Amazon's HQ2 moving to Northern VA and NYC; 2/14: Amazon pulls out of NYC after public backlash!

[the cac mamba]

This is a prestige thing for the pols responsible for getting them here. The 25K jobs is negligible to all the jobs available in NYC. It would make up less than 1%. NYC will be fine without Amazon.

yeah no ones arguing that

i dont even give her that much credit tbh, i dont think they actually left because AOC tweeted things theres clearly more going on

 

[hashmander]

she forgot the golden rule

he who has the gold, makes the rules

i mean her point has been "i dont think they were paying enough taxes" given her vast experience with business and taxing corporations. OK....but they WERE paying taxes. now she has a legitimate argument about increasing traffic and how locals would be affected, that she has to sell as being worth telling a major amazon office to kick rocks

amazon isnt going anywhere. having an amazon HQ instantly turns you into an economic powerhouse

that kind of comment applies to a nashville or pittsburgh or some other place. NYC is THE economic powerhouse. they should have never prostrated themselves for amazon in the first place. this is what i posted back in november when the deal was announced.

NYC's presentation to amazon should have been: here is a swath of land you can buy. and we promise more investments in our people so that homegrown talent will always be nearby; we promise additional investments in our public transportation infrastructure so that all city residents can get to their destination in a timely fashion and we promise to continue our strong investments in public safety to keep our city one of the safest in america. your subsidy is access to a great city you already know you want to be in, so cut the bullshyt.

same for NOVA..

looks like some people in NYC finally remembered who they were.

 

[Perfectson]

Thank you.



That's called a rebuttal.



Amazon's $3B Deal: What It Means For NYC



This article seems to agree with you. But 25 years?

And this sounds like a slush fund



Contrasted in Google's expansion also in NYC

Google plans $1 billion expansion in Manhattan


Another take on Google's expansion

New Google Campus Accelerates Tech’s March Into New York

What's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander, every deal is different and comparing it to Google is a poor rebuttal . There is nothing sinister with this deal, it improves the economy for queens and this is just a misdirected attack on the rich. Typical socialist agenda but there's little no meat to it


I'm actually glad they pulled out, AOC just lost her punching bag, despite her claiming victory , this is a huge loss for her

 

[the cac mamba]

that kind of comment applies to a nashville or pittsburgh or some other place. NYC is THE economic powerhouse. they should have never prostrated themselves for amazon in the first place. this is what i posted back in november when the deal was announced.


looks like some people in NYC finally remembered who they were.

im sure AOC has another company lined up to bring in and tax, so she can pay for her agendas

 

[FAH1223]

 

[Spatial Paradox]

The more I think about this, the more I think the above was a large part of the reason they decided against building in NYC.

Amazon, along with the tech industry in general, has been catching a lot of heat in recent years about various aspects of their business and how they conduct themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if they felt having more negative press shined on their business practices for however many years until the campus opened wasn’t a part of the decision to not build the HQ here after all.

Personally, I also think this was as much about Amazon being pissed that NYC didn’t welcome them with unconditional love and open arms like they’re probably used to from other smaller locales.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[AnonymityX1000]

Great news.

 

[88m3]

AOC and Co are getting destroyed in the local papers today, I just stopped into a bodega

 

[Jhoon]

AOC and Co are getting destroyed in the local papers today, I just stopped into a bodega

The press are complicit

 

[Perfectson]

The press are complicit

no they aren't, they are reporting facts and are probably more educated than

random postings on reddit that don't understand taxes and subsidies.

 

[hashmander]

multiple people sharing an account is ridiculous.

 

[storyteller]

Well...shout out to the Ringer of all places on this topic.
Amazon Is Ditching New York City Because It Got Burned by Its Own HQ2 Game Show

The rules of the game seemed simple. Amazon was going to build a second headquarters, and any North American city could apply for consideration. Fill out a form, show that extra bit of passion or wit or desperation in your application, and your city could become home to the vaunted HQ2. The competition appealed to lofty American ideals about meritocracy and flattered cities that would not be logical fits for an $800 billion, profit-hungry megacorporation. Who doesn’t love an underdog story?

But Amazon was playing a game within a game. When the company announced in November that out of 238 applicants it had selected Crystal City, a Virginia suburb south of Washington, D.C., and Long Island City, a Queens neighborhood in New York, as the sites of its two HQ2s, it became clear that the underdogs had never stood a chance. They were merely points of leverage for a company that always intended to move to the seats of political and economic power in the U.S., but wanted billions of dollars in tax incentives as a reward for doing so. This was a manipulative gambit, to be sure, but we’d all gone along with it, and our deep-seated national belief that the people who win tend to deserve it required accepting the outcome.

With Thursday’s announcement that Amazon is abandoning plans to build an enormous office in New York, though, Amazon revealed a third level to this nesting doll of schemes. There is no game Amazon will play in which it will not unequivocally win. The rules merely exist for Amazon to choose the terms on which it will declare victory.

Consider how the last few months have played out. Amazon brokered its deal to bring HQ2-2 to New York with Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo. They did so without any input from the City Council, even though local officials typically weigh in on such deals. After the deal was announced, New Yorkers voiced plenty of concerns with a package negotiated in secret. The $2.8 billion in tax breaks dwarfed Virginia’s incentives package for the same number of jobs. At a City Council hearing in January, a company executive said Amazon did not intend to let workers in the new facility unionize. Housing prices surged in Long Island City after the HQ2 announcement, and more neighborhoods were expected to be affected as a wave of high-earning employees arrived in Queens and Brooklyn. People fretted that the infusion of new workers would stress a deteriorating subway system.

Amazon could have addressed these concerns in good faith. Successful large-scale development projects such as this require buy-in from the constituents who will be most directly affected. But from the company’s perspective, the game was finished the moment that Cuomo and de Blasio agreed to play nice and cough up a huge tax break. It was only by stoking the HQ2 frenzy for more than a year that Amazon brought unprecedented attention to the tactics that corporations commonly use to extract huge sums from cities. And by playing the game as cynically as possible, the tech giant made itself a political target. New Yorkers stormed Amazon’s Manhattan bookstore and the Long Island City construction site in protest. U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others on the left got in the requisite Twitter dunks. Most crucially, Michael Gianaris, a state senator and vocal critic of HQ2, was appointed to a state board that could have blocked the deal.

So Amazon changed the rules—again. Instead of resuming its search for a new home, Amazon now says that no one will get the second half of its second headquarters. It is unclear whether Amazon intends to locate all 50,000 workers it dangled in front of the country as part of its reality-show competition to HQ2-1 in Northern Virginia, or if the company’s new site in Nashville will take an expanded role. Amazon could also quietly expand its existing New York offices in the other boroughs, as it indicated in its press release. Ultimately, the speculation doesn’t matter, because the 50,000 figure was arbitrary, a nice round number for the purposes of the game.

Amazon blames meddling local lawmakers for scuttling the deal, but the company should own up to its agency in meeting legitimate local concerns with hardball. It’s a recurring Amazon tactic. In Seattle, the tech giant stopped construction on a new building last spring to protest a proposed per-employee tax to raise funding for affordable housing and homelessness. There, Amazon got its way when the tax was rescinded by the City Council just weeks after it was passed. The entire HQ2 framing—and the false insistence that it would be a “full equal” with the company’s true home—can be seen as a rebuke of critics who question whether Amazon’s influence has been positive in Seattle. This is a company that likes to punish those who aren’t grateful for its presence.

There are other ways for companies—even ravenous, fast-growing ones—to behave. Google is planning to develop a massive new campus in San Jose without taking any tax incentives. Microsoft just pledged $500 million to address the housing crisis in the Seattle metro area, a problem that it and Amazon helped create by generating more new jobs faster than the region could build homes. Salesforce waged a campaign to tax itself in San Francisco. These companies act not out of altruism, but out of political calculus: It’s in their best interest to maintain at least the illusion of meritocracy, to make people feel like they have a chance to survive even if they don’t work at one of the largest tech corporations in the world.

Amazon was surprised by the vehement pushback in New York because it doesn’t understand how quickly and widely this illusion is shattering. The company is not taking its coveted jobs to a city that really needs them because it isn’t motivated to work in the national interest by expanding economic opportunity. HQ2 fed off the notion that the United States remains a place of equal opportunity no matter where you hail from. But Amazon’s game was designed to work for Amazon, and no one else. The rules didn’t matter in the first place.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

AOC and Co are getting destroyed in the local papers today, I just stopped into a bodega

big money is gonna get her up out the paint.

 

[AnonymityX1000]

big money is gonna get her up out the paint.

She has people power.