Hi folks,
Well, this is corporate welfare gone hog wild. Heck, it's almost like we kneel
down to these bastards of wealth. I think maybe it was Reagan who began to make
the wealthy have such an entitled feeling that they thought they deserved big
tax breaks when they move into a community. Has it always been that the big
guys get a tax break when opening a new facility. For example, when companies
like Ford and gM began opening large factories, did they get the kinds of tax
breaks that seem all too common today?
I don't think Adam Smith would like any of this mess.
Bob Hachey
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2018 11:32 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Amazon's Billion-Dollar Shakedown of America's
Cities
It's the old shell game, folks. Around and around she goes and where she lands
nobody knows.
And the best one of all, There's a sucker born every minute.
Talk about "Free Enterprise"!
And Amazon is sitting on top of a huge tangle of threads controlling thousands
of businesses and millions of American's jobs.
On 11/14/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Amazon's Billion-Dollar Shakedown of America's Cities
Employees at Amazon's headquarters in Seattle. (Elaine Thompson / AP)
If one required reminding of the Democratic Party's complete
capitulation to corporate interests, to say nothing of the country's
as a whole, he or she need only have listened to New York City Mayor
Bill de Blasio's address on Tuesday. "One of the biggest companies on
earth next to the biggest public housing development in the United
States," he told reporters during a joint press conference with Gov.
Andrew Cuomo. "The synergy is going to be extraordinary."
The company in question is Amazon, which confirmed earlier that
morning that Long Island City, Queens, will become the site of its
second headquarters (a third headquarters will be located in northern
Virginia). The announcement ends a 13-month pageant that saw 238
cities and their elected officials prostrate themselves to CEO Jeff
Bezos, only for the multibillionaire to move his company into two of
the wealthiest metropolises in the country (New York and Washington,
D.C.) and likely displace countless working people.
And
for this privilege, the state of New York will reward Amazon with more
than
$1.5 billion in incentives, while the city provides property-tax
abatements for the next 25 years-this as it faces public
transportation and affordable-housing crises. Amazon, meanwhile,
stands to save upward of $1 billion over the next decade.
As Derek Thompson argues in The Atlantic, moves like these are not
merely outrageous. They should be outlawed.
"Every year, American cities and states spend up to $90 billion in tax
breaks and cash grants to urge companies to move among states," he writes.
"That's more than the federal government spends on housing, education,
or infrastructure. And since cities and states can't print money or
run steep deficits, these deals take scarce resources from everything
local governments would otherwise pay for, such as schools, roads,
police, and prisons."
Maddeningly, this corporate welfare seldom results in the kind of
economic stimulus promised. Thompson points to the $3 billion in subsidies
that Gov.
Scott Walker used to attract Foxconn to Wisconsin-an investment that
was supposed to generate 13,000 manufacturing jobs in Racine. Instead,
the Taiwanese multinational has hired a fraction of that number,
automating most of its assembly work. Thompson continues: "Even when
the incentives aren't redundant, and even when companies do hold up
their end of the bargain, it's still ludicrous for Americans to
collectively pay tens of billions of dollars for huge corporations to
relocate within the United States."
So what is the solution? If these corporate behemoths are loyal only
to their shareholders, what is to prevent this same travesty from
repeating itself in cities across the country? For Splinter's Hamilton
Nolan, the answer is simple: federal regulation.
"The only way for public-you and me and every other taxpayer and city
and state government who all have much more pressing things to spend
money on than bribes to Fortune 500 companies-to win this game is not
to play," he writes. "Nobody can play. The way to accomplish this is
simple: We need a federal law banning these sorts of subsidies.
Without a federal law, there will always be an incentive for one
desperate city or state to start the bidding wars. By banning this
insulting robbery of the public till outright, business will continue
building, and investing, and locating, and relocating. They do all
those things in order to make more money. Companies create jobs
because they need work done in order to make money. They are not
charitable activities. They do not need a bribe. They are playing on
the desperation of desperate places in order to rip us all off. That
should not be legal."
Jacob Sugarman
Jacob Sugarman is the acting managing editor at Truthdig. He is a
graduate of the Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism whose writing
has appeared in Salon, AlterNet and Tablet, among other.
Jacob Sugarman
