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Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

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If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

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The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

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To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

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64Comments

  3. 3.

    TomatoQueen

    Jeff figures with the hornswoggle he’s done in Northern Virginia, particularly with the City of Alexandria and to a lesser extent the People’s Republic of Arlington, he don’t need no steenkin’ sweet deals from NYC.

  4. 4.

    Major Major Major Major

    Amazon pulled out of building a big 4-million square foot HQ2 in Long Island City. This is a lease of existing construction (itself financed with the same tax breaks), and about 8% the size. But you can call them doing something completely different from their original proposal ‘caving’ if you want to.

  5. 5.

    Roger Moore

    This kind of thing is one more reason we shouldn’t fund local government from local revenues.  Instead, all those tax rates should be set and collected at the state level and then the money should be distributed equitably to all local governments.  It would prevent local governments from competing for businesses by dangling tax abatements, and it would guarantee that even poor areas could afford decent public services.

  13. 13.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Major Major Major Major:

    If nobody in the US gave them tax breaks, companies like Amazon would have no choice but to build their headquarters to the same specification and not simply rely on other municipalities that did cave

  17. 17.

    Roger Moore

    @TomatoQueen:

    I’ll admit I’m thinking more about smaller businesses that play off several neighboring communities against each other rather than national competitions like Amazon’s.  There’s no real benefit to the area, much less the state, if Big Business locates its local distribution center in City A instead of City B, but they can get a tax break because it may be a major difference for the cities involved.

  19. 19.

    Searcher

    @Major Major Major Major: They’re two different things, but I’m mostly curious for the long-term development.  Will this just be a tiny satellite office off of the new HQ2, or will it cannibalize the HQ2 before it is even built?  Will they make people move from NYC to DC when HQ2 is finished?

     

    If HQ2 had been situated in, say, Shitsburg, USA because they had given the best tax breaks, I could see the NYC office quietly growing to rival it, because NYC, but the DC metro area is nothing to sniff at.

  20. 20.

    hells littlest angel

    She’ll be laughing out of the other side of her face when Amazon customers get hit with price hikes up to one-eighth of a cent per item.

  24. 24.

    debbie

    I will leave this here for Sab, Ohio Mom, and others consigned to the Buckeye State: Rob Portman grew a pair and spoke somewhat forcefully:

    Many U.S. House Republicans have been claiming that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They’ve made these claims despite being debunked by the American intelligence community. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) has been pushing for U.S. aid for Ukraine since 2014 and said he isn’t convinced that Ukraine was involved.

    “I believe that Russia meddled in a significant way in the election, and we shouldn’t let them off the hook. In other words, that’s where the big problem was.”

    Portman is co-chair of the Senate Ukraine Caucus and has worked with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to help Ukraine separate itself from Russia. He believes Ukraine is serious about embracing democracy and would not have interfered with the election.

    You can listen to the forcefulness at the link.

  26. 26.

    Dan B

    Hello from HQ1.  Amazon was here fir the cool culture and the lack of an income tax.  Lower income folks and artists/creatives are leaving.  Anazonians don’t seem to have a charitable mindset, at least not yet.  The infrastucture expenses just for the electricity for the 50 or so new buildings is large.  Growing too fast is a challenge for any community but especially so since we are a narrow isthmus.  Good luck Arlington and NYC.

  29. 29.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Chacal Charles Calthrop: they’re literally more than an order of magnitude different. This is just some office space they’re leasing across the street from their current nyc office. It will employ an order of magnitude fewer people, provide no new office space or infrastructure, and be in a rich part of a richer borough.

  34. 34.

    Jay

    More from the Warren archives. The financial crash of 2008 was the most destabilizing event in my life. Only *one* Presidential candidate can say that she saw the crash coming, she saw the reasons why, and she did all she could to stop it.Elizabeth Warren in 2004: pic.twitter.com/zQbQSHK04D— mark “understand this” paaa (@markpaaa) December 6, 2019

  39. 39.

    glory b

    @Major Major Major Major: I read that its 1500 employees in a leased office in Manhattan vs. 25,000 to 40,000 in Queens.

    So yep, more than a bit different. I also understand that a number if Queens residents didn’t see this as a working class victory.

  41. 41.

    Baud

    @glory b:

     

    AOC may have been right to oppose the original plan.  That’s a valid call.  This just seem like any kind of “cave.”

  42. 42.

    Mandalay

    @Baud:

     

    That’s great but is it the same investment? The tweet doesn’t say.

    Uhh…not really, no. Not even close, TBF:: Amazon leases Hudson Yards office space less than year after HQ2 debacle 

     

    So if you were one of the many meanies here who was dumping on AOC originally, you can roll your eyes a bit at this. And if you were part of the Communist filth here, who were defending AOC (like me), you can smirk a bit.

     

    It’s that rare beast: a win-win.

  44. 44.

    Jay

    @Baud:

     

    pretty sure Marianne was loaded a lot of the time,

     

    had she stuck around longer, could have been a cabinet position with her name on it,……

     

    or another campaign run,….

  46. 46.

    PJ

    @Major Major Major Major: NYC doesn’t need more office space right now:  (from an article on WeWork’s collapse): citylab.com/life/2019/10/wework-manhattan-real-estate-coworking-office-space-rental/599338/

    As it stands, commercial vacancy rates are high (and rising) in New York, even after a strong surge in new commercial leases this year.

    Furthermore, the Amazon deal for LIC included nothing about new housing, and, if it had gone through, it would have made the most expensive part of Queens even more expensive: mns.com/queens_rental_market_report

    Long Island City had been a hotbed of development long before Amazon looked its way, and losing Amazon’s “HQ” only means that commercial and residential rents in LIC won’t skyrocket that much more in the short term.  https://ny.curbed.com/2019/11/15/20965527/amazon-hq2-long-island-city-queens-nyc-real-

    estate

     

    Amazon was always going to expand in NYC (and their Hudson Yards offices are not the end of that expansion), it was just a question of how much in tax breaks they could squeeze out of the city and state.

  47. 47.

    PJ

    @glory b: There was nothing in the Amazon deal that required hiring locals, and Amazon was opposed in part because they are very much anti-union.

  52. 52.

    Jay

    @glory b:

     

    might have been a Qualcomm or Super Sonics after all,….

     

    while the taxpayer “gifts” are “guaranteed”, the Corporate “promises” are not. There’s 170 acres of prime Office Industrial not far from here that’s sat vacant for over a decade, with 3 abandoned ( not when the land deal went through) warehouse/office buildings. It was quite the deal for Dow Corning, and they will make a bundle when they sell it off in parcels, when the taxpayer subsidies and tax breaks expire.

     

    the City was supposed to get a multi hundred million dollar investment, 3,000-5,000 jobs and a new tax base. Instead, they lost a couple hundred K in taxes, 200 jobs, and massively subsidized a Fortune 100’s foray into real estate speculation.

  53. 53.

    ola azul

    @Baud:

     

    Williamson 2020: Go motherfuckin crazy!

     

    ———–

     

    Dearly beloved
    We are gathered here today
    To get through this thing called “life”
    Electric word, life
    It means forever and that’s a mighty long time
    But I’m here to tell you there’s something else
    The afterworld
    A world of never ending happiness
    You can always see the sun, day or night
    So when you call up that shrink in Beverly Hills
    You know the one, Dr. Everything’ll-Be-Alright
    Instead of asking him how much of your time is left
    Ask him how much of your mind, baby
    Cause in this life
    Things are much harder than in the after world
    In this life
    You’re on your own
    And if de-elevator tries to bring you down
    Go crazy

  54. 54.

    "Low Information Voter" Ken

    So much for all you losers who were criticizing Mayor Bloomberg’s run for president.  He got this deal for NYC, and he’ll bring the same kind of success to Washington.

  55. 55.

    PJ

    @Mandalay: The 25,000 jobs Amazon promised to supply in the LIC deal was over a 10 year period (for which they would receive $2.8B in subsidies).  Those 25K jobs were not going to arrive all at once, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon’s total office workforce in NYC is at or above that number in NYC ten years from now.

  56. 56.

    mistermix loves your ass

    @PJ: This. The promises made by the companies looking for these tax breaks are some giant multiple of what will actually happen.  Also AOC is right to take a victory lap considering all the shit she took on this in the Spring.

  57. 57.

    dww44

    @Roger Moore: Valid points.  But also true that if one’s legislature is totally controlled by the other side, majority to minority cities not only get the short shrift, in this state they get way more supervision from the capital than is deserved.

  58. 58.

    Bill Arnold

    @Baud:

    That’s great but is it the same investment? The tweet doesn’t say.

    Try bypass_paywalls_firefox (change underscores to dashes) on github. Not giving a direct link to give less for automation looking for it to find.

    ETA be sparing about using it. Not least, it’s easy to embed links that others can’t access by accident.

  59. 59.

    EthylEster

    @zhena gogolia: I find it hard to believe that the average salary was going to be $150K. That will probably be true for this scaled down effort but lots of the jobs in the original plan had to be in the warehouses.

  60. 60.

    PJ

    @EthylEster: The local Amazon warehouse is in Staten Island. I don’t know in what detail it was specified in the agreement with NYC and NYS (prob not much) but LIC was talked about as being coding/management positions, but probably there would be a lot of lower level staffers, HR, etc.

  61. 61.

    ET

    Wonder how the pols in Virginia read this. Amazon was always going to northern Virginia and they basically gave away the keys to the store.

  62. 62.

    Tyro

    The 25,000 jobs already included the 5,000 Amazon jobs that were already in NYC. Over 10 years I expect to see a steady increase in Amazon’s footprint simply because they have to compete for talent with Google and the Fintech developers.

    remember that with every large company moving in there is an opportunity cost. Those developers are not working for another company. That office space is not being used by others. HQ2 would have displaced construction and development that would have been built  for other purposes without a tax incentive.

  64. 64.

    MomSense

    @Major Major Major Major:

     

    I was just catching up with the threads and was going to say that Hudson Yards got a 6 billion tax break.  How the hell is Amazon getting subsidized rent a progressive win.  Holy hell we need progressives to stop falling for gimmicks.

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