Back in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was successfully able to stop Amazon, the online retail giant, from building a new headquarters in New York City. The Seattle-based retailer wanted to build a second HQ in the borough of Queens just across the river from the island of Manhattan. However, Ocasio-Cortez was able to stop Amazon from breaking ground in New York City, which made the massive corporation shift its focus from New York City.
Now, Amazon has announced plans to halt construction of its second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. In response to this news, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turned to Twitter to share her reaction and talk about how she was successful at stopping Amazon from breaking ground in New York City five years ago.
“When I opposed this Amazon project coming to New York bc it was a scam of public funds, the whole power establishment came after us,” she said on Twitter. “Billboards went up in Times Sq denouncing me. Powerful pols promised revenge. Op-Eds & CEOs insulted my intelligence. In the end, we were right.”
While Ocasio-Cortez was eager to celebrate her political victory, other people on Twitter did not feel the same way. Many people believed that Ocasio-Cortez cost Queens and New York City thousands of jobs, with one critic demanding that the liberal progressive politician finally “resign in disgrace” for failing the people of her constituency.
Ocasio-Cortez doubled down about how she believed it was worth it for her to speak out against Amazon and stop them from breaking ground on a second headquarters in New York City.
“‘I know I’ll never get an apology for that time, but it was worth it,” she said. “We protected NYers from a scam deal to drain public dollars from schools & infrastructure in exchange for empty promises of “Amazon jobs” w/ 0 guarantees or guardrails. Sadly, cities who took it are suffering.”
However, critics felt differently. Amazon had estimated that their new building would have brought about twenty-five thousand new jobs to Queens and the greater New York City area. Now, people are furious with Ocasio-Cortez for stopping Amazon from building their HQ in New York because they wanted to get on the Amazon bandwagon and increase the number of jobs available in the city.
“You don’t deserve an apology. You should resign in disgrace,” said one critic.
Another joked: “Lucky they have you to save them from all those jobs!”
“Wait, you prevented jobs from coming to NY. Then when the government causes a recession because of uncontrolled printing and spending and companies do layoffs, you take an ‘I told you so’ victory lap?” said another conservative critic. “This type of grift is exactly what’s wrong with Washington.”
After Amazon abandoned plans to build a second HQ in New York City, they announced in 2019 that they were looking at a location just outside of Washington D.C. in Arlington, Virginia.
Amazon’s real estate chief John Schoettler said, “Since Met Park will have space to accommodate more than 14,000 employees, we’ve decided to shift the groundbreaking of PenPlace (the second phase of HQ2) out a bit.”
Amazon pledged to spend $2.5 billion and hire about 25,000 workers for their new Arlington location.