The New American Oligarchy

Over drinks a few weeks ago, a friend of mine said, “Once you accept that America is an oligarchy, life is easier.” The statement hit me harder than the drinks --a Howard Beale moment of sorts. Over the next few weeks the evidence in favor of my friend’s statement mounted. The Supreme Court opened the door to corporate personhood ruling that closely held corporations can have religious beliefs (Not sure how that works on Judgment Day. Can God send a person to heaven and the Sub-chapter S corporation to which he or she belongs to hell?).

My egalitarian delusions crashed completely when I read that Amazon has won the rights to operate the cloud computing system for the entire U.S. intelligence community. Reminiscent of Mr. Jensen’s sermon, Amazon promises bureaucratic peace through shared data. The turf wars that led to intelligence failures will be morph into a new pax intelligentsia marked by enhanced data sharing and perfectly scalable harmony. Yes, it will be a digital Age of Aquarius where our best and brightest can stop fighting amongst themselves and concentrate on real and imagined terrorists not in government service.

That’s right, the company that wanted to deliver your books via drones now operates the CIA computers. Amazon outbid Microsoft, IBM and others to get rights to build the intellicloud. Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, also recently purchased the Washington Post. After all you’re no one in the oligarch set if you don’t have your own media outlet.

Currently, Amazon’s omnivorous algotrithms digest and redigest its ever-growing sales data in hopes of making the company a smarter seller. Fair enough, that’s business. Now those same people will be building the intellicloud. NSA analysts will likely pull up a file on a given terrorist complete with a pop-up window that says, “Analysts who studied this terrorist also looked at weapons of mass destruction and dirty bombs.” Perhaps the program will rank each terrorist according to the number of analyst hits in each category something like “Hassan al-birkabommer ranks #2 out 102,640 jihadists.”

Remember the brouhaha when the Bush Administration attempted to obtain book sale and library data in the wake of 9/11? How hard do you think it will be now? Will there be a firewall between the Amazon cloud and the intellicloud when the same people are working on both? How would we know? Who is watching the oligarchs?

Inside the Papenfuse Echo Chamber

On July 4^th, a line of traffic stopped in the eastbound land of the Harvey Taylor Bridge to watch the fireworks from City Island. They were in for a long wait. As part of its ‘rebranding’ of the city, the Papenfuse administration had expanded the Independence Day festivities to include two other locations, Reservoir Park and Italian Lake. In the process, the City Island fireworks were moved to the 5^th to coincide with a Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra riverfront concert. The problem, of course, was that many people did not get the memo, or in this case, the tweet.

City of Harrisburg Communications Director, Joyce Davis (no relation), explained the city’s publicity campaign in an online forum on PennLive.com. The city sent out a bulk mailing detailing the changes, but many appeared to have arrived after the event. Davis also claimed notices were enclosed in city water bills, but no one has found such a notice yet. Perhaps it will be in next month’s bill. Finally, Davis claimed that she tweeted news about the event to 1,000 or so followers, but sent a minimal number of tweets rather than multiple posts. The tweets directed tweetees to the city’s Facebook pages, the city’s main page and “Stay and Play Harrisburg”.

The Independence Day celebrations traditionally have attracted many from surrounding communities to come into the city. They, clearly, would not have been reached through the city water bill stuffers even if those notices did in fact exist. Inexplicably, many West Shore residents do not rise each day and perform a twitter search for “Harrisburg”, “Stay and Play Harrisburg”, or “City Island Fireworks”. If they are not part of the city’s rabid 1,000 twitter followers, they could have completely missed the great fireworks tweet amid the torrent of 140 character missives that flood the twitosphere. Clearly, these folks should have retroactively followed the directions they received in the direct mail flyer that arrived a week after the event.

Like spawning salmon, many city and suburban residents attend Independence Day fireworks out of instinct to “ooooh” and “aaaah” at the night sky. Perhaps no one can fault the Administration for moving the event to the 5^th to cut costs. Although in fairness, the Thompson Administration always found corporate sponsors to fund the fireworks and this one has not.

Papenfuse’s minions were quick to point out that the election was held in November and they did not take office until January. Clearly, they had other more pressing issues than fireworks. Fair enough, but raising corporate donations was no problem for the Papenfuse campaign when it raised more that $330,000. Perhaps the same effort on behalf of city’s image that many of those donors wish to burnish would be appropriate.

Don't Take the Tax Abate

Mayor Eric Papenfuse has leaked his tax abatement proposal to the Harrisburg Patriot and other media outlets. Although, the amount of tap dancing coming from city hall suggests this was not a planned leak. The proposal calls for a 10-year tax abatement on improvements made to vacant lots and existing structures.  The new administration gets points for persistence, not for originality.

The mayor apparently never heard the old saw that trying the same thing repeatedly while expecting a different result is insanity. Or has he? At heart, I don’t like disparage people, so I’ll assume this administration doesn’t really believe that this round of tax abatements will produce anything other than the real estate carnage the previous abatements have. I’m much more comfortable being a cynic. So let’s assume someone is benefitting from this failed policy maybe, say, um…real estate developers?

Tax abatements benefit developers and few others. Because they shift the tax burden to existing homeowners, abatements depress existing home values by making the tax-abated properties more attractive. The developers, however, take blighted properties, raise the value of the properties they develop while paying below market taxes, and then sell the properties at a higher value. The buyer gets a new property and a ticking tax bomb with a timer set at ten years.

Harrisburg has been through this before. The Capitol Heights development offered ten-year phased-in tax abatements. The homeowners paid 10% of the property tax the first year, 20% the second and so on. As the tax bite escalated, so did the foreclosures.

Exacerbating the situation is Dauphin County’s tax assessment process. New homes are assessed at current market rates while older homes hold values from the year the last assessment was performed. State law only permits a county-wide reassessment. Obviously, those with older assessments are anxious to hang on to the lower figures as the new buyers are saddled with higher assessments, and when the abatements abate, disproportionately higher tax bills. In at least two cases, it has taken court orders to compel counties to reassess their properties.

Struever Brothers, Eccles and Rouse, the Capital Heights developers built the properties and sold them. They kept the profits from the sales and paid virtually no property tax on the properties while they owned them. Now, other developers including J. Alex Hartzler, whose Harrisburg Capital PAC donated $103,147 to Papenfuse’s campaign, are lining up for more public money seemingly unconcerned or willfully ignorant of Harrisburg’s tax abatement track record. One of my sources quotes Mr.Hartzler as claiming to know nothing of the Capital Heights foreclosures.

Hartzler and other abatement plan proponents point to similar programs in New York and Philadelphia. Hartzler is dismissive of those who try to make the common sense argument that Harrisburg is not Philadelphia. In a tweet on June 19, he stated “economics and math are not subject to geographical or political boundaries. ‘HBG is not Philly’ demonstrates ignorance of both.” Hartzler’s argument discounts both the amount of untaxable property within Harrisburg and the assessment issue outlined above. Philadelphia is its own county and Harrisburg is a part of Dauphin County.  A county-wide reassessment is far more likely in Philadelphia than Harrisburg. In fact, Philadelphia began its reassessment process last year. Philadelphia also has several programs of assistance to senior citizen and low-income residents. The report calling for the Philadelphia abatement plan cites local economic conditions such as high construction costs versus relatively low median income as justification for the abatement program. While Harrisburg does have a relatively low median income, its construction costs are nowhere near those of Philadelphia. For more reasons than scale, Philadelphia is a very different animal than Harrisburg.

Raising the city’s minimum wage would raise the median income, but that would not benefit those who finance mayoral campaigns.  So I can guess its likelihood of passing.

Again, I do not wish to think ill of Mr. Hartzler. He could not possibly be as stupid as his tweets suggest.

Craven images

There's much craziness coming out of Oklahoma these days. Seems the Governor can't control her batty daughter who insists on insulting that state's Native American people with feathery fake headgear and offensive fake ceremonial dances. Hell, she can't control her corrections department either if the recent botched execution is any measure (Note to the Guv - executions aren't executions if the condemned dies from a heart attack.) 

Come to think of it, she's having trouble controlling something as simple as what statuary belongs in the state house. Seems a state rep paid for and donated a statue of the Ten Commandments for installation in the capitol building. Now, constitutional scholars know that if you open the door for one religion, you open it for all. Enter a group of civic minded Satanists. They've raised enough money for a Baphomet figure, hired an artist and come up with the mold. Soon it will be bronzed and ready for installation. I guess they figure it will look swell next to those Ten Commandments.

Oh, they have a website, naturally.

Talk about polarization. 

Dumbest Cop I Ever Knew

I traveled to Savannah, Georgia recently to visit some friends. It’s a truly beautiful city, and I had a great time, but the politics down there is Flannery O’Connor meets Franz Kafka these days.  Governor Deal, a name straight out of Dickens, signed the nation’s most permissive (or aggressive) gun law recently. Peach state residents can now pack heat when they go to bars or churches. Apparently, Georgia legislators think it’s a good idea to escalate barroom brawls to saloon shootouts.

While the gun law is interesting, another legislative marvel caught my eye down there. A driver who impedes another vehicle by moving too slowly is now breaking the law. This is where it gets weird.

I grew up in the small town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania population at the time about 18,000 and plummeting. One day in the early 80s a cow got loose from a local farm and wandered into town. A town cop, Officer Kaiser, was dispatched to corral the wayward bovine. He located the cow, unholstered his weapon, and called out “Stop or I’ll shoot.” Not surprisingly, the cow did not heed the warning and Officer Kaiser blew away the cow in a stunning piece of police work.

A few weeks later, Officer Kaiser stopped in for a coffee break at a restaurant I frequented. As the caffeine kicked in, he pontificated. “If a car is going the speed limit, it is denying me my right to drive the speed I want to drive.” The irony of a policeman arguing he had a right to break the law was lost on “the dumbest cop I ever knew.” Little did I imagine that thirty years later enough people to constitute a legislative majority would think such a concept would make a good law.

Traveling

I’m blogging from a small restaurant in Willow Hill, just off the Turnpike in Path Valley. Franklin County. Although I’ve worked as a reporter in Harrisburg for many years, I grew up in Franklin County near Chambersburg. Either for work or pleasure, I’ve traveled to many of Pennsylvania’s small towns. They often fill me with a nameless  dread.

Those dark Pennsylvania mountains we see in Harrisburg from our perch on the piedmont, epitomize the boom and bust cycles of a state so tied to its mineral wealth. Because so much of life along these ridges is lived in the present, education and other foundations for the future are given little emphasis. You’ve gotta work that coal vein while it is there. Tomorrow it may be gone. Little changes in those hills.

At the end of the Great Gatsby, the narrator, Carraway, speaks of the America where “the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night.” But Carraway, like Fitzgerald, was a Midwesterner, a flatlander. His dark fields outran the light. He no doubt never wandered the Appalachian valleys where a cloying brand of darkness roams the ridges with a presence so palpable it almost creates its own gravity.

As I sit here in Path Valley, I recall a conversation I once had with a local historian. He noted that the crest of Sidling Hill, the mountain forming Path Valley’s eastern border was the Proclamation Line of 1763. As part of the peace treaty ending the French and Indian War, the English King agreed to keep English settlers east of that line to avoid provoking the French and their allies. Ten English families had already settled in Path Valley and were evacuated by English soldiers enforcing the treaty. He noted that nine of the ten names were still common names in the valley. The darkness pulled them in and has held them here for two hundred and fifty years.

Harrisburg - Theater of the Absurd?

Sometimes, one needs comic relief. Today is such a day. It helps if one simply accepts - at least for a few moments - that Harrisburg is the Theater of the Absurd. What else would explain the on-again, off-again efforts to rehabilitate the Broad Street Market? Like so much about Harrisburg development/redevelopment, this effort represents a one step forward, two steps back approach. Plans are paid for and made, only to be blocked for unexplained reasons. Litigation ensues, mainly to the benefit of the lawyers. And the cultural treasure and source of fresh food in a food desert downtown with no major full-service grocery store within walking distance of thousands of residents (many without transportation) continues to deteriorate.

But, hey, developers are busy creating a playground for the new hip inhabitants who drive to Wegman's for their groceries from their KOZ tax-free rental apartments or tax abated renovated homes, leaving long-term renters without valuable housing stock and long-term owners shouldering an increasing tax burden for the municipal services newcomers and old-timers alike use. To top it off, developers like Alex Hartzler use their newly purchased paper and mayor to further their agenda and criticize anyone who doesn't march lock-step to their tune as elitist/privileged voices to be ignored. It's ironic, given that the elitist/privileged are the developers themselves whose skin-in-the-game represents a tiny fraction of the skin older long-time homeowners have in said game as a percentage of total net worth. Me thinks there's a lot of projection at work.