Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

BREAKING: “Middle class” now includes $1.75 million salaries!

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Herald reporter Jessica Van Sack gets a truly awesome quote out of Charlie Baker:

Baker said, “My kids are gonna have to find their way in the world the same way everybody else’s middle-class kids are gonna have to find their way in the world.”

He added, “No trust funds for the Baker kids.”

HAHAHAHA!!  Yeah, I’m sure Charlie Baker’s kids, with their dad’s $1.75 million salary, are in exactly the same boat as every other middle-class kid in Massachusetts, with their families struggling to pay the bills and whatnot.

Please.  This is exactly why Charlie Baker is such a surprisingly lousy candidate.  He is desperately trying to pretend to be something he isn’t: a regular, middle-class guy.  He should run as what he is: a wealthy, Harvard-educated, elite insider who knows a lot about state government and the health care industry (having spent years working for both) and (the story goes) has the tools to fix it.  

The electorate is not stupid, despite what wannabe politicians like Baker apparently think.  Voters rapidly sniff out phonies and punish them, as Mitt Romney learned in 2008.  The more Baker pretends to be just like the regular folks he wants to represent, the further he’s going to fall in the polls.

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  2. at least it was before this latest bankster scam

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    p>I’m going to have my kids until they are 45.

  3. This comment is pure malarky.

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    p>I refuse to believe that a man as well educated and as wealthy as Charlie Baker has not created at least one trust fund for which his children will be the beneficiaries after the death of his wife. Anyone with that kind of money sloshing around is going to be well aware of estate taxation — and will likely have consulted a good lawyer about minimizing tax duties.  

  4. Last I looked, he had resigned from Harvard Pilgrim last July.  I’m sure he’s hardly in the poor house, but at the moment at least he’s unemployed!

    • Let’s keep him that way! This guy is soooo not ready for prime time.

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      p>And I don’t mean, PR-wise. I mean, in actually ability to govern and lead, this guy will send us off a cliff.

      • Yes, even today there are constitutional duties she has.  It’s not all just waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace or the state coach.  She also collects a regular and taxable salary.

        • I wouldn’t exactly call it a job.

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          p>

          • She didn’t get the job by merit
          • She was, in fact, just given it
          • She has a few number of “constitutional” duties, with an army of servants to help her pull them off
          • No one can fire her, short of revolution

          • Of course it was inherited and stands for life.  That’s the way a monarchy works in most cases.  Nobody pretends that any little British boy or girl can grow up to be king or queen.  Don’t try to project American assumptions of meritocracy on what is called the royal FAMILY for a reason.

            • meritocracy in which one ends up being born Prince or Princess, American or otherwise. That is anethema to the very notion of a meritocracy.

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              p>Where American assumptions come into play — that such a thing is good or bad — is nothing I ever got into. I don’t begrudge the British their royal family, nor any of the dozen or so other European states which have a royal family. If Norway, Sweden, Spain and the Netherlands want to pour billions into one family’s expense account, that’s their business.  

                • are people you wish to besmirch, I guess that just goes to show what kind of bizarre, warped view of the world you hold.

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                  p>Note: I’ve never seen a Tea Party sign favoring an overthrow of the crown… which makes a lot of sense, even for Tea Partiers, given the fact we don’t have one.

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                  p>dcsurfer, you’re officially a crazy person. Please feel free to go pollute some other blog with your crazy POVs. I’d rather not scare away the reasonable, sane ones from BMG.

      • Campaigning for office =! unemployed. You’d be surprised at just what can count as a “campaign expense.”
      • Before he left Harvard Pilgrim, he was on track to earn much more than he had in his $1.75 million year.
      • He chose to run for governor and leave on his own. I don’t think he’d exactly be eligible to sign up for unemployment benefits…

      • I have no idea how it works for those up in the stratosphere… could he have fired himself and collected unemployment?

        • If he fired himself for absenteeism or incompetence, he could not collect. I don’t think he’d notice the presence or absence of a few hundred dollars a week anyway.

          • Deval Patrick..Just like you and me.

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            p>

            According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Patrick appears to have had high earnings during the years he served as general counsel at Coke. His salary at Coca-Cola began at $1.5 million in 2001 and increased to $2 million in his final year, 2004. He also received a $2.1 million in severance pay in 2005 shortly after he left Coca-Cola. $2.1 mill in severance, $10 to $20 million in stock options

            The SEC documents from that four-year period also reveal that Patrick accumulated about $2 million in stock from Coca-Cola and by sitting on the boards of directors at Reebok International Ltd. and United Airlines Corporation. Stories in trade journals, including the Atlanta Business Chronicle and Legal Times, reported that when he left Coca-Cola, in addition to the $2.1 million in severance pay, he had between $10 million and $20 million in Coca-Cola stock options.

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            p>http://www.boston.com/news/loc…

              • as I recall, he expressed gratitude at the opportunities given to him, as a child who grew up poor, and wanted to make sure everyone had the same sort of opportunities to take advantage of.

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                p>Really, so out of touch there…just makes you think the guy is SUCH an elitist snob!

          • you can collect up to $700.00 a week in Massachusetts.

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            p>other then quitting the only way you are not going to collect is to pull a weapon at work. You might even collect then.

            • to click the link I provided? Here’s another one, to the horse’s mouth:

              1. How much am I eligible to draw in weekly benefits?
              You may receive approximately 50% of your average weekly wage, up to a maximum of $629 per week.

               Where’s your source?

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              p>Your assertion about what disqualifies a person from collecting unemployment is equally unsupported and wrong.

              • My assertion is 100% correct on collecting benefits unless you pull a weapon or something else equally horrendous you will collect.

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                p>Drunk on the job collect, high on the job collect, move away collect, come to work late collect.

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                • My experience with employees over the years and correct. Employers just give up and don’t fight.

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                  p>BTW for your reference unemployment maximum $629.00 plus $25.00 per dependent plus $25.00 stimulus plan you can hit $700.00 with 2 kids.

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                  p>  

  6. You sure about that?  Seems to me we’ve had ample evidence to the contrary in recent months.  A prime example would be electing the regular guy in the pickup to the Senate so who can blame Baker for thinking that’s a winning strategy?

    • government insiders, but they are against business/corporate insiders too.  People have learned that when a candidate comes out and says he has turned businesses around and made them successful, it means they did so by either worker lay-offs or cuts in pay/benefits.  Pagliuca had a middle/working class jobs, jobs, jobs message during his campaign.  He touted himself as a successful business man who saved companies thereby creating jobs. Main St Americans know that often the most successful companies are successful because they pay low and have scarce benefits.  Who wants a job cutting, pay slashing, benefit taking corporate elitist as their Senator.  

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      p>Pagliuca was called out on it during this interview on wbur

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      His campaign slogan is “Pags = Jobs,” but the history of Bain Capital reveals a company that excels in the art of the leveraged buy-out. This is a process in which Bain often banks huge profits, but sometimes leaves acquired companies saddled with enormous debt. Some of those companies have been forced to make massive layoffs.

      The process begs the question: What’s the real bottom line at Bain Capital? Wealth creation for investors or job creation for workers? When asked, Pagliuca hedged.

      “Well, you know, that’s a complex question,” Pagliuca said. “What venture capital does is invest in new ideas and venture capital will fund them. Funding them is creating thousands of jobs because they essentially created a new industry.”

      But Bain Capital also buys out established businesses in old industries, such as KB Toys and Dade International, both of which resulted in the lay off of hundreds of workers. Pressed on this, Pagliuca hedged even more.

      “There’s investments in public companies and there’s debt in public companies, and there’s job creation and there’s job losses, and the job losses mainly come from competition, from global competition,” he said. “And those job losses in the United States now are 15 million unemployed. And there are 320,000 in Massachusetts. That’s why I got into this race, to try to reverse that.”

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      p>So let’s hope that the truth about Baker’s corporate money making “success story” that redistributed wealth from the working/middle class to the corporate CEO’s get plenty of air-time and blog time.

    • I don’t agree with the folks who voted for Brown, but I can easily see several good reasons for doing so.  Disagreement with Obama’s policies on the merits; disenchantment with the state Democratic establishment; disappointment with Coakley’s lousy campaign and a belief that it showed that she’d be an ineffective Senator — any of those, or any combination thereof, was a perfectly good reason to vote for Brown.  I don’t think all that many people voted for the Cosmo centerfold, or for the truck.

      • Disappointment at Coakley’s terrible campaign. If she had campaigned in the general the way she did in the primary, that would have made a very different election outcome, I think.

        • That’s when she lost the election for good, in my opinion.

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          p>And I can’t say I really blame people for voting against her given that assertion, in all honesty.

  7. Money gives options.  Properly handled, folks with more money can not only take good care of their own kin, but do good things.  For example, they can support artists and playwrights, build schools here and abroad; the more one has in my opinion, the more that can – and should be expected of you.  

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    p>What I mind, though is the phony poor mouthing of someone with millions of dollars claiming it is just as hard for them to pay bills as a teacher making $50k a year, or a Hyatt housekeeper with an outsourced job, or an assistant DA makinbg $35k.  That is just a form of lying and I happen to dislike lying.

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    p>So me calling Baker a millionaire doesn’t mean I don’t know Patrick is a millionaire – but then Patrick never pretended not to be a millionaire and, in fact, was shocked when people got offended when he acted like a millionaire.

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    p>It also makes me uneasy that both the Democrats and the Republicans are running Harvard-educated millionaires who have not experienced, personally, the attack on the middle class.

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    p>I would love to see a UMASS educated gubernatorial candidate.  One who spent some years as a Town Meeting Member, and worked to build a small business, whether an insurance agency, a restaurant, a construction firm – not their father’s business, either.  One he, or she started.  

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    p>A retired public-sector employee would still be better than a Harvard educated millionaire, in terms of real life experience, no offense.  On the other hand, public sector employees get pensions and routine health insurance at retirement.  The rest of us do not.

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    p>In fact, when my 60 year old husband was laid off because his entire working group was outsourced to India my brother, who works for the Federal Government called in a funk and asked “what about his pension.”  I had to patiently inform my brother that nonunion private sector jobs do not get pensions, there was no pension to lose.  Having been a Federal or university employee his entire working life my brother had no idea at all other people did not have pensions.  Never even occurred to him.

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    p>I shudder to think of all the realities that “never even occur” to Harvard Educated millionaires who have spent decades with people treating them like demi-gods.

    • While the Assistant DA’s are underpaid. Though given the quality of their services I think they are overpaid. I been involved in the periphery of two cases where they lost. One case they didn’t even speak loud enough to for the jury to hear them.

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      p>But then you have our state employees with their pensions.

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      p> Norfolk District Attorney William R. Keating, who is running for the seat of retiring US Representative William D. Delahunt, said yesterday that he has decided to collect his $119,000 state pension on top of the $174,000 congressional salary he hopes to begin receiving next January.

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      p>http://www.boston.com/news/loc…

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      • your comment wanders into incoherence. Perhaps you should have got some sleep instead.  

        • How about the starting salary stinks for DA’s  but the long term benefits of a 120K pension a year after you are 40 are amazing.

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          p>BTW 120K pension a year makes you at least a double millionaire.

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    • Patrick in no way at all started out a millionaire. As I recall, that happened quite late in his life.

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      p>So I doubt he’s totally out of touch with the middle class struggle.

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