Ever since Amazon announced its plans to build its second headquarters outside Seattle in September, cities have been falling over themselves to secure the project. Touted as the urban investment opportunity of a generation, Amazon’s “Request For Proposals” is really a shakedown in broad daylight. And while it is always painful to watch someone grovel, the pain here is merely a side effect of a bigger economic malaise.

Information is slowly trickling out about the 238 bids officially submitted, each story more outrageous than the last. Chicago, for example, is reportedly offering over $2 billion in tax breaks and other incentives. That’s 40 percent of the estimated $5 billion that Amazon estimates it will cost to build its second headquarters. Not to be outdone, the state of New Jersey and the city of Newark are putting up a combined $7 billion in incentives — more than the value of the initial investment and well over $100,000 for each one of the 50,000 jobs Amazon says it will create. And then there’s Stonecrest, Georgia, which has offered to split off a piece of municipal land to create the new city of Amazon, Georgia and make Jeff Bezos mayor-for-life of this corporate fiefdom.

Incentives on offer range from old-fashioned tax breaks to more fanciful measures like “tax-increment financing,” where future property taxes attributed to an increase in real estate values tied to the Amazon development would return to Amazon. These promises of future benefits are often accompanied by public displays of affection: whether New York City lighting up its icons (including the Empire State Building) “Amazon orange” or the Kansas City mayor’s office hand-reviewing one thousand Amazon products.