An Amazon bribe of the Pentagon... And an ISBN correction

Amazon -- when it’s not trying to crush independent bookstores and monopolize the publishing industry -- is hoping to tap into the Pentagon’s bottomless budget. They effectively bribed a key Pentagon official to get there, according to a new court filing made by Oracle, one of Amazon’s competitors for a monstrous $10 billion contract called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure -- or, ridiculously, JEDI.

Alex Emmons has the details in the The Intercept, but Amazon was in advanced job negotiations with the Pentagon official, including talking about signing bonus, stock options and salary, while the official was still involved with the procurement process. They eventually hired him. The entire structure of the military-industrial complex is inherently corrupt, but within the system, this kind of direct conflict-of-interest is seriously frowned upon, and the official argued internally for a procurement structure that heavily favored Amazon. Story is here, and I don’t think we’ve heard the last of it, particularly as Secretary Shanahan faces confirmation.

Important correction: I gave out the wrong ISBN for my book in previous emails. If you’re requesting that your local bookstore or library stock We’ve Got People, this is the correct one to help them find the book in their system: Ingram 978-1-947492-37-0.

Sorry! But please do ask your library and local bookstore to stock it. I’ll be on Democracy Now tomorrow morning talking about it.

My colleagues Rachel Cohen and Nick Surgey have an extremely important story out that has been strangely overlooked by the press. A new Trump administration rule threatens to effectively destroy the union for home health care workers, which could have profound effects on not just our electoral politics -- the SEIU in some ways is the backbone of what’s left of the labor movement -- but also has implications for how we’ll all be cared for in our later years.

And Rachel this evening was on her roof reading and tweeting out screenshots of my book. So if you haven’t bought it yet, here’s what the first few chapters are about.

And if you haven’t bought it yet, might as well fix that. You can purchase it here.

If you’re in Washington tomorrow, I’m having my book launch party at Gaslight Tavern, starting around 6:30.