Mitchell Blue writes at the Federalist to rebut analysts who use the Amazon HQ2 decision to echo Democratic Party talking points.
Besides being boring, what does Amazon’s location choice signal? According to CNN’s Jill Filipovic, the predictable selections mean that, “Republicans can no longer lay claim to being a pro-business party, successful as they’ve been at making the states they control increasingly undesirable to modern businesses and workers.” She also says the lack of a commitment to public education and transportation in Republican states was a determining reason Amazon didn’t pick a Republican-governed state.
While her claims make a tidy point for Democrats, they’re not really true. …
… When you consider that these are Amazon’s values, it is no wonder that the retailer is setting up shop in the land of work-addicted corporate lawyers, investment bankers, lobbyists, and management consultants. People in these industries are so obsessed with work that Goldman Sachs had to institute a rule forcing junior bankers go home from 9 p.m. Friday to 9 a.m. Sunday.
If you’re Amazon, you have to love a culture where telling your employees to answer work emails from home on a Saturday makes you look like you just had the existential breakdown of Tom Cruise’s character in Jerry Maguire. All these other cities worked hard on their pitch videos, but all along, New York had Bezos at “hello…. our interns are literally working themselves to death.”
So don’t let PR executives tell you this is about community values or the children. It’s about the absence of community and children, and the fact that if an Amazon employee does buck the trend and procreate, that just means she’ll have to work that much harder in order to pay for the mortgage on her $1.4 million, 600-square-foot apartment.
