Neil deMause: The Website

I went to a city hearing on giving tax breaks to an alleged union-busting firm for new office space, and more or less lived to tell the tale:

Meetings of the Industrial Development Agency - the city agency in charge of approving discretionary tax subsidies to local businesses - are generally sleepy affairs. Unless sports teams are involved, the monthly board meetings typically attract a handful of business executives and policy wonks but little public attention.

This morning’s monthly IDA hearing, though, was widely anticipated for a different reason: One of the items on the agenda was $24 million in sales tax breaks on office and building materials to Thomson Reuters, the news-and-information-services giant created when the Canadian firm Thomson bought the wire service Reuters in 2008… [read more]

Under the guise of tax reform, New York’s mayor and city council speaker are trying to push through a loophole for large interstate corporations:

You might think that the middle of a recession spawned by massive corporate malfeasance wouldn’t be the best time to propose a giant tax break for corporations. But then, if you’re Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Council Speaker Christine Quinn, you might not. Crain’s reports today that the dynamic duo of City Hall has begun a major push to cut taxes for city corporations by $2.7 billion over the next decade, a gift that could eventually be worth more than half a billion dollars a year to city businesses.”… [read more]

Note: Obviously the last line of this article became outdated after the 3 p.m. coup in Albany.