Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Spends $350K On Seattle Mayor's Race (jeffreifman.com)
reifman writes: Until this summer, Amazon had never contributed more than $15,000 to a city political campaign in Seattle, but this year's different. The company is a lead funder in the Seattle Chamber of Commerce's PAC which dropped $525,000 Monday on Jenny Durkan's PAC, the centrist business candidate. Her opponent Cary Moon is an advocate for affordable housing, which complicates Amazon's growth, and city-owned community broadband. Comcast and Century Link joined Amazon contributing $25,000 and $82,500 respectively to the Chamber's PAC. Amazon's $350,000 contribution represents .00014 of its CY 2016 net profit.
Amazon's political team: "You think those Russian bots were good at influencing elections? Those are amateur hour, man... wait until you see ours! It's not an election, it's an Alexa-ion!'
#DeleteChrome
Can we get some of that money thrown at my campaign?
In all seriousness I am running for mayor in my town and am against the use of violence on peaceful people. Realistically Amazon won't care about little old New Hampshire- particularly in the town I'm running for mayor. I am a principled libertarian and moved to NH as part of the Free State Project effort and Shire Society (it's a migration of those who believe in freedom and liberty over everything else- including "safety", "children", terrorism, naked people, breasts, etc).
I got about 1/3 of the vote shockingly in the primary here with very little effort exerted. No matter what your social or political objectives are I believe they should not come at the expense of coercion, violence, or theft (ie at the government level they call this taxes).
And before you call me heartless I just did about 20 hours of community service this past month at a homeless shelter and have put in hundreds of hours this past year outing abusive cops and police tactics. I support charitable organizations who are NOT dependant on theft and other principled libertarians have even started and run organizations to help feed and find housing for those in need.
My partner was even wrongly arrested for filming an unconscionable police checkpoint where cops were searching 'random' vehicles (we live in a police state for those who aren't aware, his case is being dismissed as I write this, but only after spending thousands of dollars on lawyers, ie the intimidation has not been effective, but it would be against most activists).
My volunteer efforts have not been publicized although I did a two second interview that hit the media in regards to volunteer work I was doing at another facility although I didn't mention I was running for mayor and the media outlet was not a local one so it would not benefit my run in any way. It also wasn't focused on me, but rather what another libertarian run organization that I support was doing. Though there was no mention by any of the participants of politics or the word libertarian in the news peace.
Have gnu, will travel.