For generations, Americans learned in school what public servants should be--totally devoted to the public interest, incorruptible, ready to help. Hardly anybody lived up to this standard, not even Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln. (If nothing else, many of the founding fathers were inordinate land speculators and got themselves into great financial trouble that way. And we will skip the whole slavery issue, which is a whole other can of worms. Except to say that because of the thoughts and actions of some of those slaveowners all of us, including the descendants of their former slaves, are better off.)
But to return to the ideal public servant image--we have been well served because that image exists. In city and town halls across the country, especially on the local level, there have been people--town councillors, mayors, and aldermen--who have tried hard to live up to that ideal; and we are all richer for it.
I believe Councilwoman Jean Belinski is one of these, and as such represents a treasure to the City of Bethlehem.
But Mrs. Belinski is up against a new/old phenomenon, what I might call the Politics of Corporate Acquisition. As I have indicated, there is nothing new about this. America's post-Civil War era was noteworthy for a generation of entrepreneurs we still call robber barons.
The difference between those robber barons and the modern breed of Corporate Acquirers--those I call the People With Plans--is that the former built useful things, things like railroads and industries. The latter just-acquire.
And the public should beware. The things they want--and intend--to acquire include facilities and services that are vital to society's health and way of life. Once these things are privatized--and they include things like watersheds, landfills, and sewage facilities--how many of the public will be able to afford them?
And how will the public be able to guarantee that these things will be run well and with safety? When you get a glass of water from the tap, can you guarantee that it will not give you dysentery? The odds favor you now; but what if the water system were run for profit, and costs were cut on disease controls?
Or what if you cannot pay your water bill? According to the Christian Evangelical left organization Sojourners, the Detroit water system is owned by a German corporation. Those who cannot pay have concrete dumped into their pipes--by city employees. We are talking about water here, an absolute necessity for life.
To me it seems clear that former Bethlehem mayor Don Cunningham, now running for Lehigh County executive, and current Bethlehem mayor John Callahan, apparently, alas, undefeatable in this electoral round, are politicians in the People With Plans mold. I had the first hint of this some years ago, when I went to Easton to check on Cunningham's campaign contributors.
For years I was a little confused, even after he dumped the landfill at a cost Bethlehem taxpayers still are paying. I could not imagine why a candidate for mayor of Bethlehem needed contributions from New Jersey corporations. But the scales fell from my eyes, as they say, when I saw Callahan, Cunningham's protege, behaving in exactly the same way as his mentor. They are politicians in the new/old school of Corporate Acquisition. The change they are working toward is a future in which average people have few rights and no recourse. It is logical for a giant corporate entity like the Chicago Tribune/Morning Call to support them; and the CT/MC does just that.
Then there is Councilwoman Jean Belinski, a public servant in the old, honorable civics class style, an independent and highly effective thinker, a fighter for ordinary people and for what she believes to be right.
No wonder "They" are after Belinski.
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