Firstly, his boss is worth $133 billion according to Forbes and made 11.2 billion in profits in 2018 almost double its $5.6 billion for 2017. Amazon is not expected to pay any federal taxes this year according to reports.
Now the media says that that Amazon has "thrown down the gauntlet" as indicated by the tweet above from Dave Clark, Amazons senior vice president of worldwide operations. He has invited Ocasio-Cortez to visit the plant.
Rep Ocasio-Cortez should refuse this as it is a trick. she should meet Amazon workers not selected by the company and the company should have no knowledge who they are and they should meet secretly and talk with her, community organizations, the unions trying to organize them. The boss doesn't pick which employees they talk to.
Bezos and parasites like Dave Clark here along with other investors that don't work but live off of the (cheap) labor of others have a right to a job, security, housing and a decent life, not the right to accumulate huge amounts of wealth off of human beings labor power. $15 an hour is anything but "decent pay" especially in NYC and it certainly isn't here in California where a closet is $1200 a month.
If the city had $3 billion to give to Amazon in tax breaks it can use that money to create public sector union jobs in NYC. These corporation blackmail cities and communities pitting one against the other for who can give these vultures the most breaks.
Bezos, and others own capital, that's why they are called capitalists. But they do not create this capital, this surplus value created through the labor process where workers are paid less in wages than the value we produce. Workers, organized as a direct action force and as an independent political force must take that capital from them just like they take our homes or our jobs when it suits them.
In that way we can collectively decide on how we allocate society's wealth in a democratic and rational way. There's no other way.
Rep Ocasio-Cortez must emphatically refuse to meet with them and instead start by using the $3 billion they were going to give to Amazon for job creation and don't stop there.
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