Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed over anti-Amazon push in New York City billboard: 'Thanks for nothing'
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is getting some negative reviews in her home city.
Fresh off helping drive Amazon’s planned headquarters out of New York City, the rising Democratic star has inspired a billboard in Times Square.
“Amazon Pullout, Thanks for Nothing, AOC,” the billboard, located on 42nd street near 8th Avenue, reads.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}OCASIO-CORTEZ GOES ON TEAR DEFENDING ROLE IN AMAZON'S NEW YORK EXIT
The high-visibility blast is funded by the Job Creators Network and will be up for all to see until next Wednesday.
“The Amazon pullout is a perfect example of what we’ve been saying: socialism takes and capitalism creates,” Alfredo Ortiz, JCN president and CEO said in a release on Wednesday.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“The economic consequences of the HQ2 termination gives America a small taste of the harm that is to come if Ocasio-Cortez’s anti-business canon comes to fruition and is made federal policy.”
Thanks for Nothing, AOC
NEW YORK CITY'S DE BLASIO BLAMES AMAZON FOR CAVING ON DEAL FOR NEW HEADQUARTERS IN CITY
It comes after Ocasio-Cortez vigorously defended her role in sinking Amazon’s move to New York City on Tuesday in the face of bipartisan criticism, claiming the deal would have been “one of the biggest giveaways in state history” and would have priced people out of the local community.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“Frankly, the knee-jerk reaction assuming that I ‘don’t understand’ how tax giveaways to corps work is disappointing,” she tweeted.
“No, it’s not possible that I could come to a different conclusion. The debate *must* be over my intelligence & understanding, instead of the merits of the deal.”
The freshman Democratic New York congresswoman has faced days of criticism from normally friendly media voices and fellow Democrats over her role in Amazon's decision to pull back from building a $2.5 billion campus in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Amazon had cited the opposition of “a number of state and local politicians” in its decision to abandon the plans. Ocasio-Cortez and others at the local level had pointed to incentives such as a $2.5 billion in tax breaks as a reason for their opposition.
“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,” Ocasio-Cortez said last week.
Mayor Bill de Blasio pushed back on that claim on Sunday. Even as he slammed Amazon for its decision, the mayor said critics wrongly suggested that tax breaks represented money that could be spent on other things. He said it wasn’t “money you had over here. And it was going over there.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The Democratic mayor said: “That $3 billion that would go back in tax incentives was only after we were getting the jobs and getting the revenue.”
Fellow Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., accused those who are against the deal, including Ocasio-Cortez, of being opposed to jobs.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"It used to be that we would protest wars. Now we are protesting jobs?” she said on CNN Friday, before criticizing the economic arguments of those opposed to the Amazon move.
"I'm a progressive too, but I'm pragmatic,” she said. “We are $4 billion less than we usually get and yet we are kicking out a company that would have been projected [to pay] over 10 years roughly $27 billion in taxes.”
Amazon announced in November that it had chosen the Long Island City section of Queens for one of two new headquarters, with the other in Arlington, Va. Both would get 25,000 jobs. A third site in Nashville, Tenn., would get 5,000.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The company planned to spend $2.5 billion building the New York office, choosing the area in part because of its large pool of tech talent. The governor and the mayor had argued that the project would spur economic growth that would pay for the $2.8 billion in state and city incentives many times over.