Amazon Archives - Public Seminar

Interviews

Fresh Hope for Labor

A conversation with labor historian Dave Kamper on the growing strength of American unions, as recounted in his new book, Who’s Got the Power?

March 12, 2026 • by Shea Dean and Dave Kamper

In his new book Who’s Got the Power? The Resurgence of American Unions (The New Press, 2025), labor writer and organizer Dave Kamper delivers a bit of good news in a dark time. “Much of the last half century has, for the labor movement, sucked beyond the telling,” he writes. ...

Corporations

Amazon’s Secret Utility Discount

The growing tendency of corporations hiding details of their subsidy deals

July 25, 2022 • by Pat Garofalo

Amazon also may have applied for a discount on the new facility’s power, but the relevant governing body—the New York Power Authority (NYPA)—refuses to either confirm or deny if Amazon submitted an application.This is the latest example of a troubling trend: noncompliance with public records law, in order to hide details of corporate ...

Corporations

Meet A Corrupt Company Town

Anaheim is a prime example of the nexus between corporate subsidies and public corruption

June 3, 2022 • by Pat Garofalo

Communities can take on the Amazons and Disneys of the world and win. We all just need to share the resources and tactics that make those wins possible....

Corporations

The Future of DC’s Antitrust Fight With Amazon

State attorneys general can challenge the damaging practices of the largest corporations in America

May 27, 2022 • by Pat Garofalo

Last year, Karl Racine, the attorney general for Washington, D.C., sued Amazon under the District’s antitrust laws. And his case was a novel one. While Amazon in the American zeitgeist is associated with low prices, Racine alleged that Amazon was actually using restrictive and unfair agreements with its third-party sellers ...

The Future of DC’s Antitrust Fight With Amazon

Corporations

Amazon Extracts Billions from Communities Globally

March 21, 2022 • by Kenneth Thomas

Last month, UNI Global Union and my organization Good Jobs First released a report detailing the subsidies Amazon.com, Inc. has gotten around the world. I was the lead author of the study. Months of research by our multi-lingual team found that the company has received at least $4.7 billion....

Amazon Extracts Billions from Communities Globally

Economy

New York’s Anti-Monopoly State of Mind

How and why the Empire State took center stage in the fight against corporate power

March 9, 2022 • by Pat Garofalo

I traveled up to Albany, New York, this week to help out with the unveiling of a bill in the state legislature there that would prevent New York officials from subsidizing Amazon’s warehouse network. According to Good Jobs First, New York taxpayers have gifted Amazon with nearly $400 million in ...

Economy

Piercing Amazon’s Veil of Secrecy

A community took on a secret Amazon deal — and won

February 22, 2022 • by Pat Garofalo

Usually I write about a lot of doom and gloom here, but today, it’s time for a happy story: A community in Frederick County, Maryland, caught wind of a secret agreement that was being negotiated between local leadership and Amazon to build some Amazon Web Services data centers, and made ...

Economy

2022 State Legislative Preview

Nine things I’m watching at the statehouse level this year

January 24, 2022 • by Pat Garofalo

Legislative sessions in most states either started recently or will start soon, so it seems like a good time to take stock of what’s happening at the state level and what I’ll be paying attention to in the coming year when it comes to corporate subsidies and the larger effort to ...

Technology

What’s Google Up To?

It says it turned down subsidies in three cities. What gives?

October 4, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

Tech giant Google recently announced that it bought a building in New York City in a massive $2.1 billion deal, which is the largest real estate purchase in the U.S. since the pandemic began. Google also said it would not avail itself of the corporate subsidy programs offered by New ...

Politics

A Better Way to Do Corporate Giveaways

How legislation would put a stop to the most senseless of senseless state competitions

March 8, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

_____ The debate around corporate tax breaks usually centers on a specific giveaway. Should Virginia have given hundreds of millions of dollars to Amazon for its so-called HQ2? Does Netflix really need $24 million, plus an undisclosed amount of property tax reductions, from New Mexico? But playing whack-a-mole and attempting to ...

New York City’s Sunnyside Yards, and Our Urban Future

Citizens are challenging high-tech megaprojects

September 16, 2019 • by Joseph Heathcott

Welcome to contentious New York City, where real estate rules, but residents engage in feisty, concerted, and highly underfunded opposition. While real estate interests have long called the shots in this town, the reign of global finance and development capital over the urban landscape is a product of the near ...

Uncategorized

The Weirdness of U.S. vs. AT&T

An important debate over media mergers, or just another attack on CNN?

March 23, 2018 • by David Lieberman

The first thing to recognize about the antitrust trial over AT&T’s $85 billion plan to buy Time Warner -- which begins this week at the U.S. District Court in D.C. – is how fundamentally weird the whole thing is. Few really understand why the Justice Department decided to challenge the deal ...