Author: tio

In the 2022 and 2024 American elections, the crypto industry spent big. With all of the chaos in Trump 2.0, from ICE raids to exploding boats in the Caribbean to the longest government shutdown in history and fights over the release of the Epstein Files, the public can lose sight of a basic truth: The American president’s personal wealth is now inextricably linked to the viability of…

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It was October, at the beginning of Amazon’s “peak season”— the long run-up to the holidays when package volume begins to swell. It was my second night working as a “jam breaker” in a facility known as PIT9, an automated sortation center located in the woods near Pittsburgh International Airport. I was standing alone on a mezzanine high above the warehouse floor, watching a robotic sorter direct thousands of packages through five induction stations, where packages emerged onto a conveyor belt that circled the facility, dropping boxes down chutes to be placed in bread carts and loaded back onto trucks. Nobody ever told me what I was supposed to be doing. My training had consisted of two half-shifts watching corporate videos about how to flirt with a co-worker without committing sexual harassment. Now I was alone, surrounded by loud machines and watching a stream of packages roll past.

Occasionally, the boxes came through bunched too close together, causing the belt to briefly stop and reverse, dumping the packages into a large plastic bin. Since the bin seemed to exist for this purpose, I let them collect there. After an hour of staring at my phone, I grew bored and started placing the fallen boxes back onto the belt, which would whisk them away. It dawned on me that I had discovered a job function. 

Two hours into my shift, the belt stopped completely. I waited. After 15 minutes, still nothing. Rather than risk being asked to do something else, I stayed put and kept quiet. My bottleneck was so dense that it had inhibited the upstream flow, forcing the line behind me to a standstill. Even the people unloading the truck had to stop. In the distance, I could see them standing around, shuffling their feet. The mechanical hum was now an eerie quiet, punctuated only by distant voices on walkie-talkies and the rhythmic beeping of jam alerts. Without trying, or even quite knowing how, I had brought the machine of holiday consumption in this corner of the country to a grinding halt.

They are designed for human labor to be as minimal, and ultimately as unnecessary, as possible.

This is not the first Christmas that I have turned to Amazon to supplement my income as a freelance journalist. A few years ago, I worked as a delivery driver for an Amazon courier contractor. We were encouraged to drive too fast, forgo seatbelts and — as you may have heard — use Vitamin Water bottles instead of restrooms. A few years before that, I worked at PIT5, one of Amazon’s “legacy” sortation centers, where humans did all the work. Unlike the automated wonderland of PIT9, my colleagues and I at PIT5 unloaded and scanned packages, built pallets and loaded everything onto trucks. This was the old Amazon of countless labor horror stories, of constant pressure and process assistants monitoring scan rates in real time. Time Off Task was the hammer. If you spent too long in the break room or stood idle for more than a few minutes, the system flagged you. Enough flags, and you were gone. The job demanded full attention and full effort, every minute of every shift. 

The new generation of Amazon warehouses, however, is a very different beast. Modern sorting centers like PIT9 are not monuments to Taylorism, ruthlessly squeezing machine-like efficiency from human beings. Rather, they are designed for human labor to be as minimal, and ultimately as unnecessary, as possible. 

The obviousness of this — of my intentional disposability, of my witness to the end of human warehouse labor — dawned on me as the shutdown I had caused dragged on. With the induct at a halt, I realized that my sense of superfluity was the product of intelligent design. 

When a process assistant in his early 20s finally arrived to restart the system, he evinced no concern over my error or obvious lack of training. Honestly, he seemed surprised to find anybody standing at my station at all.  

“Do you know how to reset this?” he asked. 

“No,” I said. 

Under his instruction, I pressed two buttons: “RESET” and “START.” The boxes started moving again.

For years, analysts have been watching Amazon scale its automated logistics technology with an increasing sense of marvel. One layer of that system is what Amazon calls the “middle mile,” a stretch of its logistics network that sits between fulfillment centers and last-mile delivery. Greater Pittsburgh is a dense hub in that middle layer, home to multiple sortation centers as well as PIT10, an office focused on Alexa and machine learning, where the algorithms that govern Amazon’s next-generation warehouses are developed. My job at PIT9 gave me a front-row seat to how that system functions — and the future it heralds for seasonal labor in places where thousands of people have grown to depend on it.

In the old “legacy” sortation centers, human beings would palletize packages by ZIP Code at the end of chutes. It was mind-numbing, repetitive and exhausting work. But it produced a lot of jobs. According to Marc Wulfraat, director of the logistics consulting firm MWPVL International, PIT5 employed 500 full-time workers and 200 seasonal employees. PIT9, by contrast, handles about 80% more volume with 323 full-time employees and 159 seasonal workers. 

“What you’re seeing in PIT9 is the latest generation of sortation center technology,” says Wulfraat, who maintains a database of Amazon’s 3,000-plus facilities around the world. “Labor’s disposable. Just train them to do one thing. Don’t spend too much money or time.” 

As one of those 159 seasonal workers, I was not necessarily complaining. The work is physically easier in the new, automated warehouse. At PIT5, my shifts were relentless because the system could not function without constant human input. At PIT9, labor is intermittent, because the system is designed to handle surges and gaps on its own. Excess capacity is baked into the workings of a warehouse built for peak volume. Humans are present mainly to scan odd-sized boxes, push carts, clear sporadic jams and press the occasional button. Training is deliberately minimal; turnover, no longer a concern. As Alessandro Delfanti writes in “The Warehouse: Workers and Robots at Amazon,” “Workers do not take care of the whole process.” Instead, they “perform individual tasks strictly dictated by algorithms.” 

“Labor’s disposable. Just train them to do one thing. Don’t spend too much money or time.”

Idleness at PIT9 is not a managerial failure, but a feature of the design. Humans do not work the machines so much as monitor them, in advance of a day when they won’t need monitoring at all. 

Until then, most of the job is spent waiting for something to happen. On slow nights, packages arrive at PIT9 in bursts. You can stand around for minutes watching the HIPPO (High Input Parcel Process Operation) loop spin overhead, its carriers empty. If you’re standing near someone, you can talk. If you aren’t, you are free to wander around, perhaps over to another station to see if they have “volume.” But most likely, you just look at your phone, a way to pass the time that is technically against the rules, but generally tolerated. After weeks of this, some employees welcome the arrival of peak season, when more packages arrive and more jams occur — requiring more buttons to be pushed — which provides the illusion of doing something and alleviates the tedium.

The absence of pressure is one of the most striking differences between the legacy PIT5 and the automated PIT9. At PIT5, you stayed visibly busy or got into trouble. At PIT9, I was explicitly told that “your time is your own.” A process assistant once thanked me for taking voluntary time off because it saved him from having to find something for me to do. The facility relies on unpaid time off as a buffer: If someone wants to knock off early, they do. As long as their balance doesn’t hit zero, no one intervenes. 

One of my PIT9 co-workers, whom I’ll call “AB,” had been there long enough to understand and accept the “hurry up and wait” rhythm of the job. After being passed over for a union apprenticeship (too many skilled applicants, too few jobs) he came to Amazon to work five hours a night, four nights a week, and approached the job as we all did: as a low-commitment income stream. “It’s mindless,” he told me. “We’re just here to make sure the machines keep running.”

Still, there is some room for initiative. When a station opens up, you can step in and volunteer. But nobody cares, and there’s no reward. You do it because standing around and doing nothing feels worse than working. In the context of so many grinding self-operating belts, this impulse feels touchingly human and incredibly sad. 

It is easy to see employee indifference as another goal of PIT9’s design. As Amazon’s automated warehouses produce fewer jobs, they also generate less grievance. People show up, work when there is work to do and leave. They don’t organize or complain, because the jobs aren’t punishing enough to resent. Organizing requires friction — shared resentment, sustained contact, a sense that the job is asking something of you, taking something from you besides your time. But at facilities like PIT9, nothing holds you tightly enough to push back against. It is just a decent paycheck for observing machines do most of the work.

Five years ago, I interviewed Chris Smalls during his effort to organize Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island. This was at a moment when the company still relied more heavily on human intensity, endurance and speed. Even then, Smalls described a system governed almost entirely by metrics. “The system runs strictly off the numbers,” he told me. “Everything they do is ran off of numbers.” When workers attempted to introduce friction into that system, the response was swift. After Smalls began warning co-workers about unsafe conditions in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was isolated and removed from the building. “They only decided to quarantine me,” he said. “To silence me.”

Amazon’s wager is that a workforce with nothing invested will also have nothing to organize around.

Smalls stayed. He continued organizing outside the facility, and two years later those efforts culminated in a narrow but historic victory: the first successful union election at an Amazon warehouse in the United States. It took extraordinary circumstances — public scrutiny, sustained worker anger, years of pressure and a historic pandemic — to overcome a labor model built around turnover, deskilling and replaceability.

Facilities like PIT9 can be read as Amazon’s answer to JFK8. Automation here does not simply replace human labor; it redesigns the conditions under which labor exists at all. The work is intentionally thin, the shifts short, the relationships fleeting. Nothing accumulates: not skill, not attachment, not grievance.

This is not the end of work, but it is the beginning of a very different kind of work. In the warehouse of the future, the human role is small enough to be interchangeable, temporary enough to remain politically inert. The system does not need to discipline workers aggressively if it can design jobs that never ask enough of them to provoke resistance. Amazon’s wager is that a workforce with nothing invested will also have nothing to organize around. 

The hiring process at PIT9 was as frictionless as the job. My online application involved playing an Amazon video game that proved I knew the names of basic shapes and could read alphanumeric characters. An hour later, I received an automated email with an orientation date and a Zappos coupon for free steel-toed shoes. No human being interviewed me.

Leaving the job, I learned, is just as seamless. I opened the Amazon A to Z app on my phone and searched for an option to resign. When I couldn’t find one, I asked the app’s AI chatbot: “How do I quit?”

It replied that it was standard to give two weeks’ notice, defaulting to generic chatbot drivel because it didn’t know the answer. After arguing with it for a while, I gave up and drove to the warehouse, where I approached a human resources kiosk called PXT, a tortured initialism for “People, eXperience, and Technology.” Situated next to the break room on the warehouse floor, it was covered in plastic “jungle fauna,” an apparent reference to HIPPO, the automated, high-intensity conveyor belt/sorter that was both PIT9’s brain and arterial system.

“Hi,” I told a guy in a safety vest. “I want to quit.”

“Did you try the app?” he asked.

He walked me through the procedure, which did, in fact, involve a “quit” option in some out-of-the-way menu. I got the impression that most people didn’t bother resigning officially; they just stopped coming to work. Either way, there is no exit interview, no form to sign, no offer to explain the separation process. The interaction took less than two minutes.

After I turned in my badge, a security guard escorted me to the front door. I was allowed to keep my Zappos safety shoes.

The warehouse economy does not need walkable streets or town squares.

On the drive home along Route 60, I passed Three Rivers Studios, a state-of-the art movie studio on a bland stretch of state highway. In 2022, this was one of the filming locations for the Amazon Studios reboot of the hit movie “A League of Their Own.” Amazon has been shooting all over the region for years, drawn mostly for its authentic backdrop of post-industrial decay and old-school brick architecture that has been scrubbed from most larger cities. 

The productions come here because western Pennsylvania still looks like mid-century America. The brick rowhouses, the steel bridges, the hills pressing in on narrow streets — the whole region is a standing set for period pieces and stories about decline. You can film 360-degree shots without seeing a glass skyscraper or a Whole Foods. When the steel mills closed in the ’80s, the younger generation fled, leaving the architecture intact.

For its gritty police drama “American Rust,” Amazon built sets, hired local crews, invested in the region’s economy. It is a rare example of the company choosing the harder, more expensive path, because the result looks better. They want real rust, real brick, real light coming through the trees along the Monongahela River.

It is ironic, then, that the America sought out by Amazon Studios, with its dense neighborhoods and corner bars, is the same country that Amazon, the logistics company, has done so much to erase. The warehouse economy — not the legacy version, and definitely not the nascent automated version — does not need walkable streets or town squares. It needs big boxes near highways and an increasingly disappearing labor force willing to work for $23 an hour and no benefits until the Christmas peak season is over. The company films here because the region looks like the America that people remember or want to believe in. It operates here because the same economic collapse that preserved the architecture also produced a workforce desperate enough to feed packages into machines for five hours a night.

PIT9 will still be there next Christmas. A new group of people, although almost certainly a smaller one, will stand sentinel at the induct, and learn how to reset the belt when too many boxes trigger a jam. But for now, the machines need a watcher, just in case. Somebody has to stand there, scrolling their phone and watching the HIPPO go round and round.

The post Warehouse Diaries: The Automated Ghost of Christmas Peak appeared first on Truthdig.

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

Before Todd Blanche could be confirmed as the second-highest official at the Justice Department, he had to satisfy the concerns of ethics officials.

Blanche, President Donald Trump’s personal attorney during his New York criminal trial last year, was a cryptocurrency investor with holdings of between $159,000 and $485,000, records show.

To prevent possible violations of the federal conflicts of interest statute, Blanche promised to dump his digital assets no later than 90 days after his Senate confirmation as deputy attorney general in March, according to his government ethics agreement. He also pledged not to participate in any matter that could have a “direct and predictable effect on my financial interests in the virtual currency” until his bitcoin and other crypto-related products were sold.

But about a month into the job — before divesting — Blanche issued a memo that ordered an end to investigations into crypto companies, dealers and exchanges launched during President Joe Biden’s term. He also eliminated an enforcement team dedicated to looking for crypto-related fraud and money-laundering schemes. And his memo said the Justice Department would assist Trump’s crypto working group of experts and Cabinet members that went on to issue a list of recommendations aimed at making the United States the global leader in digital currency.

Blanche’s directives, while he still owned significant crypto investments, violated the conflicts of interest law and his ethics agreement, legal experts and former federal ethics officials told ProPublica.

Blanche promised to dump his digital assets no later than 90 days after his Senate confirmation in March.

“If you are invested in that industry and now making a decision that could affect whether or not the DOJ is gonna pursue prosecutions, that’s an obvious conflict of interest,” said Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House, Treasury Department and Securities and Exchange Commission during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Even when he did ultimately divest his crypto interests, Blanche’s ethics records show he did so by transferring them to his adult children and a grandchild, a move the experts said is technically legal but at odds with the spirit and intent of the law.

Blanche’s actions illustrate the ethical problems posed as the Trump administration relaxes regulation of digital money to make good on the president’s vow to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the world.” In less than a year, Trump has nominated at least 216 political appointees who owned — either by themselves or with their spouses — cryptocurrency investments worth between $175 million and $340 million at the time of their nomination, a ProPublica review of federal financial disclosure records found. By contrast, in the first two years of his presidency, Biden appointed about two dozen people who, combined, held less than $7 million in crypto investments.

Trump’s crypto-friendly appointees include several who head agencies with regulatory authority over the industry.

Among them is Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Until this year, Lutnick was CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm with billions in crypto investments. The firm is also the primary banker for Tether, among the world’s largest issuers of stablecoins — a type of crypto pegged to the dollar or another asset to avoid wild swings in value. 

After signing an ethics agreement, Lutnick transferred his stake in Cantor Fitzgerald to his children, including his two adult sons who now run the firm. The transfer was completed in October. By then, Lutnick had taken several pro-crypto steps — announcing that Trump would create a bitcoin strategic reserve, having his department take part in the president’s crypto working group and publishing economic data on nine key blockchains, a move designed to foster more trust in the digital market. (The blockchain is a digital ledger that underlies cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.)

A Commerce Department spokesperson noted that Lutnick was given a limited waiver from the White House allowing him to work on general issues that could affect Cantor Fitzgerald while the transfer of his stake in the firm was pending. The waiver was dated July 8, nearly five months after he was sworn in. The spokesperson said Lutnick “fully complied with the terms of his ethics agreement” and did not have any “economic gains or losses associated” with the transfer of his stake in the firm. 

Another crypto-friendly appointee is Paul Atkins, chair of the SEC, whose ethics records show he owned stakes of up to $6 million in crypto-related businesses before his confirmation in April. Since Trump took office, Atkins’ agency has dropped or settled enforcement cases with crypto companies.

Atkins signed an ethics agreement promising to sell a crypto investment fund and equity in two crypto companies. He has since filed paperwork saying he complied with the agreement and listed millions of dollars worth of investments he sold, but those do not mention any crypto-related sales. An SEC spokesman said Atkins complied with his ethics obligations but would not say when he sold his crypto-related assets. 

A staffer for Blanche said he and the Justice Department would not comment.

“The conflicts of interest in this administration are blatant and hugely against the public interest.”

Trump has led the way on ethical conflicts connected to crypto. During last year’s election campaign, he pledged to the crypto industry that he would end Biden’s strict approach toward regulation. In turn, the industry heavily bet on Trump, spending millions to support his election and those of other Republican candidates.

On the eve of the election, Trump promised he would be America’s “crypto president” if he won a second term. He and his sons launched their own cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial, and after his election victory, Trump and his wife, Melania, issued a pair of meme coins, allowing anyone to use crypto to enrich the incoming president. Within days of taking office in January, Trump signed a presidential action promoting the growth of digital assets and started nominating government officials to fulfill his goal.

James Thurber, a former congressional staffer who worked on federal ethics reforms and is now professor emeritus at American University, characterized the Trump administration’s disregard of traditional government ethics as unprecedented. He contrasted Trump’s sale of crypto coins to the example set by President Jimmy Carter, who announced he was putting his peanut farm into a blind trust when he took office.

Thurber noted that Obama and Biden required their appointees to comply with an ethics pledge to avoid conflicts of interest. On the day of his inauguration in January, Trump rescinded Biden’s ethics pledge requirements for appointees.

“The conflicts of interest in this administration are blatant and hugely against the public interest.” Thurber said.

Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement to ProPublica that the “administration is fulfilling the President’s promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world by driving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans.”

“Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest,” she added.

Tonya Evans, a former professor at Penn State Dickinson Law who now consults on the digital economy, said the increase in crypto investors serving in the executive branch under Trump is a measure of the industry’s success in taking over regulatory bodies that were previously hostile to them. She compared the industry’s newfound power to how Goldman Sachs alums — such as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin during Trump’s first term or Biden’s SEC chair, Gary Gensler — held prominent government positions and were able to exert outsized influence on shaping financial policy.

“My concern is not so much that people who understand crypto are in leadership positions,” she wrote in an email to ProPublica, “but that ethics frameworks may not yet meet this critical fork in the road of development, especially if ‘divestiture’ takes the form of passing to family. We are a long way from President Carter’s peanut farm!”

Crypto Conflicts

Blanche rose to prominence in recent years as Trump’s main defender in criminal court.

A former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, Blanche, 51, was Trump’s lead attorney in the Manhattan trial that resulted in his being convicted of 34 felonies stemming from his hush-money payment to a pornographic actress, Stormy Daniels. Blanche also defended Trump against criminal charges accusing him of conspiring to subvert the 2020 election and retaining highly classified documents. (Those two cases were dropped after Trump was reelected president.)

Since gaining Senate confirmation on March 5, Blanche has helped lead a massive remaking of the Department of Justice, shifting the emphasis from long-standing priorities, like the protection of civil rights. Thousands of employees have been terminated or resigned as the new administration ended police misconduct prosecutions, environmental abuse lawsuits and abortion access cases. Blanche has pushed for tougher border control enforcement and the use of fraud statutes to prosecute institutions with diversity- and inclusion-related policies. As news of Trump’s ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein gained momentum this year, it was Blanche who personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime confidante now serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping him sexually abuse underage girls.

Blanche has pushed for tougher border control enforcement.

When Blanche issued the sweeping memo ending the department’s Biden-era crypto enforcement approach, he effectively ended a three-year effort aimed at penetrating the shadowy world of transnational criminals.

The agency’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, as it was called, had won the conviction of a man who defrauded crypto investors out of $110 million; a guilty plea from a Russian man who processed more than $700 million through an online marketplace for drug trafficking, money laundering and other crimes; and the conviction of a cryptocurrency exchange operator that helped launder billions from hackers, ransomware attacks, identity theft schemes and narcotics distribution rings.

The team also assisted a multiagency probe of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. The investigation found, among other things, that Binance failed to report and prevent suspicious financial transactions for Hamas, al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations. Federal prosecutors charged the company’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, with violating U.S. laws against money laundering; to settle the case, Zhao pleaded guilty, resigned as company chief executive and served a four-month prison sentence. He also agreed to pay the U.S. $4.3 billion in penalties. (Trump pardoned Zhao in October. Months earlier, Binance had used a stablecoin developed by the Trump-owned World Liberty Financial to fund a $2 billion deal.)  

In his April 7 memo with the subject line “Ending Regulation By Prosecution,” Blanche scoffed at the Biden Justice Department’s approach toward crypto, calling it “a reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution, which was ill conceived and poorly executed.” He said the agency would now target only the terrorists and drug traffickers who illicitly used crypto, not the platforms that hosted them. He announced the disbanding of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.

“The digital assets industry is critical to the Nation’s economic development and innovation,” Blanche wrote. “President Trump has also made clear that ‘[w]e are going to end the regulatory weaponization against digital assets.’”

The market reacted favorably; crypto trading spiked.

At the time, Blanche hadn’t relinquished his bitcoin assets worth between $100,000 and $250,000, nor his investments in the cryptocurrencies solana and ethereum or his stock holdings in Coinbase. Blanche should have recused himself from the decision, experts told ProPublica.

Under the federal conflicts of interest statute, government officials are forbidden from taking part in a “particular matter” that can financially benefit them or their immediate family, unless they have a special waiver from the government. The penalties range from up to one year in jail or a civil fine of up to $50,000 all the way to as much as five years in prison if someone willfully violates the law.

Blanche’s wide-ranging memo benefited the industry broadly, including his own investments, ethics experts said.

At the time, Blanche hadn’t relinquished his Bitcoin worth between $100,000 and $250,000.

In an ethics filing he electronically signed in June, Blanche said his bitcoin and other cryptocurrency investments — including solana, cardano and ethereum —  “were gifted in their entirety to my grandchild and adult children.” Financial disclosure records don’t provide exact amounts but instead a broad range for the worth of a government official’s investment. At that point, Blanche’s records show his transfers to his family members were worth between $116,000 and $315,000. He said he sold additional crypto-related investments worth between $5,000 and $75,000. The divestment took place in late May and early June, the ethics filing said.

Legal experts noted that the federal conflict-of-interest law prohibits government officials from using their position in a way that would financially benefit a spouse or a minor child; it does not mention adult children or grandchildren.

Still, even if legal, giving assets like these to a relative doesn’t satisfy the ethical concern that a government official could act in a way that helps their family financially, they said.

“The purpose of the law is to eliminate even the appearance that an official’s decisions are influenced by their financial interests,” said Kedric Payne, a former deputy chief counsel for the Office of Congressional Ethics who is senior ethics director at the Campaign Legal Center. “That purpose is defeated when an official simply gives conflicted assets to adult children.”

The post Top DOJ Official Halts Crypto Enforcement While Holding Over $150,000 in Crypto Assets appeared first on Truthdig.

It’s 2025. Stablecoins are embedded in global payment systems. Public debates over digital dollars have stalled. Financial surveillance is rising. And with Project 2025 reshaping Washington, the regulatory foundations to address these issues are under threat. Having worked on Capitol Hill drafting stablecoin legislation, and later contributing to digital payments policy at the U.S. Treasury…

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Germany’s transformation into a military power is in full swing: confidential government documents reveal plans to channel billions into ammunition and controversial weapons systems. Is the country prepared for the consequences?

In this article series, we take a second look at current events in countries that often remain only briefly spotlighted in German reporting. Together with local experts, we ask: What political and social developments lie behind the current events that we see in the news? What does this mean for democracy and media freedom? With our exile expertise, we want to reveal global connections and understand what we can learn from this for free, democratic coexistence.
In this episode, Azerbaijani journalist Fatima Karimova writes about the repression of media workers in her homeland and why the European Union repeatedly turns a blind eye to it.