We don’t want Amazon HQ2 here

John Bazemore | AP

A tract of land known to locals as The Gulch is shown Thursday, Jan. 25, 2018, in Atlanta. As Atlanta vies to entice Amazon to build its second headquarters on the site, local leaders are studying a proposal to build a $5 billion project with more than three times the office space of New York’s Empire State Building.

Lost in the chorus of economic development boosters and the daily drip…drip…drip of surveys touting Atlanta as a favorite to land Amazon’s second headquarters is a growing sentiment that the resulting income inequality, unaffordable housing and traffic congestion is not worth even the 50,000 jobs “HQ2” would bring.

The NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard) is bubbling to the surface with the launch of AtlantaAgainstAmazon.org.

The website, which provides few clues of about the group or its agendas, compares the HQ2 derby to “something like a televised Hunger Games death-match.” Based on the ownership of the IP address, the website, registered Feb. 1, appears to be hosted in Europe possibly by a Romanian company.

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The activists, who have taken their message public with a Twitter account and

colorful flyers

, view Amazon with suspicion— a company whose end-game, they say, is to replace its employees with robots and turn towns into the “live-work-playgrounds of the new rich.”

The Atlanta activists are not alone. Amazon’s high-profile HQ2 search has united an ideologically diverse group of dissenters, ranging from rightwing organizations linked to the Koch brothers to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), The Guardian notes.

Like the Atlanta group, Generation Opportunity, a conservative advocacy group for millennials associated with the Koch brothers, has launched a targeted digital ad campaign that also compares the HQ2 competition to Hunger Games. A Generation Opportunity spokesman said Friday his organization is not affiliated with AtlantaAgainstAmazon.