New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has collected $9m (£6.6m) in unpaid fines from Amazon, which has been violating clean air regulations by leaving engines running on its parked vehicles.
His office announced the recovery of the money last week, days after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos appeared to criticise Mamdani’s push to tax the rich in order to fund education.
“Amazon is worth $2tn. Yet it did not deign to pay the millions of dollars it racked up in unpaid fines as its trucks illegally polluted our air and forced New Yorkers to breathe in their exhaust,” Mamdani said in a statement.
“We are going to collect every dollar they owe the people of this city.”
Lisa F Garcia, commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, said: “I applaud Mayor Mamdani and the Department of Finance for securing more than $9m in illegal idling fines from Amazon, which has long been among the top worst idling offenders in the city.”
In an interview with broadcaster CNBC last week, Bezos criticised New York’s public education system and said that even doubling his taxes would not help local teachers.
“If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, your packages would take six weeks to arrive,” he said.
Mamdani’s administration has prioritised enforcing existing laws against large companies as part of a bid to rein in corporate power and improve public finances. Earlier this month, his office said it had secured a record-breaking $31m (£22.9m) in penalties against negligent landlords.
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Mamdani’s administration has prioritised enforcing existing laws…
WTF has everyone else been doing?!?
Corruption.
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Accepting money from a lot of people they shouldn’t have been.
What a legend. He’s not even radical, but someone doing simple decent things seems radical when you’re so used to the rot.
Yeah, politicians like him should be norm and not the exception.
Make him the norm again - MHTNA!
Nope, that doesn’t fly, although the motto is great.deleted by creator
Mamdani for Norm - MafoNo? Nah, that doesn’t work either. But I agree with you, great Motto!
Previous Mayor Adams was caught up in a corruption scandal.
Ex-governor Cuomo had to resign over a sex scandal.
The GOP candidate was a local joke shock jock.
Mamdani was very lucky to be the best in a a weak field, and yet barely got over half the vote.
He knew he had to hit the ground running.
I can only imagine how much actual money is actually there to be taken, at the city, state and federal level if we just fucking enforced the rules.
If you include things like wage theft. Multiple Trillions.
Umm, I’m old enough to remember mail order, when some things did take six weeks to arrive. And you know what? We survived, somehow. I’d gladly go back to that world, with living wages for workers, affordable food, affordable housing. I don’t need cheap, plastic shit delivered in an hour to be happy.
In short, GFY Bezos.
Would 6 weeks be enough to give your drivers bathroom breaks? Or let them leave a burning warehouse? Or one that is in the path of a tornado? Not walk around the dead bodies of their fallen coworkers?
Ghouls on an unstable mountain of corpses shouldn’t throw stones.
Ghouls on an unstable mountain of corpses shouldn’t throw stones.
Why? No one has been holding them accountable for decades. There’s no downside for them.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
Bezos hasn’t been CEO of Amazon for the past five years. Great reporting.
Yup, totally destroyed the credibility of the whole article.
/s
I mean yeah reporter could’ve used the right term but Bezos still runs Amazon. He’s not separated from the company. Not sure why you have such an issue with the person using the term CEO vs chairman which in my opinion would be more confusing for the wider audience
In reality, the CEO has a much greater active role in a company. Calling Bezos the CEO of Amazon is both inaccurate and factually incorrect.
He’s literally above the CEO he pays someone to do work he doesn’t need to do anymore. But that doesn’t mean he’s not involved. He’s still the guy in charge
That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.
Yes it is. CEO is more day to day, he just doesn’t have to do that anymore. He’s the Executive Chairman and I believe the largest shareholder as well. He’s still completely active in the company.
Nobody in the world is going to misinterpret the difference between an executive chairman and a CEO. Neither you or I even know the specifics of what either role’s specific duties are. It’s literally irrelevant
I think you’re not holding journalists to a high enough standard.
A journalists job is to translate information for the masses. I don’t think referring to him as CEO is that damaging to the story
All that does is sensationalize it, which is inherently harmful.
Lmfao it literally doesn’t and is not harmful at all. What possibly could be harmful about calling the executive chairman a CEO?
It’s like mistaking the executive chef as the head chef or chef de cuisine.
From the outside nobody would know what the hell the difference is and to be honest it would be largely irrelevant.
Lies are harmful, end of story.
Stupidity, willful ignorance and splitting hairs is far more harmful.
You’re the type that would be more upset people are calling someone a slave owner instead of a slave driver than the fact there are slaves at all. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater
“the reporter chose to be wrong because a flashy headline was more important”
But you can’t eat clean air! What about the homeless! This is just what they want everypne mirandering around, like it even a shit to warrant. Doesn’t even.
Trying to following the logic, and sentence, here. Sorting out one problem means they’re not working on anything else? Getting money owed to the city isn’t good step toward spending that money on a different program? Or are you just having a complain because you’re never happy or perhaps paid to?
No, I promote my educational (f)art project by being an idiot to attract the attention of actual idiots and teach them about philosophy, spirituality, and mental health skills using targeted marketing the F-I mean, the CIA, that’s who I work with, theu trained me to do this, I think.
