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Amazon Blames Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez For The Failure Of Their New York City Headquarters Plan

By Maria Goncalves
Published on: 06:46 PST, Feb 15, 2019

Amazon blasted Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Democrats, claiming they were partially responsible for the failure of their New York headquarters plan for creating an “unjust hostile environment.”

On Thursday, the online retail giant announced they were to withdrawal their original plan to set up their second headquarters in Long Island City, with their head of policy communications calling out Ocasio-Cortez and her peers for opposing the deal. On Friday, Jodi Seth claimed that the Democrats were behind not “any one incident,” but rather several months of political discourse that led to Amazon eventually deciding to pull the plug on their proposal to set up a new branch in New York City, per the Daily Mail. The company’s current headquarters are in Seattle, Washington.

“It was that the environment over the course of the past three months had not got any better,” Seth told NBC.

“There were some local and state elected officials who refused to meet with Amazon and criticized us day in and day out about the plan. If you talk to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it’s ‘Never Amazon,'” she added.

The congressional newcomer has been strongly opposed to the proposal for months, claiming that the city should ultimately reject it because it would spike rent prices and force people to relocate to other parts of NYC — an effect which was observed around Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. And on Thursday, she was one of the first to celebrate the tech company’s decision to withdraw the plan, tweeting that “anything is possible.”

“Today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world,” she wrote.

One of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s main points was that the tax incentives given to Amazon should be used to improve certain sectors in New York City, such as the subway system, and to invest in local communities who need the most.

“Someone’s got to look out for the people our system is leaving behind – esp now, when most of the wealth created is going to fewer people, those left behind are the majority of Americans,” the 29-year-old tweeted.

And while Seth said that she was “pretty confident” that the plan would have received a green light had Amazon decided to move forward with it, the billion-dollar company’s bosses decided they would not want to “work in this environment in the long term.”

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