Skip to main content

Amazon poured $1.5 million into Seattle City Council races. It apparently backfired.

Amazon poured $1.5 million into Seattle City Council races. It apparently backfired."First, Amazon dropped a money bomb on the Seattle City Council elections," says Daniel Beekman at The Seattle Times. "Then, voters dropped their own bomb with Tuesday night's election results."Amazon dumped $1.5 million into the city council races via a political action committee of the Metropolitan Seattle Chamber of Commerce. Lots of votes still have to be counted, but of the seven candidates the business organization backed in Tuesday's election, it appears no more than two will prevail."On balance, this is not the city council that Amazon or the chamber of commerce wanted to see," councilmember Lorena Gonzalez, who was not up for re-election, told The Associated Press on Wednesday as the votes trickled in. In 2010, seven of the nine city council members were backed by the chamber, former Mayor Mike McGinn added, and now they will have just two or three allies. "Amazon's spending helped unite and grow the left," he told AP. "The labor and social justice block gained seats in this election."Even Egan Orion, a chamber-backed candidate trying to unseat Socialist Council member Kshama Sawant, seemed annoyed at having "the shadow of Amazon hanging over me." Having Amazon's backing "was completely unnecessary" and "a big distraction from our closing arguments," Orion added.The city council clashed with Amazon in 2018 when it passed an "Amazon tax" to get large Seattle companies to help pay for homeless services. It later repealed the tax after fierce blowback from Amazon. The online retailer said it's pleased with Tuesday's election results. "We're looking forward to working with the new city council, which we believe will be considerably more open to constructive dialogue and making the decisions that need to be made in order for Seattle to be world-class city to live and do business," Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said in a statement.




from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/36KRFaS

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

REPORT: Furious Spike Lee Paces Aisle, Turns Back To Stage...

REPORT: Furious Spike Lee Paces Aisle, Turns Back To Stage... (Top headline, 5th story, link ) Related stories: REVIEW: Hostless Show Starts With Rock & Rolls Off Rails... Actor knocks borders, walls during speech in Spanish... Stage designed to look like Trump hair? 'GREEN BOOK' OVERCOMES BACKLASH, NABS BEST PICTURE... Top Critics Fume... LIST: WINNERS... Advertise here from Drudge Report Feed https://ift.tt/2SUpIKy
Post a Comment
Read more

Tiny Love Stories: ‘Who Was I to Deprive Him of Joy?’

By Unknown Author from NYT Style https://ift.tt/2UV7YAG
Post a Comment
Read more

The Ugly History of Dual-Loyalty Charges

When Representative Ilhan Omar recently complained about “the political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country,” many noted accurately that she had deployed a trope—dual loyalty—that had been used against Jews for years. But this accusation has a broader history in the United States, having been used against several religious minorities—including Muslims like Omar. Indeed, many battles over religious freedom have revolved around dual-loyalty claims. [ Read: Ilhan Omar just made it harder to have a nuanced debate about Israel ] In the 19th century, many attacks on Catholics stressed that these immigrants were pawns of a foreign power. In the 1830s, Samuel Morse—then a prominent painter and later the inventor of the telegraph—urged Americans to build “walls” and “gates” to keep out Catholic immigrants, who would always be loyal to Rome. Because these Catholic immigrants were decrepit —“halt, and blind, and naked”—they were easy to co...
Post a Comment
Read more