October 16, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Opinion

Big time in the old town

Northwest Philadelphia hosted some big crowds this weekend.

Sunday, Oct. 12 saw another successful run of the Chestnut Hill Business Association’s Fall for the Arts festival. It was the 23rd time the Avenue hosted the annual gathering of artists and performers.

If something is a consistent feather in the cap of the business community in Chestnut Hill, the two annual festivals are it. Without fail, tens of thousands of people from around the region come to the neighborhood and look forward to returning for the next one.

Though it may seem to run itself — as if it is as inevitable as falling leaves — the festival is the result of a herculean effort by a very small staff at the CHBA. Peggy Miller, Kate O’Neill, Peggy Hendrie, with help from Fran O’Donnell, coordinated the remarkable event, scheduling more than 150 artists, hiring a dozen performers and musicians, and managing the drop off and removal of hundreds of tables, tents and thousands of chairs for all the vendors and businesses.

It’s an event that Chestnut Hill really can be proud of. To see many, many photos of the event and the people who attended and performed, visit our Web site: www.chestnuthilllocal.com.

Before that, though, on Saturday, Oct. 11, Vernon Park was the site of a visit by Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Obama, a rock star of a figure, drew approximately 20,000 people to the small park along Germantown Avenue in that neighborhood’s historic center.

This week, writer Jim Harris notes how the visit sparked some local pride in Germantown. Like the Fall for the Arts Festival, Harris says the Obama rally left a positive impression on those who may have ventured to Germantown for the first time. His account begins on page 10.

A note on our cover

I’m sure this week’s cover of Barack Obama will spur charges of bias and lack of balance. I don’t expect to have the opportunity to run a similar cover featuring Republican Presidential nominee John McCain.

The choice to cover Obama so prominently is not a political statement or an endorsement, but, rather, coverage of a very big event in our area. It’s not every day that a candidate for our top office comes to Germantown Avenue. I don’t think playing down the event in the interest of avoiding bias charges is the right way to go.

In the last year, we’ve had many famous people in our area to campaign for the Democratic nominee: Ted and Caroline Kennedy and Carole King. We have not yet heard of any similar appearances by the Republican candidate or his surrogates. So, if John McCain campaigns on Germantown Avenue in public, he will get the same treatment (are you reading, John?).           

  Pete Mazzaccaro

Washington a paid accomplice in Wall Street crimes of excess
by JIM FOSTER

“Repulsive” is the first word that came to mind as I watched the Senate and House leadership of both parties congratulate each other for voting $850 billion of taxpayer’s money (yes they added $150 billion for personal pork projects) after being hammered night and day by a host of players in all major financial industries warning of unthinkable consequences for the U.S. and world economies.

Pompous and self-assured, they even pretended to understand who and what they were bailing out.  Some of the most informed financial experts and economists admit that the amount of the potential failure in the world-wide meltdown is not known, as there are no consolidated records of just how high the most risky of creative financial instruments that virtually all major banks, investments houses and insurance companies participated in might go when those amounts are tallied.

Let’s put some vital facts on the table that we all should understand before we vote in November for any elected officials at the federal level. Our government is bought and paid for by lobbyists in the financial industries at a rate that exceeds all others. A check of those who voted “yes” for the bailout versus those who refused shows that virtually every vote in favor was cast by individuals of both parties who received significantly more in campaign contributions than those who cast a no vote. Wall Street hedges its bets by contributing to both parties where it sees a need for influence.  If hard dollars gets your attention, they gave Barak Obama $25 million for his campaign and John McCain $22 million for his. Make no mistake these folks expect a return on their investment.

Playing cover-up for major financial houses is nothing new for federal authorities, and trying to keep it quiet and pass off failures of major institutions as simple mergers was pulled off quite successfully right in this city in the mid seventies when the feds orchestrated the “merger” of First Pennsylvania, Philadelphia’s largest bank (20th in the U.S.) with Continental Illinois of Chicago, in order to avoid paying failed First Penn’s depositors up to the level of insurance, which at that time would have taken three times the total amount of reserves in the FDIC.

Actually, First Penn had been way ahead of the curve mimicking what banks and Wall Street are doing today.  They had a massive portfolio of under collateralized loans and specialized in risky deals, often taking equity positions that clearly belonged in venture capital companies; but of course they were using depositors’ money.  Continental Illinois had no such issues and was even larger, but it had a different problem. It was knowingly the largest laundry for mob money in the U.S. and was days away from Justice Department action when our federal government “in the public interest” made the snake swallow the rat.  Less than 10 years later, the First Penn disease killed the snake and taxpayer dollars paid the depositors of a bankrupt Continental Illinois.  Things really do happen first in Philadelphia.

Instead of learning from that experience, our Presidents, legislators, Treasury Secretaries, financial gurus (read Greenspan, et al) and advisors decided that they could use this “expertise” to let the finance industry run as close as it chose to the razor’s edge, sure that it could always pull of an 11th hour deal with mystifying language and mirrors while kicking the stone only farther down the road. 

While nibbling around the edges of regulation separating banking and speculation during the late 1980s (despite failures like First Penn and the Savings and Loan debacle), a vast majority of Congress, with enthusiastic support from Treasury, and a quick signature by the President, destroyed any last vestige of fundamental regulatory oversight in 1999 by overturning the Glass-Steagel Act of 1933, separating banking from speculation and insurance.  It has been “anything and everything goes” ever since.

Most, but not all, of Washington thrived on every minute of these no-regulation investment and lending policies. The friendly climate enabled them to buy votes in their districts with very soft deals for favored participants. Even those programs with supposed social purposes, like low-income home mortgages, often mushroomed into easy deals for individual speculators and developers who ran the real estate market into the stratosphere on a foundation of quicksand.

There were, however, attempts to reign in excesses in these markets, and film clips from the floor of congress have made it to the forefront in the last week, clearly outlining who tried to bend back the process as the first warning bells were sounding.  What we will be learning in the weeks and months ahead is how they phonied up financial records, covering the crises for a few years. But now Pandora’s Box is open.

What was done in the past few weeks is criminal. It committed every American, and most of their resources, to rescue the charlatans who knew full well how risky these deals were, but with the help of the bought and sold political leadership, pawned off marginally worthless paper as blue chip. The leadership of both parties and both houses of Congress are fully complicit in this fraud, particularly those senior members directing the banking and finance committees. While not prominently disclosed by the mainstream media (no surprise there), even 12 members of the House Banking Committee refused to vote for the bailout, despite intense pressure from leadership.

Forget party affiliation. Do your homework on who takes the most aggressive stand on truth and transparency, demand that representative government be returned to the people, and let those who “played” us suffer the consequences.

Jim Foster is a Mt. Airy businessman and a former lending officer for First Pennsylvania Banking and Trust Co.

The puck stops here?
Palin’s appearance at Flyers’ opener is poor taste for classy club
by CLARK GROOME

When Flyers chairman Ed Snider agreed to have Alaska governor and Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin drop the ceremonial first puck at the Flyers’ season opener Saturday night, he, to mix my metaphors, dropped the ball. Big time.

Since founding the Flyers 43 years ago, Snider has presided over an organization that has rightly earned the reputation as one of the classiest in all of professional team sports. Only hockey’s Detroit Red Wings and baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals are mentioned as being in the same class as the local NHL team.

Evidence of the respect in which this organization is held was seen recently at the two games the Flyers played at its original home, the Spectrum, which will be torn down next fall. Returning to celebrate the building’s history were 11 of the team’s 15 captains and at least two-dozen members of the 1974 and 1975 Stanley Cup championship teams.

What’s remarkable is the number of former players who still are part of the organization: Bob Clarke, Paul Holmgren, Bill Barber, Gary Dornhoeffer, Brian Propp, Bob Kelly, Bernie Parent, Bill Clement, Eric Desjardins, Chris Therien and Keith Jones are those who quickly come to mind.

When asked why this club is able to retain so much loyalty from its players the answer from all concerned was that Mr. Snider runs a class operation, and the Flyers are, in the truest sense, a family. This family has created the highly successful and widely copied “Flyers Wives Fight for Lives” carnival that, over the years, has raised millions for charity. In another family connection, Lauren Hart, the daughter of legendary broadcaster Gene Hart, sings the National Anthem (or “God Bless America”) before every game.

That feeling of family - along with some compelling personalities, a number of very exciting teams, those two Stanley Cups and a real commitment to engaging in the community – has helped to create what has been called the most loyal and, praises be, most intimidating fans in hockey.

With all that as background, it struck me that turning the opening night game into a political evening was a huge breach of trust.

The stated reason for having Governor Palin drop the first puck is that she’s a hockey mom and as such has brought great attention to the sport. Another factor has to be that Ed Snider, according to financial sources quoted in several articles about the event, has contributed a significant amount of money to the McCain campaign.

No matter what the event, Palin’s appearance anywhere right now, with about three weeks left in a hard-fought and quite contentious presidential campaign, is nothing if not political.

And therein lies my principal concern. With the economy rapidly going to hell in a handbasket, with the campaign becoming increasingly ugly and with wars going on in Afghanistan and Iraq, a sporting event is one place where we can escape all that. For two to three hours, at a cost of up to two to three hundred bucks, we can escape the outside world, and have fun. For an owner as savvy as Ed Snider to intrude on that is, as my 38-year-old Flyers fan son Rob said in an e-mail, “just wrong.”

Imagine how those who have forked over all that dough and don’t support Palin will feel. Where’s Joe Biden? Well, the Flyers might smugly say, he’s not a hockey anything, Palin is. Get real. This is about politics as much as hockey, even if the Flyers folks really think it isn’t. It can’t help but be political. To repeat: we’re in the middle of a campaign and Palin is a polarizing figure.

No one has a problem with an elected official, whether of the same political persuasion or not, throwing out a first pitch or doing a coin toss or dropping the ceremonial first puck. Office holders, yes; candidates, no. And while I’m not supporting Palin, I would feel exactly the same way if it were Joe Biden who dropped the puck on Saturday evening.

When Palin arrived at center ice she was accompanied by the winner of the Flyers’ search for the best local hockey mom, Cathy O’Connell, and former Flyer winger and broadcaster Brian Propp, who’s also a Republican politician in New Jersey.

The event itself was low key. The fans’ reaction was not. There was a mixture of cheers and boos. Did the boos drown out the cheers? This is Philly, so the answer is “You betcha.”

And that, under the circumstances, is exactly as it should have been.

It wasn’t until veteran referee Dan Marouelli dropped the real first puck that the attention of the fans, and the team, turned to the evening’s true purpose: a hockey game. Let’s hope that’s where the focus remains for the rest of the season.