While conservatives and liberals consider the political leanings of Washington Post buyer and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in an attempt to divine how his politics will affect those of the historic institution, the truth appears to be far simpler: the Post is now Bezos’ latest political tool in a crony capitalist effort to work with the Obama administration. How else to explain President Obama puzzling decision last week to roll out his corporate tax plan at an Amazon.com fulfillment center?
The sale of the Post was supposed to be top-secret, with
staffers asked not to tweet about it for ten minutes. But it’s more than
possible that the Obama administration had some advance notice about
the sale, and that Obama appeared at the Amazon warehouse as a sign of
good faith to Bezos prior to the move. Bezos has not been averse to
holding hands with President Obama, either; back in October 2009, Bezos
had lunch with Obama, at precisely the time Amazon was pitching cloud-computing services to the feds. This year, Amazon received
a lucrative 10-year, $600 million cloud contract with the CIA, despite
its bid being higher than that of competitor IBM. Bezos also backed
Obama’s plan for an internet sales tax. Federal help wouldn’t come at a
bad time for Amazon, which has seen two straight rough quarters; Amazon reported a 37 percent drop in profits in the first quarter of 2013, following hard on a fourth quarter 2012 report showing a net income drop of 45 percent. (Full Story)
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