The Amazon drive in Bessemer, Alabama was never going to be easy.

Dominated by the GOP, Alabama’s political institutions are so deeply corroded that they’ve attracted national attention twice in recent years — first due to a constitutional crisis that saw the heads of all three branches of government simultaneously investigated for corruption and second due to the near-election of an accused pedophile and bible-thumping reactionary too toxic even for Donald Trump to endorse for the US Senate. When United Nations experts visited the state for a 2017 study, they were “shocked” by the level of extreme poverty and lack of access to basic utilities. In another recent low, efforts to re-allow yoga in schools (yes, it is currently illegal to do yoga in schools in Alabama) are stalling as opponents fear it will insinuate Hinduism into Alabama schools.

This reactionary political and economic environment is hostile to progressive organizing of all sorts, much less a union drive at one of the world’s most powerful companies. But there were two other, often overlooked, hurdles that bedeviled the Amazon campaign and present a challenge to many other organizing efforts across the country: the lack of public spaces conducive to organizing and extreme media consolidation that tilts the playing field toward business.