Karl Dean Sits on Left Aisle of Corporate Party Jet
Take Hospital Corporation of America, for instance. Even though HCA was already headquartered in Nashville, Dean was able to wrangle a deal that gives HCA a $3 million annual tax abatement for 20 years, plus moving expenses to relocate into a new headquarters in West Nashville. The year that Dean provided his corporate welfare deal to HCA, the company brought in over $30 billion and had a net profit of $2.45 billion.
And then there is the Omni Hotel deal, which provided Omni $103 million in tax breaks over 20 years, plus another $25 million to acquire the building site near downtown. And, of course, there are other sweet deals of less impressive proportions.
Dean's generosity with public funds for corporate welfare projects was just as striking when it came the white elites' final solution for schooling the children of the disenfranchised. In 2011, as public school buildings were crumbling and teachers were running around with garbage cans to catch the rain from leaky roofs, Dean ponied up 10 percent of Nashville's four-year school building budget, $10 million, for one KIPP, Inc. school in Nashville.
When Dean left his mayoral post, he joined the board of a national charter school privatization venture bent on spreading the Schools Matter: Karl Dean Sits on Left Aisle of Corporate Party Jet:
