Trip Gabriel and Peter Eavis

The economic incentives offered the company amounted to no more than “taxpayer bribes,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who accused Amazon of holding American democracy “hostage.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has introduced the “Stop BEZOS Act” to tax companies he says underpay employees, congratulated New Yorkers “for standing up to the power of Amazon.”

Their blunt condemnation of Amazon underscores the extent to which this has become an animating issue for the far left. And their reaction is one act in a broader set of progressive issues for contenders and would-be contenders for the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination.

Candidates and potential candidates perceived as more centrist did not immediately weigh in. Some candidates, like Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California, have deeper connections to tech companies.

The sudden unraveling of the Amazon deal Thursday meant the company’s promise of 25,000 jobs in New York City would be unfulfilled over opposition to the city and state’s offer of $3 billion in tax incentives, which highlighted the practice of luring businesses to states and cities with promises of big tax breaks.

Amazon’s decision to cancel its deal with New York also comes at a time when prominent Democratic lawmakers in Washington are crafting legislation and advocating policies that could constrain or even break up large technology companies.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., a candidate for president, is sponsoring a bill that would require disclosure about who is paying for online political advertising. Warren supports antitrust policies. Sanders’ Stop BEZOS Act, named for the chief executive of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, would tax corporations whose low-wage workers find it necessary to rely on food stamps and government health care benefits.

The push to step up regulation may have support among the public. In a Pew Research poll last year, 55 percent of the respondents said technology companies had too much power and influence, compared with 37 percent who said the firms had the right amount.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/us/politics/amazon-democrats-2020.html" id="32a5f5ea-28c0-3439-a9e6-514ba5742127">The New York Times</a>.

The decision by Amazon this week to abandon its planned headquarters in New York City tapped into one of the major themes of left-wing Democrats: that giant corporations — and in some cases the billionaires who run them — must be held to account for wage inequality, corporate greed and middle-class stagnation.

For Some 2020 Democrats, Rejection of Amazon Aligns With Liberal Policy Views

<h1>The decision by Amazon this week to abandon its planned headquarters in New York City tapped into one of the major themes of left-wing Democrats: that giant corporations — and in some cases the billionaires who run them — must be held to account for wage inequality, corporate greed and middle-class stagnation.</h1>

And some contenders and would-be contenders for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination were quick to take a victory lap over the retailer’s sudden reversal.

Their blunt condemnation of Amazon underscores the extent to which this has become an animating issue for the far left. And their reaction is one act in a broader set of 2020 issues for progressive Democrats that includes the Green New Deal, which proposes far-reaching federal intervention in the economy to tackle climate change, and the determination to rein in leviathan tech companies, whose founders have lost their luster as heroes of a new economy.

Candidates and potential candidates perceived as more centrist did not immediately weigh in, reflecting one of the fault lines in a Democratic Party wrestling over who is the best standard-bearer to suit up for a coming titanic struggle with President Donald Trump. Some candidates, like Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California, have deeper connections to tech companies.

The views of centrists may have been channeled by Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, who slammed fellow Democrats for putting “their own narrow political interests above their community.”

“There are large questions philosophically about whether taxpayers should give billions of dollars to billionaires,” said Gordon Hintz, the Democratic minority leader of the Wisconsin state Assembly, who is a critic of a state deal in 2017 to lure the electronics giant Foxconn with $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies.

“There’s frustration in the public right now where wealth is being concentrated, the opportunities for economic mobility are lower, and they see the people who receive these deals seemingly unconcerned with their reality,” he added.

Wisconsin, a battleground state Trump narrowly won in 2016 as part of his appeal to white blue-collar voters, is certain to be a crossroads of national Democratic contenders ahead of 2020, as they try to win back some of those voters and excite others who stayed home. That Trump played a role in the Foxconn deal — and jumped in again recently when the Taiwan-based company wavered — is a ready-made target for Democrats inclined to criticize corporate giveaways.

Hintz said the issue played a role in the re-election loss last year of Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican.

Even as New York sent Amazon packing, other cities and regions renewed their courtship of the company. On Thursday, officials in Newark, New Jersey, sent a courier in red to deliver a giant heart-shaped card to the company bearing the Valentine’s Day message that the city and New Jersey “still love u, Amazon!”

Booker, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has made no comment on the deal. A Democratic county chairman in Iowa, Kurt Meyer, who put Booker up overnight on a recent swing through the state, predicted that criticisms of large corporations would feature in appeals to the party base there, which is more progressive than in many states. Iowa’s $208 million in incentives for an Apple data center near Des Moines with just 50 jobs was debated in the 2018 midterm elections.

“I suspect the issue will be exploited extensively in Iowa, due in part to our vague but distinct sense of economic insecurity, which, while unrelated to Amazon and Apple, is pretty dry tinder,” Meyer said.

At a CNN town hall in Iowa last month, Harris was asked if the existence of multibillionaires was “morally defensible.” She replied that the 2017 Republican tax cut bill was “unconscionable” for giving breaks to corporations and those in the top 1 percent but excluding working families.

In the past two years, big scandals in the technology sector have made privacy and the security of social media networks hotly debated issues. Russian entities used Facebook’s network to try and influence the 2016 presidential election. The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that Facebook users’ data had been misused.

But not every party official believes in shaming corporate chieftains and corporations.

In northeast Ohio, Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat whose district recently lost 1,600 jobs with the shutdown of a plant making the Chevrolet Cruze, wrote a letter Friday imploring Amazon to build a second headquarters there.

Ryan, in an interview, predicted that everyone at the basketball game he planned to attend Friday night at Howland High School, where his daughter is a cheerleader, would be talking about how to lure Amazon and its jobs to the area.

Ohio is a swing state that Democrats, including Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is weighing a presidential bid, would like to win back in 2020.

“It doesn’t serve us well to be hostile to business in general,” Ryan said. “We need them. We can’t reverse climate change. We can’t rebuild manufacturing. We can’t retool workforce development without a partnership with the free enterprise system.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="da6bf73b-a7c6-4145-ab23-4bb1067a8fc0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/us/politics/amazon-democrats-2020.html">The New York Times</a>.

An Amazon Reversal, Presidential Hopefuls and a Swift Victory Lap

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has introduced the “Stop BEZOS Act” to tax companies he says underpay employees, congratulated New Yorkers “for standing up to the power of Amazon.”

An Amazon reversal, presidential hopefuls and a swift victory lap

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Trip Gabriel and Peter Eavis

Articles written by the author

For Some 2020 Democrats, Rejection of Amazon Aligns With Liberal Policy Views

An Amazon reversal, presidential hopefuls and a swift victory lap