Amazon Shows Its Inner Trump

I meant to stop in at a bagel shop yesterday morning on my way to work. There was an all-staff meeting at the office. I couldn't stop and get a dozen bagels because the bagel shop is no longer there.

The main thoroughfare of my neighborhood has been bleached of personality largely due to the massive year-after-year expansion of Amazon's corporate presence downtown. Any old Hippie or Punker ghetto chic has been blasted away. Now there is nothing on Broadway but expensive restaurants, drop-in for-profit health centers, and chain stores fronted by sidewalks filled with the homeless. The Alley, an arcade of greasy spoon eateries, is still hanging on. But for how much longer?

Bear all this mind if you care to read two stories -- "Amazon pauses plans for Seattle office towers while City Council considers business tax," published by the remaining daily in town, the plutocratic Seattle Times, and "Amazon Halts Downtown Construction Pending City Council Vote on Head Tax," by the blog of one of the weekly papers, The Stranger.

Seattle City Council is considering a modest tax on large employers in the city. As The Stranger explains:

The council proposal would tax businesses grossing more than $20 million a year $0.26 cents per hour per employee. Beginning in 2021, the employee hours tax would be phased out and replaced with a 0.7 percent payroll tax. 

It would affect roughly three percent of businesses and bring an estimated $75 million to housing and homelessness services.

There is a serious homelessness problem in the city. As the Times story reports, "Seattle’s homeless crisis is among the worst in the country, with an official state of emergency more than two years old and a record 169 deaths recorded last year."

I could write about it every day. When I walk to work in the morning it is a tour of destitution. And what makes it so bizarre is that the sidewalk shanties and refuse-strewn nooks of abandoned storefronts are cheek by jowl with the high rises shooting up and tower cranes seemingly on ever block.

Walking home from work at the end of the day I walk through the heart of Amazonia. It reminds me when I used to go visit my high-school buddy. He was at Stanford and I was at Berkeley. We would trade off weekend visits a couple times a year. He lived on campus. For me, Stanford was like a country club. That's what the Amazon-heavy parts of the city are becoming, privileged enclaves of elite workers.

What made the news yesterday is that Amazon lifted up its shirt and showed the butt of a big handgun shoved under its belt. Executives in a meeting with councilman Mike O'Brien threatened to halt construction on a huge, long-stalled development in the heart of downtown if the large-employer tax moves forward.

Amazon's threat puts the city council, which right now is 5-4 for approving the tax, in a tight spot, and not in a way that Amazon would want. For any of the five to change his/her vote now would be very damaging; at the very least, it would invite a challenge the next election.

In the end, the whole thing -- the homelessness crisis in tech-giant boom town; the hostile, extortionist response to a modest tax from a corporate behemoth that posted $1.6 billion in profit last quarter -- stinks to high heaven. It is yet more proof of how completely bankrupt peak neoliberalism is.

My sense is that the Seattle City Council will hold the line. It will be an interesting study to see if big money can bribe and threaten its way out of this. I suppose one of the five could switch sides and then not run for reelection, or run for a different seat. Lorena González is the weak link.