Tag Archives: Jeff Bezos

The Great Billionaire Space Caper, by Matt Taibbi

Posted on April 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

Why are taxpayers picking up part of the tab for the space dream of one of the richest men in the world? From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:

Let’s fly the first black woman to the moon, but send the checks to Jeff Bezos! On the congressional hustle that perfectly captures 2022 America

In a story that shows how hard it is to deter a billionaire ravenous for public money, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Washington Post fame appears to have prevailed upon buddies in the Senate to keep alive a childhood dream of not only going to the moon, but getting the public to pay for it. A Bezos company officially lost this moon contract three times in less than a year, but the fourth time’s a charm: thanks to congress, his Jason Voorhees-like determination may be rewarded with a contract worth $6 billion or more.

On March 28th, Joe Biden released his fiscal year 2023 budget, which despite eyebrow-raising changes — in particular, a 10% increase in defense spending — generated few headlines. One of the few items the press did cover was this passage:

The Budget provides $7.5 billion, $1.1 billion above the 2021 enacted level, for Artemis lunar exploration. Artemis would return American astronauts to the Moon as early as 2025, land the first woman and person of color on the Moon…

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JEDI Mind Tricks: Amazon versus the Pentagon and Trump, by Thomas Knapp

Posted on December 12, 2019 | Leave a comment

Jeff Bezos’s animus towards Trump put him at the back of the line for supplying the Pentagon an unnecessary cloud computing system. Now Amazon is suing. From Thomas Knapp at antiwar.com:

Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world, boasting revenues of more than $230 billion last year. But last month the company sued the US Department of Defense over a paltry potential $10 billion spread over ten years.

Amazon lost out to Microsoft in bidding for the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (yes, JEDI, because the most important part of a government program is coming up with a cool acronym) cloud computing program.

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The Tech Giants Are a Conduit for Fascism, by Michael Krieger

Posted on October 2, 2019 | 2 comments

The tech giants are aiding and abetting the government’s ever-increasing repression and curtailment of liberty. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

A second former Amazon employee would spark more controversy. Deap Ubhi, a former AWS employee who worked for Lynch, was tasked with gathering marketing information to make the case for a single cloud inside the DOD. Around the same time that he started working on JEDI, Ubhi began talking with AWS about rejoining the company. As his work on JEDI deepened, so did his job negotiations. Six days after he received a formal offer from Amazon, Ubhi recused himself from JEDI, fabricating a story that Amazon had expressed an interest in buying a startup company he owned. A contracting officer who investigated found enough evidence that Ubhi’s conduct violated conflict of interest rules to refer the matter to the inspector general, but concluded that his conduct did not corrupt the process. (Ubhi, who now works in AWS’ commercial division, declined comment through a company spokesperson.)

Ubhi worsened the impression by making ill-advised public statements while still employed by the DOD. In a tweet, he described himself as “once an Amazonian, always an Amazonian.”

– From the must read ProPublica expose: How Amazon and Silicon Valley Seduced the Pentagon

That U.S. tech giants are willing participants in facilitating mass government surveillance has been widely known for a while, particularly since whistleblower Edward Snowden risked his life and liberty to tell us about it six years ago. We also know what happens to executives who don’t play ball.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Intelligence, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology

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The Real Big Brother, by Eric Zuesse

Posted on August 29, 2019 | Leave a comment

Jeff Bezos is a prime exponent of US interventionism. He’s got a lot a ways to make his views known, and a very receptive audience in Washington. From Eric Zuesse at consortiumnews.com:

It’s a billionaire’s world and the biggest of them all is in the thick of it, as Eric Zuesse explains.

Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post, which leads America’s news-media in their almost 100 percent support and promotion of neoconservatism, American imperialism and wars. This includes sanctions, coups, and military invasions against countries that America’s billionaires want to control but don’t yet control — such as Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, Libya, and China.

These are aggressive wars against countries which have never aggressed against the United States. They are not, at all, defensive, but the exact opposite. It’s not necessarily endless war (even Hitler hadn’t planned that), but war until the entire planet has come under the control of the U.S. Government, a government that is itself controlled by America’s billionaires, the funders of neoconservatism and imperialism — in both major American political parties, think tanks, newspapers, TV networks, etcetera.

Bezos has been a crucial part of neoconservatism, ever since, at the June 6-9 2013 Bilderberg meeting, he arranged with Donald Graham, the Washington Post’s owner, to buy that newspaper, for $250 million. Bezos had already negotiated, in March of that same year, with the neoconservative CIA Director, John Brennan, for a  $600 million ten-year cloud computing contract that transformed Amazon corporation, from being a reliable money-loser, into a reliably profitable firm.

That caused Bezos’s net worth to soar even more (and at a sharper rate of rising) than it had been doing while it had been losing money. He became the most influential salesman not only for books, but for the CIA, and for such mega-corporations as Lockheed Martin. Imperialism has supercharged his wealth, but it didn’t alone cause it. Bezos might be the most ferociously gifted business-person on the planet.

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Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of His Privacy, as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State for Everyone Else, by Glenn Greenwald

Posted on February 10, 2019 | Leave a comment

The hypocrisy is obvious. From Glenn Greenwald at theintercept.com:

THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER HAS engaged in behavior so lowly and unscrupulous that it created a seemingly impossible storyline: the world’s richest billionaire and a notorious labor abuser, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, as a sympathetic victim.

On Thursday, Bezos published emails in which the Enquirer’s parent company explicitly threatened to publish intimate photographs of Bezos and his mistress, which were apparently exchanged between the two through their iPhones, unless Bezos agreed to a series of demands involving silence about the company’s conduct.

In a perfect world, none of the sexually salacious material the Enquirer was threatening to release would be incriminating or embarrassing to Bezos: it involves consensual sex between adults that is the business of nobody other than those involved and their spouses. But that’s not the world in which we live: few news events generate moralizing interest like sex scandals, especially among the media.

The prospect of naked selfies of Bezos would obviously generate intense media coverage and all sorts of adolescent giggling and sanctimonious judgments. The Enquirer’s reports of Bezos’ adulterous affair seemed to have already played at least a significant role, if not the primary one, in the recent announcement of Bezos’ divorce from his wife of 25 years.

Beyond the prurient interest in sex scandals, this case entails genuinely newsworthy questions because of its political context. The National Enquirer was so actively devoted to Donald Trump’s election that the chairman of its parent company admitted to helping make hush payments to kill stories of Trump’s affairs, and received immunity for his cooperation in the criminal case of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, while Bezos, as the owner of the steadfastly anti-Trump Washington Post, is viewed by Trump as a political enemy.

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Jeff Bezos Puts the Pentagon on His Monopoly Board, by Jason C. Ditz

Posted on November 4, 2018 | Leave a comment

Jeff Bezos wants Amazon to be the Pentagon’s go-to supplier. From Jason C. Ditz at theamericanconservative.com:

While employees at Google and Microsoft are wary of collaborating with the military, Amazon revels in it.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons and Jonathan Weiss/Shutterstock

Speaking at the Wired 25th anniversary last month month, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that his company will continue to accept Pentagon contracts. That includes a very controversial cloud-computing contract that Google and Microsoft have already backed out of due to vocal employee opposition to working with the U.S. military.

Amazon was long considered the front-runner for this contract, but Bezos’s rationale for taking it goes well beyond its being low-hanging fruit. He’s argued that the government’s job is to “make the right decision, even when it’s unpopular,” and that large tech companies should support those decisions irrespective of politics.

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Bezos’ Decision to Raise Wages is Largely a Machiavellian Distraction, by Michael Krieger

Posted on October 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

Jeff Bezos wants to dominate the world’s retail. He’s well on his way. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

For the many low wage Amazon workers — both full time and temporary — set to receive a raise thanks to the just announced boost in minimum pay to $15/hour, the news is certainly a big plus. It should also be noted that had Amazon not been subject to intense scrutiny and criticism from the likes of Bernie Sanders and others, Jeff Bezos never would have responded with such an aggressive move. That said, if you think a little beyond the surface level about why he’s doing this now and what his real motives are, it becomes clear nobody should take this move at face value.

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Amazon is Far More Dangerous and Powerful Than You Want to Admit, by Michael Krieger

Posted on September 4, 2018 | 1 comment

No question but that Jeff Bezo and Amazon are in bed with the government and Deep State. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

The sneaky thing about Amazon’s increased dominance in so many key aspects of our lives is that much of the perniciousness is hidden. No one’s going to tell you about all the retailers who have gotten pressured or destroyed via its tactics while you’re happily clicking “add to cart” and smiling about 2-day free shipping. In this sense, it can be best compared to the evils of factory farming. Most people just simply have no idea about the immense damage going on behind the scenes as they indulge in incredible convenience and what looks like a good deal.

– From my November 15, 2017 post: Amazon Poses a Serious Threat to Freedom and Free Markets

Today’s post should be seen as an update to last year’s article referenced above. In the months that have followed, I’ve been consistently frustrated by the lack of interest when it comes to the dangers presented by Amazon and its richest man in the world ($165 billion as of last count) CEO Jeff Bezos. The following Twitter exchange is a good example of what I mean:

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Cronyism, Government, Intelligence, Media, Surveillance

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NSA Launches Amazon-Backed Cloud-Computing Service For Sharing “Top Secret” Info, by Tyler Burden

Posted on June 22, 2018 | 2 comments

What could go wrong with this? From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Four years after handing Amazon a $600 million contract to develop a cloud-storage service for the US intelligence community that can store information across the full range of data classifications – including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret – the NSA announced on Thursday that it has moved most of its mission data to a front-end cloud computing system developed by the agency that’s supported by – you guessed it – Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos.

According to NextGov.com, the IC GovCloud, which was created by the NSA but is supported by Amazon’s web services, will offer similar hosting services to the other 16 members of the US intelligence community. The advantage of having all of these intelligence agencies using the same system, according to NSA Chief Information Officer Greg Smithberger, is that it will allow analysts from across agencies to share information and “connect the dots” more quickly. But even before the other agencies sign on, the NSA will use the platform to “collect, analyze and store” classified information in a “classified cloud computing environment.”

The goal of the platform is to gather all of the signals intelligence that the NSA gathers on foreign targets (and, of course, its myriad spying on the American public) into one centralized location that’s easily accessible by its analysts.

The impetus for the multi-year move is getting the NSA’s data, including signals intelligence and other foreign surveillance and intelligence information it ingests from multiple repositories around the globe into a single data lake analysts from the NSA and other IC agencies can run queries against.

“The NSA has been systematically moving almost all its mission into this big data fusion environment,” Smithberger told Nextgov in an interview. “Right now, almost all NSA’s mission is being done in [IC GovCloud], and the productivity gains and the speed at which our analysts are able to put together insights and work higher-level problems has been really amazing.”

To continue reading: NSA Launches Amazon-Backed Cloud-Computing Service For Sharing “Top Secret” Info

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Big Tech firms march to the beat of Pentagon, CIA despite dissension, by Tim Johnson

Posted on June 4, 2018 | Leave a comment

As SLL said in “The Friendly Faces of Fascism,” Big Tech has crawled into bed with the government. From Tim Johnson at mcclatchydc.com:

A funny thing has happened to Google and Amazon on their path toward high-tech success: They have become crucial cogs in the U.S. national security establishment.

Both companies are expanding teams of employees with security clearances to work on projects that include deploying artificial intelligence and building digital “clouds” to offering law enforcement facial recognition tools that can even read the mood of people caught on camera.

The security establishment’s embrace of Big Tech has ruffled the feathers of traditional defense contractors and roiled employee ranks, in Google’s case, over whether the company is being drawn into what disguntled employees called “the business of war.”

Defense industry analysts say the Pentagon views Big Tech, and particularly Google with its deep bench of artificial intelligence researchers, as vital to the nation’s future safety.

In some ways, the evolution of companies born to disrupt the status quo into business giants with a broad array of clients, including the security establishment, is a result of the profits to be made doing business with the federal government.

The Pentagon currently is testing a customized Google AI surveillance engine that sifts through massive amounts of footage from tactical drones to produce what it calls “actionable intelligence and insights at speed.” The tests are under way at six locations in Africa and the Middle East. Such drone footage has been used in the past to target and kill ISIS extremists.

The pilot, known as Project Maven, spurred nearly 4,000 of Google’s 88,000 employees to sign a petition in April demanding that the project be cancelled because it would “irreparably damage Google’s brand.” The petition added: “Building this technology to assist the U.S. government in military surveillance – and potentially lethal outcomes – is not acceptable.”

The internal protest about Project Maven appeared to be taking a toll. The tech website Gizmodo, citing three unnamed sources, reported Friday afternoon that a Google executive told employees earlier in the day that the backlash over Project Maven had been severe and that the company would not pursue further artificial intelligence work with the Pentagon.

Google declined to answer questions about Project Maven, and a spokeswoman for the Mountain View, Calif., company did not answer broader queries about the company’s activities in the national security sphere.

To continue reading: Big Tech firms march to the beat of Pentagon, CIA despite dissension

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