Harnessing near-free resources - from roads to labor - Amazon is leveraging competition between territories to secure financial aid and tax exemptions to support its sales teams, hungry for deliverable goods. Cataloging, customer interfaces, data storage, warehouses, logistics - the company is widening the gap between the knowledge economy neighborhoods where it sets up its cloud and the post-industrial wastelands where an unskilled population serves its warehouses. Recently established in Washington, D.C., and a key player in the American social divide, Amazon is not helping to narrow it.