BOB MCMANUS: With Amazon gone, everyone sees that Emperor Andrew has no clothes.
Emperor Andrew has no clothes — and Amazon noticed.
Or perhaps Jeff Bezos was channeling George Bernard Shaw — “I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and the pig likes it” — and decided that, whatever the upside of a major presence in the Big Apple, the cost of doing business here was just too high.
Either way, arrivederci Amazon!
What’s astonishing is that the digital dynamo decided to come to Queens in the first place.
Isn’t the bulk of Gov. Cuomo’s economic-development varsity — including his as-close-as-a-brother top aide — on its way to prison because of the team’s first-term pocket-lining? Haven’t all of his grand plans flopped spectacularly, one after another and usually mired in scandal?
And then there is Mayor de Blasio, a party to the Amazon deal and a fellow who spent most of his first term under investigation for corrupt practices; who has a kindergartener’s attention span; and who nobody takes seriously anyway — to say nothing of trusts.
Why would any self-respecting company want to do business in such an environment?
That is, in a culture where a signed, sealed and delivered agreement traditionally is just a starting point for the so-called community-benefits-agreement shakedown — the process where local politicians attempt to squeeze cash and other considerations from good-faith investors.
And, sure enough, local pols began circling the deal the instant it was announced — piously preaching policy concerns, but clearly on the make for extracurricular advantages. It’s a tradition, don’t you know.
Thing is, when you’re one of the world’s most significant economic engines, you don’t have to play by local rules.
So Bezos bagged it.
It’s also a lesson to other pols, in other places in the future, not to get too greedy.