Anyone who believes in such "commitments" in the first place is a fool.
As a reminder, Amazon is a business, and its first priority is to make money. Everything else does not really matter.
Everyone and every organization has responsibilities to the community. They are parasites if they leave the community, on which they depend 100%, to others. Business depends 100% on a system of laws, freedom, peace, social goods (e.g., education for their workers and customers - who is going to read? - healthcare for them), infrastructure, security, order, prosperity, ......... Try operating a business without those things.
One could argue, successfully I think, that Amazon's business is 99% utilizing community resources and they add only a small bit of their own.
Or better, face the fact that Amazon responds to power, not to you. People who post just to call other people's opinions cynical, without adding anything of substance, could be replaced with AI with no loss. You don't know anything about people's dreams.
It does and will. Amazon has to respect laws and not alienate customers, and also has goodwill toward their community - even if it's trendy to talk like sociopaths.
> Inventing a 2400 year history of discussion of "private cooperative endeavors" that change "countless times," however, is not inspirational.
I don't know about the length of time, but the discussion has gone on for generations.
Your current position is tied to a 1980s theory, new at the time (and maybe from Milton Friedman?), that the only role of corporations is serving its shareholders. Somehow, people have accepted this one theory as an eternal truth. But clearly that doesn't happen; it's a matter of degree: Corporations pay taxes, fund workers compensation, etc.
More recently DEI and ESG have been widely embraced, one side of the argument, and currently the tide in the US is to reject them. The tide will change again.
In other countries, the degree of oblgation to other stakeholders is much greater. German companies are required (?) to have labor representatives on the board of directors, for example. Japanese companies traditionally have a very strong commitment to career employees.
I think we are all a fool as well to simply accept that the made up institution of "business" has to be about maximizing shareholder value, like anything, this is all a political game, and it is what we agree to make it.