WOW! AOC IS MORE POWERFUL THAN NEW YORK CITY'S MAYOR AND NEW YORK STATE'S GOVERNOR! WHO KNEW? - Hallo friendsGOOD OF CONEX NEWS, In the article you read this time with the title WOW! AOC IS MORE POWERFUL THAN NEW YORK CITY'S MAYOR AND NEW YORK STATE'S GOVERNOR! WHO KNEW?, We have prepared this article for you to read and retrieve information therein. Hopefully the contents of postings Article health, Article news, Article sport, Article tips, Article treatment, We write this you can understand. Alright, good read.

Title : WOW! AOC IS MORE POWERFUL THAN NEW YORK CITY'S MAYOR AND NEW YORK STATE'S GOVERNOR! WHO KNEW?
link : WOW! AOC IS MORE POWERFUL THAN NEW YORK CITY'S MAYOR AND NEW YORK STATE'S GOVERNOR! WHO KNEW?

WOW! AOC IS MORE POWERFUL THAN NEW YORK CITY'S MAYOR AND NEW YORK STATE'S GOVERNOR! WHO KNEW?

A Times Square Billboard Hits Ocasio-Cortez on Amazon. She Hits Back.

By: Shame Goldmacher

The New York Times

21 February 2019

Probably the last thing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez needs is a billboard to get her more attention or notoriety.

But there it was, on 42nd Street in Times Square, a digital attack ad that blamed the freshman Democratic congresswoman for Amazon’s decision to pull out of New York, taking with it 25,000 promised jobs.

“Thanks for Nothing, AOC!” the ad read, using Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s initials that became ubiquitous even before she officially set foot in Congress.

The ad was paid for by a Texas-based group called the Job Creators Network. In the past, tax records show that the Mercer Family Foundation has funded what appears to be a related group, the Job Creators Alliance, also based in Addison, Tex.

The company asserted on its website that Amazon only decided to leave “once opposition from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, along with other anti-business politicians, ramped up.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez sought to specifically link the ad to the family of Robert Mercer, the financier who had given away millions to Republican and conservative causes and whose daughter, Rebekah, was a key player in the 2016 campaign of President Trump.

“Few things effectively communicate the power we’ve built in fighting dark money & anti-worker policies like billionaire-funded groups blowing tons of cash on wack billboards (this one is funded by the Mercers),” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter.

The billboard seemed best positioned to reach tourists, sitting directly above Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and adjacent to Madame Tussauds, the celebrity wax shrine where Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary, was on hand last year to unveil a likeness of Melania Trump.

The billboard was, however, cheered by Laura Ingraham, the conservative commentator. “Check out the sign in Times Sq.!” she wrote in a Twitter post that had been retweeted nearly 10,000 times.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez responded by using a reference to Michael Scott, the character played by Steve Carell in “The Office.”

“Billionaires paying to put up anti-progressive propaganda in Times Square is like the obscenely rich version of the scene where Michael Scott points to the Bubba Gump and saying ‘This is it, this is the heart of civilization, right here,’” she wrote on Twitter.

The Job Creators Network’s website said the ad would run for a week. But it was not visible on Thursday afternoon, when a camera for CNBC was trained on the billboard for an hour, as it displayed different content.

“The billboard went up Wednesday. The contract is scheduled for one week at a cost of about $4,000,” Elaine Parker, a spokeswoman for Job Creators Network, said in an email.

After Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s tweets, the company said it bought space on two more billboards, at Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street. “Hey AOC, Saw your wack tweet,” read one. The other: “This billboard cost about $4,000. But you cost NY 25,000 jobs and $4,000,000,000 in annual lost wages. Ouch.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was an outspoken opponent of the Amazon deal, which would have located a new corporate campus near her Queens and Bronx district. But she was hardly a leading organizer on the ground, where local officials and left-leaning activists pushed for the company to make additional concessions or leave.

The deal had been negotiated by two of New York’s leading Democrats, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, but they were unable to quell a progressive rebellion that sufficiently unnerved executives at one of the world’s biggest corporations.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez herself has said her impact has been overstated.

“Grassroots community members led + organized the whole effort. Wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t there,” she said in another tweet.

NOTE:  So a newly elected Congresswoman from New York seems to have become "Super Congresswoman" possessing extraordinary powers.  Perhaps this is the reason Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has attracted so much attention from the media and is probably the front runner as the object of right wing backlash right now among the newly elected Democrats.  I mean electronic billboards in Times Square?  Paid for by the Mercers?  That really is top notch right wing attention.

That Ms. Ocasio-Cortez singlehandedly beat back Jeff Bezos and his trillion dollar company is an achievement worthy of Supergirl or some other more au courant action figure that I'm not aware of.  Or at least as the story goes.  In truth, however,  the pushback against Amazon was a community based revolt and not one that any individual could have pulled off. 

While I don't know the details of the campaign against Amazon in New York, the general trajectory of such an action is very familiar to me.  The use of public funds - tax breaks - for stadia, convention centers, business parks, has been criticized all over the country for several decades now.  The hundreds of millions of dollars in uncollected tax revenue ($1.5 billion in the case of Long Island City) to lure development projects to your city or town have often been criticized as bad investments when the results don't live up to the job and economic development promises made at the front end of such projects, an estimated 25,000 jobs in the case of the NYC Amazon development.

I've never seen post development studies that adequately gage the impact of large scale developments and whether or not they have lived up to their promised benefits.   Once the shiny new buildings and 70,000 seat stadiums are built everyone seems to forget about the public investment in tax breaks a project received.   One reason is that it's very difficult to capture the spin-off benefits that an increased population in a given area generate or even the direct benefits.  Sure, you can estimate how much each new employee to an area will spend in retail (lunch, clothing, household goods) but in order to gainsay the net benefits you must have a decent baseline of pre-development factors which is rarely the case.

In addition, in the overall scheme of things, the increased number of employees that new development generates generally comes from somewhere else.   In the case of Long Island City, probably from other parts of New York and probably from workers already employed.  Thus, the stores and shops, restaurants and coffee houses in the sending areas will lose business and thus revenue to the receiving area, in this case Long Island City.   

In fact, the negative ad targeting Cortez contains a clearly false assessment:  “This billboard cost about $4,000. But you cost NY 25,000 jobs and $4,000,000,000 in annual lost wages. Ouch.”  

Setting aside the accuracy of the figures, this would be only true if every single employee of the Long Island City project when completed weren't already employed, i.e. they all were collecting unemployment insurance or simply sitting at home living off their parents.  In addition, on a net loss basis for New York City,  this can only be true if every single employee relocated to Long Island City from outside New York.  Either scenario is ludicrous.  In fact, one could logically argue that while Long Island City would have been a direct beneficiary of 25,000 jobs and $4 billion in annual lost wages (I have no idea where this came from) with the Amazon development, it would have siphoned off both jobs and revenue from other parts of the New York region.     

To actually gage the impacts of a development like Amazon's Long Island City project is incredibly difficult.  No one actually knows.  And I suspect that it is this probably one of the main reasons why the community - and AOC - objected to the project.   

What is clear, however, is that loaded fat cats pushing their personal political agenda against AOC with Times Square electronic ads helps no one. 

Take Care and Have A Great Day!

Thus Article WOW! AOC IS MORE POWERFUL THAN NEW YORK CITY'S MAYOR AND NEW YORK STATE'S GOVERNOR! WHO KNEW?

That's an article WOW! AOC IS MORE POWERFUL THAN NEW YORK CITY'S MAYOR AND NEW YORK STATE'S GOVERNOR! WHO KNEW? This time, hopefully can give benefits to all of you. well, see you in posting other articles.

You are now reading the article WOW! AOC IS MORE POWERFUL THAN NEW YORK CITY'S MAYOR AND NEW YORK STATE'S GOVERNOR! WHO KNEW? with the link address https://coneknews.blogspot.com/2019/02/wow-aoc-is-more-powerful-than-new-york.html

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: