Amazon In Crystal City 'Threatens' America's Roots: Columnist

ARLINGTON, VA -- Amazon's decision to locate its second headquarters in Crystal City was met with cheers from local officials who offered $819 million in incentives to get it. But a new op-ed in Politico by a local law professor puts the move in a different light: it "threatens the Founders' vision for America," he wrote.

David Fontana, a professor of law at the George Washington University School of Law, wrote that the geographic separation of Big Business from Big Government is essential to American democracy, and that separation is being eroded with the move of online retail behemoth Amazon to a spot just across the river from the White House and the U.S. Capitol.

"[The Founders] designed the United States with this principle in mind—and for much of American history, it has stuck: We have kept our biggest corporations out of our our capital," Fontana wrote.

Analysis: Big government and big companies have always been separate — and the fathers of our country wanted it that way https://t.co/Nxs0LEzcti
— POLITICO (@politico) April 13, 2019

Amazon set off a nationwide bidding war when it announced that it would be placing a second headquarters -- which they said would be just as big as its current one in Seattle -- in some North American city. Few were surprised when the company announced that Crystal City would win the bid as rumors abounded that owner Jeff Bezos -- already a D.C. resident and owner of the Washington Post -- would want to put the HQ in spitting distance of Capitol Hill.

Fontana went on to say that Amazon's arrival shows a growing intertwining between the government and businesses who spend millions of dollars lobbying to bend the rules in their favor.

"The city no doubt thinks now it’s a new kind of leading metropolis—the center of government as well as an economic center," he added. "But Washington doesn’t realize that in becoming both, it is undermining the very democracy it stands for."