Today’s corporate malfeasance update comes from two good friends.

1) Matthew Simmons forwarded me this link to an article on The Slog about the ongoing protests at the faux-local Starbucks in Seattle. Good job guys!

2) Stephen Elliott sent me a link to this piece about The Rumpus’s Continuing War on Amazon.com . The latest issue (not to suggest the other issues went anywhere) is Amazon’s staunch opposition to states’ attempts to collect sales tax from it. Now, I admit, my first reaction was “why would the Rumpus be supporting the option that will result in me having to spend more money to buy books?” But the case they sketch–it’s a brief article, so please read it–makes the prescient point that by allowing Amazon to not charge sales tax, they’re given a substantial competitive advantage over locally-owned, bricks and mortar bookstores. I’m not telling you whether to join the Amazon boycott or not, but I think this article is worth considering, and the links in it are all worth clicking. And of course, when the really-existing bookstore in your neighborhood can’t produce Gershom Scholem’s 1000 page biography of Sabbatai Sevi that you stupidly got yourself a hard-on for, (and the only one at Powell’s seems to cost fifty bucks) there’s always Abebooks.