By The River

The biggest story of the week, at least since Wednesday, was buried on the inside of Saturday's Patriot-News. "Pennsylvania Medical Society finds support for universal healthcare" was the story, and David Wenner, an old friend, was the reporter.

What it said--ready for a surprise?--is that nearly 66 percent of state residents want universal healthcare. That's up from a similar poll in July 2008, when 64.4 percent of state residents said they wanted everyone to receive the healthcare they need.

Republicans have been shouting and screaming all week, pointing to the upset victory of Republican Scott Brown over Democrat Martha Coakley in Massachusetts on Tuesday as evidence that "America" has turned against the Obama healthcare plan. Heck, all it really showed was that Coakley was a terrible candidate and Brown was a skillful one. And I have a gut feeling Kennedy fatigue may have set in after nearly 60 years, even though Coakley didn't ask for Kennedy help until it was too late.

Like Michael Dukakis, the former Massachusetts Governor who was the failed Democratic presidential candidate in 1988, Coakley punched all the right tickets on her way up, endorsed all the right causes. This Boston Globe story from before the election is a good summation of her pros and cons. Unlike Dukakis, her career centered around prosecutions of people for alleged sex crimes or crimes against children, notably nanny Louise Woodward. She also fought clemency for Gerald Amirault in the Fells Acre Day Care Case long after the "evidence" against him had been discredited as largely nonsensical. Coakley came off as a descendant of the Puritan prosecutors in Massachusetts.

Looking at her admittedly from the outside, Coakley seemed like a cold professional woman who knew little about Massachusetts outside her own wealthy enclave and circle of elite friends. Yet despite all that, she still got 47 percent of the vote to 52 percent for Scott Brown, who was a George W. Bush type of candidate, the one you'd want to have a beer with. And as we know all too well from eight years of Bush, that's a bad reason to vote for a candidate.

So Democrats in Pennsylvania, man up. Stay the course on universal healhcare--the people want it. You've got a reputable poll telling you so.

Posted by David at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My neighbor the lawyer had to file a Right to Know request to the Pennsylvania Department of State to get this information, but he finally unearthed both the list of directors of Mayor Linda Thompson's Loveship non-profit, and as a bonus, its original bylaws. Loveship has gone into drydock since Thompson was elected mayor, but this stuff is still interesting.

Most of the bylaws are basic boilerplate, but then the curious reader comes to "Article V-Officers" and this paragraph:

"The Chairman of the Board of Directors shall be Linda Thompson, who shall serve until her death or resignation. The Chairman may also be removed by a unanimous vote of the remaining members of the Board only for gross errors defined as severe deviation from the teaching of the Bible (Old and New Testament read together as a whole) which would tend to spiritually endanger and lead the members of the fellowship away from the Lord, the God of the Bible."

Now Linda Thompson the private citizen can have just about any bylaws she wants in her own 501(c)3, even one with the overtly secular agenda of "home ownership counseling" and "combat academic underachievement."

I think it's fair to say most Americans want their elected officials to be religious or have a strong moral compass, but the above paragraph might go too far for many of them. It suggests deeply fundamentalist beliefs which are not held by the majority of Americans. Combine this with Thompson's comparison of herself to the prophet Nehemiah sent to save Jerusalem, i.e., Harrisburg that used to be on her website, and the Bible verses my lawyer friend saw posted liberally about the interior of Loveship, and its more religion than a lot of voters want.

At its core, that paragraph is simply a severe limitation on the grounds for Thompson to be removed as head of Loveship (known as Timeship in the original incorporation papers, with a ring of science fiction). The part about the Old and New Testament read together is clever--it means she can't, for example, be removed for eating pork or shellfish, banned in the Old but blessed in the New. Thompson, who has pledged transparency as mayor, was loading the dice to make sure she couldn't be removed as head of Loveship.

The danger of having a deeply--and I mean deeply--religious person of fundamentalist beliefs as mayor of Harrisburg or in any major elected post is that she starts filtering her decisions for the public through her personal religious beliefs. No matter what the Christian Right may tell you, the U.S. Constitution mandates the separation of church and state.

Oh, and the Loveship directors for 2008 were Gerald Robinson, Dr. Norman LaCasse, K. Lameson Lawrence, Jacquetta McCoy, Lois Glass, Greg Rothman, and of course Thompson herself.

Posted by David at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The letter-to-the-editor in the Patriot-News today ought to be a warning bell for moderate and liberal Democrats in the midstate wondering whether Democratic Congressman Tim Holden still deserves their support. The writer was David Black, president of the Harrisburg Regional Chamber.

"We appreciate the efforts of members of Congress like Tim Holden who are standing up to their [Democratic] leadership and insisting we can do better along with others representing our region, [Republicans] Todd Platts, Bill Shuster, and Joe Pitts," he wrote.

Black is just being his usual pro-corporate, anti-worker self. It's what he's paid to do. If a bill came along allowing corporations to dump health insurance for their workers but keep it for the CEO and top management only, he'd be jumping up and down cheering on its passage. But I digress.

It's Holden I'm concerned about. He was one of the few Democrats to vote against the national healthcare bill that would finally extend health insurance to nearly all Americans and eliminate insurance industry abuses. The bill passed the House with a five-vote margin and the Senate by 60-40, as everyone knows, but the two versions of the bill must still be reconciled and voted on again. We need Holden's vote this time around.

Why this is particularly dicey is today's election in Massachusetts, where Democrat Martha Coakley is running against Republican Scott Brown, a diehard conservative state senator who once posed semi-nude for Cosmopolitan Magazine, for the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy. Brown is leading and has vowed to destroy national healthcare if he wins, providing the 41st and crucial vote needed to sustain a filibuster in our undemocratic Senate. Majority doesn't rule.

If he wins (late polls have shown Coakley with a tiny edge), President Obama and the Democratic leadership will do what they have to do to get the bill passed. That may include asking House Democrats to vote for the Senate version of the bill as it stands, eliminating the need to bring it back to the Senate for another vote. Because there may be defections, Holden's vote FOR the bill is vital. And obviously, David Black and the business lobby are hoping he will abandon the people who put him in office and vote their way.

If Holden again votes against national healthcare, that's it for me. I won't vote for a Republican but I won't vote for him, either. My hope is that if Holden continues down this path, that Sheila Dow Ford of Harrisburg will carry through on her threat to jump into the Democratic primary to oppose him and give moderates and liberals a real choice.

Posted by David at 05:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's editorial in the Patriot-News launches an unfortunate attack on local bloggers (including, by implication, this one) for supposedly publishing racist and hateful comments about Mayor Linda Thompson.

But one of the two comments attributed to blogs in the editorial--"Harrisburg is no longer a city! It is now Slumbville!! Gang Wars and Mass Killings Drive By's are on the rise!. The Dawgs are out in full force. Move out now!!! Perry County here we come"--was actually published in the PennLive Forum section on Nov. 4, 2009. I couldn't find the other one, "Where does she get her hair done, PetSmart?" via Google, but suspect it was also from PennLive.

PennLive is owned by the same people who own the Patriot-News. Think of them as different pockets in the same suit. The newspaper editors do not have complete control over the website--a source of great frustration to the staff when stories they wrote for the print edition inexplicably fail to appear on PennLive. Editors can have Forum comments removed if someone complains, but don't really want to do so, for legal reasons. We were always told that an unedited comments section has more legal protection than an edited one. Go figure, but it's apparently true.

The Patriot-News could eliminate a lot of the racial garbage by ending anonymous posting. Anonymous letters-to-the-editor aren't allowed. Why should Forum posts be? As for comments on my blog, I regretfully get very few of them. I allow nearly all to be published, but read each one before I do and weed out ones that are illogical or offensive. As with New York Times letters-to-the-editor, you have to make your case, or at least have an interesting opinion. I have allowed anonymous posts, but since I don't allow cheap shots, it is not a critical issue.

What I gather from some of the comments posted on PennLive is yes, there are still racists in America. But I also see that robust political dialogue is alive and well in America. Most of the criticism of Thompson--and all of it in this blog--has been based on facts and observations, not stereotypes.

One would need a psychiatrist and a couch to get to the deepest motivations of the person who wrote that editorial, but I suspect part of it stems from frustration by the newspaper that it is no longer in control of the news agenda in Harrisburg. The Patriot-News tried to portray Thompson sort of as Martin Luther King set upon by Bull Connor and his police dogs, but bloggers and the public weren't buying that. They saw a deeply flawed and divisive candidate with a taste for the high life, questionable personal finances, and a fundamentalist religious fervor that led her to believe she had been called by God to save Harrisburg.

Bloggers, including this one, wrote about the facts and contradictions in Thompson's record, treating her as they would any other serious candidate, and the newspaper, reluctantly it seemed, followed in our wake (at least until five days before the election, when coverage in the newspaper mysteriously ceased). Thompson received the votes of about 12 percent of registered voters in the city, but that was enough when the vast majority of voters stayed home.

Like I said in a previous post, we're stuck with her now, and those of us who own property in Harrisburg (and aren't leaving, like the Patriot-News), have a stake in her success in dealing with the city's monumental problems. Both Linda Thompson in her former role as city council president and former Mayor Stephen R. Reed had a hand in creating those problems. Let's hope someone can find a solution. In the meantime, I don't plan to cease my coverage.

Posted by David at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's not even a bad joke anymore, it's simply wrong. Wrong and destructive. A lie.

I'm talking about Pennsylvania's most embarrassing myth, that agriculture is the state's "No. 1 industry" and "contributes $45 billion to the state economy." The Patriot-News, after nearly 10 years of studiously avoiding (because of my reporting) this mendacity, jumped back in with both feet on Sunday in its top story on A-1, "Candidates cultivate farm votes." Yes, it's Farm Show week. And Auditor General Jack Wagner is only the latest in a long line of elected officials to unknowingly help perpetuate this myth.

Before I go any further, let me give you the real statistics, courtesy of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis: in 2007, crop and animal agriculture, i.e., farms, contributed $3.3 billion to the $533.2 billion Pennsylvania economy. That's not even one percent! Let me give you some other statistics: manufacturing in 2007 contributed $73.4 billion to the state economy. Finance & insurance chipped in $40.4 billion. Government? $52.3 billion.

Farming didn't even beat out mining ($3.8 billion) or paper manufacturing ($3.6 billion). Agriculture in Pennsylvania is way, way down the list.

Ah, but wait, say the people at the state Department of Agriculture and the ag studies folks at Penn State whose jobs depend on this myth. If you add in food product manufacturing and the restaurant trade, that makes agriculture No. 1! Well, no, it doesn't. Food product manufacturing in 2007 contributed $7.8 billion to the state economy, and food service, $9.16 billion. Add that to farming and you get $20.26 billion. That's respectable, but well short of the claimed $45 billion and intellectually dishonest to boot. If you're going to count the rippling effect for farming, you also have to count it for mining, or paper, or any other basic industry. Those products also go into other products. Apples to apples, farming is one of the state's tiniest industries.

Income and jobs-wise, the situation is, if anything, worse. Pennsylvania had 7.4 million people employed in all jobs in 2008, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Of those, 56,230 were farmers. Now, the same folks who say agriculture is the state's number one industry say you have to also count farmhands, people working in food manufacturing (like Hanover Foods, for example), grocery stores, and bars and restaurants (I'm not making this up) as "agriculture" employees. Apart from the continuing intellectual dishonesty of this, that brings the total up to 746,660, or 10 percent of the workforce.

Sounds halfway respectable until you realize those are generally low-paying jobs. Total compensation in 2008 for the "expanded" definition of agriculture jobs was $14.2 billion, or 4.4 percent of the total $320.6 billion in compensation paid to Pennsylvania workers that year. Farmers alone were paid an average of $10,711 apiece. There have to be a lot of part-timers among the 56,230 who called themselves farmers that year.

So who benefits from this brazen mendacity? That's the really interesting part. Why should Pennsylvania have a separate cabinet department for one of its tiniest industries? Nostalgia is great, but we don't have a Department of Conestoga Wagons and Flintlock Rifles. The Ag Department ought to be merged with either the Department of Environmental Protection or the Department of Community and Economic Development to save money. But hey! Doesn't the state's "Number One Industry" deserve its own cabinet department?

But even more than that, and why the myth of Pennsylvania agriculture is so destructive, is the special status and attention it gains for farming in the state Legislature. I can tell you that many legislators believe the myth is gospel truth and act accordingly. That's why we have laws like the Right to Farm Act that limits what municipalities can do to control farm odors and other agricultural nuisances, and the loophole-ridden Nutrient Management Act that regulates how and where farmers may spread the enormous amount of manure generated by today's factory farms. I first debunked the myth while working on a 1998 series on factory hog farms and the problems they cause.

The clout of the agriculture industry in Harrisburg is such that DEP doesn't want to touch farmers, who generate much of the nutrients that are killing the Chesapeake Bay. Municipal sewage treatment plants are ordered to make costly upgrades that will burden ratepayers but yield only incremental benefits, while farmers are merely "encouraged" to undertake voluntary compliance measures like planting trees. Why would we want to burden our "Number One Industry"?

The hard truth is that animal agriculture may have to be banned or severely limited in south central Pennsylvania if the Chesapeake Bay is to be saved. Either that or the state will have to pay for manure incineration facilities for the region. As you saw from the income statistics, few farmers can afford a facility like that themselves. Farmers can't continue to burden the land (and drinking water) with endless annual applications of hog and poultry manure. I yield to no one in my love of a good meat entree, but things can't continue the way they have.

It is time for the leaders of Pennsylvania to acknowledge the truth. Agriculture isn't the number one industry and probably never was, at least since the very earliest days of the Commonwealth. It is an "important" industry, as many are. To falsely claim it is number one makes the state look ridiculous and probably harms real economic development.

(The Bureau of Economic Analysis website is at www.bea.gov. To find the contributions of various industries to the gross domestic product of Pennsylvania, follow these steps: Under "Regional," click on "GDP by State and Metropolitan Area." Under "State Annual Estimates," click on "Interactive Tables." Step 1, click NAICS. Step 2, highlight "Gross Domestic Product by State." Step 3, highlight "Pennsylvania." Step 4, highlight "All Industries." Step 5, highlight "All Years." This will bring up the table I used. To get to employment and income statistics for Pennsylvania, go back one page and click on "State Personal Income and Employment." Then click on "Interactive Tables, Annual Personal Income and Employment." Click on SA25 for "Employment by Industry" and SA06 for "Compensation by Industry." You will need to enter Pennsylvania and the years that interest you, just as before.)

Posted by David at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Mayor Stephen Reed leaves office today after a long and mostly distinguished career as Harrisburg's mayor. He managed to turn Harrisburg from a run-down colony of state government to a city where many of us chose to live and raise families. I salute him for that, and wish him well in whatever he does next in his life.

He will be replaced, of course, by City Council President Linda Thompson. She was elected by 12 percent of registered voters in the city and comes in with a mandate only from her base in the poorest, blackest neighborhoods of Harrisburg. She won in large part because 27,000 registered voters stayed home. I don't doubt her supporters are ecstatic. The danger for Thompson, and for the rest of us, is that she may find it difficult to say no to any of them, or anyone who claims to speak for them.

I don't want Thompson to fail. I live here. I own property here. I have a stake in her success. I'm just afraid she'll do no better with city government and its $160 million budget than she did with her Loveship non-profit and its $25,000 to $35,000 budget.

She also seems to have a taste for high living that she obviously couldn't indulge on her $20,000 city council salary. She drives a Mercedes, which she hints her brother Steven Crawford paid for out of the settlement of his wrongful incarceration suit. She appeared to be carrying a designer handbag in one of the pictures during the campaign, although it could have been a knock-off. She is holding a grandiose, gubernatorial-like, $100 ticket inaugural ball at the Farm Show arena, with invitations that looked remarkably like wedding invitations. Mayor Reed had his inaugural party at the much smaller Hilton, and charged half as much. And via the print edition of the Patriot-News (it was oddly missing from the PennLive version) we now know that her inaugural gown was purchased, like Sarah Palin's campaign finery, at Neiman Marcus, a top tier luxury department store.

So the Plum in downtown Harrisburg, where many Harrisburg business women of all races purchase their finery, wasn't good enough? The nearest Neiman Marcus is in Philadelphia. How does this square with her self-professed image as a representative of the poor and downtrodden? I half expect her to have a balcony overlooking Market Square built out of the mayor's office and to proclaim, like Eva Peron, that her poor supporters expect her to dress in top designer fashions so they can bask in her glamour. I'm not suggesting she wear sackcloth and ashes, but every smart politician knows what the public will accept and what raises eyebrows.

This isn't a good beginning. Yes, it's legal for her to use campaign funds to pay for that dress, and for the inaugural ball, and for the hundreds of comped tickets that will likely go to her supporters to make the Farm Show look at least halfway full. All of this spending has to be disclosed at some point, and it will be interesting to see what the final bill will be. It is important for Mayor Thompson to understand that people, including people who in the worst way didn't want her to be mayor, will be monitoring her every step. She needs to follow the rules, written and unwritten. The high life is nice, but only if you can really afford it. Ask Mayor Sheila Dixon of Baltimore.

Posted by David at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)