Hey Bezos, have you corrected this behavior?

Attn: @JeffBezos! https://t.co/42WXWyAFdh

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) September 20, 2020

Did they think no one would tell Candace?

Dear @amazon. About 1,000 people have written to let me know that your employees appear to be stomping on and in this case, smearing Vaseline on my books before mailing them. I know it must have pained you to ship out all 90,000 copies you had in stock— but this is unacceptable. pic.twitter.com/ADwXmhJDn5

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) September 19, 2020

Amazon is banning and censoring books

Allum Bokhari has the story here in Breitbart.

Elon Musk calls for Amazon monopoly to be broken up

In the Wall Street Journal, Nat Ives reports,

Tesla CEO Elon Musk blasted Amazon after it rejected a book about the coronavirus pandemic, a clash that highlights the power some big tech companies wield over speech.

The criticism came in response to a tweet by Alex Berenson, who said Amazon had rejected his submission for a self-published e-book called “Unreported Truths about Covid-19 and Lockdowns.” It questions whether the virus is as deadly as public health experts say.

“Time to break up Amazon,” Mr. Musk wrote on Twitter. “Monopolies are wrong!”

Shortly after the exchange, an Amazon spokeswoman said the book had been removed in error and was being reinstated. The company earlier tied the decision to withhold the book to the retailer’s policy on content around disease-related information, according to a portion of a note from the company to Mr. Berenson that he shared on Twitter.

The Amazon spokeswoman didn’t address Mr. Musk’s claim that the company was a monopoly that should be broken up.

Bezos and Amazon refuse to allow viewpoint diversity

In PJ Media, Tyler O'Neill looks into the accusation that

Amazon Is 'Expressing Public and Open Hostility Toward Conservative and Religious Organizations'

Read the whole thing here.

Amazon deletes positive reviews of conservative books

Matt Margolis writes in PJ Media,

This unfortunate situation comes just as I’m about launch my new book, Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy, which will be published on Tuesday, July 30. I’d like to believe that Amazon will allow it to have as good a chance as any other book, regardless of politics, but how can I be sure? If a successful anti-Obama book is treated so poorly that they'll purge more than a quarter of its reviews, then what kind of shenanigans will they pull with a new pro-Trump/anti-Obama book to keep it from being successful?

Read more here.

How about paying some taxes, Bezos?

In CNBC, Lauren Thomas reports,

...After Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos on Thursday issued a challenge to other retailers, not naming which ones specifically, to match Amazon’s pay and benefits, Walmart snapped right back.

“Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage. Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It’s a kind of competition that will benefit everyone,” Bezos wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.

“Hey retail competitors out there (you know who you are) how about paying your taxes?” tweeted Walmart’s Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs Dan Bartlett on Thursday morning, sharing an article about Amazon paying $0 in federal taxes on more than $11 billion in profits last year.

...Walmart’s minimum wage of $11 an hour, set in January 2018, is still below Amazon’s, which was hiked to $15 in November. But Walmart has said its average worker earns $17.55 an hour with wages and benefits.

As for Bartlett’s argument: Amazon's low tax bill mainly stemmed from the Republican tax cuts of 2017, carryforward losses from years when the company was not profitable, tax credits for massive investments in R&D, and stock-based employee compensation.

Read more here.

#Woke Robber Barons

Why do I go first to the Ace of Spades blog each day? Because Ace and his team do not pull any punches. In fact, they fight back! Here's one example.

Amazon, The World's Largest Book-Burner: Tommy Robinson's Book About the Koran Now Banned By Amazon. If you liked the original Robber Barons, you're gonna love the #Woke Robber Barons.

Ace then links to this vitally important article written by Robert Spencer in PJ Media.

On January 7 of this year, I published an article at PJ Media about Amazon removing doormats featuring Qur’an verses from sale because the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found them offensive. In that article, I asked:

How long will it be before Hamas-linked CAIR starts demanding that books that criticize jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others also be dropped by Amazon?
The answer turned out to be 51 days.

It’s the British government and the BBC, rather than CAIR, that are likely behind this, but Amazon has just dropped the book Mohammed’s Koran by the renowned British activist Tommy Robinson and Peter McLoughlin -- and apparently only because its censors dislike Robinson. In the last two weeks, Robinson spectacularly embarrassed the BBC by exposing the bias and dishonesty of its reporter John Sweeney. The retaliation has been swift and severe: Robinson has been banned from YouTube and Facebook, and now his book has been withdrawn from sale.

Coauthor Peter McLoughlin states:

[T]his is the twenty-first century equivalent of the Nazis taking out the books from university libraries and burning them. Can you think of another scholarly book on Islam that has been banned by Amazon? Mein Kampf is for sale on Amazon. As are books like the terrorist manual called The Anarchist Cookbook.
McLoughlin is correct that Amazon’s behavior has been wildly inconsistent. He adds that Amazon officials are steadfastly mum on why the book was banned:

[They] refuse to reinstate the book and refuse to explain why it has been banned. So they have banned the No.1 best-selling exegesis of the Koran. I can’t get my head round it. Every few weeks for the past 18 months they had emailed me asking to put it into special sales programmes, as it was selling so well. For 18 months they sought to profit even more from the sales.
“As dark as my vision is,” McLoughlin concludes, “I thought we were 10 to 20 years away from dissenting books from being banned.”

Indeed. Those who object to my labeling Leftist totalitarians “fascists” should take careful note of this story. What group is most famous for burning books? That’s right. And what group is doing it now? Right again. I predicted this, but like Peter McLoughlin, I didn’t think it would come so soon.

This is an extremely ominous development. Amazon and Barnes and Noble -- which is also not carrying this book -- have a virtual monopoly on book sales. When these two giants refuse to carry a book, that book effectively does not exist. If they are now going to ban books that are critical of Islam and opposed to jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others, then an Islam-critical perspective will be almost impossible to find anywhere.

Some will applaud this as the ultimate and laudable demise of “Islamophobia,” but it is actually far more insidious. If the motivating ideology of jihad terrorists cannot be criticized or even discussed openly, jihad terrorists will have an absolutely free hand. They will act with impunity, secure in the knowledge that any criticism of their activities will be shut down the same way Tommy Robinson was shut down.

Whatever anyone thinks of Tommy Robinson or the Qur’an, this is a serious matter that anyone who cares about the freedom of speech should be extremely concerned about.

Mohammed’s Koran is critical of Islam’s holy book. It endeavors to illustrate how violent jihadists justify their actions by referring to Islamic texts and teachings -- and that’s all. Robinson and McLoughlin call for no violence. Their book is accurate.

Anyone who has written a book that is critical of anything should read the writing on the wall and realize that once this censorship begins, it won’t end with Tommy Robinson or Qur’an-critical books. But they won’t. PEN, the international organization that is supposedly dedicated to defending the freedom of speech, is made up of hard-Leftists who won’t utter a whisper in defense of Tommy Robinson’s book, or a murmur of protest that it is not allowed to be sold.

They don’t realize that what is being done to him can be done to them. But it will be.

Amazon bans Tommy Robinson's book

Robert Spencer reports in PJ Media,

On January 7 of this year, I published an article at PJ Media about Amazon removing doormats featuring Qur’an verses from sale because the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found them offensive. In that article, I asked:

How long will it be before Hamas-linked CAIR starts demanding that books that criticize jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others also be dropped by Amazon?
The answer turned out to be 51 days.

It’s the British government and the BBC, rather than CAIR, that are likely behind this, but Amazon has just dropped the book Mohammed’s Koran by the renowned British activist Tommy Robinson and Peter McLoughlin -- and apparently only because its censors dislike Robinson. In the last two weeks, Robinson spectacularly embarrassed the BBC by exposing the bias and dishonesty of its reporter John Sweeney. The retaliation has been swift and severe: Robinson has been banned from YouTube and Facebook, and now his book has been withdrawn from sale.

Coauthor Peter McLoughlin states:

[T]his is the twenty-first century equivalent of the Nazis taking out the books from university libraries and burning them. Can you think of another scholarly book on Islam that has been banned by Amazon? Mein Kampf is for sale on Amazon. As are books like the terrorist manual called The Anarchist Cookbook.
McLoughlin is correct that Amazon’s behavior has been wildly inconsistent. He adds that Amazon officials are steadfastly mum on why the book was banned:

[They] refuse to reinstate the book and refuse to explain why it has been banned. So they have banned the No.1 best-selling exegesis of the Koran. I can’t get my head round it. Every few weeks for the past 18 months they had emailed me asking to put it into special sales programmes, as it was selling so well. For 18 months they sought to profit even more from the sales.
“As dark as my vision is,” McLoughlin concludes, “I thought we were 10 to 20 years away from dissenting books from being banned.”

...This is an extremely ominous development. Amazon and Barnes and Noble -- which is also not carrying this book -- have a virtual monopoly on book sales. When these two giants refuse to carry a book, that book effectively does not exist. If they are now going to ban books that are critical of Islam and opposed to jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others, then an Islam-critical perspective will be almost impossible to find anywhere.

Some will applaud this as the ultimate and laudable demise of “Islamophobia,” but it is actually far more insidious. If the motivating ideology of jihad terrorists cannot be criticized or even discussed openly, jihad terrorists will have an absolutely free hand. They will act with impunity, secure in the knowledge that any criticism of their activities will be shut down the same way Tommy Robinson was shut down.

...Mohammed’s Koran is critical of Islam’s holy book. It endeavors to illustrate how violent jihadists justify their actions by referring to Islamic texts and teachings -- and that’s all. Robinson and McLoughlin call for no violence. Their book is accurate.

Anyone who has written a book that is critical of anything should read the writing on the wall and realize that once this censorship begins, it won’t end with Tommy Robinson or Qur’an-critical books. But they won’t. PEN, the international organization that is supposedly dedicated to defending the freedom of speech, is made up of hard-Leftists who won’t utter a whisper in defense of Tommy Robinson’s book, or a murmur of protest that it is not allowed to be sold.

They don’t realize that what is being done to him can be done to them. But it will be.

Read more here.

Alexa blurts our, "Kill your foster parents!"

Jeffrey Dastin reports in Reuters,

Millions of users of Amazon’s Echo speakers have grown accustomed to the soothing strains of Alexa, the human-sounding virtual assistant that can tell them the weather, order takeout and handle other basic tasks in response to a voice command.

So a customer was shocked last year when Alexa blurted out: “Kill your foster parents.”

Alexa has also chatted with users about sex acts. She gave a discourse on dog defecation. And this summer, a hack Amazon traced back to China may have exposed some customers’ data, according to five people familiar with the events.

Alexa is not having a breakdown.

The episodes, previously unreported, arise from Amazon.com Inc’s strategy to make Alexa a better communicator. New research is helping Alexa mimic human banter and talk about almost anything she finds on the internet. However, ensuring she does not offend users has been a challenge for the world’s largest online retailer.

Read more here.

Time to Break Up Big Tech?

Scott Galloway has a best selling book entitled,

The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.

Chateau Heartiste quotes from it in writing about Amazon.

Here are some Galloway quotes.

Since the Great Recession, Amazon has paid just $1.4 billion in corporate taxes compared to Walmart’s $64 billion. ... In 2017, Amazon paid nothing in federal tax.

...Its ostensible search for the next city to house its second headquarters has become “the Olympics on steroids,” Galloway says, with state and local governments promising tax breaks that would starve funding for schools, police and fire departments. We have a new national holiday, Amazon Prime Day. Alexa and Echo, Amazon’s cloud-based voice-operated systems, sit in an estimated 40 million homes and spy on us, reporting our moods, tastes, wants, needs and fears back to HQ.

Yet we don’t fear Alexa.

CH writes,

(Bezos) hates President Trump, as evident by the daily TDS droppings of the newspaper he owns, the Washington Post-Op. If Bezos gets his greedy mitts on a monopolistic stranglehold of streaming video, you can just imagine the amount of anti-Trump, anti-White, anti-American bilge that would spill forth every minute of every day. “93% negative stories on Trump? We can hit 100%! (with no pee breaks)”

Galloway:

We have become equally complacent while technology mauls our economy, he says. “We seem to be comfortable, at least in tech, with the 8,000 people who work at headquarters splitting $80 billion in revenue,” while lower-wage workers struggle to get by. Business Insider reported that as of this year, Amazon was among the top companies whose employees relied on food stamps. And that $15 minimum wage? In exchange, the company quietly cut monthly bonuses and stock options.

...This complicated problem, he says, has a simple answer: Break up Big Tech.

“The key to competitive markets is that no one entity has too much control of the marketplace,” he says, adding that no other company has violated anti-trust over the past 100 years as Amazon and its ilk. Bezos’ recent support for a universal basic income is alarming, Galloway writes, because it means he sees a near future in which Big Tech permanently puts people out of work.

...“Ma Bell couldn’t have been easy to break up, and we unleashed 30 years of incredible innovation,” Galloway says. “Teddy Roosevelt broke up the railroads. If the Department of Justice hadn’t moved in on Microsoft [in 1998], do you think we would have Google? We don’t break companies up because they’re evil or take jobs or don’t pay taxes. We do it because it’s time.”

CH finishes the post:

Bezos is the villain who immiserates the “Forgotten Americans” Trump vowed to protect. So why isn’t Trump taking action? What’s staying his hand? It’s obvious Bezos fears an anti-trust suit; he’s busy paying off a small army of congressmen to do his bidding and cuck on cue before the almighty Amazon. Is the weak link Jeff Sessions?

Trump should make anti-trust and the Wall his defining issues in 2019 if he wants to lock up 2020.

Maybe AI isn't so good at telling employers whom to hire!

In Business Insider, Isobel Asher Hamilton reports,

Amazon built an AI tool to hire people but had to shut it down because it was discriminating against women!

...This was apparently because the AI combed through predominantly male résumés submitted to Amazon over a 10-year period to accrue data about whom to hire.

Read more here.

Sanders and Bezos butt heads

At Instapundit, Spen Green uses this headline to link to a story: THAT SEEMS A BIT HIGH: Amazon and Sanders Butt Heads as Senator Prepares 100 Percent Tax Bill. In the linked story at PJ Media, Bridget Johnson reports that Sanders accused Amazon founder Jeff Bezos of making in ten seconds what the average Amazon employee makes in a year!

Last week, (Bernie) Sanders sent out an email to supporters asking them to sign a petition that declares in part, "I don't believe that ordinary Americans should be subsidizing the wealthiest person in the world because you pay your employees inadequate wages."

By Friday, Sanders said he had collected more than 100,000 signatures and would introduce legislation in September "to demand that Mr. Bezos and other billionaires get off welfare and start paying their workers a living wage."

That bill would require companies to pay, in the form of a 100 percent tax, for any public assistance programs used by their lower-wage workers

Read more here.

Giving ten billion dollars to Amazon is a bad idea

Keith Curtis reports at American Thinker,

The U.S. Department of Defense has more than 3,000 datacenters and countless applications. The DOD smartly want to consolidate to save money. In March, the DOD put out a request for a proposal about a compute cloud infrastructure. Business Insider reports that Amazon is currently a shoe-in for the $10-billion contract.

He explains here why it is a bad idea.

Amazon moves to number two most valuable company

Amazon has now passed Alphabet to become the second-most valuable company in the US. Apple remains number one. Details here.

“M”, for monopolist, is today’s scarlet letter.

Eve Smith at The Economist writes
To: Jeff Bezos , Mark Zuckerberg , Sundar Pichai
CC: Tim Cook , Reed Hastings , Satya Nadella

Dear Jeff, Mark and Sundar, if I may
...

Facebook and Google are responsible for nearly 80% of news publishers’ referral traffic. In 2017 they claimed around 80% of every new online-ad dollar in America. Google dominates as much as 85% of online-search-ad revenue worldwide. When you combine the stuff Amazon sells itself with the stuff others sell using it as a marketplace, the company controls some 40% of America’s online commerce.



Many also believe you to be anti-competitive. Amazon is a retailer which is also a marketplace. Google determines the position that publishers get in search results and which ads are served to their patrons—as well as controlling the system that says if the ads were read and should be paid for. Ms Vestager fined it for hurting rival online-shopping services; it could face further charges for forcing smartphone makers using its Android operating system to include various Google apps.

All three of your firms have used insights from the data you gather to spot incipient rivals and buy them up. Facebook’s little-known app Onavo, which tracks users’ smartphone activity, helped it spot several potential threats, including Instagram, a photo app, which it bought in 2012; WhatsApp, a messaging service, for which it paid a stunning $22bn in 2014; and tbh, a social-polling app, which it acquired last year. When Snapchat rebuffed it in 2013, it responded by cloning the app’s most successful features. There’s a potential lesson from history here. Microsoft tried to buy the nascent browser company Netscape in the 1990s; when it failed, it put lots of the browser’s features into its own product, making it freely available to all. That got it into a lot of trouble. Some see the weak share price of Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, as proof that challenging Google’s and Facebook’s online-ad duopoly has become nearly impossible.

A further charge is that tech firms’ products are addictive. People argue about this, but many feel that people who spend time on social media, especially teens, are less happy than peers. Rates of teen depression and suicide have risen in some places; some adults have been shown to be more prone to insomnia, depression and anxiety due to online activities. Two of Apple’s shareholders—the California State Teachers’ Retirement System pension fund and Jana Partners, a hedge fund—recently demanded more be done to help youngsters’ smartphone addiction. You know you are in trouble if a Wall Street firm is lecturing you about morality.

In addition to harming mental health, your firms are charged with damaging democracy. Social-media firms create filter bubbles, where users are fed information confirming their existing beliefs; they spread fake news that reinforces political polarisation. After last year’s terror attacks in London, Theresa May and others pointed fingers at YouTube, where jihadists promote extremist propaganda. Russia’s use of social media in America’s 2016 presidential race reflected particularly poorly on Facebook, which was seen as doing too little to stamp out deceptive ads and fake news stories. As for nuclear braggadocio on Twitter, let’s not even go there.

...Break up
This has several supporters, especially on the left. One is Barry Lynn of the Open Markets Institute (he was dismissed from the New America Foundation last year, allegedly because Google’s Eric Schmidt disagreed with his take on tech). Tim Wu, who was influential in the Obama White House—he coined the term “net neutrality”—was recently overheard telling an Economist journalist that he is in favour of a revival of “the big case tradition” of trustbusting. The DOJ or the European Commission could try and force Facebook to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp (the deal European regulators really care about), thus creating three rival social networks. Google could be split from YouTube (which, kind of remarkably, is itself the world’s second-largest search engine) or be forced to spin off DoubleClick, the technology it bought in 2007 that places ads across the web.

Such gambits might well fail; but that risk is not the deterrent you might expect. Mr Wu and others think such attempts serve a greater good even if their subject survives. Before eventually breaking up AT&T, which controlled America’s telephones, regulators forced it to license its technology. Neither IBM in the 1960s nor Microsoft in the 1990s was actually split up. But IBM had to open its platform to independent software developers and Microsoft was obliged to disclose details about the workings of its Windows operating system to rivals. Some scholars reckon this government-ordained disruption was as much of a boost to progress as any endogenous “creative destruction”. They may not be going too far when they trace the rise of your generation of tech firms to those antitrust cases.

Pre-emptive action might sometimes be an option. Some see your search for a second headquarters, Jeff, as a portent of such a strategy: a step towards spinning off Amazon Web Services. (This would not allay concerns about Amazon being both a retailer and marketplace, but it could subdue and distract regulators.) The creation of Alphabet as a holding company in 2015 means that splitting, say, Google from YouTube would be less hard than in years gone by.

Self-severance might be preferable to waiting for regulators to arbitrarily decide which limb to sever. But it is still a big step. An alternative is just lying low. Do not provoke regulators, as Mr Gates did (he called one FTC commissioner a communist). Do spend some of your money on influence. In 2017 the internet sector spent $50m on lobbying in America, which is three times what it spent in 2009—but still only a quarter of what pharma firms spend. Your K-street battalions should remind regulators that attacking deals which have already been done chills the market. And the antitrust hipsters need to know that break-ups are not stable solutions. The network effects that make bigger networks more attractive to new joiners give these markets a winner-takes-all quality. One of the Googlettes, or the Facebabies, will do better than all the rest, and a new giant will rise.

Utility regulation
That said, taking this winner-takes-all argument too far could backfire. Mark, you and your peers may all come to rue the day you described Facebook as a “utility”. You were trying to argue that Facebook’s market-dominating social network could be as ubiquitous as electricity. In doing so you armed your critics. Utilities so big that everyone depends on them get regulated.

...Price regulation is hard for services that are basically free to the user. It is possible, though, that a regulator could force prices up—for example by insisting that you offer customers the chance to pay for an ad-free service. A more likely approach, though, would be to cap profits. On the basis of your third-quarter figures, a mandated 20% rate of return would represent a fall in profitability rates of 11% for Google and 56% for Facebook. Your share prices would plunge.

Read more here.

They ordered four storage bins from Amazon

Yes, it's pot! Howard Cohen reports at the Miami Herald,

The first tip off was the weight. Four empty plastic storage bins should not weight more than 93 pounds.

Then the smell —an overpowering odor akin to the old Hollywood Sportatorium rock concert hall in the 1970s.

But that is what has an Orlando couple feeling dazed and confused. When the pair opened their order from Amazon that arrived at their doorstep they found the storage bins loaded with 65 pounds of wrapped marijuana.

“They were extremely heavy, heavier than you would think from ordering four empty bins,” one of the customers told WFTV.

Slightly more than 63 pounds of marijuana, wrapped in boxes, wound up in four plastic storage bins an Orlando couple ordered from Amazon, WFTV reported. WFTV

Read more here.

Amazon is not profitable. Who knew? What will their next move be?

Amazon deleting unfavorable reviews of Hillary's deplorable book

Ace:

CBS is the Only Network to Report That Amazon Has a Coordinated Partisan Effort to Delete One-Star Reviews of Hillary's Deplorable Book
One fun point: Norah O'Donnell reports, with great satisfaction I'm sure, that Hillary's deplorable book has a five star average on Amazon, not apparently realizing they just reported Amazon is zapping all the unfavorable reviews.

And by the way, I've seen people complaining that two star reviews are being zapped too

The online business with a "political constituency"

Amazon is certainly an impressive retail success. Although they are highly automated, they continue to employ more and more people at higher and higher wages. Laura Stevens reports at the Wall Street Journal,

...Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos founded the company in his a garage just outside Seattle in 1994.

...In Seattle, where Amazon has been based for more than 20 years, the retailer has opened new office buildings to accommodate its rapidly growing workforce, which now tops 40,000. But Amazon said Thursday it is seeking a new campus to eventually house an additional 50,000 workers.

Seattle is “just not big enough to double the size of their footprint,” says Christopher B. Leinberger, a professor at George Washington University School of Business and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in land use.



. Meanwhile, home prices in Seattle have risen 47% to an average of $667,488 since 2007, according to the Cost of Living Index by the Council for Community and Economic Research.

The online retail giant said its next headquarters should be located in a walkable transportation hub with good access to an educated workforce and universities. A second headquarters would also give Amazon a chance to spread its economic clout and political constituency. Proposals are due next month, Amazon said.

"Political constituency?" What has that got to do with selling things online? Have you seen what Bezos has done to the Washington Post?