in “Center of attention,” Associated Editor Gil Smart of the Sunday News reports:

“Was at the convention center consultant presser this morning, and came away with a different take than what we’re reporting here.

“The big takeaway from the presentation is this: Not only is the hotel tax going to have to rise – and soon – but to achieve a long-term, “global, forever” solution, additional, new sources of revenue are going to have to be conjured up in the near future.

“’Sources of revenue’ as in, taxes. Perhaps a countywide sales tax. Perhaps a food and beverage tax. Perhaps a levy/assessment on downtown businesses.”…

En route back home after a two week absence, we learned about the above from an e-mail from perhaps the most knowledgeable and a vociferous critic of the ‘white elephant”.  The subject line read:

“We told them so.”

From the DAILY MAIL:

The guards came for the prisoners every morning. Herded past a high-voltage fence, the men were taken down into a giant underground factory, where they were forced to work three shifts a day, cutting boards to size, making kitchen utensils and assembling cheap furniture.

Although this scene reads like something out of a Nazi concentration camp, it is far more recent. It took place in the 1970s and the 1980s at a prison near Brandenburg, some 40 miles west of Berlin, in what was then totalitarian East Germany.

But, most shockingly, the items produced in this factory — and there were many more like it — were not being made for the East Germans, but for a firm that is a household name throughout the world: Ikea…

Click here to read the full article.

A series by Bill Keisling

The Harrisburg Authority’s forensic audit of its incinerator, by design, deals only with the last desperate attempts to pull a broken vehicle from the mud. It does not do much to explain how and why the vehicle veered off the road in the first place.

While the audit report spends a sentence or two on the history of the troubled incinerator going back to 1990, it is primary concerned with a period of time from 2000 to the present, when the outstanding debt of the incinerator ballooned from about $80 million to $300 million.

As such, the audit presents only a tantalizing if frantic snapshot of this past decade. This snapshot is only a piece of the larger puzzle, which began decades earlier, with the 1981 election of Harrisburg Mayor Steve Reed.

The audit documents the increasingly desperate attempts of Mayor Reed to get a broken incinerator online, and the increasingly diminished reserves of credit at his disposal to get the job done properly.

In the end, Mayor Reed was like a frantic and penniless mechanic of a broken getaway car who has badly underestimated the cost of a job, and who now must attempt to finish an all-important repair job with shoe string and gum.

Mayor Reed became like Han Solo of Star Wars fame, desperately trying to get away in his bucket of bolts Millennium Falcon before he is caught and put on ice by Jabba the Hutt.

The analogy is somewhat apt: Han Solo owed money to Jabba the Hutt.

Puckish Mayor Reed owed the bonding industry.

From BBC:

… With almost all votes counted, centre-right New Democracy is leading with 18.9%, down from 33.5% in 2009.

New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras said he would form a national salvation government to keep the country in the euro.  But he said he would seek to “amend” Greece’s controversial EU-IMF bailout agreement in order to boost growth…

Days of wrangling lie ahead. What is clear is that a majority of Greeks have spoken out against austerity. It could be very hard for the international community to demand yet more cuts…

Click here to read the full article.

These articles and editorials published in the Lancaster Newspapers make it appear to be more and more likely that LNP truly does not know what their “partner” in the Penn Square Partners has really been up to. Is it possible that Lancaster Newspapers has been manipulated and taken advantage of nearly as much as the public?

EDITOR: It is a moral certitude that the Steinman Foundation would not have wished to profit at the expense of the community.

Rather, it has always been the gist of NewsLanc’s reflections that that the then CEO involved LNP with the best of intentions, improperly relied on others to handle the project, and , when properly informed, lacked the will power to redress the situation.

Meanwhile the Steinman family leaders were of an advanced age where they could not appreciate what was taking place.

By Polly Cleveland, on May 6th, 2012

Econamici: It feels like a large splinter jammed under my left thumbnail. From my thumb and forefinger, the skin burns in a strip up to my elbow. Recent shoulder surgery has left nerve damage, not uncommon. During the day, it’s a distraction; at night, much worse. Before bedtime, I swallow two 5 mg oxycodone. At 3 or 4 AM I jolt awake—my arm has turned into an alien serpent, its fangs sunk in my shoulder. I gulp two more oxycodone, chase them down with a Heineken, slap an ice pack on my arm, and browse the Financial Times until the pain fades.

Hail to the god Morpheus, who gave poppies to our ancestors! Used with respect, opiates still provide the cheapest, safest, and most effective relief for serious pain. The only side-effects are constipation (guaranteed!), and for some, a warm, floaty feeling, drowsiness, slight nausea, and in a small minority, addiction. But compare that with those expensive, non-addictive wonder drugs, Celebrex and Vioxx, that turned out to cause heart-attacks and strokes! Or even compare that with Tylenol, often combined with oxycodone to make Percoset. Tylenol causes liver damage and doses not much higher than recommended for pain. (That’s why I requested oxycodone straight.)

Why do we Americans have such a thing about addiction to pain-killers? Nicotine is much more addictive. Alcohol can be addictive. Also sex—see DSK. Also caffeine, Spider, and Nutella. It’s true our poorer addicts (unlike Rush) lead a nasty life, constantly worried about where the next fix is coming from, whether it will be adulterated, whether they will be arrested… But the Swiss, Portuguese, British, Australians, and others have long since shown that given access to cheap, clean drugs through special programs, opiate addicts can lead normal lives, and even kick the addiction. Moreover, such programs help keep drugs out of the black market and away from children.

I feel a chill reading the latest alarmist accounts of opiate abuse, with calls for crackdowns on doctors who overprescribe. Will I be cut off? A recent story in the New York Times describes the dilemma of emergency room docs faced with patients demanding opiates. How utterly degrading for all three parties: the patients with physical pain trying to persuade the docs the pain is real, the addicts trying to persuade the docs the pain is physical, and the docs who can’t easily tell the difference. It’s like the cops in Arizona, trying to decide if a brown-skinned individual might or might not be an undocumented immigrant. US opiate policy traces back a hundred years to a campaign against Chinese immigrants. Today, hundreds of thousands of Americans suffer inadequate treatment for pain, hundreds of thousands of low-income addicts live as pariahs, and many a dedicated pain-specialist doc faces prosecution, loss of license, and even prison.

I’m lucky. After three months, the pain is starting to recede. I feel awkward asking Dr. Martin, our family physician, for yet another prescription. As I hand the pharmacist $5 for a month’s supply, I worry that Dr. Martin will suspect I’m becoming addicted.

For more thoughts on illegal drugs, see “Economics of Illegal Drug Markets: What Happens if We Downsize the Drug War?” (2005), and “What Drives the War on Drugs?” (2011).

EDITOR: The following is a report from a syringe exchange in a Pennsylvania city comperable to Lancaster.   These essential and successful  efforts to reduce the use of drugs andto prevent the spread of venereal diseases and HIV /AIDS are not taking place in Lancaster due to the unwillingness of Lancaster General Health, a Public Charity exempted from real estate taxes and profiting at a rate of close to a hundred million dollars annually, to provide a modest subsidy of perhaps $100,000 a year to the Urban League to provide these services.

April 2012 Monthly Report

Twenty-two participants were tested for HIV in April.

Total contacts: 349

Total IDU contacts: 301

Total unduplicated IDU contacts: 263

Syringes: 3120

Condoms distributed: Male- 2730, Female-57, Dental Dams-42 Finger Cots-60

Demographics of unduplicated IDU contacts:

African American male: 39

White Male: 42

Latino: 72

African American female: 29

White female: 46

Latina: 35

We completed 198 referrals for various services.

This month, as a result of our 83 total D&A referrals, five participants entered into drug treatment facilities. This indicates those of whom we are aware; there may be additional entries of which we are not aware.

April 2012 Monthly Report

Twenty-two participants were tested for HIV in April.

April 2012 Report

Total contacts: 349

Total IDU contats: 301

Total unduplicated IDU contacts: 263

Syringes: 3120

Condoms distributed: Male- 2730, Female-57, Dental Dams-42 Finger Cots-60

Demographics of unduplicated IDU contacts:

African American male: 39

White Male: 42

Latino: 72

African American female: 29

White female: 46

Latina: 35

We completed 198 referrals for various services.

This month, as a result of our 83 total D&A referrals, five participants entered into drug treatment facilities. This indicates those of whom we are aware; there may be additional entries of which we are not aware.

According to an article “Man who rejected plea deal faces up to 15 years in prison” published in the Intelligencer Journal New Era:

“Looking back, Meredith Penn would have been wise to take the plea deal, his attorney said Friday.

“Instead, Penn refused a deal offered in March of 11 to 23 months in jail — then skipped his trial on burglary charges.

“A local judge [Margaret Miller] made him pay on Friday: Penn will spend up to 15 years in state prison, according to her order…”

There are two separate issues here.

The first and specific is for how long someone should have to serve in prison because of missing a court appearance?   A year?  Two years?

The second issue is whether the judicial system is offering too short a penalty for those who plea bargain or too punitive a sentence for those who desire to exercise their rights.  Why should the discount or the penalty be more than say 50%?

From reading the report, we fear that the sentence may more reflect the pique of the judge than a sober judicial evaluation.  If so, the judge should have to serve half of the convicts time since her apparent  petulence in administrating justice  is worse.

A series by Bill Keisling

The “The Harrisburg Authority Resource Recovery Facility Forensic Investigation Report” audit by necessity is a difficult document to read and understand. Bonds transactions by their very nature are complicated financial instruments. Nevertheless, because of the resulting crippling public debt, the report is required reading for two groups of people.

The first group of readers — the bonding industry, its customers and its regulators — no doubt finds the report amazing if predictable reading. One safeguard and accepted practice after another was ignored or discarded by everyone to bring the incinerator, the Authority, and the City of Harrisburg to their collective knees, the audit relates.

The second group of readers who by necessity must try to make sense of the complicated audit report, its information and its findings, is the public: the taxpayers who ultimately must foot the bill.

One can argue that the very nature of public bonding practices for the last quarter century has been designed to short circuit the involvement of citizens and tax payers in the running of their governments. One of the primary reasons elected officials turned to bond financing since the 1980s was to avoid the blunt unpleasantness of raising taxes.

When a tax bill comes in the mail, taxpayers can readily understand what is going on at city hall, and voice their displeasure. If high taxes are about to drive a city and its residents over a cliff, elected officials will quickly hear from a displeased public.

But when bonds that may take decades to mature underwrite these same services, the vast majority of the public simply does not know, and turns a blind eye.

A bond prospectus is infinitely more complicated to understand than a simple tax bill.

So the inherent complicated nature of bond financing, its ramifications and regulation, seem designed to further lock out the public from understanding, and participating in, an ongoing financial debacle, even if it takes decades to unfold, as in Harrisburg.

When a city is about to be driven over a cliff by irresponsible bond financing, it requires wizards of high finance, and industry insiders, to understand and hopefully explain the problem.

Hence we have the forensic audit report of the Harrisburg incinerator’s staggering $300 million debt.

The audit report, then, is required reading for all members of the general public who care to understand how their cities and states today are run. Today our local and state governments are increasingly run, not on tax revenues, but on the proceeds of complicated bond transactions.

As such, the understanding of the Harrisburg Authority’s forensic audit and the fine print of a bond prospectus should be required reading for every eighteen year old seeking a public high school diploma.

In the old days, a graduating high school senior was ill prepared for life if he or she did not know how to balance a simple check book.

Now that our governments increasingly are financed by the bonding industry, a young person’s future may well depend on how well he or she can read a bond prospectus, and understand its dismal ramifications.

This of course presents an interesting dilemma. Harrisburg city schools themselves are burdened by an additional $300 million of bond construction debt, separate from the $300 million owed by the city incinerator.

In 2011 alone, some $15 million in payments to service its bond debt crippled the Harrisburg School District. (Other local school districts are similarly in debt, if not quite to this extreme.)

The Harrisburg School District’s $15 million bond debt payment accounts for about 12 percent of the district’s $124 million 2011-12 budget. By the time the outstanding school bonds are retired in 2034, it is projected that the school district will have paid a staggering $588 million on its bond debt. Ifthe money can be found.

Meanwhile, due to a lack of funds, some students in the Harrisburg School District this year were not issued pencils or books

To understand the problem undermining their futures, today’s Harrisburg High School students will not only have to understand and cipher bond debt.

They will have to bring their own pencils to do it.

From ALJAZEERA:

Three men who worked as photojournalists have been found slain and dumped in plastic bags by a canal in the eastern Mexico state of Veracruz, less than a week after the killing in the same state of a reporter for a newsmagazine, officials said.

Press advocates called for immediate government action to halt a wave of attacks that has killed at least seven current and former reporters and photographers in Veracruz over the last 18 months, most of them among the few journalists still working on crime-related stories in the state.

The deaths have spawned an atmosphere of terror and self-censorship among journalists…

Click here to read the full article.

EDITOR: We American largely  through our foolish ban on marijuana and complicit both in the death of these journalists and the destruction of Mexico as an free and independent nation.  Civil war is taking place there, with tens of thousands of casualties over the past few years.  (We saw over 50,000  deaths in one report.)

What  keeps the US from facing reality?  The pharmaceutical industry, the criminal justice industry, craven politicians and blind ignorance.   Visit Drug War Facts, a compilation of federal and peer review articles describing every aspect of the issue…facts, not opinions.