the wealth and power to resume their career years later. Their comeback single, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” defiantly rebuffed would-be suppressors. But less powerful country artists confirm the fear of getting “Dixie Chicked” influences everything from their lyrics to political engagement. That fear is just starting to ease nearly two decades later.

Performers identified as right-wing, like country star Toby Keith, may deter some invitations to perform with their stances, but face no such organized intimidation.

Patriotically correct doctrines include: American exceptionalism is unquestionable, even though we trail other wealthy nations in many key measures. Our military spending is untouchable. Service members should receive preferential treatment without regard to personal merit. And patriotism should be expressed with chest thumping and flag waving, not dissent that aims to illuminate and correct our biggest flaws.

The NFL is among the institutions enforcing those rules. When President Trump attacked Colin Kaepernick for this kneeling protest against police killings of Black people, the NFL didn’t merely fail to defend an employee, it effectively halted his career. Silencing one of the league’s most visible stars made it unnecessary to tell any athletes just trying to make a team to “shut up and play.” Message received.

And what is the playing of our national anthem at sporting events other than institutionalized patriotic correctness?

Patriotic correctness is so omnipresent we rarely notice it and, like racial biases, practice it unconsciously. In an interview, liberal icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called Kaepernick’s protest “dumb and disrespectful,” giving the patriotism police a quote to weaponize. (She later apologized.)

Meanwhile, right-wingers play the victim when grifters like Milo Yiannopoulos lose speaking gigs for business reasons, failing to fulfill contractual promises or when college students organize to stop their fees from going to such self-promoting provocateurs.

As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato Institute says, “every group has implicit rules against certain opinions, actions and language as well as enforcement mechanisms — and the patriotically correct are no exception. [But] they are near-uniformly unaware of how they are hewing to a code of speech and conduct similar to the PC lefties they claim to oppose.”

To be clear, political correctness can do harm to the free exchange of ideas, and too many Americans are ready to judge others for a careless utterance, but the patriotic correctness unleashed on The Chicks is both more pervasive and severe than any progressive pressure.

The Chicks blacklisting yielded only a setback — one they had the power to overcome by virtue of their previous success, but their persecution silenced many more vulnerable people.

The most powerful suppression of speech is accomplished through implied threat and voluntary compliance, not punishment.

The writer, Jeff Milchen (@JMilchen), is a political consultant who founded Reclaim Democracy! and the American Independent Business Alliance.

Chevron Corporation Caught Scheming to Pit Minorities Against Greens

June 18, 2020 by staff

Corbin Hiar, E&E News
June 18, 2020

It was an audacious messaging campaign: White environmentalists are hurting black communities by pushing radical climate policies that would strip them of fossil fuel jobs.

The email to journalists, sent by a public affairs firm at the height of national protests over systemic racism earlier this month, accidentally contained the name of a high-profile client.

It was Chevron Corp.

The Virginia-based communications firm, named CRC Advisors, urged journalists to look at how green groups were “claiming solidarity” with black protesters while “backing policies which would hurt minority communities.”

“Despite this claimed solidarity, environmental organizations, composed of predominantly white members, are backing radical policies like the Green New Deal which would bring particular harm to minority communities,” wrote John Gage of CRC in an email sent to media outlets including E&E News.

The story pitch included an offer to connect journalists with black conservatives who oppose the Green New Deal, a sweeping government jobs program advanced by progressive lawmakers who champion environmental justice issues for communities of color.

The email ended with a revealing tagline.

“If you would rather not receive future communications from Chevron, let us know by clicking here.”

Chevron denied involvement in the messaging campaign, but the email’s accidental nod to the oil giant is renewing suspicions among activists and academics that Chevron’s public statements about climate change fail to match its lobbying activities. While Chevron has promised to do more to slow rising temperatures, observers view the email as a shadowy continuation of the fossil fuel industry’s past efforts to undercut legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Chevron’s fingerprints appear to be on this,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard University history professor and the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a 2010 book about how scientists with ties to Big Oil worked to obscure the truth about global warming.

Oreskes described previous instances of oil and gas companies working with communications firms to advance industry talking points. But the CRC effort is remarkable, she said, for trying to leverage national unrest about systemic racism and police violence to promote an expansion of oil and gas drilling.

“There’s no socially acceptable language to describe how despicable this is,” she said. “It’s hard for me to contain my fury.”

Chevron, a longtime CRC client whose shareholders recently called on the oil major to detail its lobbying on climate change, says it had nothing to do with the message.

“Thanks for the opportunity to clarify the situation,” Chevron spokesman Sean Comey said in an email.

‘A clerical error’

The email received by an E&E News journalist on June 3 included quotes from two black conservatives who oppose the Green New Deal.

They were Ken Blackwell, a Republican who served as Ohio’s secretary of state in the late 1990s and has gone on to stump for a wide variety of conservative causes, and Derrick Hollie, a former advertising executive.

The email portrayed CRC as playing a helpful role in distributing Blackwell’s and Hollie’s concerns with the climate plan and its effect on black communities.

Instead, the firm appears to have organized the campaign. Hollie, who said he doesn’t personally know Blackwell, revealed that CRC approached him with the idea.

“They was like, ‘Derrick, would you mind being a part of something that we’re working on?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ And they asked me to put together a quote,” Hollie said in a phone interview.

“I didn’t know what they were going to do with it,” he added. “I figured they were going to put it in an op-ed or something like that.”

Gage, the account executive at CRC, said in an email to E&E News that he had contacted journalists “on behalf of Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Hollie regarding this issue and inadvertently attached a disclaimer from another client’s media list onto that email.”

“This was, in effect, a clerical error,” Gage said.

The Green New Deal is a conceptual resolution that calls for a sweeping public jobs program and asserts that the government should “achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers” in a decade’s time.

That would require overhauling the nation’s oil-dependent transportation system “to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions” and invest in “zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; clean, affordable, and accessible public transit; and high-speed rail,” the proposal says.

Chevron hasn’t directly lobbied on the Green New Deal, but it has pressed members of Congress and the Trump administration about “Energy Transitions, technology, and climate change,” lobbying disclosures show.

Energy prices — another major focus of the CRC pitch — are also an issue Chevron has lobbied on.

“Radical policies like the green new deal that raise the cost of driving to work and heating our homes would target the African-American community and … would make us even more vulnerable and marginalized than we already are,” Blackwell said in the email sent by CRC. He is currently an adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign and senior fellow at the Family Research Council, an anti-abortion group.

Blackwell’s quote was partially featured in the headline of a June 4 story on the website of the conservative Daily Wire.

‘White environmental extremists’

Hollie is the president of Reaching America, a nonprofit group whose tax-exempt status was revoked by the Internal Revenue Service in 2017 because it repeatedly failed to file required annual reports.

Since then, Hollie has testified twice in the House Natural Resources Committee against efforts to transition the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels. At a February 2019 hearing, he denied receiving any funding from fossil fuel companies or corporations.

“With black communities ablaze, the same nearly uniformly white environmental extremists assure us of their solidarity while at the same time trying to kill high-paying oil and gas jobs that have been the cornerstones of progress in lifting up working-class minority communities,” Hollie was quoted as saying in the CRC email to journalists. “Any program such as their Green New Deal that makes energy more expensive or jeopardizes jobs is counter-productive, reckless, and wrong.”

To be sure, the environmental movement has struggled with its own racial disparities. The largest green groups are overwhelmingly white, and they have historically overlooked communities of color when trying to reduce pollution. Some have racist pasts (Greenwire, June 5).

But people of color are also underrepresented in much of the oil and gas industry. For example, a 2016 report by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, found the oil and gas business to be “among the worst in terms of employment and earning equity for women, African American and Hispanic populations.”

Reaching America is based in Bennsville, Md., but its sparse website is registered to Domains By Proxy LLC, an Arizona firm that shields the identities of web address owners.

CRC also has a limited online presence.

The group is led by Leonard Leo, President Trump’s informal adviser on judicial nominees, and Greg Mueller, a conservative communications executive. The firm recently hired two Trump White House communications staffers and a Fox News veteran. CRC’s website lists no staff, clients or contact information.

Although Hollie and his group have a long history with CRC, he denied having a formal role with the firm.

“Hell no! I wish I did,” he said with a laugh. “This guy named Jay Hopkins is who I deal with.

“I knew CRC had an energy client,” he added. “I didn’t know it was Chevron.”

Hopkins, a senior account manager at CRC, has deep ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Prior to working at CRC, Hopkins did communications for Citizens for a Sound Economy, a think tank established in 1984 by the oil barons Charles and David Koch. The group eventually split and formed the tea party groups FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity.

In 2002, Hopkins joined CRC, which was previously known as Creative Response Concepts and CRC Public Relations.

During his time at CRC, he “identified and recruited third-party organizations to serve as surrogates for clients,” “wrote and placed client op-eds in top-line publications,” and “cultivated strong relationships with journalists nationwide, particularly focusing on reporters in energy,” according to his LinkedIn profile.

Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state, has written numerous op-eds over the years in support of the U.S. oil and gas industry as well as Chevron and other CRC clients.

In a 2012 Reuters blog post, Blackwell described Brazilian authorities’ attempt to penalize Chevron for a 3,600-barrel oil leak off the coast of Rio de Janeiro as “one of the most shameless shakedowns of an American company by another country in recent memory.”

After a two-year legal battle, a federal judge in Brazil ordered the California-headquartered company to pay around $135 million in compensatory actions (Greenwire, Oct. 2, 2013).

Blackwell didn’t respond to calls or emails for comment. Hopkins didn’t respond to emailed questions about his work at CRC.

Hollie, meanwhile, said that Reaching America works with organizations across the political spectrum.

“I don’t appreciate being used as a racial pawn during this time and would appreciate if you leave me out of your vendetta against Chevron and CRC,” he said in a follow-up email.

‘Not being candid’

Experts on corporate influence campaigns suggest that CRC is engaged in a shadowy campaign to shape federal policy on climate change.

The firm may be “attempting to influence public policy surreptitiously using industry money,” said Marcus Owens, a partner at the law firm Loeb & Loeb LLP. “I’ve been doing this for nearly 50 years now, so I think I have a fairly well-developed sense of who’s not being candid.”

The involvement of the former Ohio secretary of state, in particular, was an indicator for Owens, the former head of the nonprofit division at the IRS.

“You don’t hire Ken Blackwell if what you want to do is run a soup kitchen or truly educate people about anything,” he said. “You hire him if you want to run a political organization and you want to court industry or people who donate to right-of-center causes.”

What CRC did is a textbook example of the “most unethical type of PR,” according to Pallavi Kumar, a communications professor at American University.

“It’s just a way where they put together a coalition and therefore you think it’s something, but it’s done by a corporation,” said Kumar, who worked in corporate public relations for two decades before becoming an academic. “To me, they really screwed up by showing it’s coming from Chevron.”

Kumar got her start in PR at E. Bruce Harrison Co., which helped promote the Global Climate Coalition. Prior to its dissolution in 2002, the industry group was opposed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and was supported by Chevron. (Kumar says she did not work on that account.)

The oil major’s ongoing involvement with CRC is troubling to some of the company’s shareholders.

“If Chevron is hiring public relations companies that are putting out a message that is contrary to what the company is publicly espousing, that is a concern,” said Danielle Fugere, the president of As You Sow. “Just hiring these individuals or these groups for public communications purposes raises red flags.”

Her shareholder advocacy group backed a climate lobbying proposal put forth by the French investment group BNP Paribas Asset Management at Chevron’s annual shareholder meeting last month.

It called for the oil company’s board of directors to issue a report describing “if, and how, Chevron’s lobbying activities (direct and through trade associations) align” with the goal of the Paris Agreement, which calls for limiting average global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius.

Chevron’s board urged shareholders to vote against the resolution because the company “shares the concerns of governments and the public about climate change risks” and “adheres to the highest ethical standards when engaging in lobbying and political activities.”

A majority of its investors, however, backed the proposal (Energywire, May 28).

Comey, the Chevron spokesman, indicated that the company doesn’t plan to detail its work with CRC in the climate lobbying report shareholders requested.

“They help us with communications,” he wrote, referring to CRC. “They are not involved in lobbying.”

Kumar, of American University, described CRC’s work this way: “Stealth lobbying, AstroTurf lobbying, front groups.”

While those tactics aren’t new, the focus of the campaign surprised her. The firm is trying to take advantage of the Black Lives Matter movement, she said.

David Pellow, the African-American director of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s global environmental justice project, argued that Chevron’s involvement with CRC shows the oil company is more focused on countering support for the Green New Deal than helping communities of color.

With the U.S. in recession and tens of millions of Americans out of work, “the Green New Deal is now looking much more reasonable as a proposal,” he said. “And that’s got to have big polluters worried.”

Chevron has been criticized for its slow response to the widespread protests over police violence against people of color. The company released a statement on racial injustice on June 5 — two days after CRC pitched a story attacking a resolution that seeks to address that issue and combat climate change.

Comey said that “it’s important that we face and address the systemic racism and discrimination that denies African Americans equal access to opportunities for advancement.”

Chevron, he added, is leading by example: “For more than 25 years, diversity and inclusion have been a part of our corporate culture.”

But Pellow, who is also the chairman of UC-Santa Barbara’s environmental studies department, said the company’s actions speak louder than its words.

“If you’re perpetrating climate disruption, as Chevron is, then you’re also perpetrating racial injustice,” he said. People of color “the world over are being harmed disproportionately by climate change.”

FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of criminal justice, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.