Remember Him When You're Stuck in Traffic: Pennsylvania's Lieutenant Governor

Commuting around Philadelphia is expensive, unpleasant, and time-consuming.  But Lieutenant Governor and former Northeast Philadelphia State Senator Mike Stack recently came close to arriving at an ingenious fix for the problem.  

Too bad Stack himself would have been almost alone in benefiting from his proposed solution.  Reportedly, he tried to secure the insertion of a provision in the annual budget bill that would give him the legal authority to force traffic to get out of the way so that a car in which the Lieutenant Governor was a passenger could pass through unimpeded.

This special rule would not have applied only in an emergency, but all the time.  Basically, the people who Stack would have been allowed to force all other drivers off any road in Pennsylvania for his own convenience.

Nine states don't have a separate office of Lieutenant Governor, perhaps because people there don't like to waste money employing one.  In our state, the office exists to give some political worthy a fat salary, personal staff, and a state-leased vehicle.  The incumbent's function, if it can be called that, is to attend ribbon-cutting events.  Stack apparently believed that the office should come with power to push around ordinary people, and figured that the state's roads were a good place to accomplish this.  (He was recently quoted as saying, "PennDOT is the best," and has got to be one of the few people in the state who thinks so.)

Fortunately, if the news report about the matter is correct, state legislators and Governor Tom Wolf decided not to give Stack the privilege the desired.  Unless Stack manages to get the provision slipped into another law, he may be forced to sit in traffic with the rest of us.

Roadways in Philadelphia are congested. and the major ones seem like permanent construction zones.  Despite that, they're often in disrepair.  Pennsylvania's taxes on gas and diesel fuel are, at the time of this writing, the country's highest.  Gas tax revenues are being used to repair the state's highways, but after decades of neglect, improvement is very slow.  Roads in the city deemed too unimportant to be targeted for this money (the vast majority of roads here) get barely any attention.  The only consistently well-maintained road, the Turnpike, has seen tolls rise for nine years in a row to high levels far out of line with turnpikes in other states.  It's no illusion that Turnpike tolls nearest to Philadelphia are the most expensive.  The rest of the state likes it that way.  If you drive into Philadelphia, you'll pay massively for parking.  If you think you can avoid trouble by not taking your car, most people familiar with SEPTA, the public transit system, would tell you to think again.  It isn't good even when it's running at its best, and it hasn't been at its best lately.

Political connections shouldn't be the ticket to getting around hassles like these that ordinary people must face everyday.  Rather than trying to add more comforts to their own privileged lives, politicians should be thinking about how to help other people.  

But what should happen isn't always what does happen.  In 2013, Stack, some relatives, and James Anderson (the head of a big construction firm that often performs services for public agencies in Pennsylvania, and a man whose name appears on the "contributions" schedules of several local politicians' campaign finance filings) reportedly came close to profiting from an interesting land deal.  A company that they owned, known as the Beach Street Corporation, had somehow acquired more than a million square feet of riverfront land at 2001 Beach Street for $1 in September 2008, according to the city's online property tax database.

Casino gambling had been legalized in Pennsylvania in 2004, and two of the casino licenses were mandated to be issued for casino sites in Philadelphia.  Licenses were awarded in December 2006, but controversy persisted over where casinos would be built.  Casino operator Steve Wynn reportedly wanted to buy the Beach Street Corporation's land and, with one of the two Philly licenses, build a casino.  Wynn was slated to pay a lot of money for the site, enough to net many millions of dollars for the Beach Street Corporation's owners.

At some point in the process, Wynn must have noticed that our region would soon have so many casinos that the one he planned might lose money.  (Incidentally, despite recent interest, only one casino, the Sugar House, has been built so far.)  When the Wynn deal fell through, the Beach Street Corporation continued to hold the land.  According to the city's property tax database, it still does.  But without a casino deal in the offing, the site, which is in an area surrounded by old warehouses and industrial sites on the Delaware River side of I-95, wasn't worth anything like what the Wynn deal might have yielded.

In July 2016, State Senator John Sabatina, an ally of Stack's and his successor for his old Senate seat, announced that he had helped steer a state grant for planning for riverfront development to the Delaware River City Corporation (DRCC).  According to the DRCC's webpage, its chairman is former Congressman Robert Borski. James Anderson sits on the DRCC's Board of Directors, which also includes two City agency managers, another from the Port Authority, and a proxy for City Councilman Bobby Henon.  (The board's other members own or manage local businesses.) 

The DRCC is not well-known to people in Northeast Philly despite the influence it wields here.  It will use the grant to update the "master plan" for the Delaware River Greenway.  The Greenway is a public park project many years in the making.  When completed, it's supposed to stretch along the waterfront from Port Richmond to the Bucks County line.

Currently, the Greenway plan doesn't call for it to extend quite so far to the south as the Beach Street Corporation's property.  But plans can change, and Sabatina's grant is intended to pay for changes of some kind in the Greenway plan.  One can easily imagine changes that might favorably impact development prospects for the Beach Street Corporation's idle land. For instance, the Greenway's planned route could be extended to reach the property.  Or plans for access to the Greenway could be changed to favor the property.  Either way, the property's value and development potential would increase.

I don't know whether Stack, his family, or any of his friends are currently the beneficial owners of the Beach Street Corporation, as the Inquirer reported they were in 2013.  But Anderson's name is listed as president of the Beach Street Corporation on the state's corporate entities search page.  And Stack has expressed interest in the recent Greenway grant.  A post on Stack's Twitter account thanked Sabatina "4 securing vital funding 2 update N. Delaware waterfront."

It would be nice to see the Greenway project completed.  It has been talked about for years, but implemented only in spots, and a trail that exists only in spots leaves something to be desired.  A completed riverfront trail would be great for local recreation.  It would attract people to visit and to live in its vicinity.  

Changing plans for the Greenway might actually push its date of completion farther into the future, and cost more money.  Any changes made mainly for the benefit of a few well-placed people could make the plan worse, rather than better, from the public's point of view.  And the idea that public projects might be changed to aid people who know people, rather than the public at large, is objectionable in itself.  The project is supposed to be a Greenway, not anybody's way into the green.

Here's hoping that whatever the DRCC does with its recent grant, and with its plans for the Greenway, is done solely in the public interest and done well.  And here's hoping that Stack has better luck in the future avoiding traffic snarls, even if he didn't gain the right to blow past them.  I'd hate to think that any of the very important things the Lieutenant Governor does might be delayed.

Long Lines and Late Trains: SEPTA Rides Its Passengers

Few should have been surprised when it was revealed last month that the new, custom-made regional rail cars that SEPTA has been purchasing for the last few years to replace its aging fleet all have faulty welds that pose a threat to safe operation.  More surprising is SEPTA's recent claim that its decision to force people to wait through lines to pay fares before even getting to the very late, jam-packed trains during the evening rush hour is an "issue of equity" and "fair treatment."  

Massive overcrowding due to a third of the system's rail cars being out of service made it impossible on some trains for conductors to walk up the aisle, collect fares, and inspect passes.  A SEPTA spokeswoman suggested on the evening news that some riders actually contacted the transit agency to demand that fares be collected for the miserable service being provided.

For the record, I'm not one of the riders who insisted that SEPTA charge for the privilege of riding trains that are often twenty, thirty, or forty minutes late, with all possible space for sitting or standing occupied by sweating, miserable commuters, and with some people turned away and told to wait to pay for similar space on the next late and overcrowded train.  Nor do I know any other riders who demanded that fares be collected.  (The fares, by the way, have been continually raised by SEPTA when energy costs were peaking, but since those costs have come down, SEPTA has never broached the subject of reducing its fares.  It has only postponed another increase.)

Perhaps SEPTA was telling a fib.  No one asked to pay it money.  It just needed a way to collect without having to acknowledge that the payment of full fares would still yield terrible service.  Of course, some people might question whether the cause of "equity" and "fair treatment" is really served by making people pay for a service that isn't worth the cost.  But that, apparently, isn't the kind of equitable treatment SEPTA is concerned about.

SEPTA's board of directors, like those of many other public entities in our region, has long been dominated by people selected for their political connections.  By law, elected officials appoint the board, and appointees aren't required to possess any particular skills.  Without such a requirement, the only criteria that applies to selecting appointees is loyalty to elected officials.  

Alas, toadies and hangers-on may find it challenging to run the complicated public entities they direct.  Buying decent equipment for a railroad sounds like one of many activities involved in running a public transit agency that might be beyond the ken of SEPTA's board. Lately, it has proven to be so.

Why Do Northeast Philly Politicians Want to Bankrupt the Catholic Church?

The monsignor at my parish church in Northeast Philadelphia had some good news to share, more than usual, in fact.  He said that the Catholic Church had lately dodged a bullet aimed at it by state legislators in Harrisburg.  He was partly right about that, for reasons I'll explain below.  

But when the monsignor told the congregation that their calls and letters to local state legislators had, as he put it, "made a difference" in securing the removal of an anti-Church provision from a pending piece of legislation, he was being too kind.  In fact, local legislators ignored their Catholic constituents' calls and letters.  Members of each of the three political factions in our part of Philadelphia who sit in the state legislature-- the Democrats tied to the Boyle brothers, the Democrats connected with John Sabatina, and the Republicans-- all voted wrong on the anti-Church provision.

The provision in question concerns how long a person has to bring a lawsuit against the Church alleging that they were abused before reaching age 18 by a priest or other Church employee.  Current Pennsylvania law gives people twelve years, until they reach age 30, to bring a lawsuit alleging that they were abused as a child.  Both the Pennsylvania House and Senate have passed bills that would give people twenty more years, until they reach age 50, to bring suit against the Church.  The retroactivity provision included in the House bill but omitted from the Senate bill would apply this change not only prospectively to cases that arise in the future but retroactively.  That means that people who have remained silent about abuse they claim to have suffered in the 1970s and 1980s-- people who could no longer sue under current law-- would be allowed to sue the Church now.

If adopted, this anti-Church provision could cause Catholic dioceses across Pennsylvania, including the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, to go bankrupt in the coming years.  Parish churches and schools would fold.  Charity work by a Church that is one of the biggest charitable organizations in the state would be curtailed.  Church property would be sold off to pay creditors.  It seems unthinkable, but it has happened elsewhere, and it could happen here.

It's well known that a child sexual abuse scandal has plagued the Church in recent years.  Over many years, a very small percentage of Catholic priests inflicted serious harm on some children with whom their ministry brought them in contact.  Very rightly, many of those abused as children have sued the Church.  Suits against dioceses throughout Pennsylvania and the country have proliferated in recent years, and many victims have been justly compensated.

As noted above, both the House and Senate bills would give future abuse victims until age 50, rather than age 30, to sue the Church.  20 extra years is a long time by any human measure.  It's an extremely long time when it comes to proving something in court.  Current law hasn't stopped abuse victims from obtaining compensation.  Whatever social stigma used to attach to accusing priests and other authority figures of wrongdoing of this nature is long gone.  People haven't had trouble making accusations in the twelve years the law currently allows.  In fact, some dioceses have gone bankrupt as a result of the many payouts made to abuse victims.

In the case of abuse allegedly perpetrated by a priest, the priest may well have died by the time a person abused as a child reaches age 50, leaving the priest unable to testify in court.  Even if the alleged abuser remains alive, evidence gets stale over time.  Witnesses' memories fade and physical and documentary evidence is lost or destroyed.  The Church and other institutions to which the proposed legal changes will apply will have to keep detailed records dating back an additional 20 years to have any hope of mounting a defense if false claims are made.  

Adding 20 years to the statute of limitations may thus encourage false claims.  But it has the support of both houses of the legislature. The bills they passed were not identical, though, so no bill will be sent to Governor Tom Wolf for his signature unless agreement on identical language is reached. If they manage to agree, Wolf would probably sign the bill into law.

The retroactivity provision in the House bill was left out of the Senate's bill, which resulted in the difference between them.  The bill attracted surprisingly little controversy as it moved through the House months ago.  Church leaders were either not paying attention, or hoped that the bill would fail without their intervention.  Either way, they did not call for a campaign against it, and only a few people who saw its harmful potential contacted their legislators.  When the bill reached the Senate, though, Church leaders like the monsignor told Catholics to call and write to their Senators.  The Senate's Judiciary Committee chose to eliminate the retroactivity provision, and the whole Senate did not restore it before it passed its bill.

The monsignor was right to be happy about the Senate's action, but it didn't fully resolve the retroactivity issue.  The conference committee may still agree to include that anti-Church provision in the bill it sends back to both houses.  Then, it would be up to the Senate to decide whether it could accept the bill with retroactivity included.

Although I think that changing the statute of limitations for cases that arise in the future won't serve the interests of justice, I can understand why it's likely to happen.  The Church waited too long to change its personnel policies to prevent child abuse, and legislators like to be seen to do something about widely publicized problems.  The Church appears to have made the needed changes in is personnel policies to reduce the incidence of abuse, and it can change its recordkeeping policies going forward to at least attempt to protect itself from false claims.

But to change the statute of limitations retroactively is a different matter.  It would expose the Church to much more legal liability than it faces now at the stroke of a pen.  Catholic dioceses across the state may well have discarded records that they would need to defend against allegations of abuse that might have no basis in fact.  Practically anyone who was a child 40 years ago and crossed paths with a now-deceased priest could sue alleging that they were molested way back when.  Often, it would be their word against no one's, with little other evidence available either to support or refute the claim.  The Church would have to litigate endlessly and would lose some cases to fraudulent claimants, with dire consequences for its finances and its future.  In short, retroactively changing the statute of limitations is unfair.  It may also be unconstitutional, and the precedent that such a change would set has worried business groups the members of which think that other statutes of limitation might be retroactively undone in the future.

Until the bill is finally disposed of, Catholics should keep contacting their legislators.  Unfortunately, those in Northeast Philly who have contacted them already have so far been ignored.  Local legislators from three political factions in our area ignored the pleas of their Catholic constituents and cast their votes to include the provision in the bill.

State Senator John Sabatina doubtless received numerous calls and letters as Catholic voters throughout his district were urged to contact him.  Although he is a Church member, Sabatina ignored those pleas.  As a member of Senate Judiciary Committee, he voted to include the retroactivity provision in the legislation.  Luckily, a majority of Sabatina's committee colleagues recognized that the bill was unfair, probably unconstitutional, and likely to wreck the Church, and they voted to remove the retroactivity provision.  When the bill reached the whole Senate, it was clear that most senators would not support putting the retroactivity provision back into the law, but Catholics in Northeast Philly have other senators, not Sabatina, to thank for that.

A Sabatina understudy and another Church member, Matt Darragh, is running for State Representative.  Darragh is a Democratic committeeman in the 66th Ward, where the Democratic Party is led by Sabatina's allies.  One of the two ward leaders there works in Sabatina's office.  The other was Darragh's boss at the state Auditor General's office. (Good luck getting a job in that office straight out of college, as Darragh's website says he did, it you aren't the stooge of such people.) Darragh's campaign appears to rely on groups that also donate to Sabatina, and his published statements conform with positions taken by Sabatina. While Darragh hasn't published a stance on the retroactivity provision, he seems otherwise beholden to Sabatina. I doubt that he would do things differently.

That, however, is no reason to vote for Darragh's opponent Martina White, the incumbent and a Republican.  In the House, she voted to amend the bill to add the obnoxious provision, then voted for it on final passage in the whole House.  The House passed the bill before Church leaders paid much attention to it.  But the people who argued for the bill didn't hide their intention to subject the Church to big damage lawsuits.  The bill's potential to ruin the Church financially should still have been clear to White and to other House members.

But White, also a member of the Church, voted for retroactivity anyway.  Then she feigned surprise when Church leaders grew alarmed as the bill moved to the Senate and told those in attendance at masses to contact their legislators.  "Choking back tears," White told the Philadelphia Inquirer how, after the vote, she faced a hostile reception from priests at some parishes in her district.  Her unconvincing sob story concluded with her accusation that the Church wasn't living up to its reputation for "acceptance and forgiveness."  If White knew or cared that the Church had these qualities, it's a wonder that she voted to bankrupt it.

And what of the third political faction, the Democrats led by Congressman Brendan Boyle and State Representative Kevin Boyle?  The Boyles, too, are Catholics.  But Kevin Boyle voted to add the retroactivity provision to the House bill, then voted for it on final passage.  Like White, Boyle did so before the Church campaigned actively against the bill.  But that doesn't excuse his support for a measure that threatens the earthly existence of the Church, its schools, and its charitable activities in Pennsylvania.  Fifteen of his House colleagues had the courage to stand up against an unfair bill.  He didn't.

What do you make of a situation in which politicians representing every political faction in an area feel free to ignore the interests of a potentially decisively influential bloc of voters?  To me, it's one among many reasons why a new, more responsive political grouping needs to emerge and sweep the three rotten existing ones aside.  Until that happens, voting in local races isn't worth my time or yours.  Once a Boyle Democrat, a Sabatina Democrat, or a Republican from the Northeast gets elected, they care only about a few donors.  Northeast Philly needs an approach to politics that is less about money than about people.  None of these three groups can deliver it.

Bernie Sanders and Reform: A Man and a Movement Part Ways in Philadelphia

Events in Philadelphia during the Democratic National Convention, which got underway on Monday, have exposed a defect in the way that the media has portrayed close to half of the people who voted in the Democratic presidential primaries.

The idea that the millions of Democrats who voted for Bernie Sanders were merely unthinking followers of a man was never very convincing.  But the news media kept characterizing them as "Bernie Sanders supporters," and nothing more.

On Monday in Philadelphia, that claim and that idea never looked more false.  Conspicuous inside the Convention were delegates for Sanders who were clearly unwilling to fall in line behind Clinton.  Many of them held signs that demonstrated their continuing support for Sanders and opposition to Clinton. 

Outside the Convention, in spite of sweltering heat and obstacles erected by the city reminiscent of the miniature police state it created for the Pope's recent visit, thousands also protested against the nomination of Clinton.  The protesters regard her devotion to a rigged political system and an unfair economy as akin to that of big-business Republicans.

Lest anyone should mistake Sanders' primary voters for blind followers of a leader, a crowd of them booed Sanders himself when he urged them to set aside their principles to get into the gutter with Clinton.

Sanders won as many votes as he did because he spoke for ideas that the mainstream of both major parties had long shunted aside.  Sanders' platform rejected a politics that forced voters to choose between two groups of self-interested rich people who could care less whether ordinary people live or die.  

Instead, Sanders called for restoring influence over the political process to ordinary Americans.  He also demanded that government intervention in the economy to make the outcomes it produced more fair for ordinary people.  

Sanders' demands for economic and political fairness reminded me of a time before the Clintons became dominant figures in the Democratic Party.  Back then, before the party's leadership turned its mainstream into nothing more than a second party of big business, it was possible for politicians like Sanders to occupy leading positions in the party.  

Sanders' campaign sounded a very different note from the trickle-down policies catering only to big business and the richest Americans that both the Republican and the Democratic Parties have pursued for a generation and more.  For people who demanded a fair political process and a fair economy, he was a hero.  For all the Clinton campaign's talk of making history, Sanders broke through a glass ceiling constructed by the Clintons' big-business wing of the party that had shut genuine opponents of corruption and privilege out of the Democratic Party's leadership.

Sanders led the many people animated by these ideas as far as a partisan politician could.  But his partisanship and the principles he espoused came into conflict on Monday. It's no surprise that many of his supporters were disappointed, and resolved not to do what he asked of them.  

Indeed, for people who sacrificed time and money and made strenuous efforts on Sanders' behalf, his apparent sellout to Clinton in exchange for easily forgotten platform promises was in some ways deeply offensive.  With the primary process already marred by a system of "superdelegates" designed to make a Clinton victory seem inevitable from the start, documents recently leaked on Wikileaks revealed that Clinton's allies in the Democratic National Committee also effectively worked to rig the primaries in Clinton's favor, and practiced just the kind of politics condemned by Sanders..

Those who worked hard for Sanders thus saw their work thwarted illegitimately by their own party's leaders.  Now, Sanders has asked them to vote for a candidate whom they had long regarded as a supporter of a rigged economy and politics after she essentially cheated to defeat them.

Donald Trump won't see Sanders' primary voters will back him in droves.  But neither will Clinton.  Until someone else is willing to stand up for the principles Sanders stood for during his campaign, they'll be there waiting like a fallen standard for someone else to pick up and carry forward.  Sanders' campaign showed that when that new person comes along, he or she will have a large following.

Clinton and her friends can be expected do everything possible to prevent the rise of anyone who might take Sanders' place at the national level.  Both Hillary and Bill Clinton built their political careers in important part on the votes of people who felt that they had nowhere to turn after the Clintons marginalized Democratic leaders who stood for ordinary people against big business.

Still, demand for the platform Sanders advocated will persist, and demand has its way of encouraging supply.  In time, someone will surely try again to deliver the goods.

------

At the local level, it might be too difficult or time consuming for politicians of Clinton's ilk to stop every reformer.  What might that mean for Philadelphia?

People here are jaded, and many don't think the existing bosses can be overthrown even by democratic vote.  Ballot access requirements, the silent treatment from local news media, and property damage, intimidation, and physical violence are all likely to stand in the way of any serious effort to clean house at the top.  

The city has also no credible opposition party.  The Republicans here are tiny, distrusted, and as rotten as the Democrats.  The most likely place for any movement along the lines suggested by Sanders to emerge is within the Democratic Party among its many disaffected members, or alongside it as a local third party.

Despite the obstacles to change, I'll go out on a limb and say that Sanders-style politics might someday pose a threat to the current group of political bosses.  

It's no coincidence that none of them came out for Sanders, even though Democrats across the country did so.  The very problems he drew attention to-- a rigged political system and an economy designed to favor a small number of very well-off people-- are present in microcosm in Philadelphia.  Our existing political leaders are part of the problem.  Many people think so.

What's been lacking are people committed to making the political system fairer, and to making the city's economic and regulatory measures and administrative and hiring practices something other than a smorgasbord of giveaways to well-placed people.  Philadelphia still awaits its own group of reformers to make these changes happen.  If they appear, they should have no trouble making their case.

What Will the Cash-Strapped City of Philadelphia Pay for the Democratic Convention?

When poor people subsidize rich people, something is wrong.  Alas, with Philadelphia about to host the Democratic Party's National Convention, that's what is about to happen.

Mayor James Kenney's administration has pursued a policy of secrecy to keep the public from learning about the finances of the Democratic National Convention.  Anna Adams-Sarthou, the spokesperson for the Convention's local host committee, and Paul Deegan, an official at the city's industrial development authority PIDC-PAID, appear to have been handed the task of turning away requests for Convention-related financial information until the law unmistakably requires the city to disclose it by court order.  The Democratic National Committee (DNC) isn't saying anything either.

When it was announced that the Convention was coming to Philadelphia, big promises were made that millions of dollars would be raised from private sources to pay for the event's costs.  Private donors, former Mayor Michael Nutter and convention organizers promised, would bear the burden.  The supposedly brilliant fundraising talents of Ed Rendell and others associated with the Convention's local host committee were to be put to good use.  Rendell said then, in February 2015, that he felt "confident" they could raise the $84 million they estimated was needed, along with "a little cushion."

But news reporters from mainstream local sources including the Inquirer, the Daily News, and local television and radio stations did not bother to ask what should have been the most important question:  what happens if the fundraisers claim not to have gathered enough cash?

The answer, as it turns out, was pretty simple:  the city pays, and its taxpayers lose.  That would have been easy to report, but it might have led city residents to question the merits of holding the Convention in Philadelphia.  So local media companies, which took a friendly approach to former Mayor Nutter's administration and have been fanatically devoted to Kenney's, just didn't bother to mention that taxpayers would be liable if fundraisers dumped convention costs on the city and focus on fundraising for Hillary Clinton.  City taxpayers' liability for unpaid convention expenses went unmentioned at a time when city residents might have demanded action to change it.

The city is clearly undertaking extraordinary expenses for Convention purposes, including costs associated with event security, and the $1.2 million cost of a special insurance policy to cover the cost if the police beat up some of the many expected protesters.  Like information about what was raised, information about what's been spent is secret, too, so the Kenney administration may even be hiding cost overruns.

The DNC, meanwhile, has been collecting large sums of money from people who will attend the Convention and paid to have special access to politicians.  Political action committees, lobbyists, and individuals were asked to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars, or raise as much as one and a quarter million dollars, for big-donor "packages" that let them enter exclusive events at the Convention and hobnob with politicians whom they hope will do their bidding.  While the DNC's goal is to raise money for the fall campaign, it would have to divert only a small fraction of what it would otherwise hand to Clinton's campaign to the city to save local taxpayers from bearing any burden.

But why should it?  Former Mayor Michael Nutter allowed the Host Committee to make a deal that put city taxpayers on the hook for unraised money, and Kenney refuses to call that arrangement into question.  The result, it appears, is that city taxpayers will soon be handed a bill for whatever Rendell and his friends didn't bother to raise.  

Philly, mind you, is the same city that is by some measures the poorest in the country.  It's the same city that has lately resorted to gimmick taxes on cigarettes and soda to supplement a host of others not commonly charged beyond city borders, and the same city that goes to Harrisburg every year to plead for more state money.  It's the same city that recently forced its main public-sector union, District Council 33, to accept a deal that will leave many future workers without an adequate retirement pension.  And it's the same city as to which City Council will hold hearings (after the Convention, of course) on the city's "true financial health."  The members of DC 33 don't know it yet, but they may never receive pay increases they're being promised in exchange for selling out new hires who won't get meaningful retirement pensions.  The city may simply go bankrupt like Detroit, and DC 33 workers will be denied the benefit of their union leaders' unwise bargain.

One item on the bill city taxpayers will receive will be a contract awarded to a firm co-founded by Jesse Rendell, Ed's son.  The Host Committee paid Jesse's firm to make a cell phone app to help visitors find donkey statues that have been placed around the city.  The cost of Jesse Rendell's firm's very important contract to the city is still a secret.  Although it seems to me scandalous that Jesse even got the contract, both local and national media seem uninterested in pursuing the matter.    

When the city pays Convention contract awardees, however, and forces its taxpayers to bear the burden, Jesse's app won't be needed at all, because it will be no challenge for city residents find the jackasses.  Under the terms of the sweetheart agreement between the city and the DNC, city taxpayers will just have to look in the mirror.

What Rich People Paid for Political Access at the Democratic National Convention

What do rich people and companies pay for access to politicians?  Yesterday's leak of documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) posted on WikiLeaks contains one showing what it cost rich people for a voice at the Democratic National Convention, which will be held in Philadelphia this coming week.

The Convention tickets described in the leaked document may well be the most expensive tickets to any event ever held in Philadelphia.  Four possible "packages" named after Philadelphia-area sites were available to contributors.  The cost of the packages ranged from $66,800 for the "Main Line" up to $467,600 for the "Rittenhouse Square."  As an alternative, you could get the same range of packages by raising between $250,000 and $1,250,000.

If you paid for one of the packages, you're entitled to special access at the convention.  For instance, the "Main Line" package bought this:

• Preferred booking for one hotel room within the National Finance Committee room block • 2 credentials to Democratic National Convention proceedings • Tickets to stadium/arena VIP lounges on select night(s) • 2 tickets for an exclusive preview and photo opportunity at the 2016 Convention podium • 4 VIP tickets to the official Convention Welcome Party • Invitations to select National Finance Committee events • 2 reserved place for an exclusive roundtable and campaign briefing with high-level Democratic officials • Participation in business roundtables and industry panels throughout the Convention

The more expensive packages, which included the "Fairmount" (give $133,600, or raise $500,000) and the "Society Hill: (give $267,200, or raise $750,000) conferred the right to more goodies.  The most expensive, the "Rittenhouse Square," offered these:

• Priority booking in a premiere hotel within the National Finance Committee room block • VIP credentials for all Democratic National Convention proceedings • Nightly access to stadium/arena VIP lounges • 6 tickets for an exclusive preview and photo opportunity at the 2016 Convention podium • 20 VIP tickets to the official Convention Welcome Party • VIP invitations to all exclusive National Finance Committee events • 6 tickets to an exclusive VIP party • 6 reserved places for an exclusive roundtable and campaign briefing with high-level Democratic officials • Participation in business roundtables and industry panels throughout the Convention

In WikiLeaks, the document appears as an attachment to a short email between two DNC staffers sent in May 2015 under the subject line "Re:  wendy abrams." Draft versions of it also appear among the leaked documents, but this version is apparently final.  You can view it by going to the link above, clicking the "Attachments" link, and choosing the first attachment.  

By the looks of the document, its file name, and the email to which it was attached, it received limited distribution to rich people thought to be potential contributors.  One might infer from the email and attachment that someone named Wendy Abrams had asked, or was being asked, to buy one of the packages.  It so happens that there's a big Democratic contributor named Wendy Abrams.

In October 2015, the political news website The Hill wrote about a gathering of DNC leaders and lobbyists in Washington to raise money to pay for the Convention.  The Hill's article by Megan R. Wilson included links to two documents similar to the leaked one showing packages available for lobbyists and political action committees.   But they had to pay up by December 31, 2015, to get their special access.  The rich individuals who received the recently leaked document had five more months to get the cash flowing.  If you compare the documents, you can also see that the packages on offer to the rich individuals suggested larger contributions.

If you were like me and couldn't raise $250,000 or give $66,800 to the DNC by June 1, 2016, as the cheapest package required, it appears that you won't be rubbing elbows with anyone important at the Convention.  If you know someone who's going, politely ask them how much they paid for their ticket.  If it wasn't anything like these amounts, you may have to inform them, regrettably, that they got the cheap seats.

Incidentally, Philadelphia's Democratic leaders are attending the Convention.  Mayor Jim Kenney, Governor Tom Wolf, Senator Bob Casey, Representative Bob Brady and Representative Brendan Boyle are all speaking.  If you get the rare opportunity to ask your elected officials questions to which they must respond publicly, feel free to inquire about the "package" holders they met at the Convention.  Who were they, and what did they want?  

If they won't tell you, it's not because they're not allowed.  There's nothing that legally requires them to keep their discussions with donors at the Convention confidential.  If they won't tell you, it's because you didn't pay enough to join in the discussion.

The Democrats may be less effective at preventing leaks than the Republicans, but the Republicans must have charged similar sums to rich people who wanted special opportunities to have their voices heard.  If that is so, it's one more reason to think that politicians in both parties are totally beholden to rich people.  Anyone who can't pay enormous sums has no real voice in either party, and can't expect anything from either party's politicians.

Keep Northeast Philly Voters at a Safe Distance: Boyle, Sabatina, White, and Telephone Town Halls

People in Northeast Philadelphia often get phone calls from elected officials inviting them to so-called "telephone town hall meetings."  Congressman Brendan Boyle held the most recent one yesterday.  State Senator John Sabatina and State Representative Martina White have held them, too.  During an expensive campaign this spring against Sabatina, Kevin Boyle, who is Brendan's brother and also a State Representative, even invited people from outside his own district to his telephone town hall meeting.

These fake town halls are no substitute for face-to-face meetings with assembled audiences of voters at which officials field questions and explain and defend their policies.  At an in-person, public meeting, it quickly becomes clear whether a politician's handlers are trying to filter out tough questions, and whether they've tried to stack the meeting with stooges and shills who will sing their praises and throw them softball questions.  No wonder Boyle, Sabatina, and White don't hold them.

On the phone, things are different.  It's impossible to know for sure who is asking a question, and hard to identify connections between the politicians and the participants.  It's more likely that all or part of a telephone call can be staged, worked out in advance to make the politician look good, or to exclude hard questions.  Important physical cues that people always examine in order to tell if another person is lying or equivocating are impossible to see over the phone.

In addition, when politicians elsewhere hold real town hall-style meetings, they take place on evenings or weekends, at times when ordinary people can actually attend them.  But the fake telephone meetings are often scheduled when the only working people likely to be on the line are those who work for the politician.  For instance, Brendan Boyle's recent meeting was held at 10:00 AM on Thursday-- not a very convenient time for workers, unless they happened to be on Boyle's payroll.

Elected officials who rely on telephone meetings to interact with their constituents behave in a cowardly fashion.  They know that their districts are full of people with tough questions for them, people who have good reason to think their representatives at every level of government don't care about them, but only do the bidding of donors and bribe payers.  For the politicians, the point of telephone meetings is to pretend to satisfy widely held expectations that they be willing to explain themselves, while keeping serious questions from ever being asked.  

The DNC, the Philadelphia Police, and Hillary Clinton's Racist Buddies

The head of the union representing Philadelphia police officers, John McNesby, posted a message yesterday about an interesting omission from the program of the Democratic National Convention that his rank and file will be called upon to protect next week.  McNesby noted that presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton and party leaders were "excluding the widows... and other family members of Police Officers killed in the line of duty who were victims of explicit, and not implied racism."

The Fraternal Order of Police's Lodge 5 leadership is evidently annoyed at the fact that family members of fallen police won't appear at the DNC even as the family members of seven black people killed around the country over the last few years have been tapped as DNC speakers.  

The speakers' relatives died in circumstances that seem unjust, in some cases at the hands of police.  Sadly, surviving members of their families chose to respond by creating a group, Black Lives Matter, that advertises racism in its name and on its website.  The group appears to condemn any encounter a black person has with the law that doesn't end well for them as "state violence" and the work of anti-black racists.  That a large proportion of the police force in big cities like Philly is black, that many of the allegedly racist encounters blacks have with police involve black police, and that several of the police who gave their lives in recent violence are black are all facts that seem lost on the group.

Black Lives Matter's founders have been asked to speak as a group at the DNC.  McNesby drew attention to DNC organizers' seeming endorsement of Black Lives Matter.  It gets a national platform while police survivors likely to present a different view will be kept silent.

Clinton's campaign responded to McNesby's statement by noting that two people it considered spokesmen for police would speak at the DNC, and a general statement about how much she claims to like police.  But it's not clear that either police speaker (one of whom is former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey) will speak to the issues raised by recent violence against police, at least some of which seems to be racially motivated.  Nor will their words be as poignant as the words of survivors of slain officers, especially when other DNC speakers who are survivors of individuals killed by the police are likely to portray police generally in a very negative light.

One might accuse McNesby of being publicity hound, and his characterization of Black Lives Matter as a "terrorist group" makes them sound more significant than racist cranks.  They don't deserve that.  But he is right to call attention to Clinton's strange decision to showcase a racist group while excluding survivors of police who died under circumstances no less unjust than those of the racists' relatives.

Why would Clinton do this?  Here's my take.  Clinton owes her nomination to the votes of black people in Southern states that no Democrat will be able to carry in November.  She thinks that black votes will also be essential to her in November, so she is taking steps to focus her party's attention on issues affecting black people. In doing so, she has overreached and placed her stamp of approval on a group that advocates racism as long as non-black people are the targets.

Looking back at the Democratic primaries, Clinton scored her biggest wins over Bernie Sanders in Deep South states where black people form by far the most important Democratic-voting group, and won across the wider South, where blacks' numbers make them more influential in the party than elsewhere in the country.  Almost all of these states have mostly Republican electorates that send Republicans to Washington.

Throughout the rest of the country, including states where Democrats are dominant or competitive, Sanders ran strong and often defeated Clinton.  She needed wins in Southern states that will be unwinnable in the fall to secure the nomination.  Clinton owes black people much for  big victories in the South that offset her weakness elsewhere.

Attempting to pay back that debt by pandering to an unrepresentative, outspokenly racist black group at the DNC could cost Clinton in November in her race against Donald Trump. McNesby won't be the only person to call Clinton out for racist demagoguery. 

Indeed, within Clinton's own party, most members are of a kind Black Lives Matter purists would regard as racially inferior. They aren't black.  And members of this genetically compromised majority of Democrats were much more likely to vote against Clinton in the primaries than were black Democrats.  If too many of them are turned off by Clinton's attempt to turn out the hate vote among black people, she will lose close races in states outside the South, Pennsylvania included.  

Wasted Money in Far Northeast Philly's 5th Senate District Primary

Democrats in Northeast Philly, what are your votes worth?  A lot, to some people.

The primary election in the 5th State Senate District held on April 26, 2016, in which the incumbent John Sabatina, Jr. defeated the challenger, State Representative Kevin Boyle, cost more than $1,516,175.12. According to campaign-finance filings searchable on the Pennsylvania Department of State's webpage, that's how much these two candidates and the outside groups supporting them spent between March 8 and May 16, when the bulk of the bills generated by the primary campaign likely came due.  Since 34,209 total votes were cast, a minimum of roughly $44.32 was spent for each vote.

I say "more than" and "a minimum" because these numbers don't include any money spent on the election by or on behalf of either candidate prior to March 8, 2016,  Due to the way Pennsylvania's campaign finance reporting requirements are written, pre-March 8 spending won't have to be reported until candidates and the outside organizations and PACs that make independent expenditures on their behalf complete their annual filings months from now.  Also, some outside groups might not have reported their spending on either candidate's behalf yet.

Even $1.5 million, though, is a lot of money, both in absolute terms and relative to what is commonly spent in similar races.  And the spending isn't over.  Sabatina will continue to spend money to defeat a Republican opponent, Ross Feinberg, in November.  Boyle ran for his State House seat even as he challenged Sabatina for the Senate.  That act of cowardice may have cost Boyle the close Senate election by losing him the votes of people who don't like cowards.  But it also means that Boyle, too, will continue to spend money on his House race against a Republican in the fall.

It's a disgrace that more-- possibly a lot more-- than $1.5 million had to be wasted to decide between two totally uninspiring and unappealing political insiders.  Households in the district received lots of expensive cardboard mailers and leaflets from both candidates, along with a bunch of annoying robocalls,  This rush of advertising was supposed to convince people that Boyle and Sabatina are hardworking (a favorite buzzword of both candidates) and very much like the people they're supposed to serve.

In fact, both Sabatina and Boyle owe their careers to family connections.  Both are followers in the state legislature rather than leaders.  Neither has been the moving force behind any broadly significant adopted legislation.  Both claim to pride themselves on the constituent services they provide at their local offices.  In reality, they're great places to stop for free state maps, but if you aren't a campaign contributor, don't expect much help with other problems.  Literally every politician in the state does the same thing; there's nothing special or particularly good about either Boyle's or Sabatina's offices.  Their offices' main purpose is to let them hand jobs to their favorite toadies.  For all their backbreaking hard work, both Boyle and Sabatina look like they need to hit the gym.  At the end of the day, a corporatist acceptable to rich donors was going to win no matter which one came out on top.  Why was it necessary to throw so much money down a rat hole?

The reason has nothing to do with any difference of principle between the candidates.  It was hard to tell what issues, if any, separated Sabatina and Boyle.  Rather, upwards of $1.5 million had to be wasted because of a power struggle between two cliques of Far Northeast Philly Democrats.  One is led by Congressman Brendan Boyle and his brother Kevin.  The other is led by Sabatina, his father John, Sr., who is a ward leader, and Lieutenant Governor Mike Stack, III.

Make no mistake:  neither of these factions in any sense consists of reformers.  Both are entrenched groups that depend upon keeping others off the ballot rather than upon their own appeal to voters. If voters were permitted other alternatives, there's a good chance both of these worn-out factions would be defeated.  The differences between them boil down to a contest between two smug, self-centered groups who feel entitled to run things.  Both groups consist of pay-to-play men who sell access and votes to campaign contributors. 

Each faction has its toadies.  If you live in the Northeast, you might know one of them.  If you do, but you're unsure who pats them on the head and pays them beer money for standing at the polls on Election Day, ask their opinion of the Boyles, Stacks, and Sabatinas.  They're likely to tell you how good one clique is, and how bad the other is.  Hearing that ought to tell you something about these toadies.  They can be bought for beer money.

Alas, the Boyle faction may not have had enough toadies to help sell out their neighbors in the recent primary election.  Kevin Boyle's campaign reportedly had a talent agency issue a casting call for actors to stand at the polls and pretend to support him.  Sabatina, by contrast, was helped out by some rich friends in Washington, where a PAC called the Turnout Project is based.  They spent more than $180,000 on his behalf, making them the biggest single contributor in the primary.

The other principals in this wasteful dispute don't look any better.  Brendan Boyle managed to get out of his seat in the state legislature and into Congress shortly after voting for the huge state gas tax increase that explains why gas prices in Pennsylvania seem much higher than in other nearby states.  Now that Boyle is in Congress, he has sat idly while a Federal program, the Housing Choice Voucher Program (Section 8), gradually turns neighborhoods in his district into grim, poorly maintained, absentee-owned, renter-occupied areas with sinking property values.  Boyle could propose laws to reduce or divert the impact of this program, but he might well believe that the program benefits him electorally by changing the demographics of his district.  As for Stack, he seems to have bailed on Northeast Philly, leaving his family's perennial ward leader post last year.  One wonders whether his uneventful tenure in the State Senate in what is now Sabatina's seat had more to do with learning about potentially lucrative property investments like the ones down on Beach Street in Fishtown than with any higher motives.

None of this makes either the Boyle or the Sabatina-Stack faction different from, or worse than, other Philadelphia politicians.  Nor is there any reason to think that the Republicans would do a better job. But it's pretty discouraging to see so much money spent on a race in which voters have no real choice.  The Northeast badly needs new leaders to emerge both within the Democratic Party and beyond it who can provide an alternative to these two failing groups.

Until that happens, I wish both factions would stop wasting money at election time. Instead, they should put all of the money they raise together, and mail a check to every voter who bothers to waste their time showing up to vote for either group's lackluster candidates in an amount no less than $44.32.  Everyone might as well get some beer money from these two rotten groups.