First they came for the Books, and I did not speak out
Then they came for the Bookstores, and I did not speak out
If Amazon is a giant Ponzi scheme as independent researcher Dave Kranzler from Investment Research Dynamics alleges, then is it simply a fraudulent scheme to enrich a few shareholders at the top or is there a more sinister agenda at work...
First of all keep in mind the SEC let the Madoff swindle go on under their noses for years before they finally dropped the hammer to conveniently create a Shylock-type villain to mark the end of the last bear market.
Most mega-corporations are criminal operations on one level or another that operate with the cooperation of the government, but what is fascinating about Kranzler's Amazon.com theory is that it involves a company that started out as an online bookstore and has become so successful shipping books that real bookstores are virtually extinct.
There once was a time when every neighborhood had at least one bookstore. Then Borders and Barnes & Noble came along and put the small booksellers out of business. For a short while those two national chains with their coffee shops and comfy chairs dominated the brick-and-mortar book business.
In 1994 Amazon came for the bookstores and seven years later Borders declared bankruptcy and went out of business along with the thousand of small booksellers their large-retail business model destroyed a few years earlier.
Wikipedia: The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism.
Wikipedia: In 1946, the Allied occupation authorities drew up a list of over 30,000 titles, ranging from school books to poetry and including works by such authors as von Clausewitz. Millions of copies of these books were confiscated and destroyed. The representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order in principle was no different from the Nazi book burnings.
If Amazon.com is in fact a Ponzi scheme then most likely the real agenda at work is the destruction of the bookstore, specifically the destruction of the neighborhood bookstore where like-minded, free-thinking individuals can meet to discuss ideas, build alliances and form communities.
Do a Google search for "radical bookstores" and you'll come across The Brecht Forum Archive which contains a list of Marxist bookstores and publishers. One of them, Bluestockings in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, is "a radical bookstore, fair trade cafe, and activist center". The search also yields an article titled "Ode to the Bookstore" by John Avalon in which the author reminds us via Mitchell Kaplan that “independent bookstores are about community”.
Community. Activism. Ideas. Anonymity. These concepts are enemies of the state. Here's what the state wants: controlling what you read, keeping track of what you read, isolating you from other readers and most importantly making sure what you read doesn't give you any radical ideas.
So if you want to keep the state happy make sure you keep buying your books online (preferably in electronic format), and don't forget - the delivery drones will be watching...
