Liberal foes chase Amazon out of New York
What happened
Amazon chief Jeff Bezos scuttled plans for a second headquarters in New York City last week following a torrent of opposition from community groups, politicians, and labor leaders. Resistance to the 4 million–square-foot HQ2 campus in Queens was fierce: State and federal lawmakers said one of the richest companies in the world didn’t need the $3 billion raft of tax breaks assembled by New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo. Community groups howled over the potential for spiraling housing costs in the surrounding neighborhood. Labor leaders objected to Amazon’s aggressive opposition to unions. Still, the e-commerce giant’s decision left some HQ2 supporters stunned. “There wasn’t a shred of dialogue,” said New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. “Out of nowhere they just took their ball and went home.”
Amazon’s exit exposed a growing rift in the Democratic Party between pro-business centrists and a newly animated progressive wing of the party, many of whom adopted the rallying cry “Stay the helipad out,” in a reference to the campus’ planned helipad. The New York campus, planned for a neighborhood called Long Island City, was one of two—the other is in Arlington, Va.—that Seattle-based Amazon announced in November after a pageant-like search for a host city. As conceived, it would have brought 25,000 jobs paying an average annual salary of $150,000, as well as $27.5 billion in state and city taxes over 25 years. Still, Amazon’s foes were not shy about proclaiming victory. “I hope this is the start of a conversation about vulture capitalism and where our tax dollars are best spent,” said City Council Speaker Corey Johnson. A coalition of community groups called Amazon’s retreat a victory “for a city that works for us and not for billionaires like Bezos.”
What the editorials said
“The job killers won,” said the New York Daily News. They looked at the “caterers, construction workers, electricians, cleaners,” and others who stood to benefit and told them, “Suck it up.” Why? “Because Amazon is a huge corporation.” Because the 2,500 workers at its Staten Island fulfillment center are looking to unionize—and the company wouldn’t promise neutrality. Indeed, those who railed against Amazon’s $3 billion subsidy package miss the point, said The Buffalo News. New York must pay more to compensate businesses for the costs of operating in one of the most “business-unfriendly” climates in the nation, where “taxes are infamously high.” Once, New York could have gotten away with just being New York. But “those days are gone.”
Amazon called “the socialists’ bluff,” said The Washington Examiner—and now everyone wins. U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) gets “to crow” about keeping neighborhoods poor. New Yorkers don’t have to give Jeff Bezos tax breaks to put an office in their state. And Amazon? Maybe it’ll learn that instead of “seeking special handouts” from communities, it should seek out “low-tax states with right-to-work protections and a friendly-but-fair business climate for everyone.”
What the columnists said
“New York’s rage” over Amazon’s $3 billion tax-break package might suggest the era of such “billion-dollar boondoggles” is ending, said Bryce Covert in The New York Times. And not a moment too soon. There’s no reason “in an age of rising rents and stagnating wages” to give corporations such deals—especially since we have “reams of evidence” showing these subsidies don’t pay off.
The Amazon fiasco exposed the gap between the Democratic Party’s pragmatists and “the far, far left,” said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post. Now the Democratic establishment, which eagerly embraces “crony capitalism,” is fighting progressives like Ocasio-Cortez who “tend to see capitalism in any form as evil.” Though perhaps when it comes to Amazon, Ocasio-Cortez is right, said Jibran Khan in NationalReview.com. New York dodged a bullet. Corporate welfare is always justified with “unbelievably high projections” for jobs and future tax income. Those “rarely materialize,” and yet these deals keep happening, as all the taxpayer-funded stadiums “for billionaire team owners make clear.”
If you want to understand what’s driving the activists who fought Amazon’s HQ2, look at San Francisco, said Alexis Madrigal in TheAtlantic.com. There, longtime residents no longer recognize their city. It’s become a metaphor for “how tech money can transform even one of the most charming and irascible cities into a place where no teachers can afford to live” and even young, rich people are “terrified of losing their apartments.” ■
