A14 | THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER | TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 2015

C | PHILLY.COM

Inquirer.com/opinion
"@PhillyInquirer

H.F. Gerry Lenfest PUBLISHER

Mark Frisby ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER
Stan Wischnowski VICE PRESIDENT, NEWS OPERATIONS
William K. Marimow EDITOR
Sandra M. Clark MANAGING EDITOR / FEATURES, OPERATIONS, AND DIGITAL
Gabriel Escobar MANAGING EDITOR / NEWS AND DIGITAL
Tom McNamara DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR / SUNDAY AND SPORTS
Harold Jackson EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Acel Moore ASSOCIATE EDITOR EMERITUS

A watchdog
with teeth

everal years ago,

Philadelphia was
so mired in a culture of quid pro
quo that it was
barely governable. A federal
investigation into former
Mayor John Streets administration yielded 24 convictions, but it did not eradicate the culture. Although
Mayor Nutter has done
much to clean it up, the next
mayor cannot relent.
One key sign of a mayoral
candidates commitment to
honest government is support for a more powerful, independent
government
watchdog through a permanent city Inspector Generals Office. A 2013 proposal
to accomplish that was
dropped like a cash-stuffed
envelope when it went before City Council. Thats part-

| EDITORIAL

A permanent, independent
Inspector Generals Office is
crucial to honest city
government.
ly because an inspector general enshrined in the City
Charter could investigate
Council.
Since 2008, the Inspector
Generals Office has saved
taxpayers more than $50 million and forced more than
200 badly behaving city employees off the payroll. But
the office operates under an
executive order and therefore could be dropped by a
future mayor.
In response to an Editorial Board questionnaire, all
the mayoral candidates say
they support making the Inspector Generals Office permanent (except Milton
Street, who did not participate). However, former District Attorney Lynne Abraham hedges on changing the
City Charter, saying that
question should be evaluated by a commission to consider the charter as a
whole. Her full answer, and
those of the other candidates, are featured on todays op-ed page.
Former Judge Nelson
Diaz advocates the additional step of combining the
functions of the citys inspector general, chief integrity officer, and Ethics Board into
a sort of ethics czar position.
The plan is worth considering as long as the watchdogs
remain independent.

MONTE WOLVERTON / Cagle Cartoons

Amy Kurland, the citys

inspector general. File
As a former city councilman, Jim Kenney is the only
candidate who had a chance
to advance the cause directly. He deserves credit for
sponsoring a bill to include
the inspector general in the
charter, though he could not
persuade his colleagues to
pass it.
Marketing consultant Melissa Murray Bailey, the lone
Republican in the field, proposes a welcome extension
of the inspector generals
reach to other city offices,
including those of the district attorney, city controller,
sheriff, and register of wills;
former Philadelphia Gas
Works executive Doug Oliver also suggests an expansion of the offices purview.
These agencies have long
operated without sufficient
independent oversight.
State Sen. Anthony Williams and Diaz offer an additional ethics proposal, saying they would prohibit officials from taking outside
jobs with city contractors.
Its an idea that is overdue
as well as a jab at Kenney,
who worked for an architectural firm that did work for
the city while on Council.
Nutter has set Philadelphia on a course toward
government that puts the
citys interests before special interests. Now voters
have to hold the candidates
responsible for continuing
the journey.

EDITORIAL BOARD
Harold Jackson

EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

Josh Gohlke
DEPUTY EDITORIAL
PAGE EDITOR

Kevin Ferris

ASSISTANT EDITORIAL
PAGE EDITOR

Russell Cooke

SENIOR EDITORIAL WRITER

Cynthia Burton

EDITORIAL WRITER

Trudy Rubin

COLUMNIST

COMMENTARY

Calif. trends should worry GOP

im Brulte, Californias Re- of older, white conservatives, and

publican chairman, has so- its solicitude of Americans with
bering but useful words for very high incomes. When House Rehis partys leaders and 2016 publicans in Washington voted to
candidates: If they dont repeal the estate tax last week, they
learn from what happened to the were helping all of 5,400 of the
GOP here, they may doom them- wealthiest households in America,
selves to repeating its decidedly un- not exactly a move with mass appleasant experience.
peal.
California is the leading edge of
As has often been the case in
the countrys demographic chang- American history, California is simes, Brulte said in an interview. ply the harbinger of changes in
Frankly, Republicans in
this case demographic
California did not react
that are happening more
quickly enough to them,
slowly elsewhere.
and we have paid a horriThe one thing no one
ble price.
can stop, says Rep. Ted
One measure of the
Lieu, a Democrat who was
cost: In the three presielected to Congress in the
dential elections of the
Los Angeles area in 2014,
1980s, California voted
is that every month, the
twice for Ronald Reagan
rest of America looks
E.J. DIONNE
and once for George H. W.
more like California.
"@EJDionne
Bush. The state has not
The Republicans probgone Republican since,
lem with Latino voters is
and it wont get any easier in 2016. especially pronounced here. The
The hole is deep enough that passage of Proposition 187 in 1994
Brulte has concentrated his own en- with the strong support of Republiergies on rebuilding the party from can Gov. Pete Wilson the ballot
the bottom up. He has enjoyed measure barred illegal immigrants
some real successes at the local and from a variety of state services
county levels, and the GOP eliminat- simultaneously alienated Hispanic
ed the Democrats veto-proof major- voters from the GOP and mobilized
ities in the state legislature in the many of them into the political pro2014 midterms.
cess.
But the Republicans are still vastThe same thing is now happening
ly outnumbered in both houses nationally. The growing anti-immi25-14 in the state Senate, 52-28 in grant sentiment in the GOP has cut
the Assembly and the Democrats the Republicans share of the Latino
picked up a seat in 2014 in the U.S. vote from the 40 percent range for
House of Representatives. They George W. Bush to 27 percent for
have won all of Californias state- Mitt Romney in 2012. The partys
wide offices in three of the last four strenuous opposition to President
elections. The last time that hap- Obamas executive actions on immipened: 1882.
gration will only make this problem
The principal cause of the GOPs more acute.
troubles is its alienation of Latinos,
But even more remarkably, ReAsian Americans, and African Amer- publicans have also suffered severe
icans in a state whose population is declines among Asian Americans.
now majority nonwhite. Republi- According to the exit polls, a majoricans can win in 2016 without carry- ty of Asian Americans voted for
ing California, but the partys strug- George H.W. Bush in 1988. But in
gles here highlight the extent to 2012, Romney won only 26 percent
which the GOP is making its life in of their ballots.
presidential years very difficult
Rep. Xavier Becerra, a Democrat
with its increasingly hard line on whose Los Angeles district includes
immigration, its image as a bastion Koreatown, Little Tokyo, China-

George H.W. Bush, in 1988, was the

last GOP presidential candidate to
win California. Associated Press

town, and Historic Filipinotown,

notes that when he was first elected
to Congress in 1992, a large share of
Asian Americans leaned Republican. Thats no longer true, and both
Becerra and Lieu pinpointed the immigration issue as the primary
cause for the shift.
Republican opposition to the
Dream Act, designed to give relief
to illegal immigrants brought to the
United States as minors, especially
rankled Asian Americans, Lieu
said: Republicans were saying,
Come support us, we like you, but
we want to deport your children.
Brulte thus takes particular pride
in his outreach efforts to Asian
Americans. His partys victorious
legislative candidates last year included state Sen. Janet Nguyen, a
Vietnamese American, and Young
Kim, the first Korean American Republican woman to serve in the California Legislature.
But this was only a start, and as
2016 approaches, every GOP candidate should tack this reminder
from Brulte on a headquarters wall:
In 2012, Mitt Romney carried 59
percent of the white vote and he
carried independents. In 2004, this
would have elected him president.
In 2000, it would have given him an
Electoral College landslide. In 2012,
it gave him second place.
E.J. Dionne is a Washington Post
columnist. +ejdionne@washpost.com
"@EJDionne

Dont let FCC slow innovation of the Internet

By Renee Amoore

ists of the most important

inventions of the past 115
years include the affordable automobile, the electric
lightbulb (along with the grid to
power it), and the Internet.
While advances in technology
have made todays cars far faster,
safer, and more fuel-efficient than
their distant relatives that first
rolled off the assembly line, the
basics of most cars are the same:
four rubber tires, an internal combustion engine, a steering wheel,
a windshield, and so on.
Its been 135 years since Thomas Edison received a patent
for a lightbulb, but only recently
have they begun to evolve from
their incandescent roots into
LED bulbs. But the concept remains the same: You screw a
lightbulb into a socket (imagine
trying to get that through the
maze of safety and consumer
agencies today!) and, voil,
light.
The Internet, however, has
evolved far more quickly. The
first Internet message was sent
in 1969 from a computer at the
University of California, Los Angeles, to a computer at Stanford.
Those two computers were the
first two the only two
nodes on the Internet. Today the
Internet is a worldwide techno-

logical wonder that we nearly

take for granted. According to
the Internet Society, there are
more than three billion billion
Internet users around the
world.
During that time, the Internet
has gone from a tool for the government and academic institutions to a toy for hobbyists to
(following the passage of the
Telecommunications Act of
1996) a basic system to move
information among people, institutions, and businesses.
Since 1996, when the Internet
became available for commercial use, the growth, penetration, speed, bandwidth, and services available have all been
funded by publicly traded companies. With the Internets rapid
development, there has also
been infinite possibility.
When I founded the nonprofit
Ramsey Educational Development Institute (REDI) in 1998,
we envisioned a way to unite the
affordability and accessibility of
the Internet to empower individuals. Today, we provide vocational, educational, and life skills to
help more than 5,000 people improve themselves and the lives
of those around them. REDI is
only one small example of the
power that can be harnessed
when people not the government are permitted to let an

FCC Chairman Thomas Wheeler testifying before Congress.

idea and the Internet come together and grow. There are
countless other examples of how
the Internet is helping develop
ideas, industries, and jobs in our
region and around the country.
To show how important the Internet has been to the commonwealth economically, consider
that the Federal Reserve Bank
of St. Louis estimated the gross
domestic product of Pennsylvania in 1997 in the infancy of
the Internet at $3.5 billion. It
estimated Pennsylvanias GDP
in 2013, with the Internet in full
flower, at $6.4 billion. That is an
increase of nearly 83 percent.
Unfortunately, in February,
the Federal Communications
Commission, chaired by Thomas

Bloomberg

Wheeler, took the astonishing

step of removing the Internet
from the hands of the organizations that have built it into the
most important information service in history and declared it a
telecommunications service,
meaning it will fall under the
same regulatory concept as telephones when the new rules go
into effect in June.
With the governments involvement, we risk making the Internet less accessible and more expensive. Do we really want to
make people who are already
struggling to gain Internet access struggle more?
The future of the Internet
should not be in the hands of
three unelected commissioners.

Nor should the Internets future

be tied up in the inevitable court
proceedings that are taking
shape as a result of the commissions unilateral action. The
change is too massive; the service is too crucial.
Instead, Congress should make
it clear that it has the authority
to shape the future of the Internet. And currently there are bills
with Democratic and Republican support working their way
through House and Senate committees to do just that.
Rather than allowing perhaps
years for the FCCs unilateral decision to work its way through
the federal courts, Congress can
solve this in a matter of months.
If not, it is likely that the investment necessary to maintain the
consistent innovation and invention that has created the Internet we know today and the
Internet we cant even imagine
tomorrow will slow to a trickle as investors wait to see how it
all comes out.
Congress should act soon. The
Internet is too important to its
three billion users including
the parents, children, and siblings who rely on it for life-improving training and skills at
REDI to be stuck in the courts.
Renee Amoore is president of the
Amoore Group. +amoore521@aol.com