On the fourth Friday of November the Christmas shopping season kicks off all over the world, since the Black Friday was widespread: the big sales multinationals have included it as a traditional celebration in the citizens' consumption calendar to further stifle fungi into smaller and scarcer shops. That's the day chosen by the alterglobalist movement Attac to punish one of the big shoppers who want to monopolize consumption, the Amazon.

On October 12, Attac organised symbolic sabotages in dozens of French towns and cities against Total, Amazon and BNP-Paribas to denounce the tax fraud that multinationals have stolen every year large amounts of money from the State and to call for the elimination of the injustice of the tax system.

“On this occasion [on 29 November] – say those of Attac- we want to go further, liberate more people from the regrettable connection with these multinationals. Because if we can change our forms of consumption, we can also tackle them collectively to bring about a much deeper change. The current action is even more ambitious:We have to block Amazon on November 29. The Black Friday celebrates the collapse of prices and extreme consumerism, which in no case can be married to being able to live with dignity on a decent planet.”

For Attac, one of the leading whistleblowers of neoliberal globalization, Amazon is a clear example of multinationals that have achieved too big and risky command. As far as social rights, human rights, respect for ecosystems or tax fraud are concerned, they have managed to put themselves above the states, because the political structures are too weak in the face of their strength and their lobbying capacity.

They're so powerful that they take advantage of all the loopholes in existing laws to bypass rules they don't like, and if not, they push political rulers to change to their convenience. “Multinationals are the major winners of free trade, enabling them to confront countries with each other by providing weaker social, fiscal and ecological standards.”

French Attac also has a local reason to deal with giant Amazon: In addition to selling and distributing 10 billion products online in the world, the multinational that integrates media, film, artificial intelligence and even space projects is making a special effort to strengthen itself in France. The American giant is already a leader in the Hexagon in the sale of Internet clothing and cultural and electronic products, but very little products produced by French companies on the Amazon network are still sold.

In 2007, Amazon built the first warehouse in France in the city of Orleans, with an area of 70,000 m². Since then, his network has expanded as a spider, as reporter Gaspar Allens recently explained in his chronicle “Amazon’s secret plan for France”. Increasingly gigantic warehouses, eight or ten of the usual logistics: Boves' president, Emmanuel Macron, inaugurated an area of 107,000 m² and this same year is going to launch another 142,000 m²...When the goal is to achieve the monopoly of all commercial transactions and reduce the delivery time of anything to one day, no matter the ecological trace of dementia infrastructures, or the living and working conditions of the workers.

Moratorium and otherwise blockade

Amazon is among the world's champions in tax fraud. Authorities have started to take a number of measures to control what is known as "euphemism tax avoidance" to fraud, the GAFA tax launched by Macron (GAFA: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon). Just 3 percent -- that immediately Amazon has added to the companies that they sell on their platform, laughing at the legislators.
Attac believes that the new tax will serve almost nothing, as the multinationals declare in each country the share of all the activity they want, no more. Amazon hides 58% of everything that moves in France, according to Attac’s calculations. The rest of the proceeds are re-invoked to foreign subsidiaries, including Luxembourg’s internal tax haven of the European Union. One more part, wrapped in intellectual property, sends it to Delaware's tax haven in the United States. The United States, discounting its profits. Etc.

When Amazon has added Macron’s GAFA tax to French companies (3%), these suppliers have not got anything clean, they are trapped by big sellers, used to seeing contractual conditions change at any time. The truth is that Amazon has done nothing but take the stride that big business has long imposed on its suppliers to the extreme.

The other argument for mobilizing Attac against Amazon is the way it treats workers. Journalist Jean-Baptiste Malet told “Amazonie” to the people that the multinational managed to hire in the warehouse in Montélimar and that he suffered and saw as a foot worker. Infil-tré dans le “meilleur des mondes” – Amazonia, infiltrating the perfect world. Malet's precarious working conditions in 2013 have spread to the entire world of Amazon.

Malet has shown that Amazon is not a seller of books or cultural products, but a logistics corporation, more like Chinese usins than European cultural enterprises, thanks to new technologies, employers have full control of the worker, work rhythms, relationships or salaries to organize on demand, disguised as Orweldo language (worker productivity, motivation, desire to grow...).

This is the new Tartalo that the French authorities have fed over the years. Like Hollande, Macron has tried to seduce Amazon. Mayors and municipal government teams have been willing to offer anything, obsessed with alleviating municipal debts and accounting for new jobs: they have accepted investments of all kinds, allowances or land management, sometimes negotiating plans in secret.

Attac’s protest has also brought other associations such as ANV-Cop21 and the ecologist group Friends of the Earth, and they have also announced that Jaka, whose main enemy is Amazon, will participate. The aim of the mobilisation on 29 November will be one of the 42 requests of these companies: to break with a moratorium the plans for the construction of new warehouses in the vicinity that Amazon, other e-commerce companies and large businesses want to build: “If we don’t succeed, then we will go straight to Amazon: blockages and obstacles of all kinds until they decide to leave France.”