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With Amazon NYC 'second HQ' deal canceled, Ocasio-Cortez now officially is a huge problem for Dems
By Thomas Lifson

Really do need a bigger pop corn popper

Move over, Speaker Pelosi, and make room for New York governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio as Democrats waking up to the disaster the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is inflicting on the Democratic Party. She is no longer just a potential threat to their schemes and operating principles; she has taken a wrecking ball to them. Trust me: they desperately want to be rid of her, but, due to her media presence and popularity with the young and ignorant, cannot visibly stick the shiv in her back. So Nancy Pelosi's ability to "cut your head off and you won't even know you're bleeding" (as her own daughter put it) will come in handy.

The Amazon tax breaks, calculated to be worth $3 billion over a period of many years, were going to bring 25,000 high-paying jobs to Ocasio-Cortez's district in Queens and generate many times that sum in increased tax receipts, according to Cuomo and de Blasio, who exulted over the deal. But offering any kind of benefit to a big corporation founded and headed by the richest man in the world is anathema to the radical left.


Ocasio-Cortez may not fully realize that her political party is now the party of big business, trading government favors of all sorts for massive political donations (and censorship of conservatives on internet forums controlled by the tech giants).


Cropped screen grab via Grabien.

But she has destroyed a key plan of the elders to revive a blue city and state that are hemorrhaging jobs, tax revenue, and middle-class residents. Even worse, she has sent a message to the tech plutocrats who are the new powers behind the scenes of the progressive left that any deals made with them cannot be guaranteed to come to fruition. This is a mortal threat to the cozy working relationships cultivated by wheeler-dealers like Pelosi and Schumer with their tech and financial mogul buddies.

Yesterday, in exulting over her victory, Sandy O revealed that she has no understanding at all about government finance, telling a reporter:

The city was paying for those jobs, so frankly, if we were willing to give Amazon three — if we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers, we can fix our subways, we can put a lot of people to work for that money if we wanted to.



As Marc Thiessen first noted, Sandy apparently thinks there was three billion dollars in a bank that was given to Amazon, so it is available to be used elsewhere on all the goodies she mentions. But of course, the three billion was merely a rebate on taxes that otherwise would have been paid by Amazon over a period of years. With no deal, there will be no such tax payments. Not the three billion, nor any of the taxes above that amount that Amazon would have been paying.

The spectacle of someone this ignorant having a vote in Congress on the laws governing taxation would be hilarious if it were not so frightening. Amazon clearly realizes that there is no upside in dealing with any governmental unit under the sway of Sandy and her supporters. The other tech giants watched and learned. That is why Pelosi, Cuomo, de Blasio and the other ruling-class stooges in the Democratic Party must be rid of her.

My bet is that she will never even see it coming.

Update from Thomas Lifson:

I am not alone in seeing the stilettos being unsheathed. David Marcus at The Federalist:

...there is good reason to believe that this debacle has opened the door to a potential primary challenge. Given that almost the entire New York Democratic Party machine, from Mayor Bill de Blasio to Governor Andrew Cuomo were desperate for the Amazon deal; a challenge to AOC might well attract some serious backers.

And the polls back it up. According to a recent Sienna College poll, a majority of New Yorkers supported the deal, an even bigger majority in Queens, the very borough where the HQ would have been located. Moreover, 70 percent of black New Yorkers and 81 percent of Hispanic New Yorkers wanted Amazon in Gotham. Both demographic groups suffer from higher unemployment than the rest of the city. As Daily News Columnist Rob George put it in Twitter, it was “AOC vs. POC.”

A second clue: People tell me that Morning Joe on MSNBC -- the deep state's favorite TV show -- spent a lot of time trashing Ocasio-Cortez.


Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/with_amazon_nyc_second_hq_deal_cancelled_ocasio_cortez_now_officially_is_a_huge_problem_for_dems.html#ixzz5feHBdfst
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