I’m up here on Mount Olympus to check in on the gods who are behind the effort to bring the 2024 Olympic games to Boston. The air is a little thin for those of us who are oxygen breathers, but the ambrosia is quite fine.
From up here, you can spot Massachusetts in the distance as an “international beacon for drawing the best and brightest around the globe each year and as a cradle of innovation where you assemble to dream of, and plan for, a better future for all of us.” Each day, these gods busy themselves working “closely and collaboratively to better understand the intersection of our city and its citizens in planning a better tomorrow.” The gods say this job starts with “our greatest asset — our people,” so I thought it would be interesting to see the esteem with which some of them have held “our people” of late.
First up, Joseph “Jay” Hooley of State Street Corporation, who is the co-chair of the Boston 2024 Innovation and Technology Committee.
State Street Corporation, a large financial services company with headquarters in Boston, might be familiar to you from the Congressional debate on the Dodd-Frank financial services reform bill in 2010. State Street and other banks persuaded Senator Scott Brown, whose vote was critical to the bill’s passage, to champion a successful effort to loosen the so-called Volcker Rule, which prohibited banks from gambling in the market for their own profit (where the winnings might come, say, from the pockets of their own clients). Senator Brown said at the time that his advocacy on behalf of State Street and other banks would “protect Mass. jobs.” In the years since that statement, State Street has eliminated 2,960 jobs, including many from its Boston headquarters. Meanwhile, the compensation package for CEO Hooley has risen to $15.5 million.
Lest you think that Mr. Hooley’s company has not been responsible for creating any jobs, remember that the city of Boston granted State Street a tax break of $11.5 million, which led to Mr. Hooley’s decision to construct a new waterfront office building in South Boston. That construction project gave temporary employment to about 800 construction workers. Those workers were the employees of Suffolk Construction, whose president, John Fish, also happens to be the Chairman of Boston 2024.
Please pass the ambrosia back.
(Cross-posted at hesterprynne.net)
The Innovation Committee is such a joke. It’s a financial services CEO, a data storage CEO, a pharmaceutical CEO, and homeland security consultant Juliette Kayyem.
The Olympics always brings new intrusive surveillance/”security” technologies; maybe we’ll get new engineered financial products, too.
Oh my. You mean the handful of snakes planning and promoting this heist are old cronies? Say it ain’t so.
We have a hungry (to the point of starving) Massachusetts GOP, and that party has a sitting Governor. We have a government dominated by Democrats and filled with the stench of pervasive and entrenched corruption.
If I were Governor Baker, putting those two facts together — and having my staff aggressively pursue every resulting initiative — would be at the very top of my list.
I’d have my staff scheduling informal get-to-know-you conversations with their counterparts in the US Attorney’s office. I’d be having frequent conversations with the newly-elected Attorney General, exploring her perspectives on such matters. I’d have my people chasing every hint of a lead connecting the many unsavory elements of the casino industry to Mr. DeLeo. I’d have an army of interns digging through the state’s many housing authorities, looking for names and numbers to match up with Democratic Party donor lists. I’d have more people doing the same with the attorneys and physicians who handled the many disability and pension claims over the past eight years.
The appearance (and, sadly, fact) of pervasive corruption is a dominating factor in the resistance of Massachusetts voters to any increase in taxes. The numerical domination of the Democratic Party in state government means that it is a statistical likelihood — approaching a certainty — that any corruption found will be DEMOCRATIC corruption.
Our party’s happy tolerance, enabling, and often outright embrace of political corruption (“it’s just politics”, “patronage has always been part of politics”, etc.) has created a deliciously sweet low-hanging fruit for Mr. Baker.
I will be astonished if he does not pluck and savor it.