The Many Beds Amazon Shares with the Government

I’ve posted articles here positing that Amazon’s enormous contracts with the US intelligence community drove Amazon to the business decision to delist all of CODOH’s offerings on its Web site. I have to admit the idea is a bit of a stretch, but no big deal at all in our brave new world of alternative facts. Then came David Merlin with his report of the imminence of an expanded (encompassing saying certain things about the Holocaust) definition of anti-Semitism being imposed on the US Department of Education by Congress and stating that this development was one of the things leading Amazon to delist our stuff.

Huh? I thought. How do expanded definitions by which the Education Department identifies “racial discrimination” under funding laws drive Amazon to do what it did? I kept thinking about it. Books … Education … The connection isn’t hard to make, after all.

And sure enough, when I Googled “Amazon education contracts,” look what popped up! Who needs the US Department of Education when you’re dealing with the New York City School Board? Jared Kushner, move over! We’re talking about the Largest Jewish City on Planet Earth here, the one whose former comptroller, Alan Hevesi, brought the entire Swiss banking industry to its knees not so many years ago.

Jeff Bezos did not want to end up like the Swiss banking industry, which ended up paying a settlement of $1.25 billion to their Jewish plaintiffs along with many millions more in auditing costs. Now, my previous diatribes noted $600 million in contracts between Amazon Web Services and the US intelligence community, and $30 million is a lot less than $600 million. But with the trend away from expensive paper-and-ink, heavy, fragile textbooks toward e-books and the vast plethora of government and private educational entities around the US and the entire world for that matter, yesterday’s nine-digit number could be eclipsed many times over in the near future.

And this is not the separate subsidiary Amazon Web Services. This is Amazon Books, the very product from which the tiny rivulet from which eventually sprang the vast and mighty Amazon we know today. Amazon today is no bookstore—it is a utility. And like many utilities that were originally conceived and built by private interests, it has been quite thoroughly taken over by governments of all sizes and descriptions, like an animal carcass totally obscured by a flock of gorging vultures.

The Amazon Books of yesteryear, the one Jeff Bezos so movingly proclaimed in 1998 in his speech at Lake Forest College (“… we want to make every book available—the good, the bad and the ugly … to let truth loose.") [i] has long disappeared under that pile of scavengers.

We in search of uncensored truth will have to direct our attentions elsewhere, as will we who wish to make it available to a world starving for truth and justice.

Just like the New York Subway system, just like the banking industry, just like the educational establishment itself, Amazon is rapidly becoming another government operation.