Are MassMutual Execs Funding MA AG Healey's 2022 Campaign?

In a May 6, 2022 press release, the Office of Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey quoted the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s 2022 candidate for Massachusetts governor as saying that “in Massachusetts we should be setting the path for an energy system that is equitable, reliable, and affordable—not one that pumps more money into gas pipelines and props up utility shareholders.”

Yet, ironically, on Oct. 17, 2022, the 2022 campaign committee of Massachusetts Attorney General Healey deposited $5,000 in campaign contributions from 5 individual executives of a for-profit corporation, MassMutual, which entered into an estimated $840 million transaction for the purchase and financing of natural gas assets located in Pennsylvania and West Virginia in September 2022. According to the Jones Day website:

“Jones Day represented Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company and MassMutual Ascend Life Insurance Company in connection with (a) the acquisition and financing of asset-backed notes and certificates the proceeds of which were used to acquire proved, developed, and producing ("PDP") natural gas assets in Pennsylvania and West Virginia and (b) the formation of a limited partnership and the subsequent acquisition of six proven-undeveloped natural gas wells located in Pennsylvania and West Virgina. “

MassMutual Chair, President and CEO Roger Crandall, MassMutual Vice-President John F. Kennedy, Mass Mutual General Auditor Dennis Stempel, MassMutual Portfolio Manager Tim Corbett and MassMutual HR Head Susan Cicco each made individual donations of $1,000 to Massachusetts Attorney General Healey’s 2022 campaign’s Healey Committee, according to Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance website data.

Coincidentally, as Jon Chesto noted in a Nov. 11, 2021 Boston Globe article, in 2018 Massachusetts state officials awarded the Springfield-based MassMutual company “tax credits worth $46 million over 10 years.”

Yet--unlike working-class homeowners and working-class tenants of all racial backgrounds in Massachusetts--the for-profit corporation, that 2022 Healey Committee Contributors Crandall, Kennedy, Stempel, Corbett and Cicco are executives of--owned over $22 billion in common stocks, over $117 billion in bonds, and over $18 billion in derivatives, on June 30, 2021. And during the first six months of 2021, MassMutual earned over $9.6 billion in insurance premium income and over $4.1 billion in net investment income, while paying only $131 million in federal income taxes.

In addition, the MassMutual company that state officials awarded “tax credits worth $46 million over 10 years”--at the same time 2022 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Healey was already an elected Massachusetts state official--ranked 123 on the Forbes 500 list of corporations and managed $228 billion in invested assets in 2020. And, as this writer previously noted in a July 30, 2022 Across Massachusetts Patch article, MassMutual may not be eager to pay very much in state or local taxes to end poverty in Springfield, Massachusetts in 2022, “but on May 28, 2021, through Glidepath Holdings Inc., MassMutual was eager to spend over $3.5 billion to buy the Great American Life Insurance Company and its subsidiaries.”

Coincidentally, the campaign committee supporting Massachusetts Attorney General Healey’s 2022 latest state office-seeking bid is not the only campaign committee which has deposited campaign contributions from MassMutual executives in its bank account during the last few years. On July 1, 2021, for example, the Boston Turnout Independent Expenditure Political Action Committee [PAC], that supported then-Boston City Council member Michelle Wu’s successful campaign to be elected as Boston’s Mayor, deposited a campaign contribution of $10,000 from a member of the MassMutual board of directors, Laura Sen (who lives in Brookline, MA), according to the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance data.