History supports your cynnicism, but I did hear Mayor DiBlasio
blather on MSNBC that this deal was diffthent: fewer give-aways
and more requirements. As a former New York City resident, I
hope he's right; I'm not optimistic.
Best, Peter
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Hachey" <bhachey@xxxxxxxxxxx
To: <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date sent: Wed, 14 Nov 2018 13:10:07 -0500
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Amazon's Billion-Dollar Shakedown
of America's Cities
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
