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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

They definitely didn't need to bribe Amazon. There was a time to argue against that. True leadership would have been to have these protests when the incentives package was put together, not later when we already bagged the win and would lose everything.

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> True leadership would have been to have these protests when the incentives package was put together,

Which is hard to do, since Amazon convinced most city leaders across the country to keep the majority of the incentives secret, and therefore no one could know how bad it was until it was already too late.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/technology/amazon-headqua...

There's a strong argument here that the protesters were the only people involved in this whole ordeal that actually did their job properly.

To add to this -- even when it was a secret, they were still protesting the idea of providing those incentives.

Amazon figured this out already and took steps to prevent a backlash while the packages were being put together. This was why Amazon required NDA's from every single bid team, to prevent anyone outside from knowing what the package looked like when it was being put together. So they reaped exactly what they sowed: they look terrible and ineffective, because they tried to keep it all secret and present the public with a fait acompli.

I don't think any leadership in the world could have made it so that Corey Johnson didn't try to prove a point to Blasio and Cuomo. I went to both council hearings and it didn't seem to me like any incentives or tax breaks would be acceptable for big business, even the very same current tax breaks any company of that scale could apply for and get in new york state.

Except they weren't given a chance to be part of that negotiation process, it was done in secret with minimal public input

Yes, true leadership by Cuomo and De Blasio would have involved local politicians and the people they represent from the start. But they didn't. They negotiated the deal in secret then presented it to citizens as a done deal whether they liked it or not.

Really, can anyone be surprised that this was not met with enthusiasm? IMO the blame lies at the feet of Cuomo, who is used to getting his own way and dictating to others. This is one of very few times that it came back to bite him.

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