Tag: Amazon (company)

Since Amazon’s pullout last week, Messrs. Van Bramer and Gianaris have been admonished by public-housing tenants who hoped to land jobs at the campus and supporters who saw the tech giant’s arrival as a boost for Long Island City. “I don’t know where you go from here,” he said. “Jimmy Van Bramer and Mike Gianaris used to be the politicians we came to when we needed help,” the statement said. Mr. Gianaris’s nomination to a state board with sway over the tax incentives also fueled Amazon’s decision. The company said Thursday that some politicians “made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project.” Mr. Van Bramer, a two-term councilman, said Tuesday that he knew opposing Amazon could hurt his political future. Mr. Van Bramer read the polls showing many Queens residents backed the deal. But he said he spoke with residents, many of whom had mixed feelings. He ultimately went with his conscience, he said. But after the Amazon deal ended, he said, “New York will be just fine.” Justin Potter, a 39-year-old Long Island City resident, said he created the website DefeatGianaris.com on Thursday, hours after Amazon’s announcement. While she was angry at Amazon for leaving, she put a lot of the blame on the elected officials opposing the deal, she said.

(Feb. 14) AP Politicians on the left and right continued sniping Sunday over who is to blame for Amazon’s shocking decision last week to scuttle plans to build a second headquarters in New York City. “If Joe Crowley was still a congressman, it wouldn’t have happened,” King said in an interview that aired Sunday on AM 970 in New York, according to The Hill. “It’s like putting a sign up that you can’t do business in New York,” King said. “I have no problem with fellow progressives criticizing a deal or wanting more from Amazon,” he said on the program. In addition to the jobs, the project was to generate $27 billion in tax revenue for the city and state. Amazon feared New York politicians might not sign off on some of the approvals needed for the project. On Friday, Ocasio-Cortez and Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of operations, feuded on Twitter. Citing a Newsweek article, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “is that culture of ‘strict performance’ why Amazon workers have to urinate in bottles & work while on food stamps to meet ‘targets?’ ‘Performance’ shouldn’t come at the cost of dehumanizing conditions. That’s why we got rid of sweatshops.” Clark responded on Twitter, “these claims simply aren’t true. We are proud of our jobs with excellent pay ($15 min), benefits from day 1 & lots of other benefits like our Career Choice prepaid educational programs.” He invited the congresswoman to take a tour, adding “we’d love to have you!”

Much of the immediate concern will be political: How will it embolden the city's growing progressive movement, and what will that movement's aims really be? How much is Gov. Andrew Cuomo's clout diminished? What should business interests do now? No one should overlook the longer- term implications. Clearly, the city's burgeoning tech sector will continue to become more important. With 7,500 companies, 150,000 good-paying jobs and $7 billion in venture capital invested last year, tech is emerging as the third leg of an economic stool that includes finance and tourism. Unfortunately, without Amazon, tech here won't be what it could have been. "But we probably won't see larger companies make a big bet on New York, and that will be a missed opportunity." "But," Pinsky said, "over the long term, it sends a horrible signal to the marketplace and certainly will make anyone who needs to go through public approvals think twice before entering into what is now clearly a toxic process."

He controls the Empire State Development Corporation, which circumvented local zoning laws and a democratic, locally-controlled land use review process to try to hand off land in Queens to Amazon. For two terms, Cuomo was the most dominant governor since a literal Rockefeller, spearheading whatever legislation he wanted, dreaming up and killing transit projects, and, most importantly for him, pulling every last economic development string. There is no doubt Cuomo gets his Amazon campus if the Republicans weren’t washed out of power last year. Of course, the power games won’t relent. Cuomo has tried to turn the suburban Democrats against their more liberal city counterparts, hoping this would somehow save the Amazon deal. After State Senator Todd Kaminsky, a Nassau County Democrat, suggested Amazon could come to Long Island still, a Cuomo spokesperson accused Kaminsky of having “cowered when he should have shown courage,” blasting him and his colleagues for catering to “local socialists” and kicking Amazon out of the state. If they can unite, he loses serious power over them. In Cuomo’s two terms, the legislature lacked leverage because it was divided. Democrats need to be ready to override Cuomo vetoes and meet him on his own level. For executives like Cuomo who so successfully instilled fear in others to drive an agenda, they can be particularly bewildering.

Criticism, from the likes of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and State Senator Michael Gianaris, has centered around the $3B in tax deferments and subsidies that Amazon would receive over a decade, dependent on the creation of thousands of new high-paying jobs in New York City. Amazon cites a 70% favorability amongst New Yorkers that want Amazon to enter the city in their statement announcing the pullout. What impact will this decision have on the workforce in NYC? The estimated taxes from the direct hires alone are well over a billion dollars, and this is before accounting for additional consumption, housing spend and local community growth from the newly created jobs. Indirect Job Creation: The impact of the immediate infusion of thousands of high-paying jobs in cities cannot be understated in how it affects local communities. Studies indicated that the indirect consequences are as high as 80,000 additional jobs that would have been created.These jobs would have boosted local consumption, increased tax coffers, and provided further employment opportunity in a historically struggling community that has seen rents decline by double digit percentages and has one of the largest housing projects with mean wages below the poverty line. Thousands of new technology-focused hires would have eventually led to hundreds of startups, creating a perpetual cycle of wealth generation and job creation and reinforcing NYC as a technology hub for the future. We made sure to stand our ground.” The article goes on to quote Democratic New York State Senator Julia Salazar in describing the pullout as a “turning point for the ability of working people in New York to organize for their interests against the billionaire class.” These quotes are telling as they paint local politicians and activists as more focused on “beating the billionaire” than serving their community. “So now what are you going to do?” The harsh reality for Mr. Robinson and other New Yorkers is that there is no back up plan. The rise of the pandering populist politicians, who seem to service a narrative more than the workforce, is a failure in governance and representative democracy.

SEATTLE (The Borowitz Report)—Stating that he expected the property to be “bankrupt and vacant within the next two years,” Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, announced on Thursday that the Mar-a-Lago club, in Palm Beach, Florida, would be the site of Amazon’s second headquarters. Bezos said that Mar-a-Lago was chosen from a list of soon-to-be-bankrupt properties, including the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, Trump Turnberry, and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Baku, Azerbaijan. The Amazon C.E.O. said that, after Amazon acquires Mar-a-Lago, the company will start working around the clock to remove the property’s hideous décor, which he fears could prove distracting to warehouse employees. At Mar-a-Lago, a longtime employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity, welcomed the Amazon move, stating, “This is one of the only places in the world where workplace conditions would improve if Amazon came in.” Another Mar-a-Lago employee, raising a question shared by many others, asked, “Does this mean we’ll start getting paid?” If the Mar-a-Lago deal goes through, it would mark the first appearance of books in that location, Amazon confirmed.

5 1: Can big tech stocks recover? Apple even breached the $1trn trillionmark, with Amazon close behind. Tech companies, in the eyes of many, are simply getting too big and powerful. In Ireland, tech firm’sfirms’ political importance came to the fore when some of the biggest internet firms took an unprecedented decision not to allow campaigning ads in the weeks preceding the country’s abortion referendum in May. 3: When Chinese tech firms ran into political trouble Huawei is now Ireland’s third-largest smartphone manufacturer and second in the world after Samsung. The reason, they say, is that Huawei has close links to Chinese authorities. Huawei comes in for particular atttention because it’s such a big player in communications network infrastructure. British Telecom will now move Huawei kit away from “core” network functions in rolling out 5G infrastructure, the Financial Times reported. The Chinese government was outraged by the detention, interpreting it as a direct assault on Chinese interests. This might dash hopes for connections to rural homes by the end of 2019, something that had been on the cards until the controversy around Mr Naughten’s meetings blew up at the tail end of 2018. disruption.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it a “regrettable accident,” Amazon apologized on Thursday for shipping ten thousand advance copies of James Comey’s book, “A Higher Loyalty,” to the White House. Cartons of the book arrived early Thursday morning and kept coming throughout the day, until stacks of the book clogged virtually every hallway and office in the building. Reportedly, Donald J. Trump was so incensed by the book situation that he screamed at Mike Pence while the Vice-President was in the middle of praising him, one source said. The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, called any speculation that Trump had ordered Comey’s book “absurd,” adding, “The President does not order reading material.” Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, said that he had “absolutely no idea” how the ten thousand Comey books made their way to the White House, but advised Trump to follow the procedures on the Amazon Web site for returning unwanted merchandise. “You can print up the return labels at home,” he said. “The books should be picked up and out of there in two weeks, three weeks, max.” Bezos said that shipping the ten thousand books back to the company’s warehouse would not be overly costly for Amazon. “We get an amazing deal on postage,” he said.

Today in 5 Lines President Trump continued his tirade against Amazon, tweeting that the company is costing taxpayers “many billions of dollars” through subsidized rates at the U.S. Post Office. During a meeting with the heads of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Trump claimed “nobody has been tougher on Russia” than he has, and said he planned to have the military guard the U.S.-Mexico border until a wall is built and security is tightened. Seventeen states and seven cities are suing the Census Bureau and Commerce Department in an attempt to remove a new citizenship question from the 2020 Census questionnaire. San Bruno Police Chief Ed Barberini said at least four people have been transferred to the hospital with gunshot-related injuries after a shooting at YouTube’s headquarters. The two candidates are Rebecca Dallet, a center-left former prosecutor and circuit court judge, and Michael Screnock, a lawyer and former conservative activist. The race has received national attention as another test of the nation’s mood heading into the midterms. If Dallet wins, it would change the ideological balance of the state’s Supreme Court to four conservatives and three liberals. : Special Counsel Robert Mueller has so far been silent about the hacking of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta—and that’s notable. : Fifty years after the Holy Week Uprising following King’s assassination, American cities remain segregated, and extreme poverty is rising. (David French, National Review) Did Fake News Actually Sway Voters to Vote Against Clinton?