Amazon Chooses 20 Finalists for Second Headquarters
January 19, 2018 by admin
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Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia, celebrated the acceptance of his state’s bid in a message on Twitter. “Let’s close the deal and bring it home!” he wrote.
BIG: Northern VA is finalist for @Amazon HQ2! Thx to all who put in hard work to get us here. Let’s close the deal and bring it home! https://t.co/x9hhhTTn2D
—
Terry McAuliffe (@TerryMcAuliffe)
Jan. 18, 2018
The company, based in Seattle, selected the finalists out of a pile of more than 238 applications submitted by local officials in Mexico, Canada and the United States — all of them eager to attract the 50,000 high-paying jobs the company says it could bring. When the unusual public contest was announced in September, it set off a public charm offensive by the applicants, with many local officials trying to entice Amazon with tax breaks and other benefits.
The process will now shift into a new phase, with Amazon representatives communicating more directly with finalist cities as they prepare to select a winner later this year, and perhaps with cities being even more outspoken about why they should be chosen.
“Getting from 238 to 20 was very tough — all the proposals showed tremendous enthusiasm and creativity,” said Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s head of economic development. “Through this process we learned about many new communities across North America that we will consider as locations for future infrastructure investment and job creation.”
Amazon provided little detail about how it picked the finalists for its second headquarters, which it is calling HQ2, other than to say it based it choices on the criteria it laid out for the search earlier.
According to people briefed on the process who would speak only anonymously because the deliberations were private, the process was conducted by a team of about a dozen people within Amazon, including economists, human resources managers and executives who oversee real estate. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive who was the mastermind behind turning the search into a public process and coined the term “HQ2,” was also involved, the people said.
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Amazon said in September that it needed a second headquarters because it would soon outgrow its hometown, Seattle. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, founded the company there in 1994, and it has since transformed Seattle, employing more than 40,000 in the city. That expansion has also contributed to the city’s soaring cost of living and traffic woes.
To lure applicants, Amazon showered local politicians with statistics about the impact the company has had on the Seattle economy and some of the immediate economic benefits for its new home, including plans to spend $5 billion for construction of its second headquarters.
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It asked candidates to include in their bids a variety of detailed information about the area, including potential building sites, crime and traffic stats and nearby recreational opportunities. And it asked cities and states to describe the tax incentives available to offset Amazon’s costs for building and operating its second headquarters.
The response prompted a wave of publicity stunts by cities that surprised even Amazon. A business group in Tucson trucked a giant cactus to Amazon in Seattle, and the mayor of Washington buttered up Amazon in a promotional video in which she called it the “most interesting company in the world.” An economic development group in Calgary, Alberta, took out an advertisement in The Seattle Times in which it offered to fight a bear for Amazon and spray-painted Seattle sidewalks with a humorous promise to change the city’s name to Calmazon or Amagary.
There were also more serious offers, including a commitment of up to $7 billion in tax incentives by New Jersey to bring Amazon to Newark. Officials in Chicago offered Amazon tax credits that would allow it to keep about $1.32 billion in income taxes that employees would ordinarily pay to the state, according to a report by The Chicago Reader.
The process has also attracted critics. Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit organization that serves as an advocate for local businesses, said that local politicians were enhancing Amazon’s image just as the company’s market power was under growing scrutiny from groups like her own.
“As these cities woo and grovel, they are basically communicating this idea that we should want Amazon to be bigger and more powerful in our economy,” Ms. Mitchell said.
In an interview before Amazon announced its list of finalists, Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, said Amazon, long criticized in Seattle for its role in a booming economy that has displaced lower-income residents and minorities, had an opportunity to make a statement by selecting a less fortunate city for its new headquarters.
“There’s an opportunity to turn the page here and create a new narrative for the company,” he said.
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Trump Denies Changing His Position on Border Wall
January 19, 2018 by admin
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The president — who never likes it when someone characterizes his thinking — vented his anger to Mr. Kelly and to allies, according to the person familiar with the president’s thinking. It was similar to a moment during the campaign in April of 2016, when Paul Manafort — who had just been hired to the Trump campaign — was caught on tape at a meeting with Republican National Committee members saying of Mr. Trump, “the part he’s been playing is evolving.”
When a president’s chief of staff speaks to members of Congress, it should be a “consistent message,” Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat of Texas, said on Thursday in an interview with CNN. Mr. Cuellar, who attended Wednesday’s meeting with Mr. Kelly, said the inconsistency “makes it hard” to negotiate.
Lawmakers who attended the meeting on Wednesday described Mr. Kelly’s remarks. Representative Luis V. Gutiérrez, a Democrat of Illinois who was at the meeting, said Mr. Kelly told the group that “a 50-foot wall from sea to shining sea isn’t what we’re going to build.”
Mr. Gutiérrez told reporters that Mr. Kelly referenced Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to build a wall and said, “There were statements made about the wall that were not informed statements.”
Congress is currently working on a deal that would protect some 780,000 young immigrants from deportation. During the meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Kelly relayed confidence that negotiations would move forward for a permanent solution to preserve protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, the Obama-era policy that Mr. Trump moved in September to end.
In a Twitter post later on Thursday morning, Mr. Trump said there would be no such deal without a wall.
We need the Wall for the safety and security of our country. We need the Wall to help stop the massive inflow of drugs from Mexico, now rated the number one most dangerous country in the world. If there is no Wall, there is no Deal!
—
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
Jan. 18, 2018
The president had recently started to water down his statements about building a wall and told lawmakers last week that 2,000 miles of wall would not be needed because of natural barriers. The wall is estimated to cost $18 billion over the next 10 years and cover 900 miles of the southern border, according to a spending plan submitted to Congress earlier this year.
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The White House director of legislative affairs, Marc T. Short, pushed back against the Democrats’ accounts of Mr. Kelly’s remarks on Wednesday. “I don’t recall General Kelly saying the president was uninformed,” Mr. Short told CNN in an interview.
Accounts of what was said and by whom during recent high-level meetings on immigration policies have already hurt prospects for a broad spending and immigration deal to be achieved by Friday. Some participants in an Oval Office meeting last week said Mr. Trump called African nations “shitholes” in a discussion about immigration, reigniting concerns about the president’s racially tinged language about immigrants. Others said the president used the term “shithouse.”
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The absence of an agreement could lead to a government shutdown, a risk that Mr. Trump may have increased later on Thursday morning when he wrote another Twitter post that blew up Republican plans to keep the government running.
Democrats have said they will not support a government spending plan that does not address the fate of the young immigrants, known as Dreamers, who could face deportation as soon as March.
Mr. Trump’s morning Twitter posts and his anger with Mr. Kelly about his chief of staff’s remarks to lawmakers come after weeks of the president fielding complaints from allies and staff members about the Mr. Kelly’s restrictive influence. Mr. Trump has heard repeatedly that Mr. Kelly is trying to isolate him, and that senior aides to the president are frustrated that they cannot speak directly to Mr. Trump and must go through a filter.
People have warned the president that he faces a massive staff exodus among senior officials, in part as a result of the working environment that Mr. Kelly has created.
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