We are tens of thousands of people. We are Amazon workers. We are small business owners. We are community members. And we are shoppers, all suffering under Amazon’s monopoly. Now, we are telling Congress: enough is enough. It is time to finally use our laws to break up America’s most dangerous monopoly.

In our workplaces, Amazon hides the spread of the virus from us and the world. They threaten us when we tell the truth. Our bosses ask us to rely on promises that pandemic rates inside their facilities are the same as those outside, even as their own leaked studies showed that the rate of COVID cases inside a Minnesota warehouse was many times the rate of the surrounding community.

We are community business owners who sell online. Amazon’s monopoly power over e-commerce means we’re forced to sell through them. Amazon then spies on and copies our products, selling their own copies for less until we’re killed off or, if we’re lucky, slowly suffocate our small businesses under an avalanche of profit-killing fees.

We are whistleblowers fired by a monopoly for voicing our concerns about what's happening to us at work. When Amazon chooses whom to fire, they choose Black workers, again and again. When they’ve fired Black workers, they have disparaged them with misleading productivity claims and racist insults. As the calls for safety and fairness have grown, Amazon has sought to hire former intelligence officials with private military experience to spy on us - and who knows whom else?

We have been arrested and jailed and sometimes deported thanks to Amazon's invasive databases, cameras and facial recognition programs, which capture our images when we walk our streets or protest in public spaces, then send our information to more than 1400 police departments without warrants or permission.

We live in the shadows of Amazon's sprawling operations - warehouses, data centers, headquarters and transit hubs. The corporation builds near communities of color and poor communities, choking us with pollution in some places, and, in others, driving gentrification and displacing our neighbors.

Amazon’s monopoly power means that, while the pandemic will kill some 200,000 of our neighbors, millions of jobs and most of our family businesses, Jeff Bezos will make billions more and strengthen Amazon’s dominance over our communities.

A monopoly like Amazon narrows our options for how, and from whom, we can buy what we need, because they buy or destroy their competitors and everyone, even big brands, have to play by their rules. Those rules now include: pandemic price gouging as high as 1000%, packages filled with Amazon’s own products “melting and bursting into flames” and fraudulent product rankings driven by fake reviews.

How did we get here? How does a corporation with unelected leaders increasingly dictate the terms of our lives and our future? How do a few men in a private office play judge, jury and executioner in so many aspects of our lives across small towns, suburbs, big cities and even state agencies? How are they protected from accountability and justice? Monopoly.

How do we get out? How do we stop a corporation’s rapid growth against democracy and toward tyranny? Anti-monopoly. Break up Amazon.