Albany

Turns out that Gov. Andrew Cuomo is the rare politician who can unite us. All it took was bestowing billions on the company owned by the richest man on Earth.

Backlash to the Amazon giveaway is coming from the left and right, Democrats and Republicans, downstate and up. It is not often you see conservatives nodding in agreement with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Watching the New York City congresswoman-elect defended by Tucker Carlson on Fox News, as she was last week, was another rare twist.

Is it possible that Cuomo expected the deal to bring an Amazon headquarters to Queens would be met with widespread praise?

I wouldn't have believed him capable of such tone-deaf naivete, but he does seem surprised by the overwhelmingly negative reaction.

On Monday, Cuomo released a long essay — he called it an "op-ed"; some called it a screed — in which he defended the giveaway by attacking the integrity of its critics, including those in the media. He must have a mimeographed copy of Trump's playbook.

The essay/screed suggested that opponents of subsidizing the Amazon complex are centered among "the extreme conservatives and the socialists." Now, extreme conservatives have been a Cuomo punching bag for years. (You may remember that he once said they had no place in New York.) But I don't remember him targeting socialists before.

In any event, the Democratic governor argued that subsidies are business as usual in New York (part of the problem, I'd say) and that to characterize the deal as a giveaway is to ignore how it will eventually boost tax revenue or create jobs.

Cuomo didn't name any socialists who oppose the deal, but we can assume the reference was a shot at Ocasio-Cortez, who has described herself as a Democratic Socialist and had the gall to suggest that giving billions to Jeff Bezos' company might not be the best idea when New York City's subways are crumbling.

She's right, of course.

Cuomo did find an example to represent those dreaded extreme conservatives: The New York Post's editorial page. The governor added that media critics of the Amazon deal (The New York Times opposed it, too) are compromised because they compete with the Bezos-owned Washington Post and because some, including the Times, have benefited from government subsidies of their own.

The hypocrisy charge isn't entirely wrong, but Cuomo ignored that many critics don't oppose the idea of the incentives but the immense scale of the biggest such package in state history. Meanwhile, it's plainly deceptive to suggest that opponents of the deal have "hyper-partisan ideologies."

One of the loudest critics is state Sen. Michael Gianaris, a Democrat from Queens whose critique of the Amazon package seems entirely mainstream.

He's worried about the impact on his borough and the secrecy surrounding the negotiations. He thinks it's wrong that the Amazon site will be developed without community input. He doesn't believe tax dollars should be advantaging hugely profitable companies as small businesses suffer.

"This is robber-baron stuff," Gianaris said. "The corporations are deciding policy."

As Gianaris noted, Cuomo's argument is based on a faulty assumption: That Amazon would not have come to New York without the giveaway. There is no reason to believe that is true. Indeed, Amazon choose the Queens site, along with one outside Washington, over far-more lucrative offers.

Cuomo's essay never mentions Bezos' wealth or Amazon's profits. He doesn't mention the helipad New York has agreed to provide. Nor does Cuomo mention the unfairness involved in forcing existing New York businesses to subsidize a predatory competitor.

Last year, in a survey by the Institute of Local Self Reliance, 90 percent of independent retailers said Amazon is hurting them. In a 2016 survey of 3,000 independent businesses, online competition easily ranked as the greatest threat — ahead of health-care costs, access to capital and the difficulty of finding good employees.

It would be one thing if Amazon were destroying Main Street on its own. Fair competition creates winners and losers, and there is little doubt that Americans love online shopping and even Amazon itself — despite its poor treatment of workers, tax avoidance and promotion of creepy facial-recognition technology.

But it is unjust that Amazon's growth has been fueled by subsidies, and it is unconscionable that $3 billion from New York will further destroy what's left of our hollowed-out Main Streets.

Cuomo's Amazon package is about government helping to create a monopoly. It is yet another example of a global megacorporation using its influence to get perks no smaller company could receive. The deal is about the big getting richer, while the small wither away.

It is encouraging that so many New Yorkers, on the left and right, recognize why the Amazon giveaway is so wrong. If only Andrew Cuomo understood, too.

cchurchill@timesunion.com • 518-454-5442 • @chris_churchill