After the post below was written and scheduled, I found out that Bezos is no longer the majority share owner of Amazon, which is my own ignorance. I should have been more informed before I sat down to write either the previous post or this one. According to the Motley Fool website, in an article published last March, Bezos is the largest single shareholder of Amazon stock, but he only owns about 9%. More than sixty percent of shares are held by institutional investors. I didn't know that Bezos sold off billions of dollars worth of Amazon stock last year. So far that doesn't change anything about what I said below, but it might affect what I decide to do at some point in the future. Now you know. Or at least, now I know.
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Just when I was thinking maybe I should slack off and not be so strict about my Amazon boycott, Bezos announced that he was restricting the opinions page in The Washington Post (which he owns) only to columns about "personal liberties" and "free markets." Per Bezos, they will not be publishing opposing viewpoints.
That sounds so innocuous. Who is opposed to personal liberty or free markets? But it's the refusal to publish opposing viewpoints that is just downright scary. He probably has a PR staff that spent days trying to figure out how to say "we're shutting down free speech on our opinions page" without actually saying that, and making it sound like he's striking a blow for freedom. These billionaires say that they want free speech, but really they just want it for themselves-- the freedom to say what they want without anyone fact checking to see if it's actually true, or if there are reasonable opposing points of view. The Bezos PR machine claims it's a non-partisan move, but only conservatives are applauding.
So anyway. I'm still boycotting Amazon. It won't be 100%, because we have a family kindle account, and I'm not forcing my kids to boycott if they don't want to-- they're 34 and 27, they're not children. But neither of them is a frequent buyer, either. (Between the two of them, they've bought three books in the past year.)
I'm allowing myself to use credits/points I've already paid for--like on Audible, where I have credits I paid for last August-- but so far I've been pretty strict about not handing him any new money. I'm sure he's quaking in his boots, but there's only this one way I can stand up for what I believe, and I'm going to use it.
I'm just so disgusted by these tech billionaires and the blatant self-aggrandizing they try to disguise behind a lot of blathering about free speech and unrestricted markets. I'm not enough of an expert to argue with them here, but it doesn't take a lot of knowledge to distrust businessmen who are getting rich off "unrestricted free markets" that aren't all that free and unrestricted for anybody who isn't a billionaire.
I told you in my last post that I had bought an e-reader that I didn't like from another company. It is a Nook made by Barnes&Noble, and it is sadly slow, with a clunky user interface. But I discovered that I can download the Nook app to our iPad and that works great. I've already bought several books from Barnes&Noble that I would normally have purchased from Amazon. I'm actually happy to support Barnes&Noble, who have returned to the winning strategy of loving books and the people who read them under their new CEO (James Daunt, who took over in 2019).
I'll let you know if anything changes. (uh, besides what I already said in the paragraph at the top. ha.)