Amazon says it will bring only 25,000 jobs to the D.C. area, but this understates the quantity and quality of its eventual Washington influence. It will take more than 25,000 people to support those 25,000 Amazon workers. These Amazon positions will be higher-level jobs, the kind that make Amazon officials part of the same powerful Washington networks as the higher-level political elite. And several other big companies have said that if all goes well for Amazon in Washington, they are likely to follow soon and substantially.
Once that starts to happen, corporations like Amazon won’t have to rely on the political elite to do their lobbying for them. The top Amazon officials living and working in Washington can themselves talk to the senator or staffer at the annual dinner for the schools they send their children to, or at the coffee shop in the neighborhoods that they will increasingly share.
Washington D. C. is taking a victory lap right now, after having won Amazon. The city no doubt thinks now it’s a new kind of leading metropolis—the center of government as well as an economic center. But Washington doesn’t realize that in becoming both, it is undermining the very democracy it stands for.
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