'Amazon's HQ2 Was a Con, Not a Contest' (recode.net)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: To dozens of cities across the United States, Amazon's widely publicized search for a "second headquarters" looked like thousands of new jobs, up for grabs. To Pivot co-host Scott Galloway, it now looks like a "ruse." "I lease office space all the time for my businesses and I always tell my real estate agent, 'We can lease any office in the world as long as I can walk there from where I live,'" Galloway said on the latest episode. "Amazon is now talking about having three headquarters, Seattle, Crystal City and Long Island City. The Bezos's also own three homes, and the average distance from those three homes to a headquarters is 6.4 miles.

"This was never a contest," he added. "It was a con meant to induce ridiculous terms that they then took to the cites all along that they knew they were going to be in." In other words: By soliciting bids from lots of place where it was never going to move, Galloway alleges, Amazon was probably able to get more tax breaks from the pre-determined "winners." "I would bet, Kara, that when they pick two cities and they went to 2 and 3, they didn't say, 'Well, only half our headquarters is going there, so we're going to let you cut the tax subsidies and incentives in half,'" he explained. "This just has ill will written all over it, and I think people started to figure out what was going on ... It's the Olympics on steroids. A lot of high fives and ribbon cutting, and then 10 years later, we realize it was a bad idea."

Comments

And this is why Bezos runs Amazon

[presidenteloco]

and you don't.

They're a business, what do you expect?

[kalpol]

I'm not the biggest fan of Amazon, but why should they leave money lying on the table? If they can negotiate concessions, they are perfectly within their rights and duties to do so. The cities obviously thought there was a net benefit somewhere or they would never have negotiated.

Re:They're a business, what do you expect?

[Tom]

I'm not the biggest fan of Amazon, but why should they leave money lying on the table?

From their perspective: They shouldn't.

From the perspective of society: We should force them to. Because that money can pay for schools, hospitals, police, firefighters, roads, electricity, water and a hundred other useful things.

Re:They're a business, what do you expect?

[rogoshen1]

The notion of 'Leaving money on the table' is the shiny side of the same coin as 'race to the bottom'.

Basically extracting as much from any given situation as possible; which just results in even greater concentrations of wealth; at the expense of people, suppliers, and society at large.

In this case though, it's especially repugnant because those 'gibs' amazon was trying to cajole local governments into granting would have to be paid for by the citizens, who get absolutely no say in the matter.

And for what? a few extra jobs (potentially!) that the bureaucrats can use for re-election fodder? Would the net tax base actually expand after all the concessions? Would Amazon's tricky bastard accountants figure out how to dodge them?

Re:They're a business, what do you expect?

[whoever57]

From the perspective of society: We should force them to. Because that money can pay for schools, hospitals, police, firefighters, roads, electricity, water and a hundred other useful things.

That's where politicians need to step up to the plate. Instead of bending over and competing to give the biggest tax concessions, they need to grow a pair and say no.

Remember how some people predicted that Scott Walker's deal between Wisconsin and Foxconn would be bad for Wisconsin? Now it's come out that those predictions are true.

Re:They're a business, what do you expect?

[GameboyRMH]

If you believe wealth privilege isn't real, then you're a useful idiot for the 1%. If you believe white privilege isn't real, then you're a useful idiot for white supremacists.

Solve all the problems, don't be a useful idiot for anyone.

I think it has more to do

[rsilvergun]

with the fact that he graduated from Princeton. Not that he isn't bright, but It's naive to think the contacts he got from going to an Ivy league school didn't help matters.

And there's the Wisconsin Foxconn factory

[Streetlight]

There was a promised $3 billion cash subsidy that's now at $4.1 billion, the cost to the community of additional infrastructure such as roads, utilities, etc., 13,000 jobs that are now many fewer, a change in what's produced, and a governor who's soon to be out of office as a result of the recent election. I wonder if that project will be decommissioned.

Bezos and Bezos chose the same cities!

[raymorris]

Bezos chose a couple cities where he wanted to buy a house for himself.

Later, Bezos chose a couple cities where he'd like to put his business. I'm SHOCKED that Bezos chose the same place that Bezos chose.

Hopefully the people negotiating with him in those cities realized that Bezos already had a house there, so clearly he likes that city. Therefore they wouldn't need to negotiate quite as much as another city might.

Re:Bezos and Bezos chose the same cities!

[NaCh0]

Hopefully the people negotiating with him in those cities realized that Bezos already had a house there, so clearly he likes that city. Therefore they wouldn't need to negotiate quite as much as another city might.

HAHAHAHAHA

Right.

Meanwhile in reality, government negotiators are so dumb, they probably threw in perks for Bezo's personal real estate to sweeten the deal of moving his business headquarters there.