Wednesday, November 14, 2018

MASSIVE WELFARE HANDOUT TO MODERN SLAVER JEFF BEZOS OF AMAZON - TALK ABOUT SOCIALISM!


‘Costs Us Nothing’: New York Gov. Cuomo Downplays $1.5 Billion Payout to Amazon



Andrew Cuomo
The Associated Press
1:48

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo downplayed the $1.5 billion in tax credits and $1.2 billion in tax breaks given to Amazon in return for the company basing its new headquarters in New York City, claiming it, “Cost us nothing.”

“This is a big money-maker for us — costs us nothing, nada, niente,” claimed Cuomo during a press conference. “We make money doing this.”
Despite attempting to downplay the deal, Amazon is reportedly receiving “$2.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies,” including “$1.525 billion in tax credits and construction grants,” and “$1.28 billion in tax breaks.”
Amazon chose to split its new headquarters between New York City and Arlington, Virginia, this week, after receiving hundreds of offers and incentives from cities and counties in North America which sought to entice Amazon into building its new headquarters in the area.
The decision has been criticized by figures across the political spectrum, from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.


We’ve been getting calls and outreach from Queens residents all day about this.

The community’s response? Outrage.
Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.

10.7K people are talking about this

“Hate to admit it, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a very good point,” declared Carlson. “That’s the only time I’ve ever agreed with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez… But it’s hard to argue with the internal logic. The richest man in the world just got $2 billion in taxpayer subsidies. How does that work?”
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington, or like his page at Facebook.


Amazon announces new headquarters in metropolitan New York City and Washington D.C.

On Tuesday, the technology giant Amazon confirmed that it would split its new headquarters, or HQ2, between two cities and announced plans to build an operations center in Nashville. HQ2 will officially be set up in the Long Island City neighborhood of New York City and in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia. Amazon claims it will create 25,000 jobs, and invest $2.5 billion, in each location.
Arlington and New York City have both offered the $1 trillion corporation hefty incentives for choosing sites in their two districts.
New York offered Amazon a staggering $1.525 billion package. According to Business Insider, the majority of the sum ($1.2 billion) comes from New York’s Excelsior Jobs Program. The city calculated the incentive based on the salaries Amazon expects to pay its employees over the next 10 years. Amazon estimates the average wage will exceed $150,000, meaning New York will offer $48,000 in subsidies for each employee.
New York is also offering a $325 million grant to help cover construction costs of the 4 million to 8 million square foot headquarters. Amazon will also seek further subsidies and incentives, including from New York City's Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program (ICAP) and its Relocation and Employment Assistance Program (REAP).
Virginia’s package includes $573 million in performance-based direct incentives. Virginia is offering Amazon $22,000 for each employee hired in its location over the next 12 years, totaling $550 million. Arlington will grant an additional $23 million if Amazon can boost the city’s tax revenues on hotel rooms over the next 15 years.
Virginia’s Arlington County is offering Amazon a warm welcome by rebranding Crystal City, the urban area where Amazon’s new headquarters will be located, as “National Landing,” implying the corporation’s arrival represents great national significance.
It is no accident that Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, chose locations so close to Manhattan and Washington D.C, two major epicenters of American capitalism. The Virginia headquarters places Amazon literally across the street from the Pentagon, with which the corporation has developed major contracts, and in close proximity to the US government. The HQ in New York will give it ready access to Wall Street.
The culmination of Amazon’s year-long pageant is indicative of the immense power of giant transnational corporations and the oligarchs who head them. The process, in which Amazon toyed with local governments across the country, shows an ever increasing integration of corporations into the state apparatus and their control of both major capitalist parties.
Jeff Bezos already owns the Washington Post, one of the major publications that advance the agenda of the ruling class, and will now have a headquarters virtually a stone’s throw away from Congress. Amazon spent $13 million on lobbying in 2017, a 15 percent increase from the previous year, and doubled its number of lobbyists. The company increasingly exerts its influence over American politics.
Amazon is in the process of securing a multi-billion contract with the Department of Defense (DoD). The initiative, dubbed the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), would grant Amazon the task of constructing and overseeing a massive cloud computing service for the Pentagon.
Amazon will also be strategically located in a major hub of defense contractors. Arlington is home to some 1,070 contractors with almost $44 billion in DoD contracts distributed from 2000 to 2017.
In a disturbing display of power, greed and arrogance, Jeff Bezos dangled the prize of a new headquarters in front of cities and states across the US for 14 months, only to abandon the competition it sparked. Cities and states offered billions of dollars in subsidies, and even, in one case, resorted to creative measures such as building a town called Amazon with Bezos as its king.
One of the “winners” of this contest, New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, made the self-abasing statement that he would change his name to “Amazon Cuomo” if that was what it took to win the favor Bezos and Amazon.
From its inception, the contest was designed for Amazon to be the sole winner. The move garnered massive publicity, while Amazon persistently asked cities for more incentives until it got the best deal. The company will now reap billions in benefits at the expense of the working class.
By moving to New York and Virginia, Amazon will drive up housing prices, increasing homelessness and further burdening the already failing public transportation systems in the two cities. Seattle, where Amazon is based, has faced a homelessness and housing crisis as a result of Amazon’s rapid growth. Amazon shut down a tax on large businesses that would have allocated funds to support affordable housing by threatening to stop construction in Seattle.
Amazon is a parasitic corporation that profits from exploiting its employees under sweatshop conditions at an unfathomable pace, and paying poverty wages. The median salary for an Amazon worker was a paltry $28,446 in 2017.









PASCAL ROSSIGNOL / REUTERS




The Amazon HQ2 saga had all the hallmarks of the gaudiest reality TV. It was an absurd spectacle, concluding with a plot twist, which revealed a deep and dark truth about the modern world.
Fourteen months ago, Amazon announced a national beauty contest, in which North American cities could apply to win the honor of landing the retailer’s second headquarters. The prize: 50,000 employees and the glory of housing an international tech giant. The cost? Just several billion dollars in tax incentives and a potential face-lift to the host city. Then last week, in a classic late-episode shock, several news outlets reported that Amazon would split its second headquarters between Crystal City, a suburban neighborhood near Washington, D.C., and Long Island City, in Queens, New York.



The rumored announcement has emboldened Amazon’s army of critics. Did the world’s smartest company really need 13 months, and applications from 238 cities, to reach the striking conclusion that it should invest in New York and D.C.?  The former is America’s heart of capital, and the latter is America’s literal capital, where Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, already owns a house and a newspaper.






All good questions. But here’s the big one: Why the hell are U.S. cities spending tens of billions of dollars to steal jobs from one another in the first place?

Every year, American cities and states spend up to $90 billion in tax breaks and cash grants to urge companies to move among states. 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.
In the past 10 years, Boeing, Nike, Intel, Royal Dutch Shell, Tesla, Nissan, Ford, and General Motors have each received subsidy packages worth more than $1 billion to either move their corporate headquarters within the U.S. or, quite often, to keep their headquarters right where they are. New Jersey and Maryland reportedly offered $7 billion for HQ2, which would be the biggest corporate giveaway in American history.
You might think, Don’t blame the companies. These businesses have a fiduciary obligation to make money, and it’s negligent to leave cash piles on the table while their competitors are raking it in. And you might even think, Don’t blame the local governments. Not bidding on an exciting new project feels akin to unilateral disarmament in a war for talent and business. Sometimes a big new firm can revitalize a downtown area and become a magnet for new firms.
But there are three major problems with 
America’s system of corporate giveaways.
First, they’re redundant. One recent study by Nathan Jensen, then an economist at George Washington University, found that these incentives “have no discernible impact on firm expansion, measured by job creation.” Companies often decide where they want to go and then find ways to get their dream city, or hometown, to pay them to do what they were going to do anyway. For example, Amazon is a multinational company with large media and advertising divisions. The drama of the past 13 months probably wasn’t crucial to its (probable) decision to expand to New York City, the unambiguous capital of media and advertising.
Second, companies don’t always hold up their end of the deal. Consider the saga of Wisconsin and the Chinese manufacturing giant Foxconn. Several years ago, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker lured Foxconn with a subsidy plan totaling more than $3 billion. (For the same amount, you could give every household in Wisconsin about $1,700.) Foxconn said it would build a large manufacturing plant that would create about 13,000  jobs near Racine. Now it seems the company is building a much smaller factory with just one quarter of its initial promised investment, and much of the assembly work may be done by robots. Meanwhile, the expected value of Wisconsin’s subsidy has grown to more than $4 billion. Thus a state with declining wages for many public-school teachers could wind up paying more than $500,000 per net new Foxconn job—about 10 times the average salary of a Wisconsin teacher.






Third, 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.
No story illuminates this absurdity more than the so-called Border War, in which the Kansas and Missouri sides of Kansas City have spent zillions of dollars dragging companies back and forth across state lines, within the same metro area. Several years ago, Kansas lured AMC Entertainment with tens of millions of dollars in incentives. Then Missouri responded by stealing Applebee’s headquarters from Kansas with another incentive package. Back and forth they went, until both states had spent half a billion dollars creating no net new jobs but changing the commutes of 10,000 Kansas City workers who got caught up in an interstate duel.

“We need a national truce, both within states and between states,” said Amy Liu, the director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. “There should be no more poaching of private companies with public funds.” But how would the United States ban states and local governments from poaching jobs from one another, or from giving tax dollars to private corporations?
First, Congress could pass a national law 
banning this sort of corporate bribery. 

Mark Funkhouser, a former mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, envisions the law as the domestic version of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for Americans to bribe foreign officials.
It’s not entirely clear whether that would pass constitutional muster. The Supreme Court hasn’t ruled decisively on whether the Commerce Clause gives Washington the authority to ban interstate bidding wars. In the 2006 Supreme Court case DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno, Ohio taxpayers sued the state after it paid the automaker DaimlerChrysler about $280 million in tax exemptions and tax credits. The Sixth Circuit Court sided with the taxpayers, striking down Ohio’s subsidy as a violation of the Commerce Clause. But the Supreme Court avoided a final judgment on the matter by finding unanimously that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the suit.
Second, Congress could make corporate subsidies less valuable by threatening to tax state or local incentives as a special kind of income. “Congress should institute a federal tax of 100 percent” on corporate subsidies, Jack Markell, a former governor of Delaware, wrote in The New York Times. “This would not include investments in public infrastructure, work force development or other investments that can attract employers while also providing a significant long-term benefit to taxpayers.” Taxing subsidies would hopefully force cities to change their economic-development strategies, from importing other states’ companies to building their own—through investing in research universities, building more housing, and welcoming immigrants, since foreign-born Americans have the highest rates of entrepreneurship.






Finally, the federal government could actively discourage the culture of corporate subsidies by yelling, screaming, and penny-pinching. As Meagan Day wrote in Jacobin, “The federal government could withhold funds from governors and mayors who threaten to poach jobs from other states, or who won’t disclose their incentive packages.” Washington tends to look on quietly when cash-strapped states break the bank to welcome glitzy tech firms. But an attitude change at the top could trickle down to the local level. Donald Trump, or another president, could have made a national address after the HQ2 announcement slamming Amazon for soliciting taxpayer funds in a silent auction. He could have called a summit to encourage the nation’s mayors and governors to offer the same tax subsidy for HQ2—zero dollars and zero cents. Even a tweet could suffice: “7 BILLION FOR BEZOS?? Trillion-dollar companies in America don’t need our welfare! Bad!”
But no one is yelling and screaming. Instead, in a starkly divided country, corporate pandering is the last bastion of bipartisanship, an activity enjoyed by both Democrats and Republicans at every level of government. New Jersey and Maryland, both blue states, insisted that Amazon take $7 billion in tax savings just months after congressional Republicans passed a corporate income-tax cut that some analysts project will save Amazon nearly $1 billion over the next decade.
Corporate America is getting all the help it 
doesn’t need. You and I may not like it. But 
executives such as Jeff Bezos have no reason to 
care. They are winning by the rules of a broken 
game.




Clueless Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t understand Dem corporatist strategy, attacks Amazon HQ deal




It is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s glory and burden that she actually believes all the slogans that progressives mouth. She hasn’t yet realized that the Democratic Party coalition has a senior partner, of the ultra-wealthy corporate elite that provides campaign funding and institutional support, and a junior partner, the poor and minorities, the electoral cannon fodder who provide votes and (lately) mobs, and get freebies from the government in return. The junior partners get noisy public support (aka, “lip service”) from the Dem politicians, but the senior partners get the goodies – the regulations, subsidies, and tax breaks – mostly in private.
Like broken clock that is correct twice a day, Ocasio-Cortez has taken a stand against all the corporate welfare being lavished on Amazon to induce it to locate one-half of its much-hyped HQ2 – about 4 million square feet of office space to house 25,000 newly hired workers – in Long Island City, Queens, just across the East River from Manhattan.  The New York Post:
“We’ve been getting calls and outreach from Queens residents all day about this. The community’s response? Outrage,” Ocasio-Cortez, who officially takes office in January, tweeted.
The 29-year-old went on to say: “Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s gifts do not include facility with numbers. Calling Amazon a “billion dollar company” understates its market value a thousand-fold, raising the question of her ability to grasp the federal budget on which she will be voting next year. It is unclear if she grasps that the difference between a billion and a trillion is more than one letter.
She correctly suspects that Amazon will not be hiring a lot of low-skilled people for its office jobs, other than as janitors.
Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that when it comes to bringing an influx of jobs to the community, “we need to dig deep.”
“Has the company promised to hire in the existing community?” she questioned. “What’s the quality of jobs + how many are promised? Are these jobs low-wage or high wage? Are there benefits? Can people collectively bargain?”
She also has at least a rudimentary understanding that increased demand for housing by the newly-employed Amazon workers (Amazon claims they will earn an average of $150,000 a year) will push rents higher for her constutuents.
In another tweet, Ocasio-Cortez wrote: “Displacement is not community development. Investing in luxury condos is not the same thing as investing in people and families. Shuffling working class people out of a community does not improve their quality of life.”
Ocasio-Cortez added: “We need to focus on good healthcare, living wages, affordable rent. Corporations that offer none of those things should be met w/ skepticism.”
She continued: “Lastly, this isn’t just about one company or one headquarters. It’s about cost of living, corps paying their fair share, etc. It’s not about picking a fight, either. I was elected to advocate for our community’s interests – & they‘ve requested, clearly, to voice their concerns.”
While I encourage her to continue to speak out and investigate this deal, she will get nowhere. The deal already has been struck between the Democrats’ leadership and the tech oligarchs.  Bezos is signaling that the federal government is integral to his continuing takeover of information technology, retailing, distribution, and data mining. The Washington Post, Bezos’s personal property, is integral to the propaganda campaigns of the Democrats as the local paper of the political and bureaucratic elites.  Flattering or critical articles in the Post are a surprisingly effective inducement for actions desired by the Post’s owner.  Bezos selected Crystal City, just across the Potomac from DC, for the second half of his HQ2 in order to be able to swing a lot of wright on the local economy, and have a lot of employees on the voter rolls.   Bezos also purchased the biggest mansion in DC, signaling his corporatist orientation – overseeing the federal government as his partner.
Bezos demonstrated his prowess at bending government powers to his own benefit with his skillful playing off of local governments with each other in a rush to offer incentives for HQ2. Not only did he receive a variety of tax-relief measures in the huindreds of  millions of dollar each, he quietly reaped a treasure trove of data – for free. Daniel Kishi explains in The American Conservative:
“The big prize Amazon has gotten out of its HQ2 stunt,” tweeted Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self Reliance, “is not the PR value of a bunch of city leaders singing its praises, or even the billions of dollars in subsidies that it will extort from public coffers. It’s the data.”
Indeed, under the guise of a multi-billion dollar development contest, Amazon successfully convinced the mayors and governors of 238 North American cities and regions to voluntarily surrender a treasure trove of information ranging from future infrastructure projects to land use patterns and everything else in between—all without being charged a dime.
Armed with this detailed data, Amazon will not only have a competitive advantage over its rivals in retail and cloud computing, it will also have a serious upper hand at the negotiating table with state and local governments, as it will know precisely how much taxpayer money it will be able to extract from public funds. 
As with her demonstration outside Nancy Pelosi’s office, complete with bullhorns, Ocasio-Cortez is a wild card in the eyes of the inner circle of the ruling class. Watch for her committee assignments next year when the Dems take over the House. They may try to co-opt her with committees that she wants to be on. But, if the decision is made that she needs to be leaned on, she can expect posts on committees that have nothing to do with the needs of her urban constituents.
Image credit: Donkey Hotey

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