The Parkway Left

THIS BLOG HAS MOVED

2010-12-19T16:55:00.002-05:00

The Parkway Left is moving to WordPress and changing its name:

http://pereduquesne.wordpress.com

We'll plan on keeping these archives here for as long as Blogger exists.

Crackpot realism and the West Penn debacle

2010-07-01T07:30:00.002-04:00

It is hard to overstate the cruelty involved in the sad demise of West Penn Hospital as an acute care institution. This is the inevitable result of treating health care as a business.

Health care, by right in a civilized society, ought to be operated by the government as a public utility for the benefit of everyone, rather than treated as a series of corporations subject to profit-and-loss calculations and needlessly destructive "competition." But we saw last year that the vested interests in this industry are capable of stirring up nonsense about "government takeovers" and "socialism" (if only!) in response to even mild measures. The president never even dreamed of proposing something like what I have just proposed, and yet the industry-orchestrated outbursts of irrational stupidity that greeted Obama's piecemeal proposals eventually shaped the unappetizing National Romneycare that we now have.

Given this overarching national environment, plus the overwhelming facts about the local health care market, it is impossible to see how WPAHS officials had much of a choice, if their aim is to keep their health system alive as a going concern in that context. The share of WPAHS board and management in the blame is not a small one, beginning with the birth of the system in the wake of AHERF's thievery and continuing through to today, with the high six- and sometimes seven-figure salaries of its top management. But with the mountain of debt inherited from AHERF, the doctor-poaching of UPMC, and the steady year-to-year operating losses, this eventual decision was the outcome of a merciless logic. WPAHS management are going to tell you that this is not like Braddock, and they are right about that. UPMC could have afforded to keep Braddock open. It could have afforded to keep at least three or four Braddocks open, in fact, yet it chose instead to build a new hospital in Monroeville -- a mile from WPAHS's star suburban facility, Forbes -- to capture white suburban patients with insurance, rather than keep Braddock open to serve the poor of the Mon Valley. WPAHS by contrast could not have afforded to keep West Penn as it now is for much longer and still have money left over to pay the bills.

But saying that WPAHS as currently constituted could not afford this is not the same thing as saying that we, as a society, could not afford to keep services like this in place. West Penn may have had declining inpatient admissions and declining volumes in the more lucrative surgical procedures, but it still had plenty of city patients, including many who depended on its ER after the closure eight years ago of the former poor people's hospital of the East End, St. Francis. A major problem for West Penn was not so much that not enough people were coming to West Penn, but that too many of the "wrong" people were coming there. WPAHS management concluded -- and they are objectively correct -- that their health system could not continue to do this and still stay alive as a going concern, when their much-stronger competitor could afford to take on more of the burden.

So if we had a rational ordering of the health care system in this area and in this country, we could afford to have good health care for everyone. Instead we have these large institutions -- and WPAHS is a weak player in this, next to UPMC and Highmark -- that are supposed to be operated for the public good, but in fact have gotten out of control and relentlessly pursue institutional imperatives that are detrimental to the health and well-being of most of our people. All of us, in fact -- "in the final analysis," as we used to say. To treat these developments as forces of nature rather than the product of human-made decisions and human society, to accept as inevitable the dire results like the downsizing of West Penn, as if these were "acts of God" and we can do nothing about them -- all of this is an example of what C. Wright Mills called "crackpot realism," the notion that we should acquiesce to the rationality of a system that is fundamentally irrational.

We can do better than this, but only if we fight to make it better.

Richard Poplawski day

2010-06-29T07:33:00.001-04:00

Perhaps in honor of the postponement of his trial, the US Supreme Court declared yesterday, June 28, as Richard Poplawski Day in the City of Pittsburgh.

¡Presente!

2010-06-21T08:55:00.001-04:00

A recent documentary on his life prompts this local reminiscence on the great Bill Kunstler in today's Post-Gazette. They don't make 'em like that anymore, I'm afraid.

Location isn't everything

2010-06-14T21:10:00.002-04:00

I don't think I find the methodology behind the latest Keystone Research Center report all that useful. Their point is that the state's system of economic development subsidies has been better in recent years than the last time they did a study on the subject (2003), because it has incorporated "smart growth" concepts and subsidized developments in older brownfield areas instead of encouraging sprawl in greenfields. The problem with this is that it doesn't take into account whether any of these subsidies were really necessary, whether they created the promised jobs, and whether those jobs were good jobs. Keystone more or less admits as much up-front, by saying that the report can't take local nuances into account, and that the report should only be a jumping-off point for studying these subsidies. That's fair enough as far as it goes, I guess.

More on the Marcellus Shale tax

2010-06-13T22:36:00.004-04:00

Charlie McCollester had a fine op-ed in today's Post-Gazette about the need for a state severance tax on natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale. The Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center's Severance Tax Ticker now registers $57.4 million in revenue lost due to failure to adopt this tax.

However, I am left to wonder whether the costs incurred by Marcellus Shale drilling will eventually outpace even the potential revenue from this tax. In the short-term it could go some distance towards plugging the state's enormous budget hole (which is set to become even more enormous if the increased Federal contribution to Medicaid is allowed to expire). But if the long-term damage to drinking water, the health of workers, and farmland turns out to be as bad as we have suspicion to fear, what will the eventual cost be to the state for health care bills, for poor school performance for sickened children, or for attempts to remediate ruined properties for the sake of economic development that will never come anyway because of the environmental damage?

The Undertaker and the White Job Trust

2010-06-09T19:36:00.006-04:00

It has been two years since I first discussed Daryl Metcalfe's association with neo-Nazis and Harry Readshaw's enabling of the same. There is nothing too wretched to expect from the vile Metcalfe (R-Cranberry), who needs to be driven from public life at all costs. But people who live in the City of Pittsburgh ought at least have reason to expect more of their legislators, and Harry Readshaw (D-Pittsburgh [Carrick]) -- hereinafter known as The Undertaker -- is bringing us into disgrace with his high-profile "bipartisan" embrace of racism.

This has all been thrown into sharp relief with the Anti-Brown-People legislation in Arizona, and now Readshaw and Metcalfe have scored propaganda points with the overwhelming passage of their attack on brown people in the construction industry. Their bills forbid contractors who hire the undocumented from bidding on state contracts, and revoke the state licenses and certifications of such contractors in the private sector. They also offer state protection to vigilante racial profilers (perversely termed "whistleblowers" in the legislation at a time when genuinely heroic whistleblowers are being sent to jail again).

As you would sadly expect, the building trades teamed up with Metcalfe in this. It could, of course, have the effect of depriving substandard construction contractors of state contracts. But scab contractors who use solely "native-born" and "legal" construction workers at substandard wages and conditions are unaffected, and that is exactly what someone like Metcalfe has in mind. He is on record calling for the repeal of prevailing wage protections for construction workers (not to mention the fact that he is the prime sponsor of Right-To-Work-For-Less legislation in the state, if the trades find that of interest), a sure indication that he would be happy to see immigrants working for peanuts replaced by native-born people working for peanuts.

The trades' behavior in situations like this is symptomatic of their place in the cyclical construction industry, where they are often loath to take in new members -- let alone organize -- on the grounds that there is only so much work to go around, and they have to keep current members (who have gone through the apprenticeship programs) working and happy, lest they oust the leadership in the next election. Their default behavior, then, is to (1) support any and all real estate development, no matter how heinous its other characteristics, and (2) retreat to a position of reserving jobs for existing members, lending credence to the perception of the trades as a White Job Trust (a charge that is exaggerated by anti-labor elements, but which is not without merit in its own right).

If there were support in the legislature for a bill to ban all substandard contractors from getting state contracts, or to revoke the state licenses of all substandard construction contractors, then all workers in the construction industry would benefit a lot more. I recognize that this is not possible at the moment, but it is not correct to accept this bill as a substitute, because it is worse than nothing: it in fact strengthens the White Job Trust and entrenches the a tiered system for workers in the construction industry.

If the trades were to act in the opposite fashion, and organize all workers in the industry without regard to national origin, the very incentive for employers to hire the undocumented on super-exploitable terms would disappear, and it would mean better job security and standards for everyone. Of course, this kind of organizing is impossible if the bottom tier of the workforce is criminalized and deprived of its basic rights, which is exactly the purpose of the bills pushed by Metcalfe and The Undertaker.

I should note that there are glimmers of hope in the trades, and around here there is more than a glimmer in the Ironworkers Local 3 campaign for justice at W&K Steel, where the union is embracing the cause of refugee immigrant workers in this steel fabrication plant. (You can point out that the refugees are here legally, and like all unjust systems of exploitation, the US immigration system has many gradations of humiliation and repression. The refugees have it better than the undocumented when it comes to legal status, but they also have their own problems: for instance, this story is exposing the unpleasant role of non-profits such as Catholic Charities, whose objective function in the system locally is not unlike that of what the undocumented call "coyotes," this time with a friendly face.) It remains to be seen how successful this campaign will be, but it is the only principled -- and the only practical -- road for the future if the working class is to avoid the poorhouse altogether.

Johnstown's Merchants of Death ponder the future

2010-06-06T20:32:00.002-04:00

Dennis Roddy interviews our leading local war profiteers. With John Murtha gone, the military contractors of Johnstown hopefully accept reassurance that the direct fruits of imperial adventurism will continue to fall their way. Even with his surprisingly (and usefully) critical take on the imperialist war of aggression in Iraq, which he adopted towards the end of a lifetime of hawkish militarism, Murtha in the final analysis was the leading legislative tribune of the military-industrial complex.

And its local branch was happy that he was one of their own. So, it must be said, were most of the workers who depend on the jobs created by military industries. In Western Pennsylvania, only the bleakest towns in the Mon Valley can match Johnstown in terms of sheer Rust Belt decay. Someone could probably patent a vaccine for despair by just walking Johnstown's neighborhood streets or contemplating its rotting storefronts for a day; after doing that, you could safely visit Detroit without getting the barely-resistable urge to slit your wrists. It is understandable that any kind of investment and job creation is going to look good to the people who actually have to live there; too bad the whole thing is based on mass death from Fallujah to Kandar to Barrancabermeja, Mindanao and beyond. It doesn't take an actual nuclear war to reduce much of our population to the functional equivalent of the roaming packs of cannibals in a Cormac McCarthy novel, the one they made into a movie that they filmed in Braddock, which was set in a post-apocalyptic future which the actually-existing Mon Valley represents well enough.

It doesn't have to be this way, of course. If the government drops many millions of dollars to create jobs in industries based on destruction, it can also invest in constructive work building schools, health care facilities, completely revamped and environmentally-friendly public transportation systems, and affordable housing. But that kind of massive social spending and reinvestment would soon infringe on the profits of private industry, which as we all know is so much more efficient than public spending (more efficient, that is, in putting money in the pockets of a few). And if private industry starts losing profits, they might just start pulling out of our communities until they look like post-apocalyptic wastelands. You know. Sort of like the way they do now.

Mother Nature makes fun of Republicans. Has anybody noticed?

2010-06-05T15:17:00.002-04:00

The Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center has created a Severance Tax Ticker which calculates the amount of revenue the state has lost so far because it has failed to adopt a severance tax on the extraction of fossil fuels in the Marcellus Shale. As of this writing, the cost is over $55.2 million.

The usual Republican (and general industry-apologist) excuse -- to the effect that high taxation will discourage investment and therefore hamper job growth -- is never believable to begin with, since corporate taxes cut into profits but are not a deterrent to a company that wants to pursue new markets or investment opportunities. In this case, though, the excuse is downright ludicrous, since the natural gas is there, and there is not even a conceivable way that an energy company would move to a different location in response to high taxes.

That didn't stop Dominic Pileggi, the Republican leader in the Senate, from trying out this line of argument, just as nationally the Republicans appear to have tapped into an underground reservoir of stupidity that -- unlike fossil fuels -- is a renewable resource. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska really did have the breathtakingly moronic audacity to say that because BP has more or less destroyed the Gulf of Mexico with its offshore drilling in search of profits, our response should be to reward the same profit-hungry oil companies with drilling opportunities on land, preferably in imperiled wildlife reserves. Likewise, the Post-Gazette reported this last Thursday of Pileggi on the Marcellus Shale:

"'We want the full benefit of that industry in Pennsylvania,' and don't want to discourage drillers and the jobs they will create by adopting too high a tax, he said."

As if in direct answer to Pileggi, Mother Nature the very next day demonstrated the "full benefit of that industry":

"A blowout at a natural-gas well in a remote area shot explosive gas and polluted water as high as 75 feet into the air before crews were able to tame it more than half a day later. ... The well was brought under control just after noon Friday, about 16 hours after it started spewing gas and brine, said Elizabeth Ivers, a spokeswoman for driller EOG Resources Inc. ... Houston-based EOG, formerly part of Enron Corp. [I am not making this up -- FD], was drilling into the Marcellus Shale reserve, a hotly pursued gas formation primarily under Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New York and Ohio that some geologists believe could become the nation's most productive natural gas field."

(Incidentally, why do the local newspapers -- presumably the Leader-Vindicator of New Bethlehem or the Courier-Express of DuBois in this case -- have to rely on the AP wire to report a story this big in their backyard? Doesn't this say something about the gutting of newsrooms across the country? Should I even bother with this anymore?)

This should at least be an incident to remember if there is not a state budget in a few months, and you hear someone blaming "both sides" for the impasse. Seriously folks, let's get real.

Unlivable Times

2010-05-25T21:12:00.004-04:00

The other night I saw the premiere screening of the latest film in Chris Ivey's East of Liberty Series, "In Unlivable Times." It was pretty raw, and the filmmaker says that he will still be doing some serious editing (which is needed), but it still worked well. It focuses mostly on the voices of some very young people from the poorest parts of black neighborhoods in and around Pittsburgh, commenting on the gentrification of East Liberty, which the real estate developers have taken to calling "East Side."

Despite a lot of forcefully-stated frustration and resentment from the people interviewed, most of it spot-on and very well-informed, I do have to note that it registers the sad decline in popular consciousness over the last thirty to forty years. One interviewee standing in front of the Shadow Lounge laments that a nearby building, which stood vacant for years, is now going to be yuppie lofts; this is fine as far as it goes, but he says that there is enough money in the neighborhood that someone could have done something with it to make affordable housing for people in the area (from the context, it is clear that he is referring to local drug dealers).

This sort of pie-in-the-sky dream of "self-reliance" is now not just the first thing, but the only thing that a lot of people reach for. The sad fact is that it is impractical. Once again, "self-reliance" is not a bad thing in and of itself, and locally-oriented small businesses, integrated with the community, can be a fine element of a healthy community and a step toward liberation. But forty years ago, it would not have taken a politically ideological person to point out what no one pointed out in this movie. Plenty of ordinary people would have been saying "The government needs to do something." As in, we have a lot of run-down places in this neighborhood and a lot of problems to solve, and a lot of out-of-work people who can be put to work solving them and on fixing things up; we should not have to wait for "investment" from the banks or real estate developers who will only remake things in their own image and make it unaffordable for the people who currently live here to stay; instead the government owes us, and should invest in this community to directly create jobs and put people to work at a living wage, rebuilding the infrastructure and solving many of the problems we have. It is not that most people are opposed to this demand, it is that it does not even cross their minds. This is what 30 years of Reaganism have wrought, and it is our greatest obstacle for the future.

Readshaw teams up with Metcalfe and the brownshirts

2008-06-11T22:58:00.005-04:00

Alfonso Barquera of Beechview has lived in Pittsburgh for over 10 years. Mr. Barquera is originally from Mexico. Last June, he was riding in a car driven by a woman who was also from Latin America and who had an international driver's license. The Pittsburgh cops pulled them over on the North Side and proceeded to berate the occupants of the car as "illegals," even though all of the passengers were in the country legally.

Even if you think that US immigration law as it stands is something good, needing only tougher enforcement -- in which case you don't know what the hell you're talking about, but that's for another day -- then you still have to recognize that empowering local police departments to enforce Federal immigration law is a recipe for racial profiling. That is what Hazleton mayor Lou Barletta's measures have done. Barletta's ordinance targeted undocumented immigrants by making it a local offense to rent to them or hire them. In reality, while Barletta's White Citizens Council-style "respectable" racism did in fact make life even more difficult for Luzerne County's thousands of undocumented agricultural and other workers from Mexico and other locations, it also led to the racial profiling and targeting of (1) Puerto Ricans, who are numerous in the Hazleton area, and who are US citizens; and (2) Dominicans of longstanding residence in the area, most of whom are in the country legally and many of whom have long since become citizens. This effect of Barletta's actions was entirely predictable, and we can only conclude that it was intentional, since Barletta is eager to stomp on brown bodies if it means he gets a shot at Congress.

Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl -- along with the mayors of York, Lancaster, Meadville, Titusville, Allentown, Lock Haven, and Scranton -- announced last June that immigration enforcement at the local level is inappropriate, and opposed local anti-immigration ordinances. It turns out that there are a lot of places, even in remote parts of the state, where the local mayor deems it sensible not to dress up in a white sheet.

But leave it to the worst member of the legislature to put a stop to that. Daryle Metcalfe (of Cranberry) has long been on an anti-immigrant rampage, including the release of a lurid Julius Streicher-style propaganda piece about an "illegal alien invasion," complete with a map of the state with color-coded "alien" footprints marking the scene of supposed crimes perpetrated by the Brown Peril. Today, he added a new front to his one-sided race war by introducing two new bills targeting so-called "sanctuary" municipalities. Both bills would target any municipality that adopts "ordinances, policies or procedures" that restrict cops or other municipal employees from tracking people's immigration status or from asking individuals about their status, as well as any municipality that provides "public benefits" to "unauthorized aliens." One of these bills (HB 2627) would make any such municipality liable to pay damages if any undocumented immigrant living in the municipality is convicted of a crime. The other bill (HB 2628) would withold Commonwealth appropriations to any designated "sanctuary" municipality.

One hopes that neither of these bills has a chance of passage, although it should be noted that Harry Readshaw of Carrick is the token Democrat on Metcalfe's press release. Some of Readshaw's more progressive-minded constituents might want to pay a visit to his office at 1917 Brownsville Road, or at least should be advised that his local number is (412) 881-4208 and his Harrisburg number is (717) 783-0411, if they're wondering why he's giving "bipartisan" cover to Metcalfe's racist stunts.

Harry Readshaw: What the hell is he doing?

In Allegheny County, Mark Mustio of Moon is also on these bills, and while it's understandable to expect this sort of thing from a suburban Republican shitbag like him as opposed to a city Democrat like Readshaw, it is of some interest that Mustio keeps offices at 937 Beaver Grade Road in Moon Township (phone 412-262-3780) and 519 Broad Street in Sewickley (phone 412-749-4727), and that his Harrisburg phone number is (717) 787-6651.

Do these guys realize who they're consorting with? We know who Metcalfe hangs out with, because the "respectable" White Citizens Council or "uptown Klan" always had an alliance with its grubbier counterparts, and Metcalfe carries on that tradition. For proof, you can have a look at some photos posted on Flickr by a DC-based alternative photojournalist. The photos were taken at an anti-immigrant rally last September 1 put on by an organization from Lou Barletta's Hazleton. Metcalfe was one of the featured speakers at the rally:

There are a few photos in the set of some honorable union-backed counterprotestors and people like Daryle Lamont Jenkins of the One People's Project who were there to document the presence of hate groups. But the following photo of the rally says it all:

Just about everyone in this photo is readily identifable as a neo-Nazi skinhead. (There are also some Ron Paul supporters, and of course there is a good deal of overlap there.) There is one guy near the left edge and in the back who has long hair, but he is wearing a black T-shirt with the number "88," which is widely-recognized white supremacist code for "Heil Hitler" (since H is the eighth letter of the alphabet). The people up front are holding signs saying "End Slavery - Deport Mexicans," and which advertise a website called newsnet14.com, where the 14 obviously refers to the "14 words" of David Lane, the leader of a group called The Order, which assassinated Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg in 1984. (Lane's "14 words," in case you're wondering, are "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.") If you actually go to newsnet14.com, it describes itself as "Global and Local News for Europeans Everywhere," and declares as part of its principles that "Our Race is Our Nation"; among its "featured videos" is "Did 6 Million Really Die?" referring to the Holocaust (and in case you're wondering, they answer No).

These are the people Daryl Metcalfe hangs out with. Do you want your state legislator hanging out with him?

The dice lord of Motown

2008-04-27T02:23:00.002-04:00

Don Barden's troubles continue, as Standard & Poor's assigns a B minus rating with negative outlook for the holding company (PITG Gaming) he set up for his proposed Pittsburgh casino. In case you're wondering, B- is very bad. The next-lowest rating after that -- CCC+ -- represents a company that is in serious trouble. A negative outlook means that PITG is slipping into that territory. And in fact, S&P has already downgraded Barden's parent company -- Majestic Star, through which he operates casinos in Indiana, Mississippi and Colorado -- to CCC+.

Given this, it ought to be downright shocking that of the $390 million in loans that Barden is asking Pennsylvania's Gaming Control Board to approve, some $150 million is backed by the two public pension systems of the City of Detroit. Both the police and fire fund and the general retirement fund for that city have been financially troubled, and they were a source of frustration for Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick who three years ago sought steep union concessions and resorted to layoffs even after issuing some $1.2 billion in pension obligation bonds to try to close the gap on pension obligations.

Seeing as I am an amateur blogger in Pittsburgh, it seems to me that there are several questions that need to be answered about this:

(1) Is it typical for troubled public pension funds to invest sums of this magnitude in B- rated casino projects? How does this fit into the asset mix of Detroit's funds? Andrew Conte of the Tribune-Review took the time to interview two trustees from the police and fire fund who offered conflicting views: police trustee Paul Stewart said that the gaming industry is "always booming" and therefore a "very sound investment," while firefighter trustee Jeffrey Pegg said that he "thought it was too risky." How well-aware were these trustees about the problems facing Barden's venture in Pittsburgh, and did they anticipate the negative Wall Street outlook when they made the decision to back Barden's venture?

(2) Who really controls the pension boards? In 2004, the Kilpatrick administration was fighting with the pension board over who got to hire the executive secretary for the fund. I can't for the life of me find Detroit press reports that explain exactly who dominates the pension boards now, even though someone in Detroit's city hall must know. Formally, a minority of each pension board's trustees are mayoral or city council appointees, while a majority are elected by actual city employee participants in the fund and/or by retirees who are actually receiving benefits. Surely the Kilpatrick administration and other political interests in the city must have had their favorite candidates for the pension boards. Who were they? Who was aligned with whom? And most importantly, how are campaigns for these offices funded, and who did the funding? Is any of this public information? Does anyone know? Has anyone ever seen fit to report on this, or are the vagaries of pension fund administration just too boring -- or perhaps too expensive to cover in the eyes of Gannett and Knight Ridder, who forced a five-year strike in part to gut the newsrooms of Detroit's two newspapers?

(3) Ten years ago, Don Barden fought then-mayor Dennis Archer when he did not get a casino license in Detroit. Barden's argument was that a Detroit resident would keep the casino profits in Detroit and be more likely to further black employment at the casinos. He eventually funded an unsuccessful recall attempt against Archer. The recall attempt against Archer was well-deserved for a host of reasons, although Barden was obviously self-interested. I am not one to raise questions about John Conyers -- who is one of a handful of true progressives in Congress -- but Conyers is also a fixture of long standing in Detroit's political firmament, so he has received political donations from Barden, as has Kwame Kilpatrick's mother. This is an illustration of how influential Barden's money must be in Detroit's political process. Did he essentially "buy" the loan with political donations or favors? Note that the state of the city's pension funds does not have to be a "partisan" question in Detroit's fractious municipal politics, since Dennis Archer himself was a consultant for UBS when the city issued its $1.2 billion in bonds to finance the pension obligations.

These are all questions that should be of keen interest to the people of Pittsburgh, and of even greater interest to the people of Detroit, including its city workforce who depend on these pension funds for their retirement security. The way the Detroit media cover these things does not give me hope that these questions will be answered, however. They did cover a February incident where Monica Conyers -- the Congressman's wife and a City Council member who sits on the General Retirement Fund board -- got into a shouting match with one of Kilpatrick's aides, after which the aide filed an exaggerated police report claiming that Conyers had threatened to shoot him. (In fact, Conyers had only referred to her husband metaphorically as a "gun," in the political sense, that was bigger than Kilpatrick as a political "gun." But I am growing too bored with this story to explain it any further.) From reading the conflicting stories in the press, it is obvious that no reporter actually attended the pension board meetings where the incident occurred, and no one reports on the substance of the issue (a study related to some investments of the pension fund) that precipitated the spat in the first place.

The local press were all over this story of personality conflicts (which occurred even though Conyers is a Kilpatrick ally), but as far as I can tell, they have not seen fit to cover the disposition of $150 million in retirement funds on behalf of city workers, now used to back a questionable investment in another city (mine) by a wealthy and politically-connected local businessman. And the current asinine sex scandal in which Kilpatrick is involved is of far more interest to both Detroit's local press and to the national media.

I consider all of this vindication of point 6 in the original statement of principles for this blog, which rejects the obsession with petty corruption (legislative pay raises, personal use of city vehicles) that is characteristic of media in Pittsburgh as well as Detroit (including most of the supposedly oppositional blogs). All of them can write interminably about petty nonsense, but $150 million in city pension fund money is somehow not worthy of in-depth coverage.

I am waiting for the mainstream media in Detroit -- or perhaps an intrepid reporter from Pittsburgh -- to prove me wrong on this. Will someone other than an amateur blogger -- you know, someone who actually gets paid to do this shit and therefore has some time to do actual research and reporting -- please take a look at some of this stuff? Will someone please actually report the dirty truth behind what's really going on? Or are you all going to keep ignoring the boring multi-million-dollar details of municipal finance in the Rust Belt in favor of stories about who sent salacious text messages to whom and penny-ante crap like who appropriated a city SUV for personal use?

The PA legislature has blood on its hands

2008-04-04T08:37:00.004-04:00

As with the social disaster that followed Hurricane Katrina, there are going to be plenty of people who think of the horrific Brockway house fire as a senseless tragedy, brought on by merciless happenstance. It's reasonable to think that if you don't pay careful attention to the story, but justice demands that we do, even though there are some other people who have an interest in obscuring the truth.

There are ten people dead, nine of them from the same family, including eight children. These ten people living in the same house included two young mothers who had children as teenagers. They were obviously poor. Most tellingly, news reports are already mentioning that there were space heaters in the house.

There is no reason to use space heaters in an overcrowded house unless you are having trouble affording your heating bill, or have even been shut off by the utility company. And no matter how mild this winter has seemed, it's been cold enough for the families shut off or threatened with shutoffs as a result of the so-called "Responsible Utility Customer Protection Act" of 2005, passed by John Perzel's Republican legislature with plenty of support from Democrats.

It is bad enough that poor people shiver through the night, or have to dress their kids up in winter coats before going to bed in the richest country on earth. It is even worse -- but both inevitable and completely predictable -- that people will occasionally die because of this. Any member of the legislature who voted for the bill knew this to be true, but considered utility company profits to be more important than the lives of people like the ten dead in Brockway.

So what happens next? I suppose we all reach out to console the grieving people of tiny Brockway, but it does all of us a disservice if we chalk this up to cruel fate and nothing more. Do House Minority Leader (and former Majority Leader) Sam Smith and Senate President Pro Tem Joseph Scarnati attend the mass funeral of the Peterson family without a word in public about how these two ought to be held responsible for their deaths? Grief is understandable and unavoidable. Anger -- and action -- are necessary if we do not want something like this to happen again.

The Jim and George Show -- Featuring John McCain

2008-02-23T10:03:00.004-05:00

It seems that the sad story of the demise of one of Pittsburgh's public television stations is in the news again, if only tangentially. It only comes up because of the possibility that one of the lobbyists involved may have stirred John McCain's then-not-quite-geriatric loins.

McCain is lying when he says that he was not acting on Paxson Communications's behalf in writing to the FCC telling them to make a quick decision in the sale of the WQEX license. In fact, in a deposition in 2002, McCain openly admitted that he told Paxson's chairman that he would be happy to write the letter, with the caveat that he couldn't actually tell the FCC which way to make its ruling. McCain -- unlike the people who are gullible enough to believe his shameless misrepresentations -- is not a moron; he is as accomplished a practitioner as any of the doctrine of "plausible deniability." At the time, to anyone who was actually involved in or even aware of the fight over WQEX, the letter was a clear intervention on behalf of the people who wanted to turn the station's noncommercial license over to Cornerstone Television, the Wall-based pack of crack-brained fanatics whose lineup of "educational" programming most prominently includes "scientific" explanations of Creationism. Paxson meanwhile would have assumed Cornerstone's commercial license on Channel 40, where Cornerstone remains to this day, trying to mobilize obscurantism to restart the war in Laos, answering "prayer requests," and whatever other nonsense they're into.

The deal eventually fell through, although WQEX was eventually turned into a home shopping channel.

In Pittsburgh, it's worth it to us to remember who is responsible for cooking this up in the first place: it was the responsibility of George Miles, assisted by then-board chairman Jim Roddey. Also on the board at the time were other figures of local capitalist notoriety, like Elsie Hillman. As always in this country, we don't have much of a functioning public sphere, so we don't have an actual public television system that is free of commercial imperatives and open to some public participation. Instead, we have a quasi-public hybrid that is dependent on an upper-middle-class donor base, and -- while nationally it has produced some good stuff, from Sesame Street to Bill Moyers's programs -- consequently these stations devote most of their programming time to yuppie cooking shows and recycled 1970s British comedies. We then exacerbate the problem by doing what we have always done with public services since the Reagan Administration: we put people in charge of them who do not believe in public services.

George Miles has never been much into running even one television station that did not profit him directly, let alone two, and so he and his buddy Jim came up with the plan to dump QEX. Running a television station that is actually accountable to the local public and intended to advance civic purposes takes actual work, and that has never been either Jim's or George's gig, so they were hellbent on cutting their official responsibilities in half. They ended up facing unexpected resistance from Jerry Starr and from the late Alliance for Progressive Action (note: in the pre-Peduto years in Pittsburgh, the word "progressive" actually meant something). But when you're in charge, it's always easier to just outlast your enemies, because all you have to do is do nothing, and that's what rich people do best. So to force the FCC's hand, Miles and Roddey started simulcasting on QED and QEX, using the old technique of running public services into the ground to make them look useless, and this despite a raft of alternative proposals for QEX.

Miles and Roddey have always been the Bo and Luke Duke of the local ruling class, except that they give you a glimpse of what the Duke Boys would have been like if they had also been Boss Hog. Roddey goes through life looking for business opportunities, and makes no distinctions between that and his "public service," and in George he has found a particularly congenial partner, so much so that the two even briefly entertained the notion of getting into the gambling industry together.

When you're the Duke Boys and Boss Hog all rolled into one, you never have to jump the General Lee over the county line just one step ahead of the law -- and you never have to answer to the press, either. The Post-Gazette supported their boys all the way. The same couldn't quite be said of Cornerstone, which eventually pulled out of the deal for its own reasons, which apparently had something to do with principles -- lunatic, barking-mad principles, to be sure, but principles nonetheless, and that has a tendency to get in the way of Jim's and George's mad capers for the sake of money. It didn't take them long, though, to find another commercial partner, and the new Bush regime had put Colin Powell's son in charge at the FCC, so they eventually got their way.

Sweet Home Pennsylvania: In Harrisburg, they love the Gov'nor!

2008-02-14T19:00:00.002-05:00

Let's be clear about something: what Ed Rendell said about Barack Obama's run for the presidency was true. If anything, he was understating his case when he admitted that about five points would have been shaved off his own margin of re-election victory in 2006 had Lynn Swann been white, and he definitely overestimated the extent to which Obama's supposed ability to "bring new people to the polls" overcomes the disadvantage imparted by racism.

Pointing out the existence of racism is not, in fact, a racist act -- more often, the opposite is true. Only Republicans claim otherwise, since as the party of white supremacy they are officially committed to the fairy-tale idea that this is a "color-blind" society, and that it is therefore unseemly to talk about race (and therefore racial inequality) at all. These people are angry at Rendell not because he insulted Barack Obama, but because he insulted the white voting public by telling the bald-faced truth. So kudos to him for that, as far as it goes.

But there is another side to this. Even though what Rendell said was technically true, it amounts to an offensive statement when taken in its proper context. In this respect it is similar to the evangelical preacher's statement that "Almighty God does not hear the prayer of a Jew." Technically speaking, the statement is true, but it is still anti-Semitic, because we are all supposed to understand that the preacher really does believe that there is such a thing as an "Almighty God" who does "hear the prayer" of a Christian.

Ed Rendell is an open supporter of Hillary Clinton, and it is widely known that he is angling for a cabinet position in the unlikely event that she overcomes not only Barack Obama, but John McCain. So Rendell's observation on racist white voters, while technically correct, was intended to scare off people from voting for Obama, perversely using the racism of others as an argument for voting white in the Democratic primary. That, plus Rendell unselfconsciously referred to Swann as "well-spoken," the oldest term in the lexicon of patronizing whites -- something he presumably should have learned not to do as the longtime mayor of a majority-black city.

In short, then, Ed Rendell is a racist. So fuck him.

The Rooneys let Plaxico go

2008-02-03T22:07:00.001-05:00

Let's remember that.

Why do we owe $30 million to this developer?

2008-02-03T17:02:00.000-05:00

According to the URA's real estate director, Kyra Straussman, the Oakland office space market is tight, with Pitt and UPMC -- and the assorted "small business" hangers-on who suck at the teat of institutions that large -- are always in need of more space in that neighborhood. Any developer who moves into the market presumably stands to make a killing.

So why would the public need to spend $30 million in state funds -- plus an untold amount in tax-increment financing at the local level -- to subsidize developer FWG Real Estate Inc. in such a project? State Sen. Wayne Fontana -- whose district includes the area under consideration -- seems to think that this would be a fine use of public funds, and he can perhaps claim that he's not self-interested, since the Commonwealth's campaign contributions website reveals no campaign contributions to Fontana from FWG principals Frank Gustine and Ed Pope, although they have spread some money around to Matt Smith and Ed Rendell himself.

I'm sure we'll all be shocked, shocked if Gustine's and Pope's political largesse benefits Fontana in the near future. But at least until that happens -- and before he shows up at an ostentatious FWG ribbon-cutting a year or two down the road, counting it an instance of "bringing home the bacon" to his district -- perhaps Fontana could give some thought to steering money toward people in his district with no health insurance, or maybe even toward helping out the Pittsburgh Public Schools (even though so few of his Brookline/Beechview constituents actually send their kids there after elementary school, what with the much-whiter option of Seton-LaSalle for high school). Someone tell me this long-time Wagner loyalist has not been bought.

"Reformers"

2008-01-19T09:17:00.000-05:00

There are several people lining up for the state legislative seat held by Lisa Bennington, a district covering Bloomfield and other parts of Pittsburgh's East End, plus working-class suburbs like Etna, Millvale and Sharpsburg. Bennington is abandoning her constituents after only one term, having discovered that she is bored with Harrisburg and able to make a lot more money as a divorce attorney (and would still have been able to do so even if she had taken the pay raise she had vociferously denounced Frank Pistella for supporting).

This whole sorry episode is an illustration of why this city's so-called "reformers" are ultimately a gaggle of worthless, self-important hacks -- or would-be hacks who fancy themselves so much better than the current crop of hacks in charge. Bennington ran against Pistella for absolutely no reason at all, basing her entire campaign on the faux-populist fury about the pay raise. She attracted plenty of support from the usual upper-middle-class liberal sources, even though Pistella was fine on the issues (abortion and gay rights) that these same people claim to treasure most. Unfortunately for Pistella -- and his constituents -- Bennington was the only character to jump into the race against him, and she was able to benefit from both diffuse voter anger and Pistella's laziness when it came to campaigning. The same crew of supposedly liberal know-nothings backed some nitwit seller of party favors -- who was most notable for having been in the Post-Gazette for renovating her house -- against one of the best overall members of the House, Don Walko, though Walko was at least able to make it because two other nitwits split the anti-Walko vote.

To Bennington's credit, she does at least appear to have most of the right positions on the issues, even if she's not interested in doing much about them. So when she got to Harrisburg, she realized that the problem was not Big Bad Bill DeWeese's support of the pay raise, but the Republicans' war on basic human decency, and DeWeese -- however imperfect -- was the elected leader of those who wanted to stand in the way of these enemies of humanity. She recognized enough of the facts to publicly defend DeWeese from the media witch-hunt set off by the opening stages of the Tom Corbett gubernatorial campaign.

But now, she's tired of trying to do things for her constituents for less money than she can make in the so-called "private sector," so it's back to that stuff for her. Good riddance, though unfortunately, it looks like we'll end up with a real hack of some sort in her place -- and in the place of the once-acceptable Pistella.

A few privileged fools spoil it for other whites

2008-01-13T13:07:00.000-05:00

I'm not one to be harsh on Mike Seate, since I don't envy anyone whose job is to be the lone sane person in the stable of batshit-crazy lunatics that is the list of Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnists. It is not that I am impressed by Seate's politics, but his Everyman writings do at least give the impression that he lives on planet earth, and next to Colin McNickle or Bill Steigerwald -- let alone the nightmarishly moronic racist Dimitri Vassilaros -- Seate's journalism looks like Emile Zola's.

But Seate's occasional use of the "Other Black People Embarrass Me" trope as a story hook is a fault. (Unfortunately a lot of black journalists in predominantly white media end up resorting to this -- and the PG's Tony Norman, with his frequent complaints about hip-hop, is not immune to the trend.) This past week Seate wrote about being shamed by the "ghetto" behavior of a few black shoppers at Waterworks Mall. Now, Seate is within his rights to be annoyed by boorishness of any kind, but he takes it a step too far when he openly worries that this poor behavior reflects on him because other shoppers -- and Seate explicitly refers to the whites from Fox Chapel -- associate him with the bad behavior of other blacks. No matter how many people ride the bus from Homewood to Waterworks and "act the fool," if white shoppers therefore look askance at Seate -- who is just going about his business -- then whose fault is that? Why is it still so taboo to recognize and denounce white racism for what it is, whether that be in the Waterworks Mall or the New Hampshire primary?

I have to add something else: as a white guy (and as a pseudonymous blogger, that's about all the further I'm going to go with hints about my "real" life) I have been personally inconvenienced and embarrassed by the behavior of other whites at Waterworks. There is no other mall or grocery store in the area where I have run into so much trouble finding a parking space because of the patrons' habit of leaving their grocery carts in the parking lot, taking up parking spaces -- sometimes only a few feet from the cart return stalls that are conveniently placed in the lot. It is almost always the whites who do this, because the black shoppers tend to come in on the bus, and consequently are not taking their groceries out to their cars.

And those cars . . . ! The parking lot near the Waterworks Giant Eagle is frequently full of Mercedes and BMWs, of both the sedan and SUV variety. Bush stickers are a common sight. (To the extent that there were some Kerry stickers after 2004 and beyond, it probably had something to do with the fact that Teresa Heinz is their neighbor in Fox Chapel.) And hell, these are the ones from up that way who still shop for their own groceries, and they're still so damn lazy that they can't walk ten feet to return their carts and move them out of the parking spaces being vacated by their hulking vehicular monstrosities. Someone else has to pick up for them. Grocery shopping is probably the most work that any of them do all week, so that little extra at the end would be taxing themselves too much.

Despite this, though, is there anyone who would ever write a newspaper column worrying that Waterworks might shut down because of white laziness and contempt for public spaces? Is there anyone who would suggest that Fox Chapel and O'Hara should lose their access to a grocery store in their neighborhood because of the shabby condition in which they leave the parking lot? Or that they should have to travel miles from their own neighborhood to shop as punishment for their uncivil behavior, the way the people of the Hill District have had to do things for the last forty years?

Mannarino or Melani: Pick your poison

2008-01-02T22:31:00.001-05:00

One of these guys might bust your kneecaps for not paying back a loan at 10% interest. The other charges you a co-pay of a mere 10% for the cast because you went to an in-network provider. Lucky you!

New Year's Day featured a Post-Gazette story on Ken Melani's "circuitous journey from Allegheny Valley to Highmark," one of those Horatio Alger tales about a local boy who made a lot of money. By all accounts, Melani's forebears were like most people in the Allegheny Valley in that they actually worked for a living. Places like PPG and Allegheny Ludlum employed a lot more people then than they do now.

But not everyone worked in those days, and Bill Toland's Post-Gazette account alludes to this: Melani's birthplace of New Kensington was "a robust town of pool halls and numbers games." That it was, and much more, because "New Ken" was the preserve of one Gabriel "Kelly" Mannarino. Mannarino had been the partner of Santo Trafficante in the San Souci hotel in Havana -- a frequent haunt of characters like Meyer Lansky -- until 1959's revolution put a cruel end to Mannarino's free-enterprise dream, bringing literacy, hospitals, Che Guevara's executions of Batista's secret police, and infant mortality rates lower than the US in its wake.

But Mannarino's entrepeneurial spirit could not be crushed, and soon his risk-taking move into low-tax (indeed, tax-free!) ventures back home in New Ken led to a little piece of supply-side heaven as he created numerous jobs for bookies, numbers-runners and loan-sharks. He was not even deterred by intrusive government regulators who outright arrested him in Apalachin, New York, when he was sitting down for a meeting with a few dozen of his business associates. Yes, Kelly Mannarino was an exemplar of the old saying that "Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a day; teach a man that he'd better watch out or he'll be sleeping with the fishes, and he will pay back your money first thing Monday morning, signore, I promise, please, just give me a few more days." Indeed, Kelly Mannarino rose from his humble origins to second-in-command of Pittsburgh's La Cosa Nostra, and he would have succeeded John LaRocca in 1984 had he not preceded him in death in 1980. He was proof positive that in America, the Land of Opportunity™, you can be anything you want to be.

So can it really be said that Ken Melani has risen beyond the kind of world where a guy like Kelly Mannarino floats to the top of society, and has a whole town at his beck and call?

Of course it can, because let's face it: next to Ken Melani, Kelly Mannarino was a rank amateur. Melani's Highmark steals more from the mouths of sick people in the space of a week than Kelly Mannarino stole from down-on-their-luck gamblers in his entire lifetime. The road from the Black Hand to the blue "greater hand in your health" is paved with the billions of dollars in "reserves" that Melani used not to lower premiums or cover the uninsured -- let alone to pay claims -- but to launch a competitive drive against Capital Blue Cross and Independence Blue Cross in the other half of the state. His gamble paid off, and when the merger with Independence is approved by regulators -- as it almost certainly will be -- he will be capo di tutti capi of the health insurance rackets in the state, a position more lucrative than anything Kelly Mannarino could have dreamed of.

It pays to stand up to them

2007-12-27T10:52:00.000-05:00

UPMC has dropped its tax credit demand from the city, and has said it will donate to the Pittsburgh Promise without the credits against theoretical future taxes, and also without reducing its current payments to the PILOT-in-all-but-name fund for non-profits.

It pays to stand up to bullies once in a while. Would that our city council and other elected officials would do it more often.

The Behemoth strikes again

2007-12-18T21:05:00.000-05:00

UPMC's arrogance is the stuff of legend. They spent the last two weeks basking in the self-adulatory PR of their "donation" to the Pittsburgh Promise -- the proposed scholarship program for students who graduate from Pittsburgh Public Schools -- and yesterday they pulled the bait-and-switch by demanding tax credits from the city to offset the donation. Granted, UPMC had already received some very well-deserved criticism from people who pointed out that they are supposed to be a health care non-profit, and that it is a dubious benefit for the city's children to get scholarships on the one hand even as they are gouged by medical bills (co-pays are going up for everyone!) by the likes of UPMC on the other. But "now, more than ever," UPMC has really taken it to the next level.

Schools solicitor Ira Weiss was quoted earlier today as saying that the credits would not apply to UPMC's current taxable properties, of which there are quite a few, even though there are plenty of tax-exempt properties as well. The Post-Gazette paraphrased Weiss in a full dudgeon of lawyerly dishonesty:

"Mr. Weiss said UPMC clearly meets the definition of a public charity under the current law, so it's unlikely anyone could challenge its tax-exempt status."

But of course, no one is proposing to challenge UPMC's tax-exempt status. Tax-exempt status is conferred at the Federal level by the IRS, and I am unaware of any hospital or health system anywhere in the country that has been successfully challenged on that score. (Correct me if I'm wrong!) But challenging the tax exemptions of a non-profit entity at the state or local level is a different matter, and it is states that set policy on the subject of state and local taxation. Changing the law to allow local taxing bodies to tax non-profits -- or at least grant municipalities and school districts some leverage to extract better payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs) -- is still a heavy political lift, but it is nowhere near as difficult (and unprecedented) as challenging a health system's tax-exempt status with the IRS.

Pennsylvania's current law covering these matters, Act 55, was passed back in the 1990s. This was the time of a "perfect storm" for local taxing bodies, particularly school districts. First, there was Ridge-area utility deregulation, which meant that large power plants were no longer considered public utilities, and therefore did not pay the Public Utility Realty Tax (PURTA) -- a windfall for the power companies, and a dramatic blow in revenue for school districts and (not incidentally, Pittsburghers!) for mass transit, the latter of which previously received operating support from the tax. At the same time, with the growth of managed care, hospitals were merging into larger systems (giants like UPMC were created in their current form during that decade), and in 1996 Pennsylvania's certificate of need (CON) process was abolished, knocking down one more barrier to hospital and health system growth, needless duplication of services driven by competition (cf. our two cancer centers in Pittsburgh -- why??), and further-escalating healthcare costs. At the time, hospitals looked like a ripe target for revenue-hungry districts, who were able to extract substantial PILOTs from hospitals and other non-profits in exchange for not challenging their tax exemptions generally.

1997's Act 55 made this tactic a lot more difficult. Changing this law would be a heavy political lift. It would be opposed not only by the Hospital Association (currently the biggest-spending lobby in Harrisburg) but by the universities, the Catholic Church, etc. But when mayors of distressed cities from Aliquippa to Pittsburgh to Scranton are trying to balance budgets, a challenge to the mega-non-profits privileged tax status in the state is not outside the realm of possibility.

So UPMC was trying to get ahead of this with its Pittsburgh Promise "donation" -- and how silly all of us look if we thought that their "philanthropy" was merely intended to buy generalized goodwill ahead of those statewide debates (which would have been bad enough). No, UPMC wants a direct offset ahead of time, and wants that guarantee from the city, or else they're going to pull out. This is pure-and-simple blackmail, and should be cause for great public outrage.

And in fact, the whole thing is potentially even worse right now, not just in the theoretical future. While Weiss may technically be telling the truth that the credits don't apply to the health system's current property taxes, an updated report from Rich Lord today points out that it likely will apply to UPMC's current contribution to the fund that city non-profits currently pay into as a PILOT.

We need a mayor and council who will tell these assholes where to get off by pushing hard for changes at the state level to tax non-profits. If we want to as a city, we can even use non-profit taxes and PILOTs to fund the Pittsburgh Promise. But we ought to preserve the principle that we will democratically decide how tax revenue is spent, and we will make that decision in public, not inside Jeffrey Romoff's office.

Of levitating hotels, Part II

2007-12-15T12:02:00.000-05:00

Chris Potter of the City Paper this week wrote on the Bakery Square TIF and UNITE HERE, which I discussed at some length late last month.

Potter points out another layer of complexity to the controversy, which is the fact that the building trades' hilariously-named ERECT Fund is helping finance the development. As a result, the Labor Council can't take a position on the issue, because the local labor movement is not united. (You might want to take this as vindication of the Change to Win federation's critique that the AFL-CIO is paralyzed by its consensus model of operation, but it's a long and difficult task to actually create an alternative to that. Most of the local Change to Win unions are also still members of the Labor Council, by the way.)

This event leads us to the issue of labor's pension funds, which are potentially a source of real power for workers, so much so that management theorists have worred about "pension fund socialism." But in the real world, while these funds -- which control literally trillions of dollars in assets -- represent workers' collective savings and are based on retirement promises to workers, they are controlled mostly by Wall Street and respond to Wall Street prerogatives. They are restrained by a narrow definition of "fiduciary responsibility" that leads them to seek out the highest possible return, and in cases where reform elements within labor have sought to assert control over investment decisions, they have been obliged to frame their positions on investment issues in "fiduciary" terms, because they are not legally allowed to consider broader social concerns.

As a result, you will see pension funds with investments in Wal-Mart, or pension funds becoming the playthings of private equity capitalists who launch hostile takeovers of companies and even cut jobs. It is high time that labor fought such perversities; beyond the fiduciary interest in a reasonable return for workers' retirement savings, workers and retirees also have an interest in a just society that protects workers' jobs and the environment.

You could make the argument that the ERECT fund has taken at least one step in that direction, since it invests not in just any company to get a high rate of return; instead, it invests in real estate projects that mean more work for current construction trades union members. But in this case we encounter the perennial problem of the building trades' wanting to build any and all real estate projects, even if the workers at the project post-construction will have low wages, inadequate healthcare, and no guarantee of union protections. I would argue that this is not only not in the interests of the larger community, but it is not in the long-term interests of the trades, either.

The trades do have a privileged position within the labor movement because of their political role as the "junior partner" in the real estate "growth coalition" that dominates local politics. But the trades' ability to be useful to the employers in their industry is ultimately dependent on the broader strength of the labor movement in a given area. It is not just about the trades' training funds that "add value" to employers. There are plenty of non-union contractors out there who are willing to do substandard, shoddy work for lower cost and to put in lower bids on public projects in particular. The scab contractors are active in Pittsburgh as well, and frequently have multiple-page inserts in the Pittsburgh Business Times (including this week!). If the labor movement as a whole declines in this region, we will be getting closer to a Sunbelt situation where the trades start to suffer, too, since they will have no political way to make sure that union contractors win out over non-union ones or even that prevailing wage be enforced.

To its credit, ERECT was previously involved in the effort to save jobs at the old Nabisco plant by bringing in the Atlantic Baking Group. That failed, but labor should not give up on efforts for more socially responsible development. It would be worthwhile to members of the trades and the larger community if ERECT decided to throw its weight around on this project to ensure that the hotel at Bakery Square is not only built union, but stays union once it's actually built.

Weep for the docs

2007-12-08T20:18:00.001-05:00

The Pennsylvania Medical Society opposes Rendell's plan to use part of the Mcare surplus to subsidize health insurance for the uninsured. Mcare has hitherto helped physicians pay their malpractice insurance costs. What the group did not say -- but which motivates them most of all -- is that many local doctors fear that they will have to get smaller summer homes in the Hamptons if the Rendell plan goes through.

Meanwhile, Jim Ferlo is hosting a "National Healthcare Day" in the lobby of the City-County Building Downtown on December 14 from 11 AM to 4 PM. Ferlo is a strong supporter of the Conyers single-payer bill (HR 676) at the Federal level and has previously introduced a bill of his own to further single-payer at the state level. I won't pretend that either of these is going anywhere any time soon, and I support any and all efforts to extent coverage and to shift costs back away from patients and onto those who are better able to pay (chiefly employers). But educating people on a more comprehensive reform for the system is not a bad thing to do, so if you can make it Downtown for even part of that day, I say go!

Of course, yours truly believes that single-payer itself does not go far enough. It socializes the insurance end of things, but keeps providers private. Ultimately, big health care providers -- including "non-profits" like UPMC -- should be nationalized, and doctors should be employed by the state.

Good riddance, Tom Yewcic

2007-12-04T19:16:00.000-05:00

In writing about other topics, I neglected to note a happy recent development: State Rep. Tom Yewcic has announced his retirement. Yewcic has long been the worst Democrat in the legislature, and until Tom Caltagirone's open treachery at the end of last year, Yewcic was the House's most conspicuous DINO.

It is not only that Yewcic frequently voted with the Republicans. He was a member of the Commonwealth Caucus, the anchor for the far right in the House. Their most prominent initiative in the last session -- which Yewcic strongly supported -- was to propose raising taxes on poor people in order to eliminate property taxes altogether: their goal was to lower the sales tax from 6% to 5%, but expand it to cover food and clothing. The current exemption for those items makes the Pennsylvania sales tax one of the least regressive in the country, but the Commonwealth Caucus wanted to change that.

Commonwealth Caucus members made a pledge to follow a "checklist" in their votes in the legislature. Right after "1. Is it moral?" and "2. Is it constitutional?" the checklist made sure that its members asked: "3. Does it preserve individual freedom and responsibility or strengthen government control?" and "4. Does it strengthen and/or preserve the traditional family?"

Yewcic was of course the sole Democrat on the five-person Commonwealth Caucus executive board. Caucus Chairman Sam Rohrer and Caucus Policy Director Gordon Denlinger were both graduates of the segregationist Bob Jones University. (Rohrer studied "management" there. Denlinger received the training that made him the gray and humorless accountant that he is today.) Also present were the anti-union abomination Teresa Forcier, who lost her seat in the primary because of the pay raise fiasco; and Jerry Birmelin, the legislature's leading gay-basher, who retired.

The Commonwealth Caucus does not have much of a web presence these days, and I am not sure if they are as relevant now as they were when the Republicans had a solid majority in the House and the caucus formed a right-wing opposition to John Perzel. (Sam Smith, who is now minority leader, is not a member of the Commonwealth Caucus, but was closer to them than Perzel was.) Forcier and Birmelin also departed because of the pay raise issue, and Cranberry's own Daryl Metcalfe -- the worst member of the legislature, period -- very publicly resigned from the Caucus because they did not oppose the pay raise.

The happy fact that this evil cabal is not as politically strong as it once was does not change the moral significance of Yewcic's association with them. One hopes that the voters of his district (which includes parts of Cambria and Somerset counties) will not replace him with a Republican, but it is hard to see how a Republican could be much worse.

New addition to The Parkway Left

2007-12-01T14:14:00.000-05:00

A scant few weeks into this blog's existence, I am pleased to welcome a new contributor, Joaquin Murieta. I'll let Comrade Joaquin introduce himself with his first post -- which will likely be less an introduction of himself and more a discussion of a local, regional or state issue. Readers don't need to know much more about us personally, save that Joaquin's politics are solidly in line with our principles.

Clawbacks

2007-12-01T11:39:00.000-05:00

Kim Lyons in this week's Pittsburgh Business Times reports that the state's Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) is finally beginning to enforce "clawbacks" -- requiring companies to pay back all or part of state Opportunity Grants that they received for job creation, but on which jobs they did not subsequently deliver.

I'd like to think this is a step in the right direction, but I'm afraid that this does not scratch the surface of the subsidy racket. I've written earlier about one example (which I chose more or less at random) of "job creation" that should not by rights count as a success even if the company did employ as many people in Pennsylvania as it promised: this was a case where the state granted incentives to the company to move its facilities from Rhode Island to this state. DCED actually got away with touting this sort of thing as a success, because so many people actually think it is a rational idea for states (and indeed, countries) to "compete" against one another for jobs. The only winners in this situation are the companies.

Per the usual, the most enthusiastic full-frontal attack on the subsidy racket comes from the far right, in the form of the wicked Mike Turzai, who wants to eliminate the Opportunity Grants program altogether . . . and use the money instead for business tax "relief." People like Turzai are miffed by the favoritism shown by the Opportunity Grants program, and want to act to ensure that all rich people benefit from tax cuts across the board, while meanwhile the public sector is still starved of funds, poor people's schools continue to crumble, and the costs of healthcare are increasingly borne by sick people (hey -- it's your fault if you can't take the high-performing pressures of the market, so if you have cancer or diabetes, it's your responsibility to figure out how to spend your personal health savings account!).

In reality, of course, Pennsylvania does not have particularly high business taxes; they're around middling as states go. Inequity is a problem, though -- not least the Delaware loophole.

Of levitating hotels

2007-11-28T19:07:00.000-05:00

It was 120 years ago that the hero of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Julian West, fell asleep only to wake up in 2000 -- like the Rip Van Winkle of Victorian sci-fi -- in an advanced socialist society. (And utopian author Edward Bellamy's cousin, Francis Bellamy, was a Baptist minister and Christian Socialist who wrote the original version of the Pledge of Allegiance. It didn't include "under God." But that is a discussion for another day -- and not on this website.)

Imaginative as Bellamy was, his sci-fi socialism could not produce at least one wonder that actually-existing capitalism is about to give us, right here, in Pittsburgh: a hotel suspended in the air!

Er -- rather, no. You could always count on Marx and his disciples to critique the airy abstractions of the utopians like Bellamy, and you can count on me to undermine capitalist abstractions, too. It turns out that hotels are -- and for the foreseeable future, always will be -- firmly moored to the ground.

The mundane story goes like this: the City of Pittsburgh's Urban Redevelopment Authority is using tax-increment financing (a TIF) to build the garage and infrastructure for the mixed-use development at the site of the former Nabisco plant in the East Liberty/Larimer (note: not "East Side") area. (The sorry saga of the fight to keep some real jobs at the former Nabisco plant is another discussion for another day -- perhaps on this website.) The URA wants the TIF to apply to everything but the hotel, on the ostensible grounds that the hotel would not be located at ground level but suspended in the air. The real reason they want to exclude the hotel from the TIF is to avoid having to enforce a city ordinance which would prohibit the hotel owners from intimidating workers who want to form a union.

The ordinance, which was passed before the building of the Renaissance Hotel in Downtown earlier in this decade, requires that a hotel owner receiving City funds (such as a TIF) must abide by a "labor peace" agreement, and not drag workers through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) process. I won't go into too much detail about why the NLRB process is a sham; the short story is that the so-called "secret ballot" NLRB election process is always a long-drawn-out nightmare in which the employer is allowed broad latitude in intimidating the workers whose livelihoods he holds in the palm of his hand, and even when the boss violates the law, the penalties are nominal. Labor law is stacked high against workers, and it is a miracle when they prevail against intimidation and win a union despite the fear-mongering. Under Bush -- you can at least imagine, even if you've never seen it firsthand -- things are even worse than they were in the Clinton years when it was the Democrats making NLRB appointments. The labor peace ordinance is a way to shift power in favor of workers through the creative use of local politics.

But basic class-struggle questions like this are always clarifying moments, when you learn who is really on your side:

(1) In Rich Lord's PG article, the most amusing comments are the hemming-and-hawing -- and lying -- ones from an Eric Montarti of the Scaife-controlled Allegheny Institute. The Scaife factotums' years-long attempts to position themselves as critics of TIF projects and friends of the little guy are undermined by Montarti, who says that the labor peace ordinance is itself on "some shaky legal ground," because "We're singling out one industry here. ... The city is basically saying to a developer that they have to accept a union and accept binding arbitration, which [usually] only applies to police and firefighters." This is one of the few attempts to actually get some accountability for city-led giveaways to developers, so that the little guy will at least get something -- but no, Scaife's hatred of the labor movement trumps everything, his critiques of unaccountable TIF decisions go out the window, and his concern is above all else for the hotel owners' profits, even if couched in a weaselly legal argument. And the legal argument does not even fly on the merits, since a court has already upheld the ordinance: it doesn't pre-empt the NLRB, because the City does arguably have an interest in requiring labor peace as a condition of its loan. In exchange for the organizing rights, the union also agrees to binding arbitration instead of strikes -- which is fine for workers, since with invigorated leadership at the local level and tight strategy through the national "Hotel Workers Rising!" campaign, UNITE HERE members are doing a good job of raising standards for low-income hotel workers in this city. Arbitration results will only get better and better in that situation. Scaife hates powerful and self-sufficient workers most of all.

(2) More importantly, URA behavior is an important gauge of where the mayor's real sympathies lie. Despite its board, the URA is little more than an arm of the mayor's office. Should the URA persist in its current behavior, we will see for sure where the mayor really stands when it comes to workers' bread-and-butter concerns.

Everything is OK if capitalists get richer

2007-11-25T11:50:00.000-05:00

Large employers in Western Pennsylvania saw an increase of only 2% in their health insurance costs last year, according to the benefits consulting firm Mercer. Don't go thinking that that means that health care costs actually rose that modestly; it's just that someone else, other than the big companies, is paying for it. The Tribune-Review summarizes the reasons according to Mercer: "Reasons for the percentage slowdown include shifting more costs to employees, and because employee usage of benefits is slowing."

Mercer attributes declining benefit usage to "increasing health management activities, such as smoking cessation and healthy eating programs," but the same article mentions increasing deductibles, as well as the steady increase in so-called "consumer-directed" plans. Could increasing costs for individuals be the more likely explanation for why usage is down? Given the steady media drumbeat about how fat and sedentary we all are around here (higher than the already-corpulent national average), I somehow doubt that our increasingly healthy habits are what is benefiting large employers' bottom lines. More likely, people are skipping on doctors' visits and medicines because of the increasing financial costs.

This discussion about low health care cost increases for some was nicely paralleled by the article by a little weasel from the Cato Institute that appeared in this week's Pittsburgh Business Times. This guy just can't understand why there are so many complaints about the decline of US manufacturing, when the sector shows "record output, record sales, record profits, record profit rates and record return on investment." Granted, the country lost 2.8 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2003, but the fetid skunk from Cato says that since then, "job attrition in the sector reverted to its much more modest, decades-long rate of decline," and we have lost a mere 300,000 jobs in manufacturing since then. Since the manufacturing industry is still capable of making its millionaires even richer, the squeaking rodents at Cato argue that it's sour grapes to point out that less and less of the sector's opulent output goes to any of the workers who made its millionaires rich in the first place.

In a place like Pittsburgh -- ravaged and then mostly abandoned by the great industries of the last century and the one before it -- this is especially galling. I am tempted to paraphrase the Cato Institute's namesake and say Cato delenda est.

Ripoff Friday, ripoff every day

2007-11-23T13:15:00.000-05:00

This is a day to try and stay inside at all costs, given the insane traffic crunch associated with malls, shopping centers, and their proximate highways on this most important day for the retail industry. In observation of the occasion, the Pittsburgh Business Times discusses local malls' difficulties with rising gas prices and increased competition.

They lead off with the Pittsburgh Mills in Frazer, which has been trouble for its developers since it opened. But here is the key paragraph on the regional status of the industry:

"For many years, Pittsburgh was considered a place that didn't have enough retail. Today, however, the region's malls face more competition than ever from a new generation of shopping centers, many of which are less than 10 years old."

The Business Times stops short of calling it a retail glut, but it's hard to find another word to describe it, particularly if you're familiar with gutted hulks like Parkway Center Mall, which took only a couple of decades to achieve what took the steel industry over a century: become large-footprint monuments to obsolescence in this area's version of late-capitalist society.

Let it not be said that local public policy did not play a role in creating this situation. The Business Times draws a contrast between "life-style oriented developments" in or near the urban core (such as The Waterfront and South Side Works) on the one hand, and traditional malls on the other. But the article mentions four shopping centers of both types that have been opened just in the last decade (The Waterfront, South Side Works, The Mall at Robinson, Pittsburgh Mills), and all of these share another element of importance: they have benefited from local public subsidies, not least including tax-increment financing (TIF) in the case of all four. South Side Works in particular benefited from a tremendous level of public funding at all levels, beyond just the TIF. In fact, of all projects the City of Pittsburgh could prioritize in its requests to HUD, it is preparing to request another $1 million grant and $4 million in loans for brownfield "economic development" solely to fund infrastructure improvements related to South Side Works. Just how the city's underserved poor and the public at large are served by the development's overpriced theater and Cheesecake Factory is a compelling mystery; perhaps some answers could be found at the city hearing on the HUD grant application scheduled for next Tuesday -- if anyone shows up, that is.

It is doubtful whether the developers of any of these projects would have backed out but for the public subsidies involved; rather, developers take local public subsidies as their due, and employ "site location consultants," part of whose job is to extract free money from local governments at the sites where they planned to locate anyway. Our own local failure to demand anything in return for these subsidies is not unique in the country, but the amounts of money given away are still impressive. In the case of a mega-retail development like The Waterfront, for instance, you can argue that the greatly increased tax revenues for the boroughs (Homestead, West Homestead, Munhall) and school district (Steel Valley) more than offset the subsidy and the low-wage jobs "created" -- but given the success of the development due to its prime location not far from the most prosperous area of the urban core (Squirrel Hill/Point Breeze), it is hard to believe that the public had to forego the further tax revenues involved in the TIF just for the sake of the development going forward in the first place.

Six years ago, Allegheny County's government rejected a Living Wage proposal which would have required employers who received future public subsidies like this to pay their workers at least $9.12 an hour plus health benefits ($10.62 an hour without health benefits). Since that proposed ordinance affected mostly workers in county human services, the public discussion around it did not usually touch on the provisions affecting "economic development" subsidies, but it was most likely this provision that brought out big-guns opposition from the Allegheny Conference (and its Chamber of Commerce affiliate), Pittsburgh Technology Council, developers and other powerful interests. The opposition did occasionally argue that the ordinance would have meant that no developer of projects like the Waterfront would accept TIF or similar money in the future -- though that, of course, was part of the point. Unless we get good return for public investment -- including the creation of better-paying jobs, not just low-wage and part-time ones -- then there is no reason for so much as a dime of public money to subsidize retail developments that only compete with already-existing retail projects.

County Council acts to shield "non-profits" from scrutiny

2007-11-21T19:06:00.001-05:00

Breaking! Breaking! Film at 11!

2007-11-18T14:28:00.000-05:00

HARRISBURG, PA -- State Attorney General Tom Corbett did not take a break today from his investigation of the state House bonus scandal to call a press conference announcing an investigation of bonuses paid to Alain J. P. Belda, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Alcoa, Inc. The non-conference did not feature Corbett standing in front of a poster with a blown-up version of Belda's driver's license photo.

According to proxy statements filed with the Securities Exchange Commission and available after approximately three minutes of searching to any pseudonymous blogger -- a resource accessed by state auditors and attorneys on a regular basis, except in reality -- Belda received a $2.4 million bonus (called "non-equity incentive plan compensation" in the proxy statement) on top of his $1.4 million salary. Additionally Belda received over $6.3 million in stock and stock option awards. Belda's non-stock bonuses alone dwarf the combined total of $1.8 million in bonuses to House Democratic staffers after the 2006 election.

Corbett's non-investigation of Belda's bonuses began as a non-result of non-followup to the award of a $1.1 million Commonwealth financial package to Alcoa in January of 2006 for the relocation of its thermoforming (i.e., plastic packaging) operations from Illinois and Rhode Island to Downington, PA (Chester County). Further impetus for the non-investigation was provided by another non-occurrence, when Auditor General Jack Wagner did not decide to turn away from cheap and easy demaguguery like opposing Medicaid Viagra for sex offenders, and did not instead begin auditing state programs for instances of corporate malfeasance and abuse.

Harrisburg reform advocates Russ Diamond, Gene Stilp, and Tim Potts did not respond to the press conference called by a Tom Corbett from a parallel universe by issuing a joint press release. "We are finished with the fake populism of stirring people up about penny-ante corruption, House staff bonuses, legislative pay raises, the size of the legislature; now, instead, we will work to expose the more routine and far greater fleecing of the public by the corporate interests that really hold local, state and federal governments in the palms of their hands," the phantom document said.

"In this instance we are especially concerned that a state program gave public money to a corporation not to create jobs, but to steal them from other states, thereby participating in a system that allows companies to play states off against one another for subsidies, rather than furthering a national economic development strategy that would hold corporate power accountable. Clearly Alcoa was capable of making investments on its own, without public subsidy, since the bonus for its CEO alone -- not even counting other top executives -- was greater than the subsidy," the reformers did not continue in the press release that they would not even dream of writing.

At the press conference that Corbett did not call, members of the press did not ask aggressive follow-up questions. Some did not note that Alcoa -- a rarity among corporations -- does not even have a corporate PAC. Reporters consequently did not wonder whether other corporations may have received subsidies as well, some in return for campaign contributions. Not holding rafts of documents that they did not obtain from painstaking research, the non-diligent non-watchdogs of the public good did not call for even greater scrutiny of the incentive programs of the state's Department of Community and Economic Development. They also did not call for more basic reforms to make their fantasy watchdog work easier, such as the possible addition of features on the DCED investment tracking website that would allow reporters and members of the public to at least know the dates of the subsidies in the database.

In the real world, the press waited with bated breath for the next Corbett press conference about Democrats Gone Wild, preferably one with striking visuals that would require them to do no actual work. TV stations in particular awaited a Mike Veon "perp walk," and assigned stringers to prepare exposés about who was tailoring Veon's expensive suits these days, and other issues of pressing concern to the voting public.

Mike Langley's sweet ride

2007-11-16T19:04:00.000-05:00

Mike Langley made $364,519 in 2005, with $22,281 contributed to his employee benefit plans, the latter likely including not only health insurance but a retirement package that must be pretty generous. Since that 2005 figure comes from the latest document available online, I'm waiting for some enterprising reporter to just walk into the offices of Langley's employer -- the Allegheny Conference on Community Development -- at the Regional Enterprise Tower, 425 Sixth Avenue, Suite 1100, and request their IRS forms 990 for 2006 (you can do that, you know, and they're required to give it to you the same day). [Update, November 28: Looks like Ron DaParma from the Trib followed my advice.] I'd like to know how much of a self-sacrificing soul Langley must be to take a steep pay cut. That pay cut may not have happened in 2006, but if not, it must have happened this year.

Why do I assume that Langley took a pay cut? Because that's the only rational explanation for why he and his employer could have concluded that he had the moral authority to write an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Business Times calling for cutbacks for Port Authority workers. Or perhaps Langley's board members -- who include all of the top executives of corporate Pittsburgh -- picked the poorest person they knew to write it.

It may seem like a guy with a $20,000+ yearly benefits package would need a lot of guts to go on a tear about the "extraordinarily expensive package of health care benefits" paid to bus drivers and retirees, but on further reflection, a mid-six-figure salary on top of that does have a dulling effect on the conscience. Mike Langley, like a lot of folks, would do anything for that much money. And that's true even though one of the conditions for receiving that salary is that he not talk about how the longstanding collusion between UPMC and Highmark (a ripe FTC target if there ever was one) is the major culprit in rising health care costs in southwestern Pennsylvania. Since Jeffrey Romoff (UPMC) and Ken Melani (Highmark) are both on Langley's board and are no doubt acquaintances if not friends, Langley can live with it.

UPMC's multi-million-dollar scam

2007-11-14T22:15:00.000-05:00

The recent news stories on UPMC's ever-climbing profits give the bare-bones facts, but we could all benefit from some deeper analysis. Our local papers both reported the $93 million in profits for the first quarter of fiscal year 2008, as laid out in the quarterly statement published on UPMC's website. We further learn that $32 million of that is investment income, though if you look closely at the statements, you will see that investments actually generated $54 million, and that UPMC counts its interest payments as an investment expense (thus getting us to the $32 million). While this is proper accounting, many other hospitals and health systems in the state -- including UPMC's much-weaker regional rival, West Penn Allegheny -- count interest payments as an operating expense. This is noteworthy not only because it's good to compare apples to apples when we read stories about the profits of our health systems, but it is also important because it demonstrates just how much more important is the weight of investment income in UPMC's financial structure. The quarterly statement just cited says that UPMC employs 111 financial managers; of these, there are 34 traditional investment managers, 20 hedge fund managers, and 57 private equity managers.

In light of this, we should take a close look at actions like UPMC's issuance of tax-exempt bonds. Unfortunately, these are rarely reported directly, but end up relegated to the legal notices in the back pages of the Tribune-Review, like the notice about UPMC's issuance of $105 million in bonds to acquire Mercy Hospital and refinance its debt. This had a public hearing -- required by the IRS -- on November 8, and I am willing to bet the value of Don Barden's gambling debts that it was attended by no member of the public; it will soon be an agenda item at County Council, where it will be rubber-stamped. This is part of $115 million in debt refinancing projected for UPMC for this fiscal year -- and up to $125 million in new long-term debt, according to its financial statements.

Tax-exempt bonds are one of the most convoluted -- yet lucrative -- scams on the public in existence in this country. The basic idea is that rather than taxing rich people at appropriate levels to pay for projects of public benefit, we borrow money from them in the form of bonds, and then pay them back with interest for the privilege. How does this work? Municipal governments, school districts, and large non-profit organizations such as universities and hospitals issue debt, and they get the benefit of paying it off at a lower interest rate than a for-profit corporation would, because the bondholder earns the income tax-free. A bondholder has to be in a high enough tax bracket for the tax benefit to offset the lower interest rate; hence, only the wealthiest investors buy "munis," as they are called. The public, meanwhile, foregoes the tax revenue, because we all presumably benefit from the public project being financed.

This tends to be a corrupt, insulated, self-dealing world with all kinds of "stakeholders" who have their hands in the till: not just the governments, non-profit organizations and bondholders, but the banks and underwriters, bond counsel, bond ratings agencies, and so on. "Pay to play" and other schemes for the financial benefit of political appointees are not uncommon at bonding authorities. I won't go into this too much more, save to note that there are at least some regulations, even though enforcement is lax.

Most to my point here: tax-exempt bond proceeds are supposed to be spent, and spent only in the way described at the outset, and a non-profit organization is not supposed to take the proceeds of a tax-exempt bond issuance and put them in other investments that pay a higher rate of return. That is called bond arbitrage, and it is illegal. UPMC's attorneys are smart, so I do not doubt that they avoid violating the letter of the law, and that they do spend what they say they are going to spend on capital improvements. But you don't have to be an accounting genius to know that money is "fungible" inside an organization.

And here's the rub: UPMC's quarterly statement, by the system's own calculations, says that UPMC has 174 "days cash on hand." There's no need to discuss at length how this peculiar financial measure is calculated, but what it means is that UPMC has so much money piled up in reserve that it could stop taking in any revenue tomorrow, and it could continue to operate at its current rate for nearly six months before it ran out of money. No one denies that organizations of every kind need some reserves, but UPMC's reserves are prodigious. They can try to make excuses for this by comparing themselves to the "median" of other health systems with high bond ratings, but that only begs the question of why we allow large, ostensibly non-profit organizations to amass so much wealth and set their own standards -- in conjunction with Wall Street -- about what a "comfortable" level of reserves should be, with little to no accountability to the public.

The simple fact is that UPMC can afford to make capital improvements -- and purchase hospitals like Mercy! -- with its own internal resources, without having to go to the bond market. But it goes to the bond market anyway, gets pro forma certification from the government that its bonds are being used for a tax-exempt purpose, then pays a lower interest rate for its capital (because its wealthy bondholders are paying no taxes!), so that meanwhile it can let its other money sit in more lucrative investments. If that does not violate the letter of the restrictions against bond arbitrage, it certainly violates the spirit. Keep in mind that in Pennsylvania, the county government has to approve the spending of any tax-exempt bond proceeds within its borders. Rarely to never do county commissioners (or in Allegheny County's case, the County Council) say "no"; rarely, in fact, is there even a dissenting "no" vote cast. It is almost as rare for any of our elected officials even to ask questions about the tax-exempt bond racket and the non-profits that are part of it. After all, most of our elected officials do not even understand the basics of it, and leave the issues to the supposed "experts" -- when in fact, the "experts" are self-interested parties like bond counsel. The whole process is deliberately opaque for a reason.

In short, then, in our specific example: the gaming of tax-exempt bonds is just one more way that UPMC has built itself into a formidable capitalist enterprise. While technically its profts are supposed to be "charitable assets," it is difficult to distinguish it from a for-profit corporation except insofar as it pays almost no taxes. As we have seen, a large and growing chunk of its revenue comes from its role as an investment powerhouse employing a battalion of money managers, not as a health care institution improving the lives of people in the community. Its executives are handsomely compensated (though just how much was only released to the public in recent years!), and many of its workers -- over 40,000, making it the second-largest private employer in the state, behind only Wal-Mart -- are not-so-well-paid, to put it mildly. Their board is stocked with the wealthiest and most influential people in the region; it is the largest member of the biggest-spending lobby in the state; and it gets to run commercials putting itself in the same league as the Steelers.

After a brief twentieth-century interlude where workers had some power through their unions in the steel industry, Pittsburgh is back to being a company town.

Bonnie Prince Dickie and his toy newspaper

2007-11-12T23:18:00.001-05:00

Richard Mellon Scaife launched an attack on the Allegheny Conference from its right flank in his toy newspaper on Sunday. The headline is "Critics question nonprofit's focus, spending," and it is given the semblance of a news story by quoting a "critic," namely Scaife hireling Jake Haulk of the Allegheny Institute.

Lest anyone take a glance at the names on the Allegheny Institute board and think that it is something other than a Scaife plaything, keep in mind that the Institute's IRS 990 forms showed $423,566 in "public support" revenue in 2006. Of that, $345,000 (over 80% of the budget) came from three foundations chaired and tightly controlled by Scaife: the Allegheny Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. Haulk is paid to provide "expert" commentary in furtherance of whatever is on Scaife's agenda, and then these are printed in Scaife's newspaper whenever he wants to justify the intrusion of his editorial priorities into the paper's "news" coverage, if balanced by an always-perfunctory attempt to get the "other side" of the story.

Through his proxies, Scaife argues that the Allegheny Conference is insufficiently focused on lowering taxes. He cites the Conference's support for the 10% drink tax and rental car tax to fund mass transit. Keep in mind that the Allegheny Conference is taking the lead in Dan Onorato's upcoming full-frontal assault on the Port Authority workers of the Almagamated Transit Union (ATU); the Conference's "research" (read: agitprop, and not our kind, but the bosses' kind) arm, the southwestern PA branch of the Pennsylvania Economy League, fired the opening salvo in the war with their "comparison" of Port Authority benefits to those at other transit systems. Steeper cuts for workers will be the Conference's condition for supporting the drink tax. That doesn't go far enough for Scaife, though, since unlike most members of the Conference, he doesn't even have the prosaic concern of getting his low-income workers to work every day. Scaife would like to cut mass transit, period.

For a period in the late 90s, Scaife's minions were people of some influence in local politics, with the Cranmer/Dunn Republican majority of Allegheny County commissioners and later Jim Roddey's election as County Executive; more ominously, they were able to position themselves as the main organized opposition to Tom Murphy's various pharaohnic projects, all of which were also favored by the civic boosters of the Allegheny Conference mainstream of the local capitalist class: the stadiums, convention center, and Downtown retail-oriented "redevelopment" powered by eminent domain. Once again, the Scaife far right does have the virtue -- if you can call it that -- of consistency, in that they oppose the use of tax money for widows and orphans as much as they oppose it for sports teams and banks, but the particular fights of those years gave the Trib and the Allegheny Institute an undeserved reputation as sometime friend of the little guy, and Scaife does his level best to remain in that role.
One of the funniest parts of Sunday's article against the Allegheny Conference was the matter-of-fact statement that "[Conference] Chairman James Rohr, CEO of PNC Financial Services Group, declined to comment for this article," as if there is any reason why Rohr would give an interview to a newspaper which -- on the same day as this article -- just completed a full year of attacking Rohr personally (with photographs) every single day on its editorial page. On the subject of the attack, of course, the Trib/Scaife were 100% correct: PNC outrageously received a nearly $50 million tax-increment financing (TIF) package for building its downtown skyscraper. But yet again, the far right's critique of TIFs is that they unfairly favor some businesses over others, when the "free-market" solution is to cut business and other taxes across the board.

Joel Kotkin -- denizen of another far-right think-tank on the other side of the country -- is quoted in the article holding up the model of Houston, with its "combination of low taxes, minimal zoning and an expanding highway network." The Trib doesn't mention another ingredient of Houston's "success" -- specifically, its vast army of impoverished undocumented workers. Presumably a discussion of this reality would have been out of line with the Trib's editorial fulminations against "illegals." There is also no discussion of another low-tax, unplanned, highway-rich Sunbelt paradise: Atlanta, where the always-gridlocked highways pay testament to a woefully underfunded mass transit system and a still-burgeoning vortex of white suburbs that are about to run out of water.

In furtherance of this vision of urban development, Scaife and his minions have no compunctions about throwing good money after bad. In this connection, note that the Trib article favorably quotes local dot com millionaire Glen Meakem, who "supports the conference but believes it could more effectively promote economic growth." Meakem is a political ally of Scaife who sits on the Allegheny Institute's advisory board, though it would be laughable to expect the Trib even to mention conflicts of interest like this. (In some of the 990s linked earlier in this article, you can find more interesting tidbits, such as the fact that a chunk of the Sarah Scaife Foundation's investments are in Meakem's venture capital firm. If rich people can't find a way to make money directly from their own "non-profit" foundations, you can bet that they will at least make money from the "non-profits" controlled by their friends.)

Scaife and Meakem are currently working together on politics within the Republican party. It goes without saying that both are supporters of the party's far right: both are staunch supporters of the Club for Growth, led by Pat Toomey, who almost took out Arlen Specter from the right in 2004 and led the way in using the pay-raise debacle to topple long-time "moderate" State Senate Republican leaders Bob Jubelirer and "Chip" Brightbill in 2006. The preferred gubernatorial candidate of both Meakem and Scaife in 2006 was Bill Scranton: Meakem was Scranton's campaign chairman, and Scaife gave Scranton's campaign a staggering $100,000. Scranton -- whose fondness for flaky New Age spirituality raises suspicions among the knuckle-dragging elements of the Republican base -- has also actively courted the far right, giving piles of money to Jubelirer's and Brightbill's successful primary opponents. That brings us to the recent Pittsburgh general election mayoral campaign, where Meakem gave heavily to Republican Mark DeSantis, whose campaign manager was Michael DeVanney, a longtime staffer for Scranton's campaigns; Scranton's PAC gave DeSantis over $85,000 in in-kind services like this.

The support of Scaife (once again via the Trib) and Meakem for DeSantis, along with Scranton's management of DeSantis's entire campaign, was clearly intended as a power-play within inner-party Republican politics, to build credibility for new Republican leaders like DeSantis as a base for Scranton on this side of the state in 2010. Probably very few of the almost unimaginably stupid Shadyside liberals who voted for DeSantis knew any of this, though they love to fancy themselves more "well-informed" than the benighted "yinzers" who pulled the straight-Democratic lever. But say what you want about the "yinzers," they are smart enough to recognize their enemies when they see them, and the result was nearly as lopsided as in previous years despite DeSantis's prodigious funding. Since it wasn't even a competitive run (the best outcome they could have hoped for) the Scaife/Meakem/Scranton power play has turned out to be an embarrassment for them, with grumbling on the right that Pittsburgh is a lost cause for them anyway, and that the whole thing was a colossal waste of money, especially since they felt that they had a chance at taking the Westmoreland County courthouse this year, and blew it.

So Scaife still looks like a tantrum-prone gadfly and not a serious player, despite his potential to do damage. But if he is not well-respected by the other money people in town, he still helps pull politics to the right, and aids the Allegheny Conference in achieving their goals in areas where he sees eye-to-eye with them -- which is more often than not, when you're talking about issues that matter. Can anyone imagine Luke Ravenstahl or -- even less -- Dan Onorato taking them on for the people's sake?

Free Mike Veon!

2007-11-11T17:02:00.000-05:00

Attorney General Tom Corbett's witch-hunt against Mike Veon and Bill DeWeese is the latest attempt of the Republicans to reverse the verdict of the voters in 2006, and to cling to power by means other than an election. The first of their maneuvers was the cross-party voting trick with Tom Caltagirone; when the Democrats responded with some tricks of their own to finally remove John Perzel from the speaker's chair, Corbett went fishing for something else, and found it. Because of the Republicans' greater skill at crude "law-and-order" posturing, no Democrat has been attorney general in Pennsylvania since the position became an elected one, and the Republicans see it as a perfect perch to launch punitive prosecutions when their power is otherwise challenged.

I'm no fool. While I have no direct evidence of it, I have no doubt that the legislative Democrats have used staff to do campaign work while they are technically on the public dime. While there is supposed to be a "bright line" between "public service" and "politics," no such distinction exists in the real world, and just about every elected official of every party engages in this on a regular basis. I'd be a fool not to understand this, and I am also not about to make the argument that the Democrats should unilaterally disarm while the Republicans engage actively in such practices. That is precisely why the selective attacks on Veon & Co. should be recognized as the attacks on democracy that they are. Corbett's perfunctory investigations of the Republican caucuses in the House and Senate are a ruse intended to give the appearance of even-handedness, when what they want is to send the already-deposed Veon to jail and then find some way to remove DeWeese from office as well, thereby scuttling the Democrats' precarious majority in the House.

During his term in the legislature, Veon was perhaps the most reliable ally of the working class, and his defeat as a consequence of the faux-populist pay-raise firestorm should earn at least some small place in the voluminous history of the tendency of (white) workers in this country to cut off their nose to spite their face. On his way out (and he must have known it was coming, though he kept his cards close), he managed to engineer the defeat of the Republicans statewide, and for that he deserves a tip of the hat no matter the squalid nature of some of his subsequent lobbying clients. His only mistake -- besides the whole pay raise thing in the first place, of course -- was to trust Frank LaGrotta, who has been singing like a canary.

The Passion of Bernardo Katz

2007-11-11T00:24:00.000-05:00

Pittsburgh's Urban Redevelopment Authority has decided to foreclose on properties it previously sold to Bernardo Katz in Beechview. Katz is a Brazilian developer based in Mount Lebanon who failed to deliver on promises of revitalization in the Beechview business district, for which he received URA assistance in the Murphy years. By all accounts an unsavory character, Katz has fallen behind on loan payments on the properties, and the county real estate website shows that he has failed to pay taxes on some of them. More to the point, he is more generally charged with not upgrading them as promised, though we should note that at least one of them (1600 Broadway) was briefly the location of one of the more delicious Mexican restaurants in a city sorely lacking good Mexican food. Beechview is now home to a small Mexican immigrant enclave that counts as large by Pittsburgh standards, and Katz has ties with the tiny Latino business class organized in the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which has its offices in a Katz property.

Katz's acquisition of properties in the neighborhood made him some local enemies, and his antics have been a cause of some hilarity, at least to those not directly harmed by them. Decidedly unamused was Rupert Aumer, owner of the Alpine Tavern, who was sued by Katz for allegedly reneging on a deal to sell his bar. When Katz had to drop the suit, he went to the Simon Wiesenthal Center to accuse Aumer of having been a member of the Nazi SS, for which Aumer responded with a defamation suit of his own. (Aumer, like the current pope, had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht as a teenager, but there is no evidence of his having been in the SS.)

In support of the URA move against Katz, City Councilman Jim Motznik called him a "slum landlord," and the Pittsburgh Business Times paraphrased State Rep. Chelsa Wagner to the effect that "redevelopment of the commercial district has languished, largely because Katz owns much of the real estate and some of his properties have fallen into disrepair."

It would be tempting to assume good faith on Wagner's part were it not for the fact that a good chunk of the rest of the Broadway Avenue business district is owned by her uncle Bob Wagner (husband of county Register of Wills Eileen Wagner; brother to Pennsylvania Auditor General Jack Wagner; and brother to 19th Ward Democratic chair Pete Wagner, who is Chelsa Wagner's father). This includes the crummy rental property at 1640 Broadway where Rep. Chelsa Wagner herself maintains an address (we'll leave it to others to guess whether she actually lives there, though since the county gives it a grade of D- I have my doubts) and the substantial building at 1553 Broadway -- neither of which is an attractive sight, and neither of which has had its 2007 taxes paid as of this writing. Note, too, that another property nearby is owned by State Senator Wayne Fontana, who began his political career as a joined-at-the-hip Wagner family ally. (Fontana's residence is on the next hill over, in Brookline.)

I'd be curious to know when the Wagners first decided that they didn't like this Katz with his ambitions in their Beechview fiefdom, and what is a good blog for but some inside information if it's out there? (Feel free to post!) But Katz in turn backed the wrong horse when he threw in with Michael Diven, the former occupant of Chelsa Wagner's seat in the state legislature. At one point Diven had some good things to say about Fidel, but that was the only worthwhile thing Diven ever did, and in Harrisburg he spent his time siding with Republicans on numerous votes, and he eventually made it official by switching parties in 2005 to take on Fontana for the Senate seat vacated by Jack Wagner. He didn't win that election, but Diven's relationship with John Perzel's Republicans did translate into state rewards for Diven's friends: Katz was in line for state money to build a senior center on one of his properties. The Wagner family fought tooth-and-nail against the proposal on the ostensible grounds that there was little support in the community for a project on Katz property. It would be interesting to know whether the Wagners first turned on Katz when he went to Diven to procure a state grant, and the Wagners' political rivalry with Diven obliged them to stand in the way of anything for which Diven could take credit; or whether Katz first fell afoul of the Wagners out of slumlord-vs.-slumlord real estate rivalries, and then turned to their enemy Diven as a way to further his own business plans. The other possibility, of course, is that the Wagner clan opposed the senior center for some sort of principled reason -- a claim that is laughable on its face.

City Councilman Jim Motznik, too, is quoted in stories about the URA and Katz, where he refers to Katz as "a slum landlord and a thorn in the side to residents of Beechview for many years now." As a former staffer for Diven when Diven was on City Council, and as the leading "Democrat for Diven" during the unsuccessful race against Fontana, Motznik knew he was in trouble when it became obvious that his old friend was in for a serious drubbing by Pete Wagner's daughter in 2006. For the sake of his small-time political career he made peace with the South Hills' leading family, and since then has been auditioning in a conspicuously obsequious way for the part of the consigliere from an ethnic outgroup who is a confidant of the Don but will never be a "made man."

And so URA favor and the public gravy train are over for Bernardo Katz, as Chelsa Wagner proves herself a reliable guardian of the family interests both pecuniary and political. Transit riders will have noticed this in her opposition to the 10% drink tax intended to fund the county share for the Port Authority; since the proposal comes from the Onorato administration, Jack Wagner sees an opportunity to block a policy priority of the man he sees as a major rival for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2010. (Mercifully for residents of the state, both Wagner and Onorato are delusional in their gubernatorial ambitions. Or at least I hope so.)

Politics in the South Hills of the City are therefore clientelistic, based at least in part on competing real estate interests; they are not much about policy, even if the shifting party allegiances of the Wagners' political rivals make Wagner foes the more dangerous elements in a national and state environment where the Republicans are still out to do some serious damage. But the entrenched South Hills political interests are by no means unique in the region when it comes to opportunism and ventality.

Beginnings

2007-11-10T18:36:00.000-05:00

This is the inaugural post of The Parkway Left, conceived as a blog of Marxist-Leninist commentary, research and analysis on local and regional affairs, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

We are stating our political sympathies openly so that it will come as no surprise where we stand: squarely on the side of the working class, the oppressed and exploited; dedicated to mapping out a strategy for the left based on mass action; investigating the real interests behind the powers-that-be with an eye to increasing power for the working class and its allies. This obviously differentiates us from liberals, but it also distinguishes us from other trends on the left (anarchism, social democracy, Trotskyites, etc.), all of whom have and use other outlets for expressing their particular views on strategy. Our goal here is to produce a source of information, agitation and propaganda for the local people's movements. The guidelines of our approach are as follows:

1. Opposition to white supremacy. Racism is the lynchpin of the capitalist system in the whole country. Locally, black oppression is the most explosive contradiction of the political economy, and goes a long way toward explaining every key issue impacting the working class as a whole in the region: urban neglect and disinvestment; public transit; schools; real estate and other taxation; etc.

2. Defeating the right is a major priority. The working class and the left have been on the defensive in national politics for a long time, and the ultra-right will remain a danger for the conceivable future. A clear understanding of this problem has obvious implications for electoral tactics at every level, as well as which movement demands have the greatest possibility of success and the greatest potential for building unity. All of this also requires a proper understanding of the differences between sections of capital and between the various factions of capital's political representatives. While the leading gadflies of the far right (e.g., Scaife) are outside the mainstream of the local power structure, it is a distinct step back for all of us if they are allowed to gain a foothold in the urban core, and they do already have a foothold in the suburbs even though they are a minority regionally-speaking.

3. Direct confrontation with real estate and other capitalist interests. At the apex of local power are the big employers, as organized in the Allegheny Conference and its affiliates. As they advance their particular "vision" for the region in the context of the larger capitalist society, they also have an agenda of austerity for the broad masses of people in the region, and this is the cutting edge of the local class struggle. While the big employers dictate the terms of policy at the "commanding heights," it is real estate interests (only partially overlapping with the Allegheny Conference) who drive day-to-day policy at the local level, through use of the local politicians they control because they are the most important donors to local political campaigns. There are blocs of real estate interests that compete with one another and are allied with different cliques of local politicians. All of this means that the demands of the local people's movements are always directed against the Allegheny Conference and/or a segment of real estate capital allied with a political clique; investigating these power relations and knowing how to play off capitalist interests against one another makes the difference between victory and defeat in any people's struggle.

4. No feel-good politics. While moral outrage is an important component of social movements, it alone does not make a movement. This blog is does not primarily concern itself with tiny protests or the symbolism of moral witness by the "stage army of the good." There are other places on the Internet for that, and we wish the participants well, but we are concerned here primarily with where power really lies in this region and with those efforts that are best geared to mobilizing masses of people -- not just a few "activists" -- to change power.

5. The correct handling of contradictions among the people, and between ourselves and the enemy. We do not shrink from polemics here, but we save our ammunition for the enemy. The enemy, by the way, may be the "liberal" wing in local politics from time to time, but it is never on the left or in the people's movements. To the extent that there are differences in social movements and organizations in the region, this is not the place to air them, where anybody can read it -- so if you're a member of the bourgeois press (or any press!) looking for gossip about strategic debates inside some organization or another, you should look elsewhere. Similarly, to the extent that there are elements on the left that are actively disruptive and promote disunity, we are not going to spend a lot of our time on them, since most people don't know who the adventurist left are, and don't care. So if you want to read a blistering argument about some nitwit anarchist who likes to smash coffee shop windows for fun, you are likewise encouraged to find it somewhere else.

6. No bullshit. We are interested in serious issues here. Other blogs that aspire to muckraking are going to carry on interminably about politicians abusing city vehicles for their personal use; about legislative pay raises; or about whose political canvassers illegally stuck campaign literature in someone's Federal mailbox. Frankly, we don't give a shit. We are eager to get into the specifics of power and control in this region, and to plainly name malefactors. But petty graft in politics is only interesting to us insofar as it impacts real policy.

We'll aspire to getting something posted weekly -- more frequently if that is possible.