It’s perverse to celebrate the cancellation of Amazon’s ‘HQ2’

My hopes of an invite from Jeff Bezos to the opening of Amazon’s proposed but now cancelled ‘HQ2’ at Long Island City in New York were slim, since I was thrown out of his existing Seattle HQ on the orders of the online giant’s PR police. But I disagree with rising-star Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who hailed the scrapping of the project as a victory for ‘everyday New Yorkers’ over ‘Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world’.

It’s true that the way Amazon invited US cities to tender for the new complex with competing local tax breaks — while reportedly having paid no federal taxes on some $17 billion of profits for the past two years — displayed extreme corporate arrogance. The fact that the Long Island City site would have included a helipad for Bezos and his senior colleagues’ exclusive use was deemed particularly offensive.