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Where’s the beef?

It’s been two weeks since my last column. I had to spend some time recovering from my head exploding due to all the news stories about the Philadelphia Housing Authority and Germantown Settlement.

These are a set of stories involving two different types of groups layered in corruption with a very common denominator.

The PHA is a state-chartered agency with the mission to house low income residents of Philadelphia. Germantown Settlement is a non-profit that was founded over 120 years ago to help combat poverty.

What do they have in common that helped lead to their corruption and catastrophe? Millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars gained through political connections with no accountability.

This should lead to questions asked of every single candidate running for office: “what are they going to do to make sure our money is being spent well and on the desired results?”

This multitude of malfeasance. This plethora of profiteering. This glut of graft. If we want any hope for Pennsylvania and its municipalities, it has to end.

During this election year, even more so than other years, we the voters are in the middle of a tug of war about spending, taxes and the role of government. Candidates pit one side against another saying the opposing policies are going to hurt someone.

What is happening though is that most of them are distracting us from the real issue. We are being distracted from the reality that in the long run the policies haven’t mattered because so much waste, corruption and abuse is taking place that even good programs the majority of people agree on are underfunded.

Take the PHA (please!). Millions of dollars have been spent on Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell birthday parties, Executive Director Carl Green sexual harassment lawsuits, stolen building materials and more. Every single person in Pennsylvania could agree the mission of PHA is sound, but due to its actions it shows one of two things: it is either over funded because of all the money gone to corruption or no one cares about results because there are no expectations for the money being handed over.

The exact same can be said about Germantown Settlement, too.

And how many other government agencies or tax-payer fed non-profits or government funded private corporations that are doing the same thing? We all know these aren’t the only cases.

And the only defenses our elected officials have are incompetence or illegality.

This is what we need to hit the candidates with over and over and over again. Where is our money? What are the results? And all people have claim to this. Tea Partiers fighting for fiscal sanity in government should be screaming over the misappropriation of funds. Affordable hosing advocates should be crying foul over the amount of people left on the streets because money went elsewhere.

At every debate, at every campaign stop, we should be demanding an answer to “how are you going to make government a good steward of our money?”

We can’t afford not to.

October 5, 2010 at 12:15 pm

--Adam Lang

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