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'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."
"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."
And you woke up to that now?
Is being retarded a requirement for holding a public office or does it just help a lot? Half of the times a large company is "searching for a cooperation partner" or some such, they already have a winner in mind. They just need to go through the motions for regulatory or political purposes. And it is quite common to make invitations to tender as a means to press the price of your favorites down somewhat. Even if they understand they are your preferred choice, the competition will force them into making a better offer.
Been there, done that.
The Amazon search was never an open-ended search and anyone with three working brain cells understood that. At best they had only favorites and it maybe might have been possible to sway them. More likely, two spots were already certain and one was a "maybe". Wouldn't be surprised if all of them were certain at the start.
Seriously, to expect any kind of "fair play" behaviour from an international corporation only shows that whatever you are smoking needs to be made illegal. Profit is the only ethics of a corporation, because the entire system is set up like that.
Simple way to stop it - don't allow externalities anymore. Put a price on pollution, on negative social impact, on any behaviour you want to discourage and companies will follow the money. They're like drug addicts. You could start by stopping to compete for company favors and make them compete for your grace again. I've always thought it absurd that counties or cities compete against each other to attract a company.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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?
One of the problems in Seattle's South Lake Union is that 2/3 of all the buildings are paying no taxes, so there are no funds to support infrastructure costs, so it ends up getting subsidized by the rest of the city.
Every time I hear someone new say how great it is, I ask them where they live. Chances are they don't even live in Seattle, so they don't realize what the real impact is.
By the way, we have no state or county or city income tax, or capital gains tax on stocks, so it's not like we get any real money to pay for all this.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
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.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.