The coalition cited a 15-month House Judiciary Committee investigation released back in October that highlighted restructuring as the solution to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and other monopolies. The report concluded that Congress must break up these companies to protect competition and healthy markets.
SBR is composed of several small business groups including the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding, the American Booksellers Association, the National Office Products Alliance, and the National Grocers Association. The group says that stricter measures need to be imposed by the government to stop the "abusive tactics" of monopolistic corporations such as Amazon.
"Today it's harder than ever to grow a business, no matter how great your idea or how hard you work," the coalition explains in a statement on its website.
"That's because monopolistic corporations, backed by Wall Street, have seized control of many industries and are blocking small businesses from competing. Their outsized power threatens to corrupt not only our markets, but also our government."
Amazon says it is a good and honest monopoly
The reason why SBR has chosen to focus its call to action around Amazon has to do with Amazon's unique gatekeeper role over commerce. Retailers who sell their products through Amazon's marketplace platform incur massive fees because the company knows they have limited other options for selling their wares.
To make matters worse, Amazon also directly competes against its own marketplace sellers by ripping off their products and selling them at a discount under the private Amazon label. This is like a monopoly within a monopoly.
Amazon of course denies all claims that it operates unfairly. Jeff Bezos and his minions insist that any attempt by Congress to break up its operations would be a "misguided intervention" because Amazon would never do anything to harm anybody else – except for making its employees pee in bottles, of course.
"Amazon and third-party sellers complement each other, and sellers having the opportunity to sell right alongside a retailer's products is the very competition that most benefits consumers and has made the marketplace model so successful for third-party sellers," an Amazon spokesperson reportedly told The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
According to Amazon, its monopoly is benefitting consumers
In Amazon's demented view of itself, it is the perfect little corporate angel. Its near-total monopoly is somehow fueling a competitive paradise, it claims, and everyone should be happy it exists.
As you will notice, though, the canned statement from Amazon focuses on alleged benefits to consumers, not retailers and sellers. To Amazon, "cheap" prices – cheap is in quotes because more often than not, the same products available on Amazon are available somewhere else for less – are enough to justify its existence as a monopoly.
Healthy markets cannot exist when just one place sells all the goods, even if that place claims to sell all the goods at the cheapest prices. Healthy markets exist when there are many places selling goods from a position of equal footing, creating optimal economic conditions.
"They care not for this nation, even though America is the key to their wealth," wrote one WND commenter about Amazon. "Trust busters need to rise up in Congress and in the states."
"This has always been the problem with 'investing' with Wall Street and not knowing (OR CARING) what your money is being used to commit," wrote another. "'Investing' in a lot of these companies now is akin to being a traitor."
More related news about Amazon and other tech monopolies can be found at Tyranny.news.
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