Amazon offers $1 billion for electric bills the House already voted to shift onto Big Tech

…(cont) Ten days before Tuesday's meeting at the White House, a separate filing had already run through the same building: Common Dreams reported Sept. 19 that Big Tech is collecting tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks for data-center investments the companies were already going to make, on public land the Bureau of Land Management is reviewing across six Western states. Tuesday, the president told the tech executives gathered there, Amazon's chief executive among them, to make the communities happy. Friday, Amazon made its announcement.

One billion over five years comes to $200 million a year, nationwide — total, not per town, split across every community on Amazon's list, however many that turns out to be. Set it beside what is not divided: the generator count at a Microsoft-backed site in Vineland, New Jersey, 45 of them running without permits, by a Floodlight and Guardian drone count in August. Set it beside Texas, where the attorney general opened a water-use investigation in September because the data centers there have not been reporting how much they draw.

The House already wrote the fix. It just declined to require anyone follow it. The billion is the number Amazon chose to publish. The bill is the number the House chose not to pass with teeth. Those are two different documents, and only one of them has a signature that counts, hon.