February 15, 2019
It was a funny Valentine. Yesterday Amazon announced that it wouldn’t be shipping its proposed HQ2 to LIC after all. Evidently, the tax-avoiding online retail behemoth was turned off by the growing resistance to a nearly $3 billion incentive they had extracted from City and State officials.
“You have to be tough to make it in New York City. We gave Amazon the opportunity to be a good neighbor and do business in the greatest city in the world. Instead of working with the community, Amazon threw away that opportunity.” ~NYC Mayor de Blasio
“Frankly, if we were willing to give away $3 billion dollars for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district, ourselves, if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers. We can fix our subways. We can put a lot of people to work for that amount of money if we wanted to.” ~U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
