Corporate Welfare: $ 650 million to Goldman Sachs....to build its NYC Headquarters

Companies We Keep, and Pay For


And now, Condé Nast, which was granted $10.8 million in rent and tax breaks to move into a Times Square tower that was already heavily subsidized, is said to be having discussions with government officials about relocating downtown, into the tower planned as 1 World Trade Center. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has agreed to provide $1 billion in financing for the building.
The city has not decided if it will pitch in with taxpayer money to move companies from other parts of the city into the tower, but it has “a policy goal to help Lower Manhattan rebuild, and the new World Trade Center is a critical part of that,” said David Lombino, a vice president at the city’s Economic Development Corporation.

We all know that the bill has come due for lavish spending by the city and state: swelling public pensions, huge borrowing by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that bought next to nothing, government salaries that grew faster than inflation. There is another, off-the-book cost that is also being paid: billions in public incentives given to some of the richest companies in the world.

For more than 25 years, they have been distributed by mayors, with little oversight or control, as an exercise of their discretion when faced with threats by companies to leave town.
They were criticized as forms of corporate welfare — often by the mayors themselves — that simply shifted the burden to other, smaller taxpayers, most of them not as well-connected.
Many of the threats to leave were barely disguised feints, and sometimes not even that. Condé Nast, for instance, publishes some of the most exalted titles in the magazine business, and the chances that the company would move out of Manhattan are slim to none. Other businesses equally unlikely to leave the media capital — The New York Times Company, CBS, Reuters, NBC, News America, ABC, McGraw Hill, Viacom, Hearst — were also given public money.

But most of the recipients, especially of the larger deals, were in the financial industry. Goldman Sachs was given $650 million in city and state subsidies to build in Battery Park, and JPMorgan Chase was awarded $240 million for space in Lower Manhattan. Others that have been given public subsidies include the American International Group, or A.I.G.; Credit Suisse; Bear Stearns; Merrill Lynch; Bank of America; Citicorp (now Citigroup); Morgan Stanley.


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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/nyregion/16about.html?scp=1&sq=corporate%20welfare&st=cse

nt

The teabaggers never protest the greatest threats to life, liberty and freedom. Instead, the act as willing foot soldiers for their "free market" cause.

I'd like to immediately promote BP, Halliburton and Transocean to that list but there is a lot more room. Massey, Chevron, Xe, KBR, Dyncorp, Wellpoint. Maybe we should keep it simple and just go by industry. Oil/Coal/Gas, Finance, Insurance, Pharma, Agribusiness.

They share quite a few the same boardmembers anyway.

then again, who do you think occupies all those luxury boxes? Execs of Goldman Sachs and its ilk. :eyes:

This is just insane. No wonder they think they are the masters of the universe.

Gahhhhhh! This makes me sick.

by giving them three or four times as much in tax breaks. You never hear about the "free market" when a company is shaking down a community for subsidies or threatening to take those jobs elsewhere.