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Harrisburg City: One Political Party’s Complete Catastrophe

Harrisburg City is a complete catastrophe.

By any measure, my beloved city and the home of my father’s family in an unbroken chain since 1745, is now a non-functional wreck. A shambles. A disaster.

Our combined city millage rate is an incredible, unbelievable, phenomenal record of 71 Mills! See the official Dauphin County millage rates below. Harrisburg City is at the bottom.

Those readers who do not understand what millage is, it is the local tax rate for public services like fire, water, police, sewers, and sometimes schools. Most Pennsylvania communities have a millage rate of about 6-10, total.

Millage rates are supposed to reflect the quality of public services that taxpayers receive. After all, we are paying these incredibly high tax rates for a reason.

But here in Harrisburg, we taxpayers have no such illusions or expectation of receiving much of anything in return for our hard-earned money. Most of our city taxes are squandered by unaccountable bureaucrats and politicized mayors who come and go, come and go, spending all the way. Our city council is completely non-functional, filled with bitter personality disputes and zero achievements for the actual people underwriting the bills.

And then there is the Harrisburg School District, a study in unabated and completely open incompetence and corruption. Our city school district has been run by the state, only to be set aside and allowed to fester and rot, for the whole public to see. And still nothing is done to fix it. The school children here, mostly black kids, suffer the worst, because for all their time spent inside four classroom walls, they actually get very little education.

And now the latest example of just how badly Harrisburg is run is revealed in a lawsuit by Michael Brenner, owner of the building where the Harrisburg City Public Works Department is housed. Brenner has leased the building to the city for many years, and he is owed $717,000.00 by the city in back rent, unpaid taxes, and damage to the building that the city cannot or will not fix.

For those readers who do not understand what a city Public Works Department is or does, it is the one place where taxpayers expect to see something happen, because it is all about the roads, streets, sidewalks, potholes, etc. No matter where you go in America, the city’s Public Works Department is the place where the can-do guys work, the guys who know how to fix things, weld things, bend metal, pour concrete, and operate machinery to get snow plowed and fallen trees out of the roads.

Except here in Harrisburg, it seems our city Public Works employees don’t do much of that kind of work on their own building. And it turns out the city won’t pay the owner the rent the city agreed to pay.

Folks, this is a failed government. This is a failed city. When the government cannot or will not pay its most basic bills, or properly run its most basic departments and school functions, then we have a failed government. Plain and simple.

And like almost every other American city with high taxes, poor services, failed schools, and bad government, Harrisburg shares the distinction of being overwhelmingly Democrat, black, and poor. And yet… black people run very few of the city’s functions! Those jobs are reserved for the oh-so-sophisticated White Liberals, who lord it over their Democrat plantation serfs like they are running one of their old Democrat plantations back in the 1850s Deep South.

This abject failure is the price of having just one political party in power, endlessly and forever. That one political party is the Democrat Party.

At some point, city residents will begin to ask the simple question: “What have I got to lose by voting for a different political party that has different ideas of how to run things?”

To my black city neighbors, all I can say is that the solution to this bad situation is fully in your hands. You are the majority of the voters here. If you want things to change for the better, and we know you do, then you can start voting differently. Vote for candidates who represent different values and behaviors than the same-old White Liberals who have led you down this proverbial garden path for how many decades….

Dauphin County 2018 Millage July

Time to regulate the social media utilities

Social media companies like FakeBook, Twitter, Google, InstaGram, etc. have become the modern day information equivalents of the first power and public service utilities.

Instead of water molecules, gas, sewer, or electrons (electricity) entering and exiting your home to keep your life running, today’s digital social media companies transmit photons and ones and zeros to your laptop and handheld device. The net result for the end user is that all these things are all one and the same utility service, and they serve the same function.

Just like the power company, say PPL, and the gas company, and the water company cannot discriminate against users of their services, so the same applies to the digital information companies above.

For example, you do not come home at night, flick the light switch on your wall, and remain in darkness because you got a call earlier in the day from PPL saying “Sorry, Jane, we have turned off your electricity, because we have determined that your political views are contrary to our arbitrary and vague terms of service and our company’s values.”

PPL and other utilities must provide their services and products equally to all who pay for them.

It is time to hold digital utility service providers to the same exact standard. No discrimination against users.

Presently, Google so obviously fakes its search results to favor political candidates and campaigns the owners of Google favor. Google’s politicization of search results on every subject and person is egregious.

Like Google, FakeBook also obviously discriminates against conservatives, engaging in shadowbanning and hiding messages its liberal owners do not want the public to see. Worse, Fakebook has made a lucrative business charging its users for advertising, but the person who pays for that service never knows just how far their investment went, because FakeBook deliberately withholds information about its actual efforts.  It is a blind item, exactly the opposite of what it should be: Open and transparent.

Twitter’s legendary war against non-liberals is the most public form of censorship. As illiberal as this censorship is, liberals still cheer.

These companies and the many other liberal book-burners in the digital media business have declared war on ideas and people they simply disagree with. It is time to end this assault on the First Amendment rights of American citizens who have entrusted these companies to abide by universal free speech standards.

It is time to regulate these companies like the public utilities they have become, to prevent them from illegally discriminating against people who merely disagree with their owners.

Treat us all the same legally.

The personal cost of political correctness

Political correctness is a political and social orthodoxy whose adherents behave like caricatures of religious zombies.

Having captured government schools, academia, and the mainstream media, PC constantly reinforces a seamless far-Left brainwashing from most Americans’ earliest memories through their college education and into adulthood.  Constantly told that they are correct on the laundry list of PC issues, questioning, even contemplating an alternative, is impossible.

Rigid, inflexible, out of the mainstream, followers of political correctness can inflict tremendous damage not just through failed laws and policies, like ObamaCare, the “War on Coal,” and “global warming,” but also through an inability to communicate with people who don’t share the same beliefs.

Unable or unwilling to share ideas, to have what philosopher Martin Buber called the I-Thou cross pollination and consideration of ideas, PC people have become both political Brown Shirts and personal martyrs.

Because the PC cause is so just, in its totality, no deviation is acceptable. Because no deviation is acceptable, no friendliness with other humans who are deviating from PC is acceptable. This has deeply personal consequences for old friends and families alike. PC is like old religion: Step out of line, burn at the stake.  End of friendship, painfully strained relationships, hard feelings, rejection, loss of meaning and special value. Not good.

But because PC followers are “tolerant,” ha-ha, their intolerance is justified.

So many of my friends and acquaintances have experienced corrosive and destructive PC both in their professional and personal lives that I cannot keep count. But if I can’t keep count, I can keep a general running tab. The body count is getting higher, the PC Brown Shirts commit cruelty after cruelty, and then they turn around and claim martyrdom when they are challenged or when they hurt someone.

While it is tempting to brush aside this PC excess, it has a cost that demands a response. Commitment to the PC cause must meet limits. Or else, political and familial divides will appear increasingly like those seen leading up to the Civil War.

Please be friendly, be understanding, listen, and reflect when talking, writing, or debating. The lack of reflection and contemplation among PC believers is a challenge we all must be up to helping with, and each small firm kindness extended to a PC believer may contribute to their eventual awakening.

Our nation cannot afford PC, and we must be patient in turning it back.