So was David Paterson right to change his mind about the AMD/GlobalFoundries project? By the time he became governor, the state was so far committed that it probably made sense to keep going, and the current economic activity there is helpful in a recession. But Paterson (a Democrat) said at yesterday's groundbreaking ceremony that he was genuinely persuaded to support the project much earlier, and that the people who persuaded him were two Republicans, then Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno and then-Gov. George Pataki.
When Pataki took his turn speaking at the event, he said the persuasion had included sending "hundreds of millions of dollars" to Paterson's Senate district (which was in Manhattan). At Paterson's news conference after the event, Channel 13's Bill Lambdin asked him about that, which Lambdin said a bit quizzically he presumed was a joke. The governor didn't address that part of the question, but went to make a reasonable case for the project, which I do not doubt he genuinely supports. Nor do I think his district got hundreds of millions of dollars. As Senate minority leader (as opposed to the Assembly speaker, who was in a position to demand that kind of tribute), he wasn't worth nearly that much. But spreading some grease around (for legal public purposes) is the common currency of Albany, and there's no reason to doubt it happened then. In any case, the Republican effort to persuade the then Senate minority leader turned out in the end to have been very much worth the trouble.
The deal's key player for AMD and GlobalFoundries was Chairman Hector Ruiz, who served as yesterday's master of ceremonies. This morning's Saratogian has this breakout quote from him: "We considered many locations, but the wonderful people of New York reached out to us." The only people he actually mentioned, however, were a bipartisan collection of political and business bigwigs, and I don't know many ordinary people who were anxious to press $1.2 billion-plus of public funds on his company, any more than they wanted to send hundreds of billions of dollars in the last year to banks and investment firms.
The pols' case is that they deal in the real world. I think the large public subsidy might have been justified if they'd put the plant in some depressed upstate city that needed it (as opposed to a forested, semi-rural area in upstate's fastest growing county). But, the pols would tell you, that wasn't going to happen. Business leaders want what they want. Just as GE's Jack Welch hated Schenectady and moved jobs out of there, so Ruiz was never going to put a chip fab in some downmarket upstate city. OK, I get that. Just don't tell me it's a sign of some higher wisdom. After Welch retired, GE rediscovered the virtues of manufacturing, and put a few hundred jobs back into Schenectady to develop wind energy. The past year's events have shown the substantial drawbacks in Welch's focus on financial services, as GE Capital's woes have dragged down the company's stock price. I'm sure he's doing all right, though. So are those Wall Street guys who got public funds to prop up their bonuses.
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