Complaining about Big Business and “the rich” is a staple of American political discourse but politicians lambasting individual companies or rich individuals is much rarer. At Atlantic Ronald Brownstein compares Trump’s complaints about Amazon with Kennedy’s feud with U. S. Steel:
When Trump assailed Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, taking “the stock price down by publicly singling out a company and its leader… relentlessly, and without a specific public-policy purpose, there is no precedent for that,†she said.
As Koehn noted, the closest comparison is probably the spring 1962 confrontation between John F. Kennedy and Roger Blough, the chairman of U.S. Steel. Blough infuriated Kennedy by announcing he would raise steel prices more than was recommended by Washington’s informal wage-and-price guidelines at the time. That announcement came immediately after the administration had pressured the United Steelworkers union to accept a leaner-than-usual contract.
Kennedy responded with a fierce public counterattack—which included a Justice Department investigation into alleged price fixing and threats to shift Defense Department steel procurement to companies that hadn’t raised prices. Within days Blough capitulated, reversing the increase.
He goes on to speculate on why the Chamber of Commerce hasn’t rallied ’round Amazon the way it did around U. S. Steel 65 years ago.
I think that one of the answers is that Amazon is actually two (or more) companies in one. It’s an IT services company that dominates its market and is making a lot of money conjoined with a retailer that’s losing a little money and the two in combination are practically the textbook definition of a company illegally using monopoly power. That’s not a good way to make a lot of friends.
On the steel front, its even worse. They jawboned, heh, threatened until the US companies put through a huge wave of new open hearth capacity………..just as the basic oxygen furnace was taking over.
The rest is history. Government really shouldn’t be meddling except to enforce the law.
@ Guarneri : I’m not familiar with that story. Who was pushing new open hearth capacity and why?
If sheer size were the issue, Walmart ($480 billion in revenues in 2016) outdoes Amazon ($180 billion in 2017). FWIW, a better comparison would be between Amazon and Alibaba Holdings, which is also in online retail, cloud services, entertainment, etc. — except that Alibaba is twice the size of Amazon.
I don’t think Amazon really qualifies as a monopoly.
It’s not sheer size. Amazon controls just under half of web services and in essence it was the first mover in the sector. That’s the source of their monopoly not retail.
I look forward with great interest to watching Donald Trump convince the American public that Amazon’s retail activities are of minor interest; its share of the Cloud makes it a dangerous monopoly, which must be cut down. Also:
http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450427034/Gartner-Alibaba-outperforms-AWS-Microsoft-and-Google-in-public-cloud-revenue-growth-stakes
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the market leader with a 44.2% share, followed by Microsoft (7.1%) in second place, Alibaba (3%) third and Google (2.3%) fourth, Gartner’s figures show.
However, Gartner’s revenue breakdown of the big four cloud firms’ 2016 performance shows that Alibaba and Google outperformed AWS and Microsoft, with both achieving triple-digit percentage revenue growth over the year.”
The article’s point is that Amazon is growing in the American (and perhaps European) market for Cloud services; Alibaba has China and much of southwest Asia to expand into.
As for the question raised in the original article, I suspect American businessmen are happy to let Trump scream about Bezos, partly because they don’t want Amazon as a competitor, but mostly because it keeps Trump too busy to scream at them.