LI
STEN TO SHIRLEY KRESSELL
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Shirley Kressel was unable to find work as a landscape architect in Boston due to her activism.
While Kessel asked too many questions for her chosen profession, she asked just the right amount for the profession that chose her.
A journalist’s job is to follow the money, and there are few who do it better than Kressel.
In Boston, a significant amount of public money ends up in a quasi-governmental agency called the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA). Among the problems with the BRA is that it lacks oversight, according to Kressel.
“The city councilors were sent to their room with milk and cookies in 1960 [by the BRA] and have been scratching their heads looking for a job ever since, because they don’t have a say over any of the important things in the city,” said Kressel at last weekend’s National Conference for Media Reform in Boston.
Kressel’s columns appear in the South End News where readers are treated to her brave and biting prose.
(“An RX for city’s finances,” July 2, 2008) “City Council has finished another budget review, an exercise in which, unfortunately, few councilors and even fewer citizens participate. And now that it’s all over, we still know little about the outlay of our $2 billion budget.”
(“A sad dream,” April 5, 2010) “[We see] the preponderance of public officials practicing the worst kind of corruption: willful ignorance. As Upton Sinclair said, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'”
(“No more handouts,” June 5, 2008) “JP Morgan Chase is one of the biggest companies in the world, with more than $20 trillion dollars in assets under management. This unimaginably wealthy conglomerate is actually threatening that without $2 million, spread over 14 years ($140,000 a year, from Boston’s taxpayers, and another $2 million from the state, it cannot move from downtown to the Seaport and instead, will move to Braintree. Braintree! Well, if the world’s titan of corporate capital has an opportunity to enter that suburban bastion of corporate power and still save the shareholders a few pennies, I say, go for it! JP himself would surely be proud of such a shrewd bargain.”
(“Stop the Liberty Mutual tax breaks,” March 16, 2010) “The record for ‘job creation’ by tax breaks is dismal, here and nationally. Raytheon, Fidelity, Evergreen, and countless others have received huge amounts of money for jobs, and then either laid off workers or moved them away.”
“Paul O’Neill, former CEO of ALCOA and U.S. Treasury Secretary, [said], ‘As a businessman I never made an investment decision based on the tax code. If you give money away I will take it, but good business people don’t do things because of inducements.’
“On March 14, 2010, the Globe published a scathing investigative report of the ‘job creation’ tax breaks in Massachusetts, confirming that subsidies merely give corporations money to do what they were going to do anyway. The effect is usually the opposite: when public services are starved and quality of life declines, businesses leave.”
Related Links: ShirleyKressel.com