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Amazon Tag

It looks like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has planned to expand his firm's delivery range. The entrepreneur unveiled a mockup of a lunar lander built by his Blue Origin rocket company. Bezos also announced his support for the Trump administration’s renewed push to establish a lunar outpost in just five years.
The world’s richest man and Amazon.com Inc’s chief executive waved an arm and a black drape behind him dropped to reveal the two-story-tall mockup of the unmanned lander dubbed Blue Moon during an hour-long presentation at Washington’s convention center, just several blocks from the White House.

Unions and Democrat politicians asked Amazon to come back to Long Island City, Queens, in an open letter in The New York Times. They wrote:
New Yorkers do not want to give up on the 25,000 permanent jobs, 11,000 union construction and maintenance jobs, and $28 billion in new tax revenues that Amazon was prepared to bring to our state. A clear majority of New Yorkers support this project and were disappointed by your decision not to proceed. We understand that becoming home to the world’s industry leader in e-commerce, logistics and web services would be a tremendous boost for our state’s technology industry, which is our fastest growing generator of new jobs. As representatives of a wide range of government, business, labor and community interests, we urge you to reconsider, so that we can move forward together.

Yesterday I blogged about Amazon skipping out on New York City, which gave Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) a victory. Now Amazon, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Gov. Chris Cuomo, and others  have ripped into Ocasio-Cortez not only for her behavior to push out Amazon, but how she is cheering loudly over the decision. An Amazon spokesperson said the congresswoman and other lawmakers "made it a hostile environment to do business."

Amazon announced today that it will not build a second headquarters in New York City. This is a political victory for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who opposed the deal, but that victory may be short-lived. Though the campus would not have been in her district, it would have been in Long Island City in a neighboring district. There would have been a large spillover effect of jobs and economic benefit in her own district.

Amazon employees have circulated a letter demanding that Jeff Bezos cancel sales of facial recognition software to ICE in protest of zero tolerance policies as to illegal border crossers. Those arrests have resulted in some children being temporarily separated from their arrested parents (as happens whenever U.S. citizens are arrested and incarcerated.) If you read the headlines, you'd think the demand to stop sales to ICE was the big story. Here's how The Washington Post headlined it:

When Amazon s***canned us from the Amazon Associates program, it made a point to tell us it was holding back and would not pay us any money we had accumulated as referral fees:
"... Amazon will not pay you any outstanding advertising fees related to your account ...."
I don't know how much Amazon took from us, because by the time I received Amazon's notice that we were terminated, the data was wiped clean as to unpaid earnings when I logged in. It's probably not a Yuge amount, certainly not in comparison to Amazon's capitalization and Jeff Bezo's net worth.

Not for nothing, there is life after Amazon. Walmart.com isn't quite up to Amazon's website ease of use, depth of user reviews, or breadth of product, but it's getting a lot better. And the price is the price and the shipping (or free shipping) is what it is. Do a test at Amazon, price products using Prime for "free" two-day shipping, then price the products without Prime with regular shipping.

For as long as I can remember, Legal Insurrection has participated in Amazon Associates, a way for websites to earn fees when readers shop at Amazon.com via links from our website. It was an important source of revenue to us, and paid for some of the operating expenses readers never see.

Remember when the left said that President Donald Trump's tax reform would not work because the companies would give those breaks to shareholders instead of reinvesting in the company?
Well, Bloomberg released data that shows capex (capital expenditure) has won out. It shows that the 130 companies in the S&P 500 have increased capital spending by 39%, which is the fastest rate in seven years. Returns to shareholders has only grown by 16%.

Amazon passed two major hurdles on Wednesday after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Whole Foods' shareholders cleared the way for the internet giant to acquire the grocery chain. With that out of the away, Amazon is going all in and has already announced it plans on slashing Whole Foods prices as early as Monday.

For a century Palestinians have been denying and denigrating the Jewish people’s attachment to the Land of Israel even as they’ve been doubling-down on their own fictitious claims to ‘Palestine’ in antiquity and to family lineages in the Holy Land that predate that of the ancient Hebrews. A former adjunct lecturer of Jewish history at Haifa University, now the creative director at a Tel Aviv advertising agency, decided to poke fun at this absurd situation in which Palestinians reject the historical accuracy of a Hebrew/Jewish presence in the land while simultaneously concocting an essentially fraudulent narrative of their own history. The literary product is History of the Palestinian People: From Ancient Times to the Modern Era.