Amazon HQ2B has chosen Long Island City, in Queens, New York City, for one of its two East Coast headquarters (the other will be somewhere in Virginia). The headquarters will be just across the East River from Midtown Manhattan, accessible by the Queensboro Bridge and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, in addition to various bus and subway lines. The company will bring 25,000 jobs to the City.
Newly-minted Socialist Communist-woman-to-be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is already up in arms because New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had to offer the mega-company a juicy $2 billion tax break in order to establish its headquarters in a city known for its onerous corporate taxes that have driven hundreds, maybe thousands, of businesses and workers to more business-friendly climes.
Some climate-change environmentalists are trying to discourage the company by pointing out that the location is in a flood plain. Yes, the headquarters will be on the East River, but the flood plain is actually further to the south, along the Atlantic shoreline. Now if these Amazon workers choose to live along Long Island’s southern Gold Coast, then they should check their maps. The building itself shouldn’t be in any grave danger of flooding.
Some pundits are boasting that Amazon has chosen New York for its “talent pool.” Talent? Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
Consider, for example, how she responded this week when she was asked on “The Daily Show” to explain how she intends to pay for her Democratic Socialism-friendly policies, including her Medicare for All agenda.
No less than the Washington Post’s Official Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, had to school Ocasio-Cortez.
“If people pay their fair share,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “if corporations paid — if we reverse the tax bill, raised our corporate tax rate to 28 percent … if we do those two things and also close some of those loopholes, that’s $2 trillion right there. That’s $2 trillion in ten years.”
“Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.”
.@Ocasio2018 on Nancy Pelosi: “I think absolutely right now..she is the leader of..no no, um, she is speaker..or rather leader Pelosi..hopefully we’ll see..she’s ah..she’s the current leader of the party and..the party absolutely does have its leadership in the House and Senate”
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“In an appearance on CNN on Aug. 8, when challenged on the costs of government-financed health care, she answered: ‘Why aren’t we incorporating the cost of all the funeral expenses of those who died because they can’t afford access to health care? That is part of the cost of our system.’”
“ICE is the only criminal investigative agency, the only enforcement agency in the United States, that has a bed quota. So ICE is required to fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night and that number has only been increasing since 2009.”
— in an interview with the Intercepted podcast, May 30
“As our friends at PolitiFact documented, this is an urban legend. There is language in the 2016 appropriations bill that requires ICE to have 34,000 beds available — ICE ‘shall maintain a level of not less than 34,000 detention beds through September 30, 2016’ — but it is not required to fill them. The main point of such language, a version of which dated to 2009, is to make sure the money is not spent on something else.”
“They [national Democrats] were campaigning most when we had more of an American middle class. This upper-middle class is probably more moderate but that upper-middle class does not exist anymore in America.”
—interview on “Pod Save America,” Aug. 7
“Here’s some more sweeping rhetoric. In knocking the current leaders of the Democrats, stuck in ‘ ’90s politics,’ Ocasio-Cortez said the ‘upper-middle class does not exist anymore.’”
“But the data show that while the middle class overall may have shrunk a bit, the upper-middle class has actually grown. In a 2016 paper published by the Urban Institute, Stephen J. Rose documented that the upper-middle class has grown substantially, from 12.9 percent of the population in 1979 to 29.4 percent in 2014. His analysis showed that there was a massive shift in the center of gravity of the economy, with an increasing share of income going to the upper-middle class and rich.
“In a Koch brothers-funded study — if any study’s going to try to be a little bit slanted, it would be one funded by the Koch brothers — it shows that Medicare for all is actually much more, is actually much cheaper than the current system that we pay right now.”
— interview on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time,” Aug. 8
“The reason that the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act is because they ruled that each of these monthly payments that everyday Americans make is a tax,” she announced.
“This appears to be an example of not understanding policy nuances. In the 5-4 opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., the Affordable Care Act was deemed to be an appropriate exercise of the government’s taxing power. But Roberts was not referring to the monthly premium payments, as Ocasio-Cortez claims. Instead, Roberts was referring to the individual mandate to buy insurance — and the requirement to pay an annual penalty when filing a tax return if one did not buy health insurance.”
Fox News noted about Ocasio-Cortez:
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is being roundly criticized for flubbing a question in which she criticized Israel’s ‘occupation’ of the Palestinian territories.
“Ocasio-Cortez, who surprisingly won a New York Democratic primary on a socialist platform, made the remark during an interview on PBS’s ‘Firing Line’ on Friday.
“When host Margaret Hoover asked her to clarify what she meant, the 28-year-old political newcomer fumbled over her words and acknowledged that she is ‘not the expert at geopolitics on this issue.’
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is being roundly criticized for flubbing a question in which she criticized Israel’s “occupation” of the Palestinian territories.
“Her admission led to intense criticism on Twitter…
“’I am a firm believer in finding a two-state solution on this issue, and I’m happy to sit down with leaders on both of these. For me, I just look at things through a human rights lens, and I may not use the right words. I know this is a very intense issue,’ Ocasio-Cortez said.
“’She looks like us, she talks like us and she represents the values that we have,’ said Rigoberto Marquez, an Oakland resident whose parents immigrated to the U.S., to the San Francisco Chronicle. ‘You don’t see many people like that who are authentic like she is.’
“Ocasio-Cortez calls herself a democratic socialist —” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle, “as does another hero of the Left, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — but she didn’t bring it up Tuesday. She didn’t really have to. Plenty of speakers who preceded her on the stage Tuesday did, in part because the event was co-sponsored by the San Francisco Progressive Alliance, a coalition that includes the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
“Tagging someone as a socialist just doesn’t mean as much to anyone who remembers when the Berlin Wall was standing.”
“’We’ve got to let go of these Soviet-era images,’ Marquez said.”
According to an article in Esquire, Ocasio-Cortez attended a rally for a progressive candidate in St. Louis.
“They [the Republicans] say things -” she said, “I mean, they talk about things that everybody wants, especially like if you are a parent. They talk about education for your kids, healthcare for your kids. The things that you want. And if you’re not really paying attention to how they’re going to pay for it or the rest of that, it’s easy to fall into that trap and say, my kids deserve this.”
The Republicans don’t talk about universal healthcare precisely because they know the only way to pay for it is to take it away from the earners and give it to the takers. Redistribution of wealth isn’t part of their platform. But it is part of the Socialist-Democrat platform.
Does Ocasio-Cortez really think that believing your kids deserve a good education is a “trap?”
Clearly, Ocasio-Cortez’s education was so spectacularly dreadful that she has no acquaintance with concepts like “facts” and “truth.” Nor does she seem to care. She just shrugs and says she’s not perfect. When a company arrives that can employ thousands of New Yorkers, she starts a protest because the governor of the state gave the company a tax break, one it will more than make up in increased income tax revenue, sales tax revenue and all the other bonuses that come with the blessings of Capitalism.
Talent was clearly not on Amazon’s mind when they chose New York. They hesitated long enough before finally signing on for a headquarters building in Long Island City. It’s a good thing that New York City has one of the best public transportation systems in the country, and two airports, one within shouting distance (La Guardia) of the building (it’s so close that you could almost walk that if it weren’t for the heavy traffic). JFK is not much further off.
It’s a good thing Gov. Cuomo dangled that $2 billion tax incentive in front of Amazon’s decision-makers, who had their eye on the subways, buses, and airports.
Because if Amazon was looking for an educated East Coast workforce, and they used Ocasio-Cortez as an example of a New York City education, they’d have chosen Boston, instead.
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