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A billion-dollar boondoggle

Posted: May 16, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

Pennsylvania voters won’t get an opportunity to vote in today’s primary on one of the biggest boondoggles in the state: the Philadelphia public transportation system.

The system, called the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, is a billion-dollar mess!

The latest issue with SEPTA centers on the fare cards that don’t work well, causing the organization to dump the system after spending $285 million on the flawed system. That’s more than double the original budget.

Announced with much fanfare, the delayed 2016 rollout left many residents wishing the agency had remained in the analog age. The cards have been unreliable from the start, the vending machines that distribute them are slow and confusing, and SEPTA’s choice to use proprietary systems left the agency at the mercy of the manufacturer of the cards.

It’s unclear whether SEPTA and Conduent Inc., the company has cashed in, are incompetent or corrupt, but it’s probably a bit of both.

In 2011, SEPTA hired Conduent, a Xerox spin-off headquartered in Florham Park, N.J., to design and build the Key Card system for $129.5 million. It was supposed to be operational by 2014, and Conduent has come under fire over other projects. Last December, for instance, Conduent settled for $32 million in a class-action lawsuit brought by investors who said the company misled them about its progress in updating its information technology for toll-collecting systems.

SEPTA’s 50-year history has often been a tumultuous one. Railpace Newsmagazine contributor Gerry Williams observed that SEPTA regularly staggers from crisis to crisis. It has a long history of being at odds with the riding public and both county and state officials and has had more labor strikes than any other transit agency in the U.S., occurring in 1977, 1981, 1983, 1986, 1995, 1998, 2005, 2009, 2014, and 2016.

Williams commented that there is a notable lack of “any group… influential enough to bring shame on SEPTA,” adding that the organization’s chronic ills “merely reflect the broader problems of local provincialism and petty political squabbles which are so rampant within the region.”

Since taxpayers, including those far from Philly, pony up about $1 billion a year to run the system, letting the voters have a more significant say in what goes on would make sense. The 15 board members should be elected rather than chosen by government officials who hand out favors rather than balance budgets.

Is rock ‘n’ roll here to stay?

Posted: May 9, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has lost its way!

I love the music of Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, but they’re country artists, not rockers.

Is Kool Herc an important representative of rap because he scratched turntables?

Like many teenagers, I played in a rock ‘n’ roll band. Unlike most, we had some success, recording several songs, including one that made it to the Billboard 100. We’ve also been inducted into two rock halls of fame in South Dakota and Iowa!

That’s why rock and its cathedral in Cleveland are vital to me!

Let me name just a few of the noteworthy musicians who haven’t been honored and probably never will.

Joe Cocker has many proponents for the hall. For example,  Billy Joel voiced his support back in 2014, the same year Cocker died: “I’m amazed that he’s not in yet, but I’m throwing in my vote for Joe Cocker,” Joel told fans at Madison Square Garden while covering “With a Little Help From My Friends” as Cocker once did. He’s been eligible since 1995 but never nominated.

The Spencer Davis Group has never been nominated, despite being eligible since 1991. “[Spencer Davis] was a man with a vision and one of the pioneers of the British invasion of America in the ’60s,” former band member Steve Winwood said to Rolling Stone in 2020. “I feel that he was influential in setting me on the road to becoming a professional musician, and I thank him for that.”

Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s bid for respect for progressive rock has long been an uphill battle. That was Greg Lake’s view when considering why the band hadn’t been inducted into the rock hall, despite being eligible since 1996. Years have passed, and they still haven’t been nominated, which the late ELP vocalist took as a big slight. “Groups like ELP were playing stadiums. Not clubs, stadiums,” Lake said a decade ago. “It’s not something you can overlook: ‘Oh, I didn’t notice that.'”

Grand Funk Railroad has never received a nomination, despite five platinum albums and hugely popular hits like “Walk Like a Man” and “We’re an American Band.” The omission doesn’t sit well with Grand Funk co-founder Mark Farner. “It just shows the illegitimacy of that rock hall,” he said, “and the [fans] are definitely smart enough to know this. They need to be reminded, though, that the rock hall is not a representation of the will of the people; it is a representation of the will of the owners of the rock hall.”

Procol Harum has been eligible since 1993 but has been nominated just once for the class of 2013. Five years later, their classic song “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was inducted into the rock hall’s singles category. “We all know the history of music can be changed with just one song, one record,” E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt said when introducing the category. “In three minutes, we suddenly enter a new direction, a movement, a style, an experience. That three-minute song can result in a personal revelation, an epiphany that changes our lives.”

Many others deserve consideration: Meat Loaf, Harry Nilsson, Steppenwolf, Three Dog Night, Toto, Edgar and Johnny Winter, and maybe even the Monkees.

Sadly, many influential artists haven’t been considered for the hall, which means something is wrong.

And that’s the way it was

Posted: May 2, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

When Fox settled its lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems and then ousted Tucker Carlson, my former colleagues in journalism recalled the “glory days” of Walter Cronkite at CBS News.

But were those days so good?

In a recent biography of Cronkite, Douglas Brinkley investigates some of the anchor’s antics on and off the television screen.

Following are some of the revelations in the biography:

–Cronkite cut a deal with Pan Am to fly his family to worldwide vacation spots. Together with a handful of friends, they traveled across the globe with Cronkite snorkeling, swimming, and drinking, thanks to a friend at the airline. CBS News President Richard Salant was upset at what he deemed a blatant conflict of interest but took no action against his star anchor.

–Cronkite secretly bugged a committee room at the 1952 GOP convention.

–Cronkite misled viewers about 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. On the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Cronkite nodded in thinly veiled contempt when handed a note on air that the Arizona senator had said “no comment.” Goldwater was attending his mother-in-law’s funeral that day.

“Whether or not Senator Goldwater wins the nomination,” Cronkite told viewers another day, “he is going places, the first place being Germany.” Although Goldwater had merely accepted an invitation to visit a U.S. Army facility there, correspondent Daniel Schorr said he was launching his campaign in “the center of Germany’s right wing.” 

–Although Cronkite and his fans maintained that the anchor kept his liberal views off the air, he met privately with Robert Kennedy in 1968 to urge him to run for president.

–After covering Nixon’s historic visit to China, Cronkite let loose with a night of partying in San Francisco. Cronkite and a colleague went to an infamous topless bar, and he was later spotted dining with a go-go dancer in a miniskirt and plunging neckline.

In reviewing the book, Howard Kurtz wrote: “Brinkley’s book will undoubtedly tarnish the Cronkite legacy. But my admiration for the man is only partly diminished. Perhaps it is too easy to judge him by today’s standards, any more than we should condemn Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves. Perhaps he simply reflected his times, when some journalists and politicians quietly collaborated, when conflicts of interest were routinely tolerated when a powerful media establishment could sweep its embarrassments under the rug.”

And that’s the way it was.

The ghosts of Beirut

Posted: April 25, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

When Showtime announced that it was releasing a miniseries about “the untold story of the greatest terrorist the world has never known,” it reminded me how 40 years ago this month, that man started to etch his name in blood in Beirut. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQkXeSnY_KU

At 21, Imad Mughniyeh (pronounced E-mod Moog-nee-yah) planned a suicide car bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1973, that left 63 people dead, including 17 Americans. Among the dead were seven CIA officers, including the head of the CIA’s Near East Division.

The son of a poor farmer from South Lebanon, Mughniyeh joined the Palestine Liberation Organization as a teenager and eventually became a member of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s security detail. As a Shiite Muslim and non-Palestinian, however, Mughniyeh eventually gravitated toward Lebanese politics and helped found Hezbollah, the powerful organization that basically runs Lebanon today.

An accomplished bombmaker, Mughniyeh worked with Syria, which provided logistical and operational support, and Iran, which funded his operations.

I spent several years of my journalistic career trying to track down Mughniyeh without success. But I did investigate many of his activities in the 1980s, which included the following:

–The truck bombings on October 23, 1983, against French paratroopers and the U.S Marines barracks in Beirut–attacks that killed 60 French soldiers and 241 Marines and sailors.

–The assassination of Malcolm Kerr, the president of American University, in Beirut in January 1984.

–The kidnappings of Westerners in Beirut in the 1980s, including journalist Terry Anderson, British negotiator Terry Waite, and CIA station chief William Buckley, whom Mughniyeh executed.

–The hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in June 1985 during which he executed a U.S. Navy diver and tossed his body on the tarmac of the Beirut airport.

–The 1992 bombings of the Israel embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which killed 29, and of a Jewish cultural center there in July 1994, killing 85 people.

–The Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which left 19 U.S. Air Force personnel dead in 1996.  

“Mughniyeh is probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else,” former CIA agent Robert Baer wrote. “He enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes appointments on a telephone, never is predictable. He only uses people that are loyal to him that he can fully trust. He doesn’t just recruit people.”

Milton Bearden, another CIA man, said: “Both [Osama] bin Laden and Mughniyeh were pathological killers. But there was always a nagging amateurishness about bin Laden—his wildly hyped background, his bogus and false claims. … Bin Laden cowered and hid, and Mughniyeh spent his life giving us the finger.”

In a reported joint operation by the CIA and Mossad, Mughniyeh was killed on February 12, 2008, by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria.

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