Feeling the Burn in Philadelphia
How hot was it in Philadelphia this week?
How hot was it in Philadelphia this week?
The reason we are doing better economically than most countries, Senator Chris Murphy, D-CT), told the German Marshal Fund of the United States yesterday in Philadelphia, is “because we remain a very young work force. Why? Because of immigration.” You may remember Murphy for his two-day filibuster for gun reform after the killings in Orlando last […]
The Republicans set the bar so low last week in Cleveland that it seemed impossible that anyone could go lower – but the Democrats are not off to a great start, what with more email scandals and the resignation of party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz – long overdue in the opinion of Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski (and […]
Part 5. Cleveland Scenes Johnson, who made a fortune in streetcars and steel, was in Johnstown, Pa. for the Great Flood of 1889 because he owned a steel mill there. He led the local relief efforts, and the devastation he witnessed changed his life. He turned against the privileged rich, who escaped all responsibility for the collapse of […]
Part 4. From Washington, Pa. to Youngstown, Ohio In much of southwestern Pennsylvania where I traveled, Black Lives Matter is seen as little more than a license to shoot police officers. To Precious Brown, a 17-year-old rising high school senior in Youngstown, Ohio, it is something else entirely. “I believe that all lives matter,” she […]
Part 3. From Homestead to Washington, Pa. “Both parties are dysfunctional,” said Bob Hollick, a former Democratic township supervisor in Washington County. “We need to blow things up. The politicians are just taking people for a ride – and lining their pockets.” And the man for the job? “Only Trump can shape things up – […]
Part 2: From Johnstown to Homestead It’s 65 miles from the site of the Great Flood to that of the Battle of Homestead, “the deadliest clash between workers and owners in American labor history.”* Two men featured in both events: Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. Both were members of the South Fork Fishing and […]
Part 1. From Hershey to Johnstown The drive from Hershey, Pa. to Johnstown, is just under three hours, but as you travel from “the sweetest place on earth,” where streetlamps are shaped like kisses and hotels hand out chocolate bars with your room key, to the site of America’s most disastrous flood, which a few […]
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois wrote that line 113 years ago to demonstrate that Black lives matter. Well into the 21st century, how far have we come? In the wake of Dallas and Minnesota and Louisiana, […]
“It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble.” Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) in the aftermath of Watergate. The disquieting image of two private jets on the tarmac in Phoenix: plush capsules that transport the powerful who seem ever more insulated from the rest of us 30,000 feet below; the 30-minute […]