Corruption in the Lehigh VAlley’s Shifting Sands
Please refer to the article “Corporate donor fattem politcians’ funds,” by reporters Romy Varghese and Scott Kraus, pubished in the September 3, 2006, edition of The Morning Call.
The Morning Call, which manages the news as former downtown Easton businessman David Clark and I have reported in articles published on the www.billybytes.com website, has already removed the Varghese and Kraus article from the Internet.
The publisher of The Morning Call, one of 14 newspapers owned by the Chicago Tribune, removed the Varghese-Kraus article to protect Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski and former Bethlehem Mayor and current lehigh County Executive Don Cunningham and their political donors.
These donors include the Harrisburg lobbying firm Malady and Wooten LLP, the firm of lobbyist and former Pennsylvania state senator Joe Uliana, also a former member of the Bethlehem Authority Board, whose clients include Northwestern Human Services and KidsPeace, which are junvenile probation and human services vendors; five of the 12 former or current city contractors who contributed to Pawlowski’s fund; Portnoff Law Associates Ltd. of Wynnwood, PA; Embassy Bank, which contributed $1,000 to Cunningham and the recipient of a $400,000 certificate of deposit from Lehigh County in March; Allentown’s Crowne Plaza Hotel; and the Reading, PA, law firm Stevens and Lee, Northampton County’s solicitor to its General Purpose Authority until that plum went to the Bethlehem law firm of Lesson and Leeson.
At the time Cunningham and Pawlowski were taking their oaths of office, one year earlier, President George W. Bush was being sworn in as President of the United States.
His inaugural, too, was a grand affair, to which Las Vegas Sands Casino owner and his wife, a physician, contributed a half-million dollars, $250,000 each.
That was also the time of the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed millions and to which President Bush promised $40 million in donations to the victims.
This was also the time, January 3, 2005, that the editor of the Billy Bytes publications, accompanied by his blind frient John Todero of Palmer Township, attended the January 3, 2005, meeting of Northampton County Council held in downtown Easton’s historic Jacob Bachmann Publick House.
I attended the meeting to ask council to hold public hearings on the rumored Las Vegas Sands Casino destined for South Bethlehem.
That hearing finally took place in the Foy Hall of Moravian College, the college founded by Moravians that, ironically, so many of geographically shifting Lehigh Valley’s corrupt politicians are alumni; e.g., Bethlemem Mayor John Callihan.
Indeed, Callahan, Bethlehem City Council President J. Michael Schweder, Bethlehem’s District 2 representative on council Ann McHale, and other corrupt politicians wrested the public hearnings away from county council and with the help of The Mornng Call and The Express-Times shifted the hearings in the direction they wanted the hearings to go: straight to a Las Vegas Sands casino on Bethlehem’s South Side.
Jane R. Ervin, Lehigh County’s previous county executive, paid for her own inaugural reception.
Attorney Matt Croslis, a member of the [Lehigh] county Democratic county committee, set up both [inaugural]funds [for Cunningham and Pawlowski], neither of which have boards of directors.
Their [the funds] existence was advertised only in the Lehigh Law Journal, even though state law mandates ads in two publications, such as a newspaper and a legal journal. But the state does not require proof of the advertising and, and it doesn’t issue a penalty when the funds is not adquately advertised.
Copyright © 2006-2008 Billy Givens
Bernie O'Hare said,
September 4, 2006 @ 6:08 pm
Billy, What the hell are you talking about? The article has NOT been removed from the net. I just pulled it up. I believe you have an obligation now to correct that misstatement, especially since you go on to accuse editors of collusion.
Bernie O'Hare said,
September 5, 2006 @ 7:44 am
Billy, Subsequent to posting this comment you emailed to state, “Please tell me how to link to the Moring Call articles, and I will be more
than happy to apologize to the publisher and editors of the Call.” You’ve been linking to them all along. In this instance, you apparently could not find the story on the net and decided to blast them. In addition to my comment, I sent you an email with a link to the story at mcall.com. The story is at http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-a1_5newfundsep03,0,5725874.story .
I hope that you will update your blog post with an acknowledgement that your assertion was factually inaccurate. It really was absurd to charge the MC with trying to cover up a story that the MC itself published.
Billy Givens said,
September 6, 2006 @ 12:08 am
From the time that Phillipsburg native and Jim Florio law partner Michael Perruscci, principle of BethWorks Now, announced an $879 million development on the grounds of former Bethelhem Steel in South Bethlehem, The Morning Call columnist Bill White and reporter Chuck Ayres went orgasmic, spewing their excitement for this object of their desire, which they found so “hot,” all over the spread pages of the Call Girl.
(The BethWorks project is “hot” alright, covering as it would 135 acres of a 1600-acre Superfund site that Perrucci and his dissembling BethWorks parnters Las Vegas Sands Casinos, Bethlehem Mayor John Callhan, Bethlehem City Council President J. Michael Schweder, Majestic Realty of Los Angeles, the Newmark & Co. real estate firm of New York, the Fischbein, Badillo, Wagner, and harding law firm, also of New York, and Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell have dubbed a relatively benign “brownfield.)
The Billy Bytes publications got rid of the Call Girl’s madam, publisher L Susan Hunt, by exposing the fact that she sate on every corporate board of directors in the geographically amorphous “Lehigh Valley,” which now includes Warren County, New Jersey - including the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation.
I once described those blue-and-white coin-operated boxes that sit on every street corner in downtown Easton and send The Moring Call Girl sallying forth into the community every morning with the other prostitutes as little whore houses.
Madam Hunt didn’t last long after I circulated that Billy Bytes newsletter in downtown Easton.
As regards story exposing the corruption swirling around the Don Cunningham and Ed Pawlowski inaugural funds, for such an important story The Morning Call Girl could as a public service leave it on the Internet indefinately for bloggers like you and me, Bernie, as a handy reference and link for our readers.
So I guess that’s my beef: not that The Morning Call Girl published the article - I’m happy it did - but that she doesn’t leave the article on the Internet, permanently, and for free, as a public service - which, after all, newspapers are supposed to provide as a requrement of their licensing.
.
The Billybytes publications got rid of the Call Girl’s
Bernie O'Hare said,
September 6, 2006 @ 1:49 pm
Billy, I’m not aware of any requirement that a newspaper obtain a license, which would be a free speech infringement. And your complaint concerning the MC was that it purposely removed the article from the Internet, which you incorrectly allege in your post.
Billy Givens said,
September 6, 2006 @ 3:08 pm
Bernie,
Your are absolutely right and I was wrong: There is no licensing requirements for newspapers, only for radio and TV, the argument being that radio and TV have captive audiences (which may or may not be true) while newspaper sources are virtually infinite, offering readers an “infinite” number of sources from which to choose, or not choose.
As regards The Morning Call article in dispute, if I understand you correctly TMC didn’t remove its Varghese-Kraus story about the inaugural scandal, but that it did change the story’s URL.
If I’m right, how does an Internet user like me link to the new URL?
Final point: I’ve just finished reading once again TMC articles about the Lehigh Valley hospitals’ tax-exempt status and the opinions of Lehigh County Judge Robert K. Young.
One of these articles, for example, has been on TMC’s Internet site since July 30, 2006.
Since the inaugural scandal story is also in the public interest, couldn’t TMC have kept it up on the Internet for at least a couple of days, and under the same URL as the original story?
Bernie O'Hare said,
September 8, 2006 @ 12:46 am
Of course I’m right. I’m a frickin’ genius. Incidentally, you’ve just been tagged. Pay the price, bippy.