Written by Thomas Magstadt   

I recently received an email from The Author's Guild decrying Amazon.com's predatory behavior. The email tells a sad but familiar story:

"Blackmail works best. That seems to be Amazon’s negotiating strategy, at least. The online retailer is now refusing orders on some Hachette Book Group titles in an attempt to extort better contract terms from the publisher.

We reported earlier this week on Amazon’s “slow walking” of Hachette Book Group titles. Amazon was putting pressure on the smallest of the Big Five publishers as the two firms try to negotiate a new contract.

Now the online retail giant has tightened its grip. The New York Times reports that Amazon is preventing the purchase of some Hachette books and listing others as unavailable.

Amazon’s strategy is designed both to show its market dominance and to engineer a rift between Hachette and its authors…

Will Amazon’s bullying ever backfire? Its suppression of availability dates back to 2010, when it removed the buy buttons from Macmillan titles while in a dispute with the publisher. Maybe this time around readers will realize what Amazon most wants us to forget: there are other stores in town…"

In essence, Amazon is presenting independent publishers and bookstores with a Hobson's choice: surrender or die.

Amazon's predatory business practices provide another example of "monopoly capitalism" in action. Marx was right: Capturing an ever greater share of the market is what drives Big Business. Monopolies are the antithesis of the mythical Free Market. And yet Corporate America, Wall Street, and K-Street cynically use the idea of free enterprise to bludgeon "liberals" and inveigh against government regulation.

As with the massive financial bailout in 2008-2009 (which let the banksters responsible off the hook), President Obama is badly mismanaging this issue. As The Author's Guild email notes, "Two summers ago, when the five publishers teamed with Apple to take a stand against Amazon’s e-book dominance, the Justice Department went after the publishers, not Amazon, implicitly sanctioning Amazon’s monopoly and allowing anti-competitive tactics like this to continue."

Writing and publishing are vital to the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press; far more so than the factitious "free speech" right of corporations and the super-rich to bribe politicians with unlimited campaign contributions.

It's high time to rediscover the anti-trust legislation that has been on the books for over a century now. What Amazon is trying to do to the book market points clearly to the urgent need for a trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt in the White House.