Tonight is the last night to register and go demand a real medicaid expansion in Harrisburg

Governor Corbett is pushing to reject a medicaid expansion for PA and instead wants to expand the private insurance market. It is a process that requires public input and now is your chance.

Here is how the standard expansion would work; anyone making under 133% of the poverty line and over the age of 19 would qualify for medicaid eligibility. The whole program would be paid for 100% for the first three years by the federal government. After that federal coverage will drop to 90%. 

Corbett's plan would use federal dollars to provide further subsidies to low income individuals instead of expanding medicaid for them. For the people currently enrolled in medicaid Corbett is pushing work search requirements, an annual, and a reduction in services.

Keystone Politics has the details about where you can go in Harrisburg, and across the state to protest this sham of a deal, and how that can make a real expansion more possible.

You have to pre-register now if you want to trash it in person. I’ll be at the Philadelphia hearing for sure, and can’t stress enough how it important it is for you all to pre-register here now, and then go trash it in your area. These public hearings are important, because this is the chance the public gets to weigh in during the process where Corbett requests a waiver from the federal government to do his fake Medicaid expansion. If all the news reports say everybody hates it, that makes it even easier for Kathleen Sebelius to reject CorbettCare and clear the way for a Democratic Governor to do real Medicaid expansion in 2015.

Here are the dates. Don’t sleep on this, they’re coming up quick so make sure you pre-register now!

Friday, January 3, 2014, in Philadelphia, PA
Time: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.*
National Constitution Center
525 Arch Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Registration Deadline: Monday, December 30, 2013

Friday, January 3, 2014, in Philadelphia, PA
Time: 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. (Session 2)
National Constitution Center
525 Arch Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Registration Deadline: Monday, December 30, 2013

Monday, January 6, 2014, in Scranton, PA
Time: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Hilton Scranton & Conference Center
100 Adams Avenue
Scranton, PA, 18503
Registration Deadline: Thursday, January 2, 2014

Tuesday, January 7, 2014, in Altoona, PA
Time: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Blair County Convention Center
1 Convention Center Drive
Altoona, PA 16602
Registration Deadline: Thursday, January 2, 2014

Thursday, January 9, 2014, in Harrisburg, PA
Time: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania
300 North Street
Harrisburg, PA 17120
Registration Deadline: Monday, January 6, 2014

Public Hearing Dates for Webinar Presentation

Monday, December 16, 2013
Time: 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Speaker Registration Deadline: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 

Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Time: 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Speaker Registration Deadline: Friday, January 3, 2014 

As of 4 p.m. Sunday the 5th, the DPW site used to register was down. . .  

Political Economy in Dauphin County: CAT Edition

Capitol Area Transit has a funding crisis.

As they prepare to finalize their 2014 budgets, Cumberland and Dauphin counties could be headed into a showdown with Capital Area Transit over funding.  

The counties, who join with Harrisburg as CAT's funding partners, have each proposed giving the authority level funding for 2014. But that is less than what CAT has asked for, and less than what CAT executive director William Jones said the counties need to provide under state law.  

The problem is compounded by Harrisburg's inability to pay the $73,000 it owes CAT from 2013.  

Under Act 44, the partners together have to increase their payments to CAT by 5 percent annually, Jones said. If that doesn't happen, CAT could have to return money to the state and federal governments that were meant to match local investment in mass transit.

It looks like Harrisburg's new Mayor Eric Papenfuse's fledgling admin is going to get jammed with a major bill here before all is said and done.

Harrisburg Mayor-elect Eric Papenfuse could propose changing CAT's allocation when he takes office, but that would mean cutting elsewhere in the tight city budget. 

"We wouldn't want to say anything before we get a recommendation from our transition team," said Papenfuse spokeswoman Joyce Davis. 

The new administration expects to have 15 days to make changes to the budget, Davis said. There will almost certainly be some alterations to the Thompson, Davis said, since Papenfuse wants to make changes to how Harrisburg's government is organized.

City councilman Bruce Weber seems to think the city can pay. . .

@stcif01 I would say that would be a bit extreme...#HBG should pay its required & outstanding obligations. Have to find $$. It can be done
— Bruce P Weber (@btrain12) December 5, 2013

The discussion that ensued was a good fleshing out of where Harrisburg stands politically.

I contend that for proper regional transit to be a viable alternative to automobile transportation, the counties must become a bigger part of the revenue streams to CAT. Bruce here is telling it just how it is. He is a city councilman right now and has to solve problems right now. The city, like it or not, is subordinate politically to the suburban priorities of Dauphin, and on this issue, Cumberland County. 

Suburban, exurban, and rural voter priorities are not aligned currently, even though the city of Harrisburg, not the townships, is the region's economic powerhouse. Never-the-less this disconnect makes it good politics for Dauphin County's two Republican commissioners to tell Harrisburg to eat it every chance they get, so they can get Norquisty, to the detriment of the region as a whole. 

This is exactly why we need to work to change voter preferences. 

It is not because Harrisburg is some charity case that we should feel bad for and implement policies that righteously assist it. It is because as liberals, and hopefully progressives ones at that, we realize that transportation policy should be about moving people, not moving cars. Because we realize that segregation in schools comes when people divest from their communities and separate themselves further and further from their neighbors out of fear and selfishness. It is because we want everyone to receive the same standard of access to health care and food. It is because we want to lower the barriers to market entry so everyone can have a fair shot at their hopes.  

Democrats have already won in measures of strictly affiliation. Now, if we want real policy victories, like expanding CAT's service, we need to transform that numerical advantage into people demanding change. Right now with the balance of power tilted in the GOP's favor all Democratic leaders like Councilman Weber can do, when presented with situations like this is go along to get along.

Segregation Still Matters

Last week's This American Life highlighted the strenuous research/reporting that Nikole Hannah-Jones has been doing for the journalistic non-prof ProPublica on housing discrimination and segregation in America. 

What I think was most critical to take away from the hour long segment, is that de facto racism is still a huge force in American politics, as much as the GOP want's us to think it is not.

America, years after the civil rights movement, is still heavily divided by zip code, and those five digits may be the most important numbers in your life. 

The study — based on millions of anonymous earnings records and being released this week by a team of top academic economists — is the first with enough data to compare upward mobility across metropolitan areas. These comparisons provide some of the most powerful evidence so far about the factors that seem to drive people’s chances of rising beyond the station of their birth, including education, family structure and the economic layout of metropolitan areas. 

Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. By contrast, some of the highest rates occur in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota. 

“Where you grow up matters,” said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the study’s authors. “There is tremendous variation across the U.S. in the extent to which kids can rise out of poverty.”

Knowing how important, and random birth location is, it is intuitive to say that segregation is a major political problem worthy of devoting our time and energy to combat. It can be harder once we try to stop and think about it to qualify what makes it such a problem. After all, the civil rights movement is over. We won right? Any outcomes now are normal and acceptable, based on self selection?

All it takes is a ride through Harrisburg city to know this is not the case. The perpetuation of the status-quo leads us down an already well worn road of segregation, isolation, and othering. 

Highlighted in the TAL program was President Lyndon Johnson's 1967 Kerner Commission Report. The report was produced to try and establish the causes of race riots that dominated American cities in the late 1960's. Hannah-Jones quoted from it

"This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."

"Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it."

The creation of these separate societies are as real today as they ever were. Black and white experience separate lived experiences, realities.

The failure to truly integrate haunts us still today. Separateness enables us to only further separate. White families live in income exclusive suburban environments with good schools, while people of color reside in urban, low income hoods with crumbling infrastructure and institutions. 

"The most segregated parts of the country are, and have been for decades, the Northeast and the Midwest. Milwaukee is consistently one of the most segregated cities in the country. In Milwaukee and in other cities, including New York, the level of black-white segregation by one important measure has declined only by a trickle in 30 years. 

I've got a map on the wall in my office of Brooklyn that shows a giant red cluster right in the middle, where African Americans make up over 80% of the population, even though they're only 25% of the city overall, and even though on the street, New York feels like a very integrated city."

--- 

"The average African-American household making $75,000 a year or more, that family lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average white family making less than $40,000 a year. That is, a black family making twice as much money as a white family probably still lives in a poorer neighborhood. That's according to a study from Brown University."

The availability heuristic easily takes hold and to us, what you see is all there is. The reality of white suburban conservatives and even some liberals is a racial empathy gap. 

George Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin because he perceived him as dangerous. The defense argues he was, the prosecution argues he wasn’t. No one, of course, argues that Zimmerman approached Martin with kindness, or stopped to consider the boy as anything other than suspicious, an outsider. Ultimately Zimmerman shot and killed Martin. A lack of empathy can produce national tragedies. But it also drives quieter, more routine forms of discrimination.

It includes advocacy for cutting taxes, tough on crime stances, austerity budgets, and states' rights, and local sovereignty. 

Check Out Your Gubernatorial Candidates

Temple University with the help of 1199C/AFSCME, 32BJ SEIU, AFSCME DC 47, Action United, Fight for Philly, PA Working Families, PASNAP, PCAPS, POWER, and SEIU Healthcare PA put together a Democratic Gubernatorial forum this week. Check out the recording/live-stream here.




While there is still a great amount of time ahead of the election now is the time to get acquainted with the candidate. In the new year the election will begin in earnest and it is not enough to sit by and watch the show. Without your vocal, energetic support your candidate, and your issues, stand less of a chance. 

Candidates Jo Ellen Litz and Cumberland County Minister Max Myers and Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski were not in attendance.

Raise That Wage Rep. Kim

State Rep. Patty Kim is making headlines advocating for a higher minimum wage.

At a news conference at the Harrisburg YWCA, the first-term Democrat said she is working on a bill to increase the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour in two steps. 

The first step would bump the rate to $9 an hour 60 days after enactment. The wage would reset to $10.10 an hour one year later.

She held a press conference at the Harrisburg YWCA last Thursday. 


While the odds of a first term Representative in a Republican controlled legislature are long Rep. Kim's efforts are commendable. She joins part of a larger state and nation-wide conversation about raising the minimum wage.

In Philadelphia State Senator Christine Tartaglione is pushing a bill to raise the minimum wage. Katie McGinty, the governor candidate who Rep. Kim supports, became the first candidate to advocate the measure as well.

“One of the best ways to get the economy moving is to put money into the pockets of people who work,” McGinty said. “Too many wage earners, working moms in particular, are holding down full-time, 40-hour-a-week jobs and still finding it too hard to make ends meet and support families. That’s because the minimum wage hasn’t kept pace with the rising cost of living today. That needs to change.”

On the national stage, most recently New Jersey raised their minimum wage through a ballot referendum that passed with a 20 point margin. The win is commensurate with nation wide attitudes about it being raised.

It is no secret that there is a powerful opposition lobby to minimum wage increases. Not only companies who simply don't want to pay a higher rate for labor but serious economists, usually of the Chicago/Austrian schools and libertarian in their politics. These academics make an earnest argument that by raising the cost of labor, you will unemploy everyone who's skills the market determines are worth lower than the base rate of pay. 

One institution you may find making such an argument in halls of the Pennsylvania State Capitol is the Commonwealth Foundation.

They are not wrong, there is no doubt that when the price of labor is too high consumption (employment) will drop, but there are many economists who would gladly debate that the minimum wage is not so high, or not going to be raised so much that it would truly slow demand for labor; Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, Laura Tyson, Robert Reich and of course Paul Krugman.

In fact corporate profits and holdings are at an all time high, and wages have not kept pace with productivity for years. 

These economists and many others argue that stagnating wages may be one of the biggest contributors to the current and future economic downturns. You may say," Wait! The housing market caused the economy to crash in 2008, Did it not?" 

It did, but because wages stagnated and consumption continued to grow, the consumption could only be fueled by one thing; credit. 

The point is not of course that credit is bad, and a discussion about whether a consumer based economy is a problem can be saved for another day. The point is that people do not have enough money to get by, let alone spend frivolously. 

Aside from the ethical imperative, estimates show that increasing the minimum wage positively benefits the economy as a whole:

A 2011 study by the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank finds that minimum wage increases raise incomes and increase consumer spending, especially triggering car purchases.  The authors examine 23 years of household spending data and find that for every dollar increase for a minimum wage worker results in $2,800 in new consumer spending by his or her household over the following year.

A 2009 study by the Economic Policy Institute estimates that Obama’s campaign pledge to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011 would inject $60 billion in additional spending into the economy.

Low wage workers need the money to get by, and the American people need them to have the money so they can spend it, creating demand, markets, and jobs to fill it. 

Rep. Kim, Senator Tartaglione, Candidate McGinty, and many others, keep fighting to raise that wage!

Teaparty Congressman Scott Perry Talks ENDA

Scott Perry, talking with John Micek and Robert Vickers on PennLive's Politics as Usual podcast last week, tried to pull a bait and switch when asked about ENDA. 

The bill, which was passed by the Senate to prohibit workplace discrimination against sexual preference and gender identity, has been doomed by House Speaker Boehner. John Micek still asked the question though, "Will you support it?" 

Perry deferred and said he personally is opposed to all discrimination in the workplace. Good for you Congressman but not everyone works for you and would receive your gracious tolerance. 

He followed up by stating, 

"I would also say though, sometimes some of this legislation seeks to give some groups of people a higher degree of equality. That is something that seems genuinely un-American." 

Good thing Congressman Perry was not around to prevent the un-American travesty that was the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and many, many other acts of congress advocating equity and equality.

This kind of Republican rhetoric is not at all uncommon. The worldview is many GOP Congressmen, women and leaders share is that racism and bigotry no longer exists. It is 2013 and we have a black president after all. 

When they people at that premise every lived experience of anyone who has been discriminated against is immediately dismissed as a one-off. This rejection of the reality many Americans exist in validates Republican support for rejections of the need for further protection under the law.

How Did Election 2013 Go For Us?

On November 5th you went out to the polls and voted. The results in Dauphin County show that we have a lot to be proud of.

Where did we win?

The party's biggest non-Harrisburg city wins were in Middletown and Susquehanna township. 

In Middletown our candidate for Mayor, James Curry III, defeated his Republican opponent with a margin of close to 300 votes. On council there three out of the four contested seats were won by Dems as well. Ben Kapenstein, Anne Einhorn and Victoria Malone won in the 2nd and 3rd wards, respectively. 

In the Susquehanna School District Democrats swept all four seats. Carol Karl, Helen Spence, Clifton Edwards, and Jesse Rawls Sr. were all winners. This means that there will be a governing majority of Democrats in the district.

The one contested seat for Susquehanna Township Commiser went to a Democrat as well. Justin Fleming bested his incumbent rival by 100 votes for the spot.

There were three contested spots for Swatara Township Supervisor. In Ward 2, Democrat Tom Connelly walked away as the winner. In the 4th ward candidate Megan Jones lost, but only by a narrow 25 vote margin. A similarly close margin for the Mayors races was lost as well.

On the Central Dauphin School board Democrat Eric Epstein defeated his republican incumbent opponent in region 2. 

In an open seat race for Derry Township supervisor, Democrat Matthew Weir was one of two winners. The Sun though has a one Republican on the record already seeing a blue future for Derry.

As one Republican leader put it, “Two years from now, a Ballard-Todd team could bring Democrats to control the Derry Township Supervisors.

Maria Marcinko was the highest vote-getter by nearly 200 in the race for Steelton borough council. 

It is great to know that we have strong Democratic bastions like the city of Harrisburg, where the party's candidate Eric Papenfuse won in his bid for mayor of our troubled capitol. 

I think it is more telling though that even outside of our county seat Democrats are winning elections. Not long ago the moment you left Harrisburg proper, you were in solidly red territory. Wins this week go to show that our influence is spreading and our candidates' hard work is paying off.

Where we lost. 

Democrat Anne Ginrich Cornick lost her bid for Judge of the County Court of Common pleas. She was defeated by a wide margin and this is an unfortunate loss for the county and the party. Currently the County's Court of Common pleas bench is made up of largely Republicans who live in the suburbs. Cornick is a Democrat who lives in the city itself. Kelly Summerford also lost his county-wide bid for prothonotary

What the loss clearly shows though is that a Democratic registration advantage does not mean anything if the opponent is better organized. The Young Dems, as I have said many times before, are working hard to change that old GOP organizational advantage to a Democratic ones. David Madsen, our President, was a driving force behind the parties big wins in Middletown. Brendan Murray also campaigned vigorously for Anne and the whole Democratic slate, as did many other YD's. 

This energy is what it takes to win elections, especially in off years. Let us enjoy our victories but as we turn to 2014, start thinking about how you can get out an help your local candidate.