Amazon’s $10 Billion Gov Contract Held Up In Court & Controversial Monsanto Pesticide Restrictions

Via America’s Lawyer: Mike Papantonio and Trial Magazine Executive Editor Farron Cousins discuss reasons behind the drawn-out battle over a $10 billion contract between Amazon and the Pentagon, after the cloud-computing company Oracle filed a lawsuit alleging that the Pentagon rigged a major contracting process in favor of Amazon. Also, Legal Journalist Mollye Barrows joins Mike Papantonio to talk about the controversial pesticide Dicamba, which despite scientific evidence & impassioned public pleas, Arkansas decided to side with chemical giant and manufacturer Monsanto that restrictions on the weed killer should be relaxed.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Amazon's profits have more than tripled in the last two years. And it isn't because people love buying stuff from their website. Their rise in profits is partly due to the companies government contracts for cloud computing, but their biggest prize, a $10 billion contract is now held up in the courts. I have Farron Cousins from the Trial Lawyer Magazine to talk about it. We, seems like we're doing a lot of stories on Amazon lately. This is a story that oddly enough, you know, at least written corporate media is picking up on it. A great story that actually appeared in the Wall Street Journal and in the Mother Jones. Here's the deal, there's this thing called the JEDI cloud. You know, by it's definition, the JEDI cloud sounds pretty ominous by itself. So Amazon bid on being able to have the JEDI cloud to be something that they take care of it and they house and they make all the money on it, $10 billion worth of money on it. And now we find out it wasn't a fair fight. We find out that Amazon might have tried to tip the scales of justice where it comes to fair play on this case.
Right. I, I mean basically to, to strip it down to the bare bones, Amazon essentially had a guy on the inside, a man by the name of Deap Ubhi. He worked for Amazon. He leaves Amazon, goes to work for the Defense Department, is there for about a year. And while he is there, he convinces the defense, the defense department, we need to get into cloud computing, move away from traditional servers, go to cloud computing. Then Mr. Ubhi leaves the State Department and goes back to work for Amazon. Who just happened at the time they were launching their massive cloud computing. AWS is that division and they wanted these government contracts. So this guy came from Amazon to the State Department. Helped put in the good word for Amazon, tweeted out all kinds of praise for Bezos while he was at the State Department and blog posts. It's very deep.
Lots worse than that. First of all, let's talk, let's talk the JEDI cloud. It's, as I say, it sounds pretty ominous, but it's where the military will store all of their digital information in one place.
Right.
Now, I don't know if that sounds like a good idea, but somebody along the way said, yeah, let's store everything in one place where somebody can hack into it just in one place and make it convenient. But here's what's interesting. Oracle filed this lawsuit. Oracle had a similar program that they were trying to sell. Now what this cat did that worked for Amazon and then worked for the Defense Department then worked for Amazon again. What he did is he tried to move the ball. He's, the conflict was ridiculous, but he tried to move the ball to where all of the standards for the contract fit directly into what the standards were at Amazon and varied from the Amazon,
it varied from the Oracle standards. In the process, I think what's incredible though is he actually spied on the com, on the competitors while he was working with the government.

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