A rare kudos to Philadelphia’s City Paper (15"x12"x0.5" FF) for printing an article about how the new 10 year tax abatement constructions with garages are further ruining the already-gentrified Queen Village neighborhood.  Unfortunately the rot has already extended below Washington Ave. to my neck of the woods, Pennsport.  Rather than link the article, which will move in a week, I’d quote it in its entirety here:

In Queen Village, "with" and "without" has a whole new meaning.  by Bruce Schimmel

"This will be a goner, that will be a goner," says David O’Donnell, as we wander the sidewalks of his Queen Village neighborhood. O’Donnell is pointing at house after house in the process of renovation, and almost every one will have a garage. As these garages multiply, the neighborhood O’Donnell has lived in for 25 years is becoming further divided. It’s the "with" versus the "without." And as each new garage appears and another parking space disappears, those without must circle a little longer to find a place to park.

But for O’Donnell, president of the Queen Village Neighbors Association, the invasion of garages brings much more than inconvenience. "When you punch out the first floor, it takes the life out of a street," he says. As the first floor of renovated houses remove street-level windows and take out their stoops, those inside tend to be isolated from the street — and the neighborhood as a whole becomes less secure.

"We all take care of each other," says O’Donnell, "because we have windows and doors on the street. We have eyes and ears on the street." But with more garages, he says, not only is the neighborhood less safe, it also becomes less friendly. Garage owners drive in and go directly from car to house, without ever seeing their neighbors.

"Blocks with garages lose their community," says O’Donnell. Called Philadelphia’s "First Neighborhood," Queen Village also appears to be losing some of its neighborliness. Residents without garages will call police to issue tickets to garage-owning neighbors who park on the street in front of their own driveway.

"That parking space is deeded to them," says O’Donnell, who has heard that houses with garages will fetch from $50,000 to $100,000 more than those without. "The city is giving them that parking space for free — and we’re paying all the taxes for them."

"These million-dollar new constructions are getting fabulous 10-year tax abatements. No real estate taxes for 10 years. That’s a tremendous incentive for other neighborhoods, who need to be rebuilt," says O’Donnell. "But for a neighborhood like this, which doesn’t need redevelopment, the stakes are so high that developers will do anything — destroy history, the streetscape, the walking around, and public safety to make enormous profits."

The Zoning Board of Adjustment, says O’Donnell, has been somewhat helpful in slowing down the pace. Developers cannot build above three stories without a variance. But even when a developer loses, as in one case on Kenilworth, says O’Donnell, "he was so hell-bent to put in something that he put in a short, squat house to comply [with the height restriction]."

"It’s an encroaching madness," says O’Donnell. "Look, there’s not even a place to plant a tree here," as we turn another corner to see three driveways, side by side.

According to O’Donnell, even the city’s temporary moratorium on demolishing historic buildings in this district hasn’t stopped the garages. The moratorium is easily circumvented, he says, by reconstructing in phases. "They’ll leave a toothpick, and build around it," he says, pointing at a new, modern facade that slipped past the historic moratorium.

As O’Donnell and I wander the sidewalks, everyone seems to know him. But few sound as passionate as he about stemming the garage invasion. Some longtime residents, with garages already, sound downright uncomfortable with an outright ban for the future. For them, it doesn’t seem fair to stop new residents from putting in garages when they already have theirs.

Still, insists O’Donnell, "If you took a vote, asking everyone in the community, "Do you want to end garage doors?’ they’d almost all say yes."

With neither the zoning board nor City Council coming to his neighborhood’s rescue, O’Donnell’s organization is trying to have the entire area deemed a historic neighborhood, like Society Hill."You can’t punch a hole [into the ground floor of a house] in Society Hill."

But he’s not hopeful that historic certification will arrive in time to stop the garages. "It’ll take many years and a lot of money to do what they did. And by then," says O’Donnell, "we won’t have a neighborhood left."

It its latest issue, the crucial periodical Multinational Monitor gave Harvard President Larry Summers the award they named after him for doing what he does best: being honest about how he thinks, thereby exposing the attitudes of our overlord managerial class.  Congrats, Larry!

Just thought I’d post this for fun (?); the Ronald McDonald outside of the inevitable McDonald’s on Khao San Road, Bangkok, Thailand.  Photo taken by me, 2004.  You can click on it to enlarge it to frightening proportions.

… and, for a change, doesn’t edit it to the point of suggesting I have a viewpoint 180 degrees different from my actual opinion.  The letter, second one down.

In an excellent column, actual liberal Norman Solomon takes on those poseurs MoveOn.org for tacitly supporting the war effort.  MoveOn was never more than a fundraising scam for the DNC, and a means of corraling progressives into not abandoning the Democratic Party regardless of what its positions on the issues were.  Considering that MoveOn is a completely top-down, secretive (try finding an email address of a staffer on their site!) and totally unaccounatable organization with no board their current claim that their war silence is due to some sort of Quaker-style consensus-based decision making process is laughable.  Ever since the Kerry campaign and the DNC hierarchy made it clear that War Is Good, the MoveOn campfollowers dropped the issue as anything other than a means of mildly and vaguely criticizing George W. Bush — with the presumption that he was doing a bad job of enacting a decent policy.

And people wonder why I never registered Democrat!  Seriously, though, how much did anyone expect out of an internet fundraising site built around preserving Bubba Clinton’s right to lie about adultery?

Writing in CounterPunch, M. Junaid Alam makes some excellent points about how the Dems have been actively helping tilt American politics rightward:

The blurring of political distinctions between America’s two major political parties, achieved through Democratic acquiescence to Republican ideas on every major national question, has prompted some progressives to conclude that Democrats and Republicans are now essentially identical. This conflation is a dangerous error: it is too kind an evaluation of the Democratic Party. For to view Democrats as mere Republican clones is to discount the far more pernicious role they play in encouraging a politically conservative framework that traps and demoralizes many Americans into adopting right-wing positions in the first place.

If Democrats simply paralleled Republicans, they would be politically redundant. But the Democrats are not duplicative - they are duplicitous. Peddling slightly less reactionary programs and packaging them in more appealing rhetoric, they soften up, placate and paralyze possible popular opposition to right-wing attacks. This creates the groundwork for future assaults by the Right. The Republican agenda, ugly, brutal, and brazen as it is, could not possibly pierce the public on its own - but the sordid record of Democratic appeasement has locked, loaded, and enabled right-wing advances. …

Philadelphia City Councilperson and neo-Prohibitionist Michael Nutter agreed to a postponement of a vote on his draconian anti-associative smoking bill today.  Nutter needs 9 nattering nabobs of negativity to vote for the ‘Let’s Try to Be a Poorer Manhattan’ bill, and at the moment he has but 8.  I would have loved to have seen a public humilation for Nutter’s attack on the city’s ethnic taprooms on St. Patrick’s Day, but alas he turned tail.  Again we see the anti-democratic nature of the Smoke Crusaders, not wanting the issue to go to referendum (as it did even in Jeb Bush/Katherine Harris Florida for tar’s sake!), nor to come to a vote of any sort within council until moralists like the ACS have a couple of more weeks to screech and pressure their way to victory.

One can expect another round of slick mass mailings and outright lies from the likes of the American Cancer Society, who see no apparent irony in mailing me a full-color glossy pamphlet, destined straight for the landfill, discouaraging me from supporting the individual’s right to smoke ensemble in a voluntary capacity while drinking.

Allow me to share this dispatch from a discussion group I particpate in, from a clever poster known to me only as Sparks:

Now let’s be honest
this really has NOTHING to do with the health of the employees.  If
it was a real workplace health issue OSHA would be stepping in.  This
is a loophole in public health code so people can feel good about
themselves and following a trend.  You ask somebody why they won’t go
to a bar they say "I don’t like the smoke"  not  "I can’t watch those
poor bartenders suffer in all that smoke". Theses are the same people
who also drink crappy drinks cheap beer and leave lousy tips and wave
money at the bartender when they can’t get fast enough service. If
smoke is a way to keep them out I say "light em up"

  As a former bartender I quit bartending before the ban hit in New
York State because I knew that our business would go down.  The idea
that people who didn’t go to bars/restaurants  because of smoke will
come back is like believing in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, or Iraq
had WMD’s.

With a little luck the bill will be shot down and people can
complain about something else.  The next big bill may be a ban on
cheesesteaks.  Since if you eat enough of those over a lifetime you
could die too.   I wonder what is worse for you?  Smoking a pack of
smokes a day or having scrapple every day for breakfast?

Well said, sir.  Remember folks, call the City Councilrat for your district as well as all of the free-range At-Large members in order to have any impact.  Stand up for the Bill of Rights and let folks light up in private!  (Full disclosure: I don’t smoke cigarettes.  I’m a civil rights junkie.)

The following is an edited response of mine to a friend who sent along the usual Democratic Party-line handwringing note about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  The Senate voted to drill away in the ANWR - a realtively small portion of the public lands in the Refrigerator State on the oil industry’s wish list - in a 51-49 vote.  The presumption is that this is the dastardly work of the nasty Republicans, who are being staved off by the righteous Democrats.

Interesting indeed considering that 3 Dems wouldn’t even protect the ANWR: Akaka-HI Inouye-HI Landrieu-LA… whereas 7 Republicans and the lone independent [elected as a GOP member] almost made up the difference by voting against their own party and the drilling.  That’s how bad the Democratic Party has become: they can get that kind of boost on an issue they choose to grandstand upon and still lose!

This is my blanket response to the Donkey Party loyalists who see the ANWR vote as a black-and-white Endtimes issue, proof positive of the Big Differences Between the Parties:

Yes [I was aware of the vote and...] the fellow I ran against (a Democrat) voted to drill in the ANWR 4 times and probably will again.
Why?  He gets a bit of oil (and coal and nuclear and
auto and…) industry money and people here will vote
for Any Democrat No Matter What so he has zero
incentive to do otherwise.  People I talked to in the
street when campaigning went so far as to claim that
he *didn’t* vote that way even when I could provide
the bill numbers and vote dates for independent
fact-checking.  I’ll say it a thousand times, but the
cognitive dissonance of Democratic loyalists is the
greatest danger to liberal change in America,
including and especially on majoritarian issues.

All of this makes very little difference, considering
that the handwringing of a slight majority of the
Democratic leadership on this one only masks the much
larger Arctic oil grab that both parties have very
much been in agreement about.  The Kerry website
during the election made it very clear he supported a
massive new Alaskan drilling effort in public lands
outside of the ANWR; this is a good article on some of
those areas.

While saving the ANWR is nice, the push behind
protecting this pawn has benefitted the Republicans by
diverting attention from the larger grabs and making
them appear to be taking on the "tree huggers" while
the Democrats have used the AWNR to appear to be tree
huggers in the liberal eye, the facts be damned.  The
major sell-out environmental groups, who rather more
protect incumbent Democrats than the environment, get
to pretend to be saving something.  It’s enough to
make a decent citizen upchuck.

I’m continually amazed that these little games
actually work for both parties, but they do.  When
have the facts ever survived a collision with belief
systems?

The National Forests and other public lands were
always there as private profit generators at the
public expense to begin with, as timber farms and
mineral sinks.  At no time in the past 130 years of
this polluting rip-off system has either major party
attempted to change anything; 95% of the
representatives of both parties are on the take.  You
could take the Dems seriously if, for example, they
attempted to reform the Mining Act of 1872 when they
had majorities in both houses and the presidency, but
instead Clinton used that time to let his buddies in
Weyerhauser escape prosecution (for theft from public
lands and dumping mill waste illegally) as well as plan to open Alaska to increased drilling.

Who wants to work with, if not actually talk to, the animals?  I don’t mean Eric Burdon and Alan Price, I mean cockatoos and camels.  The Philadelphia Zoo has incredibly interesting poverty wage jobs doing just that open this very moment.

The following is a worthwhile-sounding proposal from Ralph Nader, writing in the must-click CounterPunch site, on how to approach Congressional silence on the ongoing Iraq war.  Considering the DNC flat-out killed the peace movement in the disasterous 2004 elections (in the interest of success no less), we could do worse than heeding this suggestion from America’s #1 liberal-disgusted-with-the-party.

Congress violated its constitutional authority to declare war by assigning it to President Bush in October 2002. Since then many members of Congress have evoked private fury with Bush’s war lordism, the fabrications, cover-ups, the tens of thousands of horrific casualties, the vast waste of resources and our loss of respect throughout the world but they keep quiet or falsely warble their public comments with evasions.

A few - a very few - have said publicly what’s on their mind. For the great majority in Congress - Democrats and Republicans - Bush has intimidated them because they signaled in various ways that they could be intimidated.

So, let’s start getting smart about holding your member of Congress accountable. Below is a penetrating letter you can modify for your member of Congress to let them know you see ending the war as a high priority that they must attend to. Let us know what you think. And, if you take this approach, let us know how it turns out.

Dear Member of Congress (Representative and two Senators)

According to a Harris poll last month, 59 percent of Americans want US troops brought home within the next year. We are among them. You are not listening to us. Here is what we propose: To meet with you in a public auditorium with the media invited on [insert date]_ when you say you will back in your state (district). We wish to discuss specifically with you the following issues:

1. Do you support continued funding of the Iraq War and occupation without a specific exit strategy and timetable?

2. Will you announce an exit strategy for Iraq?

3. Will you investigate contracting abuses found by DoD auditors regarding the reconstruction of Iraq?

4. Will you investigate the $9 billion dollars unaccounted for in the Coalition Provisional Authority budget in Iraq?

5. How will you hold President Bush accountable to Congress?
If we do not hear favorably from you within a week of your receipt of this email (or letter or fax), we will double the number of signatures and renew the request.

If one week later we do not hear from you, we will again double the number of signatures and present some of us at your local office so you and your staff can meet your constituents.

If a week later we do not hear from you, we will peacefully and diligently street march in front of your local office to secure your attention.

You have often said how much you want to enjoy hearing from your constituents - well, here we are. Please do not take this as a hostile message; rather it is an effort to indicate to you the serious urgency we take to ending the occupation of Iraq and bringing U.S. troops home as soon as possible. Civilians, little children and soldiers are dying or being seriously injured every day.

In the meantime, we would appreciate answers to the following questions:

1. Do you have a summary of Paul Bremer’s vast directives which are still the governing authority of Iraq? These include extending Saddam’s ban on trade union organizing and allow a U.S. takeover of Iraq businesses.

2. Have you protested to President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld that they do not officially disclose the injuries to our troops there, diseases and severe mental trauma when they do not occur in combat situations - even if they are evacuated from Iraq? If yes, send us a copy of your letter. If not, why not?

3. Will you sign a simple pledge that henceforth you will vote against any attack on another nation unless Congress itself declares war as required by the U.S. Constitution? See: The United States Constitution’s War Powers Clause, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11.

4. Finally, would you propose a very selective service draft just for the children of members of Congress? The purpose of this request is that such a draft will focus the responsible attention on members of Congress in terms of realistic risks and consequences from the initiation of military hostilities.

Sincerely,

(signed by a group of constituents)

cc: members of the press and many other interested parties

Why don’t you and your local anti-war advocates try this out today. The sooner we get serious about pressuring Congress, the sooner the war and occupation of Iraq, the sooner the killing will stop, the sooner our troops will come home.

Anyone else up for this?  An ad hoc group for the 1st District PA?  Any takers..?