Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is hunting a place to plant HQ2, a second mega-center for his world-devpouring company. It will bring billions to the selected locale’s economy, add 50,000 jobs, attract highly educated, high net worth taxpayers. What’s not to like?
Well, many may be called (about 250 cities have applied), but only one will be chosen. And inevitably the rich will get richer due to the search criteria that Amazon has announced. It’s like a personal ad. Sexy tech giant seeks hot city of one million or more in population, able to attract and retain tech workers, having excellent public transportation, and a highly-educated labor pool.
Surprise, surprise, front runners include New York, Washington, San Jose, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto and maybe Baltimore and Philadelphia. Essentially, the likely finalists are the usual coastal suspects. Except for Raleigh and three Texas towns, nothing from the South. Except for Denver, nothing in the vast West. And except for Chicago and Minneapols-St.Paul, nothing in the old industrial Midwest.
In short, the fix is in. The rich, well-educated growing, prosperous parts of the country will grow even more so; the poorer, less successful, left behind parts of the country will be passed over again. This is a prescription for more social and political polarization, income and opportunity inequality. Two Americas, separate and unequal.
Does it have to be this way? You’d think tech geniuses could think outside the box. Silicon Valley was once a bunch of fruit and nut orchards until somebody, a few defense contractors around the time of World War II, decided to put a few plants and labs there. Two of America’s greatest medical institutions are in Cleveland and Rochester, Minnesota.
Raleigh is at least in the Amazon conversation because a farsighted governor realized that Duke, Chapel Hill and NC State formed a triangle of brainpower and a research park smack in the middle could pay off. In these and many similar cases, somebody thought that if they built it, they would come. And they did.
Maybe instead of trolling for bribes in the form of preferential tax treatment from already successful cities, Bezos and his ilk should consider resurrecting once great towns like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Or he could create his own utopia where he would be the Sun King. Think big by thinking smaller. There’s plenty of precedent for that. Akron and the rubber industry, The Dayton of the Wright brothers that once had the most patents filed annually in America. Cincinnati and P&G.
It still happens today. Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas. FedEx in Memphis. The Koch empire in Wichita. And speaking of those fellows, they exercise the kind of local hegemony for which the Robber Barons were once famous. Think of Carnegie in Pittsburgh or Pullman in his own eponymous company town. Think of the puppeteer plutocrats pulling the strings of their own personal legislators in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or “The Magnificent Ambersons.”
That wasn’t fiction. It was reportage. And it’s still business as usual. Wealthy families still install their legislative tools, often a member of the family. Senator of Packwood of Oregon was so in the pocket of the forest products industry he was know as Senator Plywood. Consider Sen. Rockefeller, Governor Rockefeller or Majority Leader Bill Frist, scion of the founding family of Nashville’s Hospital Corporation of America.
The Kochs own a state which they have made over in their own image. Their pet Congressman, Mike Pompeo, once saw to their interests in Washington. He is now their CIA director seeing to their international interests. They made Sam Brownback a senator, then governor where he carried out their brand of libertarian social engineering, cutting government services, education spending, environmental protections and especially their taxes. It was bad for Kansans, but good for the Koch imperium. The Kochs are also the major donors for the state’s obedient brace of senators, Pat Roberts and Jerry Moran, as well as such useful tools in adjacent states as Joni Ernst in Iowa, and Tom Cotton in Arkansas, who may be the next CIA director if Pompeo moves up to State.
Clearly, Bezos has an opportunity to not just build a second HQ, but to debug a society. He could easily chose a needy red state so small that his HQ2 would possess immense clout. In short order he could probably own the Governor’s Mansion, both Senate seats and the Congressman in Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, or either Dakota.
Or, the influx of 50,000 jobs (and a whole lot of money) in a place like Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania could tip a state from purple to blue, and with it the control of Congress, maybe even the balance of power in the electoral college.
What does it profit a man to get tax rebates in California, or New Jersey, if he could use his leverage to reengineer a whole country?