Ocasio-Cortez dunks on Republicans after Amazon caves and builds office in NYC anyway
After nearly a year since they pulled out of their plans to build their second headquarters in New York City, Amazon has come slinking back — and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is taking a victory lap.
In February, Amazon grew huffy and canceled its plans to build a 500,000 square foot campus in Queens after the local community and activists protested the nearly $3 billion in subsidies that the city had offered the multibillion-dollar megacorporation.
Ocasio-Cortez was a vocal critic of the plan and quickly became a symbol of the fight against Amazon thanks to the obsessive coverage by bootlicking conservatives and the insufferable tut-tutting of monocled finance media.
Now the company has come crawling back, announcing plans to build a 335,000-square-foot office at Hudson Yards and create several thousand new jobs — and AOC is having a field day.
Won’t you look at that: Amazon is coming to NYC anyway – *without* requiring the public to finance shady deals, helipad handouts for Jeff Bezos, & corporate giveaways.
Maybe the Trump admin should focus more on cutting public assistance to billionaires instead of poor families. https://t.co/BbqhXbB9MM
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 6, 2019
Me waiting on the haters to apologize after we were proven right on Amazon and saved the public billions https://t.co/AC64pG0nZI pic.twitter.com/xzCepkX4AV
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 6, 2019
Critics will still maintain that the jobs created will be less than the Amazon HQ2 would have built, but now residents in Queens don’t have to worry about their rents skyrocketing to adjust to a sudden influx of Amazon bucks and the city now will have an additional $3 billion to spend on something else — perhaps by creating jobs to fix the subway?
Watching a multibillion company like Amazon force the cities of America to debase themselves and dance for their amusement in a bid for desperately needed economic investment was absolutely disgusting to see. It is fundamentally immoral and wrong for large companies, especially ones like Amazon who pay no federal income tax, to hold the creation of jobs hostage in exchange for even more public funds that they do not need or deserve.
For far too long have the politicians of both parties put the interests of capital over the needs of the American people, and that’s why this election we need to elect a strong progressive to take on corporate power and start prioritizing the needs of the many over the selfish ambitions of the few.
