Five corporations that paid no 2009 taxes bought $8 million worth of candidate in 2010

NYC Public Advocate Bill De Blasio has turned the spotlight on corporations that pay no taxes while spending big bucks on political parties, candidates, PACs and the like.

From the Public Advocate website:

Public Advocate de Blasio’s analysis shows the top five recipients of corporate tax breaks avoided paying $3.7 billion in potential taxes in 2009, while also contributing more than $43.1 million to political campaigns over the last decade. During the 2009-2010 election cycle, the group of companies spent a combined $7.86 million in campaign contributions, a 7% jump over their 2007-2008 political spending.

In letters recently sent to Exxon-Mobil and four other corporations, the Public Advocate called on these companies to pledge this latest windfall will not be spent on electioneering. De Blasio is also urging consumers and shareholders to contact Exxon-Mobil’s General Counsel through www.advocate.nyc.gov/exxon to urge adoption of a proposed shareholder’s resolution calling for full disclosure of all corporate political spending.

De Blasio's focus on Exxon also spotlights increased spending by the oil and gas industry at a time of both record gas prices and record profits. During the last election cycle, oil and gas nabobs gave more than $30.5 million to federal level political interests, according to Center for Responsive Politics research. This amount includes more than $17.1 million from industry political action committees, nearly $11.4 million from individuals associated with the industry and more than $2 million in outside money the industry spent to independently promote or slam political candidates. Koch Industries, ExxonMobil and Chief Oil and Gas led the pack in spending, most of it going to the GOP or conservative "blue dog" Democrats.

The odds of Exxon/Mobil top management or any other corporate players ending the practice of investing in friendly elected officials just because the American people tell them to stop, is, admittedly, far fetched. But given how quiet many officials have been on the issue of political bribery, de Blasio deserves credit for making this issue the Public Advocate's business.

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New York's new deputy mayor is Indianapolis's former "king of privatization"

Jack and Stevie Smith coordinated the Indianapolis chapter of the Alliance for Democracy and helped develop the "So You Want to Move to Indy" website, which exposed city government giveaways to corporations. Recently, Jack gave reporter Neil deMause some background info on former Indy mayor Steve Goldsmith, the man he describes as "the king of privatization." In addition to the article below, check out this article Jack wrote for The Progressive.

by Neil deMause. Posted June 30 on City Limits

When Mayor Bloomberg tapped former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith in April to replace longtime aide Ed Skyler as the city's new deputy mayor for operations, all the talk was about the new hire's credentials as an innovator at remaking government through privatization. The Times called Goldsmith, a former two-term mayor of Indianapolis who officially started work at City Hall on June 1, "a national leader in the movement to introduce corporate-style accountability and cost-cutting into government bureaucracy." Bloomberg enthused about his new hire, "Lots of people talk about reinventing government; I think it's fair to say Steve has actually done that."

According to some of those who saw Goldsmith's work firsthand in Indianapolis, however, his record is mixed. The Indianapolis miracle, say many community and labor leaders, was less an indicator of the magic of privatization than of its limits.
Goldsmith was elected mayor in 1991 on a platform of privatizing city services, and immediately set out to put his plan into action. Goldsmith appointed a "Service, Efficiency, and Lower Taxes for Indianapolis Commission" (SELTIC), led by private business leaders, to examine every facet of city government for possible privatization. The core of his philosophy was what in his 1997 book "The 21st Century City" Goldsmith called the "Yellow Pages test": "If the phone book lists three companies that provide a certain service," he wrote, "the city probably should not be in that business."

Despite declaring that "my goal is not to lay off city workers," Goldsmith immediately announced a series of layoffs, as a part of a massive reorganization of city departments, particularly those overseeing construction and public works. Agencies involved in regulatory oversight were a favorite Goldsmith target. The city's Equal Opportunity Division lost 14 of its 21 employees; the department responsible for buildings code inspections dropped from more than 400 workers to 341. At one point, Goldsmith directed the city's Health and Hospital Corporation to use health and safety regulations "only after other alternative measures, including market-based environmental protection, are sufficiently explored." His predecessor as mayor, William Hudnut, later reported that Goldsmith's deputy mayor declared the new administration's motto to be: "If it ain't broke, break it and then fix it."

An all-out war
The response of the municipal unions "was predictable," recalls Steve Fantauzzo, an American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees official who was head of the AFSCME district council in Indianapolis during Goldsmith's time as mayor. "The first eight to ten months of his administration was an all-out war."

When Goldsmith moved from layoffs to actually privatizing services, his initiatives featured a common theme: City services would be farmed out to a private firm, which would then hike fees. If this raised issues of fairness for low-income residents who couldn't afford the new rates, the fiscal results weren't much more promising. After Goldsmith contracted out operations at three public swimming pools, for example, fees soared (more than quadrupling at one especially popular pool), while attendance fell by 30 percent; after three years, the city ended the experiment and returned the pools to city control.

Goldsmith also privatized the city's golf courses, approving a no-bid contract to turn them over to the golf pros who'd previously run them (for a flat fee), on the argument that they could raise more revenue. According to Indiana Alliance for Democracy president Jack Miller, writing in the 2001 anthology "To Market, To Market: Reinventing Indianapolis," revenues indeed went up, but only for the private partners: Since the new contracts provided that all capital improvements would be paid for by the city, while virtually all revenues would go to the new private managers, the pros simply hiked greens fees and kept the windfall profits for themselves.

Prior to privatization, the golf courses had been turning an annual $3 million a year profit for the city. Since then, according to longtime Indianapolis community activist Pat Andrews, currently active with the Marion County Alliance of Neighborhood Associations, "parks funding has been very difficult." SELTIC also tried to get neighborhood groups to take over responsibility for maintenance of the city's parks--a plan that drew jeers for expecting citizens to mow the grass, and ended with not a single one of the city's 135 parks turned over to neighborhood control.

At the same time, critics began alleging that rather that truly leveling the playing field for private contractors seeking to bid on public services, Goldsmith was favoring campaign donors and political allies. One of Goldsmith's biggest contracts went to Oscar Robertson Smoot, a newly formed consortium led by former NBA great and Indianapolis native Oscar Robertson that would go on to give $42,000 to Goldsmith's election campaigns. In a no-bid contract issued with no prior public debate, ORS was given control over the city's $530 million infrastructure building and repair program, according to Miller.

The result, according to city internal audits reviewed by Miller, was shoddy work, cost overruns, and construction delays. In one case, ORS put down sidewalks before sewer lines had been laid. In another, after the company failed to complete parks renovation work on time, it farmed out the work to a subcontractor and billed it to the city under a different contract; even after a third contractor was eventually hired on, the work was never completed. Asked in 1996 about the benefits of using ORS to do construction work in the city's parks, Goldsmith's parks director Leon Younger replied: "Oh, I wouldn't say there was a savings ... It's strictly a business decision based on our ability to get it out of our operating budget and over to our capital improvement side."?

Financing questions
Indeed, to some of his Indiana critics, Goldsmith's greatest flaw was his reliance on debt financing. "One of the things they did was keep refinancing bonds and never paying them down," says Andrews. The "poster child" for this, she says, was the Hoosier Dome, the home of the Colts football team: Originally financed with $50 million in bonds in 1984, multiple refinancings by Goldsmith and his successor Bart Peterson left it with $70 million in debt by the time it was demolished in 2008. At the same time, Goldsmith renegotiated the Colts' lease to give them an out clause, one they ended up leveraging into a new $687 million stadium, 90 percent of which was paid for by taxpayers. (Goldsmith was also responsible for the city's lease with the Pacers basketball team for the taxpayer-built Conseco Fieldhouse, in which the team pays just $1 a year in rent, while keeping all revenues from events there.)

Neither Goldsmith nor his former aides responded to interview requests for this article.

Privatization was, of course, only part of Goldsmith's record as mayor. Bloomberg's office says that before Goldsmith's tenure, "downtown Indianapolis suffered from years of urban decay, with disinvestment, population flight and difficulties with crime" and City Hall credits Goldsmith as "the leading force behind the rebirth of downtown Indianapolis, rebuilding long-neglected neighborhoods and spurring major investment."

Fantauzzo, at least, says that Goldsmith eventually backed off of his harshest privatization efforts. "His folks approached us, and wanted to discuss a change in their position away from privatization," he says, instead setting up a system that would allow existing city workers to bid against private firms for contracts. "The numbers showed what we knew all along: The problem wasn't that we had too many front-line workers. We had too many middle managers and bureaucratic bloat. For every two guys we had filling a pothole we had two guys watching them." The end result, he says, is that Indianapolis ended up with fewer middle managers but a larger union workforce after Goldsmith's tenure in City Hall.

Still, by the end of his eight years in office, Goldsmith could brag that he had successfully reduced city worker headcount in departments other than police and fire services by 40 percent. The result, he claimed, was $190 million in savings. But according to Miller, there were no independent audits made of these claims. His own research of city fiscal records found that any savings were offset by nearly $300 million in extra spending on private services.

New city, new landscape
It's not clear precisely what Goldsmith's New York agenda will be. As deputy mayor for operations, he's been charged with direct oversight of police, fire, transportation, sanitation, buildings and environmental protection. While Goldsmith's rhetoric certainly shows signs of having been tempered by his Indianapolis experience--when he recently visited Memphis to promote privatizing sanitation services there, he made a point of selling it as a way to cut bureaucratic overhead, not union jobs--he remains an unabashed advocate of the beneficial powers of market-based competition.

Fantauzzo insists that Goldsmith is flexible enough to adapt to new situations. "New York is not Indianapolis," notes Fantauzzo. "The challenge for Steve will be figuring out how to engage frontline workers in an honest discussion about how the work can be done better. And then engaging top departmental leaders in how to effectuate some of those changes. It's an easy philosophy, but much easier to say than do."

Andrews is less optimistic. "If he moves into privatization with the same style as he moved here," she warns, "you could be in for a rocky run."

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Declaration of Health Independence and Security

Healthcare advocates from fourteen states met in Wayne, Penn., April 10, 2010. The following Declaration is a result of the meeting. Add your name to the Declaration at Healthcare-Now!'s website.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for the people of this nation and its separate but equal states to transform conditions related to the common good within our control and necessary in order to assure the basic human rights of all, recognition of our common humanity and a decent respect to the opinions of humankind compel us to declare those conditions for which we demand such a transformation.

Healthcare is a basic human right. To this end, we the undersigned representatives of these assembled states, declare our dedication to the transformation of the profit-driven healthcare system into one of our shared humanity under a social insurance model–a publicly funded, privately and publicly delivered system, equally available to all. Current expenditures on healthcare can and must fund this systemic transformation.

Working in our individual and several states, we will educate our fellow residents, petition our legislators for our collective redress of grievances under the current system, and pursue passage of patient-driven healthcare policy legislation.

We hold these truths still to be self-evident, that all people are created equal and have certain inalienable rights. Among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that in order to enjoy these rights, access to healthcare without regard to financial or any other barriers must be secured.

Signed this 10th day of April, 2010, at Central Baptist Church in Wayne, Pennsylvania.

States represented: West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, California, New York, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Minnesota

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Granny D to be feted this saturday at Clearwater Festival

This Saturday, June 19, starting at 3:20 p.m., a forty minute "shout out" will honor Doris "Granny D" Haddock. Folksoul Band (her own "Tattoo") will be the principle performers, hopefully joined by Pete Seeger, a long-time close friend. A tribute will be read by Dan Weeks, President of ACR (Americans for Campaign Reform); Doris spoke there in 2006.

The Clearwater Festival 2010--The Great Hudson River Revival, a music and environmental summer festival is now in its 41st year, and has become the nation's oldest and largest annual festival of its kind. It was first inspired by Pete Seeger and friends, who built the sloop "The Clearwater" and began raising funds and awareness to restore the Hudson River. Sustainability and social responsibility are among its goals.

The festival runs from 10 AM until dusk on Saturday and Sunday, June 19th and 20th. It is sited on the grounds of Croton Point Park, along the river's edge at Croton-on-Hudson, NY. More info at www.clearwater.org/festival.

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Town Halls in Albany and Saratoga offer chance for community dialogue on corporations in politics

AfD member Joe Seeman sends the following info:
On Wednesday, May 5th, and Thursday May 6th, Capital Region residents will be able to participate in two Town Hall forums in Saratoga Springs and Albany, hosted by MoveOn.org. Against the backdrop of a struggling economy and slow job growth, these events will bring together local citizens concerned about the influence of big corporations and lobbyists in Washington. Attendees will discuss what can be done to rein in the growing influence of big corporations and lobbyists in our democracy. Organizers plan a short panel of speakers, break out groups, and action plans.

Wed. May 5th 6:30pm: The Arts Center, 320 Broadway, Saratoga Springs
Please sign up to attend here or on Facebook.

Thurs. May 6th 7pm: FUUSA Channing Hall, 405 Washington Ave, Albany
Please sign up to attend here or on Facebook.

For more info, contact Dennis Karius (518) 456-5721 or Joe Seeman 583-4326

The speakers in Saratoga Town Hall will include:
B.K. Keramati on"Clean Money and Clean Elections"
Penny Hill on"Green Economy"
Kevin Eitzman on "Financial Deregulation and the Destruction of our Economy"

The speakers at the Albany Town Hall will include:
Nick Willson on "Corporations and Our Taxes"
Mark Schaffer on "Energy"
Aaron Mair on "Roll Back 20 years of Tax Shift"
Dennis Karius on"Media Democracy"

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"NOW" on natural gas fracking and contamination of groundwater

PBS's NOW had a story this week on hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", the practice of drilling into and then fracturing natural-gas-bearing rock with a combination of compressed water and chemicals in order to release gas deposits that can't be extracted through conventional drilling. Hydraulic fracturing is being touted as a way to access large amounts of a cleaner fossil fuel within continental US borders, and so reduce dependency on both foreign oil and domestic coal, but the health and environmental costs of this procedure are still unknown, with some disturbing patterns of illness and contamination being seen in regions where fracking wells have been drilled, including Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Here's an interview with filmmaker Josh Fox, whose Sundance-honored film "Gasland" spotlights the downside to this supposedly cleaner fuel, including chronic illness, tapwater fireballs, and lack of regulatory oversight to protect groundwater and health. You can read more about the show on the NOW site or visit the film website here.

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Sweep in clean money politics: picket Joe Bruno's fundraiser tomorrow!

If you're in the Albany, New York area, take a stand for clean money politics at a picket tomorrow night outside a fundraiser for the Joe Bruno Legal Defense Fund. The picket starts at 5:30 at the Desmond Hotel in Colonie, New York, at Albany-Shaker Road off Wolf Road. Participants are asked to bring mops, brooms, and signs, the better to show that New York politics needs to sweep bribery out and clean elections in.

Bruno was convicted last month on federal charges of using his office to benefit himself. He has already spent more than $1 million he had in his campaign account to fund his legal bills.

But the fundraiser, which is being hosted by another New York Assembly member, is not just about one bad apple, say organzers.

"Joe Bruno may be the Poster Child for Corruption, but it’s not enough to convict Bruno. The contributors to Bruno’s defense fund obviously are trying to buy influence with the political machine," said Anton Konev, Albany City Councilmember.

Adds Chris Scoville, Capital District Organizer with Citizen Action of NY, “Public financing of elections would allow candidates to run competitive campaigns without taking money from special interests. This is the reform that makes all other reforms possible. If Maine, Arizona & Connecticut can have public financing of elections, why can’t New York?”

Details of this event, including a map, are online at
http://www.activistresource.org/13773

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