Why Amazon Wants a Piece of Our Political and Financial Capitals
Maryland GovPics / CC BY 2.0
Amazon made its long-awaited announcement this week, revealing where it will
site its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. The selection process pitted over
200 cities against each other, vying for the prospect of hosting the new
corporate campus with its promised 50,000 well-paying, white-collar jobs.
Politicians prostrated themselves before the online behemoth and its
CEO/founder, Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, as they competed to lavish
the company with as many enticing public subsidies and tax breaks as
possible. The winning city would flourish, they hoped, with increasing tax
revenues and the emergence of a vibrant tech hub to rival Silicon Valley. In
the end, Amazon announced that HQ2 would be divided into two smaller
locations, one in Queens, New York, and the other in Crystal City, Virginia.
While the details of the publicly financed subsidies remain shrouded, what
is known so far is enough to confirm the worst fears of Amazon's many
critics: The HQ2 auction was, at best, a boondoggle, yet another example of
corporate welfare, transferring wealth from working-class taxpayers to a
massive corporation and its billionaire owner.
"I am absolutely outraged that New York, under Governor Cuomo, is willing to
give away up to $3 billion of taxpayers' money without any consultation,"
progressive Democratic New York state Assembly Member Ron Kim said on the
"Democracy Now!" news hour, the day after Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill
de Blasio released details of New York City's winning bid for the
scaled-down HQ2. "I'm introducing legislation to claw back this deal," he
continued. "What's the point of having a majority progressive Democrat state
Senate, that we worked so hard for in the state of New York, if we can't
stop one man from transferring $3 billion of taxpayers' money to the richest
man on this planet?" Kim was referring to last week's Democratic Party
takeover of the New York state Senate for only the third time in the past
half-century. Along with the Democrat-controlled Assembly in which he
serves, Kim is optimistic that the generous subsidies can be rescinded.
Time magazine calculated that it takes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos only nine
seconds to earn $28,000, what the median Amazon worker earns in a year. Greg
LeRoy of Good Jobs First has long watchdogged what he calls "persistent
megadeals" like New York and Virginia's courting of HQ2. "It's another
example of Amazon getting paid to do what it would have done anyway," he
said on "Democracy Now!" "It wanted to be in the financial capital of the
world and the political capital of the country, so no surprises about its
location. We're massively subsidizing, yet again, a company to do what it
wants to do anyway."
In response to de Blasio's claim that HQ2 will provide opportunities "for
tens of thousands of New Yorkers, everyday New Yorkers, kids who come up
through our public schools, kids who go to our community colleges and our
four-year colleges," LeRoy says that "four out of five, typically, of the
new job takers at a project like this will not be current residents of New
York or Arlington [Virginia]. They will be people moving to the area from
outside. That means a lot of growth getting induced, a lot of schools having
to be expanded and infrastructure built and public services provided." All
these paid for by the taxpayers, not by Amazon.
LeRoy also notes that Amazon "is the biggest cloud computing company in the
world. It has roughly a 40 percent market share. And among its most
lucrative clients in that space are the Pentagon and the Central
Intelligence Agency and other federal agencies." That's why the other HQ2 is
planned for Crystal City, Virginia - as LeRoy says, "very close - literally,
practically a stone's throw from - the Pentagon."
"Amazon Doesn't Just Want to Dominate the Market - It Wants to Become the
Market," read a headline for a Nation article written by Stacy Mitchell of
the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. "It's now capturing one out of every
two dollars that Americans spend online," she said on "Democracy Now!"
Additionally, it kills small businesses. "We're losing about two retail jobs
for every one job created in an Amazon warehouse," she said. The central
threat, she added, is that "Amazon is about controlling the essential
infrastructure that other companies need to use in order to reach the market
. if you're any company producing or retailing anything, increasingly, if
you want to be able to reach consumers, you have to become a seller on
Amazon's platform. And what that means is that Amazon now controls your
business."
Jeff Bezos originally called his company "Cadabra," as in "abracadabra,"
but, legend has it, his lawyer told him it sounded too much like "cadaver."
Will Amazon's HQ2 spark a magical, high-tech age in Queens, or will it kill
small businesses, drive up rents and leave the cadaver of a working-class
neighborhood in its wake?
Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
Truthdig
Amy Goodman
