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Amazon To NYC After Reconsidering HQ2 Plans: It'd Be a Shame If Something Happened To Your Kids' CS Education
theodp writes: Commenting on reports that Amazon is reconsidering its plan to bring 25,000 jobs to a new campus in New York City following a wave of political and community opposition, Amazon issued the following statement: "We're focused on engaging with our new neighbors -- small business owners, educators, and community leaders. Whether it's building a pipeline of local jobs through workforce training or funding computer science classes for thousands of New York City students, we are working hard to demonstrate what kind of neighbor we will be." Yep, it'd be a shame if something happened. The Washington Post earlier reported that New York State Sen. Michael Gianaris, a strong opponent of the Amazon HQ2 deal, described the possibility that Amazon would pull out of the deal -- which totals up to $3 billion in state and city incentives -- as akin to blackmail. "Amazon has extorted New York from the start, and this seems to be their next effort to do just that," he said. "If their view is, 'We won't come unless we get three billion of your dollars,' then they shouldn't come." Over at Vice, Ankita Rao examines what Amazon infiltrating America's school system might look like.
It's critical that resist efforts of companies like Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon who want to exploit public education for profit. Amazon doesn't want to help students, they want to make money and getting their hooks into lucrative contracts with schools is a core part of that.
We've already seen Bill Gates make repeated attempts to ruin education for profit, Zuckerberg is attempting to enter that market, and now Bezos wants to do the same.
Education only works if teachers can teach instead of being bound to reciting material designed by non-educators working for billion-dollar companies that are designed to encourage dependency on their services and work advertising into lessons. Kids don't need that, and we must reject it.
Coming from Michigan I can tell you that decades of hand outs to the big three didn't keep them from closing factories here in the 70's, 80's, and 90's.
In order to pay those subsidies they had to increase taxes on OTHER businesses, driving them out of the state and hollowing out the economy. So when the Big 3 left, there was nothing else to fall back on.
Unlikely, Amazon is a parasite. Anything that they get as an incentive to move there is going to be a lot less than what they contribute to the local area.
They've done a pretty thorough job of destroying Seattle and yet those folks in other parts of the country were willing to compete for the same treatment. If Amazon being here was such a great thing, Bezos wouldn't be constantly looking over his shoulder when he's out in public.
Once they are there, you can count on them extorting the locality for whatever they can. We had a head tax briefly slated to go into effect here in Seattle to help counteract the damage that Amazon's presence was doing and they had some illegal meetings with the council and had it nixed. No public meetings, just backroom negotiations and ultimately, the citizens lost. We've got people who are homeless despite having full time jobs here and it's primarily due to Amazon's influence.