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Originally Posted by Crawford
Nothing in this post is accurate. Entirely fabricated nonsense.
The reality is that AOC, who is extremely influential in local politics, torpedoed 40k new high-paying jobs because she's trying to make a name for herself nationally. And she succeeded, brilliantly. The reality is that NYC is poorer for her efforts. Anyone who calls themselves progressive should be upset at her demagoguery. It's probably the worst economic development news in modern NYC history, and at the same time we have an openly hostile President and Congress, who would like nothing better than to sink urban America.
The vast majority of New Yorkers, including liberal New Yorkers, supported this economic development, but stupid Trumpian populist tripe like "billionaires will be flying into Queens in helicopters while the poor sleep in the streets" muddied the waters enough that Bezos got cold feet, not wanting to deal with the political cluster---k around a wildly influential populist.
It may be that NY gets the jobs anyways. Maybe. But we don't know. What we know is that they won't be coming to Queens, where, in conjunction with Cornell Tech, there would have been a powerful new innovation ecosystem.
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I think the left and the right are making entirely too much out of a freshmen member of Congress that has not held local office in her lifetime. To be completely honest, I like some of the stuff Ocasio-Cortez has to say. I also abhor the treatment of her as some sort of rock star. What signature legislation has she passed? Besides the Bernie endorsement and twitter clapbacks, I haven't seen her actually accomplish anything. That's hard to do in a divided Congress, so it's not meant as a dig at her. My point is that we are giving her too much credit.
But she did have a point. You make it seem like she torpedoes the Amazon deal out of spite. There were real costs associated with that deal, costs the city and state had to bear. Corporate welfare is a serious issue and I, for one, am glad to hear a voice speak out against it. The right has a legitimate concern about the government picking winners. This was a case of governments showing favoritism towards Amazon. The whole HQ2 show was a spectacle in corporate greed. Google didn't need huge incentives to expand in NY or elsewhere. Why should Amazon? And as it turns out, most of the land they were going to redevelop will be redeveloped anyway. So did New York really lose all that much? Consider the costs, not just the other side of the ledger.