Amazon Doesn’t Just Want to Dominate the Market—It Wants to Become the Market
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/amazon-doesnt-just-want-to-dominate-the-market-it-wants-to-become-the-mar
To think of Amazon as a retailer, though, is to profoundly misjudge the scope of what its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, has set out to do. (...)
Instead, it’s that Bezos has designed his company for a far more radical goal than merely dominating markets; he’s built Amazon to replace them. His vision is for Amazon to become the underlying infrastructure that commerce runs on.
In the left-behind towns and neighborhoods, the despair that has set in stems from more than just economic hardship. There is a pervasive sense of powerlessness that is toxic to democracy. (...)
The cities that possessed a degree of local economic power had a bigger middle class and a greater variety of jobs, Mills and Ulmer found. But their most important findings had to do with civic health. The cities with a robust local economy invested more in public infrastructure and services, and their residents were involved in community affairs in greater numbers.
via an interview with the author on “On The Media”: ▻https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/making-america-antitrust-again-on-the-media
▻https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/otm/otm060519_cms940786_pod.mp3