Albert Einstein supposedly said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Perhaps relying on a misunderstanding of Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the progressive left can hold that if they just keep doing the same thing — albeit spending more of Other People’s Money while doing so — their oh-so-noble policies will work where they haven’t worked before. The progressive left are complaining that more conservative urban policies won’t work, but they are being implemented because liberal and progressive policies didn’t work! Continue reading
Tag Archives: #Progressives
In Philly, it seems that squatters have more rights than property owners There's a point at which the more moderate Democrats do little more than enable the far left.
We have previously noted how the left in Philadelphia do not respect people’s property rights, and how no one in the city cannot ever be expected to protect property rights. Naturally, The Philadelphia Inquirer would never report on this story, but the New York Post did:
Philadelphia homeowner is forced to pay $1.2K to get squatters out after cops refused to intervene
By Melissa Koenig | Monday, January 8, 2024 | 2:42 PM EST
A Philadelphia homeowner says he was forced to pay squatters who changed the locks and left the property a mess $1,200 to leave after city officials refused to intervene. Continue reading
At some point, you’d think that even the most liberal of the liberals would realize that without some semblance of law and order, you no longer have civilization! In the end, 'progressive' and 'civilized' are mutually exclusive terms
Perhaps, just perhaps, even the George Soros-sponsored, police-hating District Attorney of Philadelphia, Larry Krasner, is starting, if just barely, to realize the seriousness of crime, as the District Attorney’s Office has said that they will seek to try the suspect arrested, supposedly the 17-year-old son of attorney and former judicial candidate Qawi Abdul-Rahman, as an adult. But it is also true that the United States Attorney could charge the thus-far unnamed suspect as an adult, if Mr Krasner chose not to do so.
Democratic primary voters in the city rejected Helen Gym Flaherty in the mayoral primary, instead nominating Cherelle Parker Mullins, who has at least contemplated bringing back ‘stop, question, and frisk, with her voting strength coming from the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in the City of Brotherly Love. However, Mrs Mullins was also the only black top-tier candidate in the race, and her strength among black voters could be attributed to that.
So, are the most liberal of the liberals realizing that some semblance of law and order are needed? Mrs Flaherty’s voting strength was primarily among the white liberal areas of the city, including the areas around the University of Pennsylvania, where people are generally safer than in the combat zones, and it is physically safer to vote for the harder left candidates.
My good friend, and occasional website pinch-hitter William Teach pointed out this article to me, and I think it’s an important one:
DC supermarket near closing after $500K in groceries walks out the door
Jamie Joseph | Monday, August 14, 2023 | 4:35 PM EDT
As cities across the U.S. grapple with a growing shoplifting problem, a Washington, D.C., grocery store may be on the verge of closure after rampant theft has depleted much of its resources, a D.C. councilman warned.
A popular Giant Food store reported $500,000 in product loss due to shoplifting, the store’s management told D.C. Councilman Trayon White recently, which equates to roughly 20% of sales after theft.
White called the news “disheartening” in a press conference last week, especially after the store recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire security guards and upgrade its equipment.
Despite its effort to crack down on shoplifters, thieves remained emboldened and continued to walk out of the store with their carts filled with stolen items, White said.
“We know it’s tough times, and we know the price of food has skyrocketed in the last three years,” White said. “Well, we cannot afford to hurt ourselves by constantly taking from the store, because I mean, everybody is going to be without a place to eat, and enough is enough.”
The store has had to stop suspects 135 times, “and they almost doubled that amount and didn’t get stopped,” White said.
If the store has to shut its doors, White warned the impact would be felt hard in the community, as the chain is the only major grocery outlet in Ward 8, serving more than 85,000 people.
There’s more at the original. Mr Teach pointed out:
Ward 8 is the section of D.C. that is south of the Anacostia River, and, overall, is probably the worst ward for crime. Should this really be happening in our nation’s capitol? This is embarrassing.
Embarrassing? Yes, but unexpected? No, not really, and if the Giant Food Mart closes, people in the area will be left with either having to travel further to buy groceries, or buy them at smaller bodegas or convenience stores, where prices are usually higher. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted, in a completely unrelated article:
Groceries typically operate with very low profit margins of about 1% to 2%. But stores in poor, urban neighborhoods often operate with a 4% loss, Brown said. In Philadelphia’s case, that resulted in supermarket chains largely pulling out of disadvantaged Black and brown neighborhoods by the 1990s.
I still chuckle at the Inky’s stylebook, coming from the Associated Press, of capitalizing ‘Black’ to refer to race, but leaving ‘brown’, which in this case usually means Hispanic, in lower case. We do not engage in such silliness at The First Street Journal, but also do not alter the direct quotes of others.
But I digress. Why would “stores in poor, urban neighborhoods often operate with a 4% loss,” if they were charging the same prices as ones in more affluent areas, unless retail theft is higher in stores in those depressed areas?
Robert Stacy McCain noted that the unprecedented wave of brazen retail theft can be directly attributed to the election of ‘progressive’ politicians and other leftist policies:
“Absolutely unacceptable,” says the mayor who was elected by these same criminals. That’s just it — California has become the world’s first mass kleptocracy. All the honest people have left the state, and the criminals have taken over. Everybody is stealing everything:
Proposition 47 . . . reduced penalties on property thefts less than $950 from a felony to a misdemeanor. This means no prison time. Charges for grand larceny (a felony) now require thefts of more than $950 – more than double the previous threshold of $400.
Now, not only will a thief steal more without facing a felony charge, they may steal again, and again, and again, without serious consequences. Each theft is counted as a single incident. The law allows for serial thefts. Thieves can repeat their criminal behavior as long as they don’t steal more than $950 in each larceny.
Proposition 47 passed with 60% of the vote in 2014, and opponents of the measure clearly warned that this would happen, so it’s not as if the people of California are victims — they inflicted this disaster on themselves.
‘Progressivism’ in the United States is a mindset that we just have to be understanding and kind to everyone — except, of course, those evil reich-wing MAGA Republicans! — and have sympathy for the poor and downtrodden. The result has been a serious relaxation of law enforcement, especially since the unfortunate death while resisting arrest of the methamphetamine-and-fentanyl-addled previously convicted felon and career criminal George Floyd, and now the criminal culture has metastasized, with more and more of those poorer people realizing that they don’t have to obey the law, at least not for the more ‘minor’ offenses, because breaking the law brings no real consequences to them. And despite the great sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, that increase in crime has occurred in just those areas in which the poor and downtrodden live! Mr McCain said, “All the honest people have left the state,” but that’s hyperbole, and not true at all. Some of the honest people have left the Pyrite State, but, just as the well-to-do, honest people in Rittenhouse Square and University City haven’t been the victims of crime themselves, many have remained, safely able to vote for ‘progressive’ politicians and policies, because their personal philosophies haven’t been punched in the mouth by street crime.
The real victims? The people of Kensington have been made victims, not by wallowing in the open-air drug markets themselves, but by tolerating its existence, and voting for the politicians who won’t clean it up. The honest, working-class employees of the Giant Food Mart in Ward 8, and the Nordstrom in the Topanga Mall, have been made victims, because, if things keep going as they have been, when the store closes, they’ll lose their jobs.
This is the conundrum that the left just can’t seem to understand: in their great and noble sympathy for the poor, the downtrodden, and minority Americans, their policies have made things worse for those very same people. In their attempts to shield them from the realities of law, order, and civilization, they have subjected poorer and minority communities to lawlessness, disorder, and barbarians.
The good, #progressive and environmentalist Penn students leave the streets filled with garbage Why should I take their environmentalist statements seriously when they won't live up to them personally?
Do you see those dark blue areas, just to the left of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia? The dark blue areas are the wards in which far-left ‘progressive’ Helen Gym Flaherty received the plurality of the votes cast in the Democratic mayoral primary, and the bulge toward the east is University City, where the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University are located.
The University of Pennsylvania, more commonly referred to as UPenn or just Penn, is a private, Ivy League college, the total tuition and fees of which were $63,452 for the 2022-23 academic year, not including housing. Cha-ching!
Mrs Flaherty did not win the nomination, and finished in third place, with just 22.02% of the votes, but as we have previously noted, Mrs Flaherty had:
her biggest appeal wound up being with wealthier (white) voters in the city.
Gym won 29% of the vote in precincts where people made an average of $100,000 and more and just 11% in precincts where the average income was less than $50,000 a year, an Inquirer analysis shows.
That’s why this next story is so amusing. Her support was supposedly strongest among the progressives who wanted to fight against global warming climate change and were strong environmentalists, but there’s apparently a lot of do as we say, not do as we do there:
A non-exhaustive list of trash Penn students left on the streets of Philadelphia
As students move out for the year, it’s “Penn Christmas” — or trash apocalypse.
by Zoe Greenberg | Wednesday, May 24, 2023 | 7:05 AM EDT
When University of Pennsylvania students evacuate their off-campus houses each spring, looking forward to bright summers and brighter futures, one thing stays behind on the streets of Philadelphia: their junk. This season in West Philly is sometimes called “Penn Christmas” because of the potential hidden treasures buried in the trash; it’s seen by others as pure disaster.
In honor of this annual event, we compiled a non-exhaustive list of the detritus we observed on four city blocks surrounding Penn’s campus this year. (Penn commencement was May 15, so there were not many treasures left):
Rather than reprint author Zoe Greenberg’s non-exhaustive list, I chose to include her photo, as fair-use documentation. A picture, it has been said, is worth a thousand words, and another photo she took shows a discarded love seat, as well as some carpeting ripped up, cardboard, and other trash left on the curb. There are also other photos, taken by staff photographer Monica Herndon.
Miss Greenberg’s Inquirer bio tells us that she specializes in the city’s “youth culture, gender, sexuality, and how people make money and meaning.” So what, I have to ask, is the “meaning” behind wealthy and well-to-do students, students who, in the main, are progressive and environmentalist, leaving their junk on the city’s streets?
Well, the “meaning” I take is simple: why should I take seriously the global warming climate change and environmental activist statements of people who, again, overall, don’t seem to show any real concern for the environment themselves?
One wonders what the working-class Philadelphia Sanitation Department workers think about the good, privileged Ivy League students who made 42nd Street and Baltimore Avenue look like Kensington for a week, as those workers have to pick up the trash strewn around.
‘Progressivism’ is for the wealthy
The Democratic primary for the Philadelphia mayoral nomination is over, the ‘progressive’ — a term William Teach defines as ‘nice fascist’ — candidate lost, coming in third, and the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading left are trying to spin it.
The Real Lesson for Progressives in Our Philadelphia Mayoral Defeat
by Nathan J Robinson | Wednesday, May 17, 2023
In Philadelphia’s Democratic mayoral primary, Cherelle Parker has decisively defeated her opponents. Those included progressive Helen Gym, who had the backing of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The triumph of Parker, a moderate, raises the usual question about whether today’s voters are more inclined toward centrism or progressivism and why; Politico, for example, called the primary nothing less than the “next battle for the soul of the Democratic Party,” serving as “a test of the strength of the national progressive movement.”
It’s easy to portray Parker’s victory as a message sent by voters in favor of “tough on crime” policies. During her campaign, Parker had promised to put more police officers on the streets and condemned the “lawlessness” of the city. The working class Black neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by gun violence tended to support Parker.
Mr Robinson, the Editor-in-Chief of Current Affairs magazine, a very much leftist publication, seems shocked, shocked!, to find out that the victims of crime want to be protected from crime.
But city politics are always complicated, and we should be careful about stories that emphasize a single issue.
Indeed, Parker isn’t quite the equivalent of a “tough on crime” Republican, and while she’s controversially advocated “stop-and-frisk” practices, she’s also spoken of the need for “restorative justice” and endorsed reformist District Attorney Larry Krasner when he first ran for his position in 2017. Tellingly, both the local Fraternal Order of Police and the National Black Police Association endorsed one of Parker’s opponents.
Parker is also a highly experienced politician with the backing of major local power players. She received major endorsements from local labor unions. If progressives are looking for a clear takeaway from this race, “progressive candidates can’t win if major local unions aren’t supporting the progressive candidate” is just as important as anything about the politics of crime and policing. After all, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson recently won the city’s mayoral election while openly rejecting “tough on crime” politics in a city plagued by gun violence. But Johnson was a union organizer with the powerful Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). In cities where organized labor is still strong, the key lesson here might be that a progressive candidate who wants to win cannot afford to have major unions endorsing their opponent.
Uhhh, how did Mr Robinson miss that Helen Gym Flaherty had the strong endorsement of the teachers’ union in Philadelphia?
There are still some important takeaways about crime and policing. First, clearly at least some voters who are alarmed by the city’s ongoing violence found reassurance in Parker’s promises to keep people safe. Parker offered a clear and detailed public safety plan. Those progressives who don’t think “more police” is the answer to gun violence (and I count myself among them) can’t afford to let pro-police candidates be the only ones with clear policies. The slogan “Defund the Police” was ill-conceived, not because reallocating police funding is a bad idea, but because it emphasized what the progressive movement was against (harsh policing) rather than emphasizing what it was for (good schools, good jobs, good housing, healthy communities).
Oh, so Mr Robinson does support defunding the police, but simply recognizes that the slogan was “ill-conceived.” He likes the idea, but doesn’t want to be too explicit in telling the truth about it.
Progressives who want to win in areas suffering from widespread violence need a strong pro-safety message, with an emphasis that more incarceration and more safety are not synonymous.
Here’s where Mr Robinson clearly gets lost in the weeds: like Mrs Flaherty — though she carefully avoided saying it in this campaign — he supports “reallocating police funding, and he is supporting the very things Mrs Flaherty claimed to be, but the candidate was very light on the details about how she was going to pay for all of her promises.
And, quite frankly, more incarceration and more safety are synonymous: the criminal who has already been locked up for past crimes isn’t out on the streets committing more, and District Attorney Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner’s decarceration ideas, very much supported by Mrs Flaherty, left criminals out on the streets to kill other people . . . and Philadelphians knew that.
That Ameen Hurst, accused of murdering four people in different rampages, had escaped from jail and was on the loose on election day probably didn’t help ‘progressives.’
The Philadelphia Inquirer tried to analyze Mrs Flaherty’s defeat as well, and actually got a lot of things right:
Progressive mayors have won elections in Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Here’s why Philadelphia’s race was different.
Although Helen Gym ran to help working people, her biggest appeal was to wealthier voters in Philadelphia.
by Julia Terruso and Anna Orso | Thursday, May 18, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT
National progressives were looking for another big win in Philadelphia this week, but Cherelle Parker, a moderate Democrat born and raised in the city’s Northwest section, won the historic nomination.
Progressive political celebs had lined up behind Helen Gym, hoping she might continue a wave of mayoral victories in Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
“We’re taking this movement from the West Coast to the East Coast!” U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told an amped-up Gym crowd at a rally on Sunday.
Ultimately, with 94% of votes counted, Gym came in third place in the Democratic mayoral primary, trailing Parker and former Controller Rebecca Rhynhart and frustrating progressives who hoped to propel gains in recent years into the city’s biggest office.
Further down:
While Gym ran to help working people — she often said she was running to change the way people live — her biggest appeal wound up being with wealthier voters in the city.
Gym won 29% of the vote in precincts where people made an average of $100,000 and more and just 11% in precincts where the average income was less than $50,000 a year, an Inquirer analysis shows.
In wealthier districts, like Center City and affluent parts of the Northwest, Gym almost certainly split votes with Rhynhart, who ran an effective campaign as a budget wonk and problem solver.
Mr Robinson had noted that Cherelle Parker Mullins won the nomination with about a third of the total vote, because the city allows a plurality to win, without a runoff election between the two top vote getters to achieve a majority. Yet he somehow failed to mention that, if Philly did have a runoff system, Mrs Flaherty, who finished third, wouldn’t be in it! Brandon Johnson, the newly elected mayor of Chicago, won the runoff election, but finished second in the initial ballot; if Chicago allowed plurality winners to win, he wouldn’t be mayor.
But the bigger part — other than the fact that Mrs Mullins is black and Mrs Flaherty is of Korean descent, in a city that voted along racial lines — is that Mrs Flaherty’s ‘progressive’ campaign claimed to be for “working people,” but much of her support came from wealthier ones. Mr Robinson, himself a millionaire, like so many other white liberals with money, just don’t seem to realize that the things they advocate don’t actually make much sense to poorer and working class people. Mrs Flaherty’s strong support of policies to attack global warming climate change can only mean greater costs for the hundreds of thousands of Philadelphia row homes which use natural gas for heating in the city’s cold and snowy winters. Advocating policies to reduce warming eighty years from now is a program for those who don’t have to worry about money, not for those who are concerned with putting food on the table tonight, or being able to pay their rent or mortgage next month.
‘Progressive’ politics are for the wealthy, for the people who just don’t have to worry about money, for people whose lives are already mostly safe and secure . . . and Philadelphia is the poorest of our nation’s ten largest cities. While all of the Democratic candidates were on the liberal side, Mrs Flaherty, herself wealthy due to her husband, was the only true ‘progressive’ in the race, and two of the Democratic candidates finished ahead of her.
References
| ↑1 | From Wikipedia:
I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid. |
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A major loss for ‘progressives’? Philly Democrats nominate a (supposedly) tough-on-crime mayoral candidate
Chart from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Click to enlarge.
Let me be clear here: I don’t live in Philadelphia, I don’t work in Philly, and, since July of 2017, I haven’t even lived in Pennsylvania. A victory by Helen Gym Flaherty in the Democratic primary for mayor in the city was never going to affect me personally. But a victory for ‘progressives,’ which William Teach has called ‘nice fascists,’ would have had repercussions nationwide, emboldening the dumbest people in our electorate, and that she lost makes me very, very happy.
What makes me unhappy is that the race was determined mostly by race! Former City Councilwoman Cherelle Parker Mullins won because she won the heavily black districts, and the heavily Hispanic ones, and she was the only black ‘major’ candidate; there was no serious Hispanic candidate in the race. Former City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff[1]It is interesting, and sad, that none of the major female candidates respected their husbands enough to have taken their names. won the majority white areas, but she wound up splitting that vote more evenly with Allan Domb and Mrs Flaherty. Mrs Flaherty, who is ethnically Korean, won one demographic group, which The Philadelphia Inquirer listed as “AAPI,” meaning Asian-American/Pacific Islander.
Even there, however, she took only a plurality, 41.1%, not a majority. But the notion that skin color is a determining factor doesn’t speak well for a ‘diverse’ city.
Chart from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Click to enlarge.
The Inquirer also worked out, though taking some assumptions based on precinct populations, larger political groups, and Mrs Flaherty won a plurality, 42.7%, among ‘younger white progressive voters,’ but even there, Mrs Mullins and Mrs McDuff together outpolled her, with 45.5% of the votes. Mrs McDuff, who had been endorsed by the Inquirer, carried both ‘working class white moderate voters’ and ‘wealthy white liberal voters.’
But what really sunk the progressives?
Areas that have seen the most gun violence supported Parker the most
Chart via The Philadelphia Inquirer. Click to enlarge.
A strong majority of residents rated crime as the top issue in pre-election polls, and the city remains in a years-long crisis of gun violence. But gun violence doesn’t affect residents equally: Some neighborhoods have far more shootings than others.The choice of those areas closest to gun violence is clear: They picked Parker.
Precincts that had seen more than 175 shooting victims within 2,000 feet of their boundaries since 2015 gave Parker half of their vote. By contrast, neighborhoods with the fewest shooting victims gave a disproportionately high share of their vote to other candidates.
Notably, Parker has espoused some tough-on-crime policies, including a willingness to revisit the policy of stop-and-frisk, citing a “crisis” of public safety.
It has been said before that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and while calling Philly voters ‘conservatives’ would certainly be wrong, it seems that the ‘progressive’ candidate saw her share of the vote steadily decline as neighborhoods were exposed to more shootings.
There is, however, a major disconnect in the City of Brotherly Love when it comes to crime. While Mrs Mullins won at least in part based on her tough-on-crime campaign, wanting to put more police officers on the streets — Mrs Flaherty had previously supported ‘defund the police’ efforts, though she kept it out of her campaign this year — rather than deploy social workers and mental health professionals as Mrs Flaherty wanted, the city also re-elected the very much soft-on-crime, police-hating defense lawyer Larry Krasner as District Attorney in 2021, the year in which Philly set its all-time record for homicides. Mr Krasner actually is fairly tough on actual murderers; it’s just that he’s not just a marshmallow, but makes marshmallows look tough when it comes to ‘lesser’ crimes. The thugs and gang-bangers — and the Inky once told us that there were no actual gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” and the newspaper’s apparent, if unpublished, stylebook has substituted “street group” for gangs — mostly get a pass, or just a slap on the wrist for illegal gun possession from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, right up until they up their crimes to rape and murder. The apparently odd notion of locking up the bad guys before they become worse guys is wholly outside the paradigm for Mr Krasner, and his voters as well. Mr Krasner being a separately elected official means that Mrs Mullins’ policy preferences don’t have any controlling authority over him.
Mr Krasner has been elected through the end of 2025, which means two full years in office after Mrs Mullins becomes mayor. Technically, she still has to win the general election against Republican David Oh, but in Philly, that’s almost a formality; the city hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Harry Truman was President! How much pushback he will give to Mrs Mullins remains to be seen, but I suspect it will be a lot.
Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw? Mrs Mullins said that she wasn’t going to take personnel decisions during the campaign, but, as Commissioner, Miss Outlaw has been unable to prevent a steady stream of retirements and resignations, coupled with smaller new recruit numbers, and case closure numbers have dropped. For Mrs Mullins to be tough on crime, she’ll need a Police Department that can actually do the job.
References
| ↑1 | It is interesting, and sad, that none of the major female candidates respected their husbands enough to have taken their names. |
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The left just don’t understand economics If liberals really understood economics, they wouldn't be liberals anymore
The American left just love to argue that certain things are “basic human rights.” Not things like our freedom of speech or religion, things which the Constitution of the United States recognizes as something we have as part of ourselves, but things which the left believe that other people should be required to provide for us.
In an episode of Blue Bloods, fictitious New York City Police Commissioner Frank Reagan said that the freedom of the press applies to those who own one. I’ve been on this world for seventy years now, and I do not recall anyone ever saying that if I did not own a printing press, that my constitutional right to freedom of the press meant that someone — meaning: the government — should somehow be required to provide one for me, or that The New York Times or National Review were somehow obligated to provide publication space for me. My constitutional right to keep and bear arms has never been held to mean that the government should be required to furnish a 30.06 for me to defend my farm from the critters in the neighboring Daniel Boone National Forest.
This internet thingy that Al Gore invented has provided millions more Americans with a new form of the press and has been a blessing, but yeah, I still have to pay for the internet service to use it, and the web hosting for The First Street Journal. While I have also been invited to publish on the American Free News Network, and do not pay for that, other private individuals are paying for it, of their own free choice. Given the conservative nature of AFNN, I’m pretty sure that the left wouldn’t believe that the taxpayers should have to subsidize its publication!
But they sure love declaring other things as “basic human rights,” for which other people have to pay!
Water is a basic human right. So why is Philly resuming shutoffs May 24?
The amount of money collected by shutting off service to customers who can’t afford to pay is a drop in the bucket compared to the incredible damage that shutoffs cause.
by Christina A. Roberto, Laura A. Gibson, and Robert W. Ballenger, For The Inquirer | Tuesday, May 16, 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT
During the chemical spill last March that imperiled the city’s biggest water treatment plant, nearly one million Philadelphians feared losing access to safe drinking water. Most residents are not used to living with such a threat. But many of our fellow Philadelphians will experience that fear and uncertainty every year — not because of contamination, but because of poverty.
Water security — the ability to reliably access safe water — is recognized by the Pennsylvania Constitution as a basic human right, yet tens of thousands of Philly residents have their water turned off every year because they are unable to pay their bills.
So, what does the state Constitution actually say about this? From the link provided by the authors:
The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.
So, it states that it is the responsibility of the Commonwealth to insure that the air, water, and land resources should be kept clean; it does not say that it is the duty of the Commonwealth to provide water being pumped into everyone’s homes.
Imagine if it did. That would require the state of Pennsylvania to provide the plumbing infrastructure to every mountainside home in the most remote and rural parts of the state.
We understand that the city needs to collect money from residents to maintain its water infrastructure. But the amount of money collected by shutting off service to customers who can’t afford to pay is a drop in the bucket compared to the incredible damage that shutoffs cause.
Without running water, people can’t wash their hands or their dishes, or prepare their food. They have limited use of toilets and bathing. Something as critical as a baby’s infant formula becomes highly stressful to prepare. What’s worse, water shutoffs can destroy families — unaffordable utility bills and utility service terminations are the most common housing issues requiring children to be placed in foster care. As debt accumulates from water shutoffs, it can lead to financial ruin and a downward spiral to homelessness.
Do the authors really recognize what they say they do? From their brief bios at the end of the OpEd piece, we can see that they are all ‘elites,’ professors at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, and an attorney, and people who earn plenty of money.
More, their argument that “unaffordable utility bills and utility service terminations are the most common housing issues requiring children to be placed in foster care” isn’t something which would be confined to water service; the same would apply to natural gas service, which many Philadelphians, especially in older homes and rowhouse neighborhoods use for heat and cooking, and electricity, which is also used for heating and cooking. More, most non-electric heating systems — natural gas or heating oil — also require electricity for activation and some for pumps.
The Water Department is seeking approval to increase the typical residential customer’s bill by about 21% over a two-year period. Without access to assistance, this proposed increase will place more families at risk for shutoffs.
So, someone has to pay for water service, right? Even the authors recognize that, yet if service terminations for non-payment were to be ended, as they advocate, then those people who can and do pay their water bills will have to pay more, because water service costs money to maintain and operate. Perhaps that doesn’t mean that much to Ivy League professors and an attorney who is also an alumnus of that private school, with estimated annual costs of $89,028 per year for undergrads, or a mere $73,494 if a local resident who can live with their parents, but a lot of working Philadelphians are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and while the 21% increase certainly reflects the inflation this country has suffered under the Biden Administration, those bills would have to go up even more if some people were, in effect, granted water service without having to pay for it.
Water shutoffs for debt collection are set to resume on May 24, posing a serious threat. Based on data from the Water Department, we estimate tens of thousands of Philadelphians lost water in a typical year before COVID-19.
Translation: the city, which also prohibited other utility service shutoffs and evictions for non-payment during the three years of the panicdemic — not a typo; panic is absolutely the proper word to apply to the country’s response — had thousands upon thousands of Philadelphians living without paying for their housing and utilities. And that raises the obvious question: if utility shutoffs for non-payment are banned, as the authors want, why would those who could pay their water bills do so?
That these shutoffs will occur during the city’s ever-hotter summers is a recipe for disaster. A healthy adult would struggle during a 90 or 100-plus-degree day with no drinking water. Imagine how it will affect children, older residents, and the seriously ill. The city’s poor neighborhoods without trees can be 15 to 20 degrees warmer than leafy areas in Chestnut Hill. Do we really want to inflict this kind of suffering on our most vulnerable citizens?
And there you have it: “Do we really want to inflict this kind of suffering on our most vulnerable citizens?” In the original on The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website, that’s repeated as a ‘pullquote,’ roughly six inches across and two inches wide. But as someone who grew up in the South, who was graduated from a 1937 WPA/CCC high school without air conditioning, and who has lived more than half of my life in places without AC, I recognize that hot weather is simply a part of life, and if uncomfortable, is still part of the environment. We noted, just yesterday, that several of the city’s public swimming pools will not be opened this year as well, because, in one of our nation’s most heavily taxed cities, there simply isn’t the money to repair and open them all.
This is the part that so many on the left just don’t understand: everything costs money, and for one person to receive something he did not make himself for free, someone else has to pay for it.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.
This is the kind of thing that ‘progressives’ just don’t understand
Many people have made fun of Helen Gym Flaherty’s huge promises, including this poor site, with even the Editorial Board of the very liberal Philadelphia Inquirer calling her out:
Gym should be honest about her big spending agenda before voters go to the polls on May 16. Philadelphia does not have unlimited funds. Under Mayor Jim Kenney, the city’s budget increased 50% to $6 billion with little to show for the spending spree.
The city tried to tax and spend its way to prosperity in the 1970s and ‘80s and nearly went bankrupt. Despite 25 years of fiscal sanity before Kenney was elected, Philadelphia remains one of the most heavily taxed cities in the country. The city’s tax burden continues to contribute to its slow job growth, which, in turn, is linked to its high poverty rate.
Sometimes it’s the little stories which illustrate the problem:
Philadelphia pool closures leave neighborhoods without a vital community resource: ‘Why our pool?’
Across the area pools have been closing down due to lifeguard shortages and ongoing renovations. No one is certain when, or if, some pools will open again.
by Allison Beck | Monday, May 15, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT
On a March afternoon, Lakia Toney recalled the sounds of kids laughing and splashing in the clear blue water during a summer afternoon. Neighbors of all ages joined in on the fun at 12th and Cambria Recreation Center.
She smiled at the memory of her North Philadelphia community enjoying the safety of the city-run pool, and one another’s company.
“(T)he safety of the city-run pool”? Perhaps the author, Allison Beck, forgot about, or never heard of, the city having to close the pool at the McVeigh Recreation Center last year due to “unruly behavior,”, violence, and vandalism.
Patrons of 17 Philadelphia pools are dealing with a similar story. Between lifeguard shortages and renovations, no one is certain when, or if, the pools will open again. The area pools that open often do so later in the season, with their gates closing after as little as six weeks.
Just 50 of 72 city pools could open in 2023, and many of them for only a portion of the summer.
Parks and Recreation has been recruiting lifeguards through high schools, community groups, and employment organizations. They are hiring Philadelphians who do not yet know how to swim and offering free training and certification ahead of the summer. Pay was recently raised to $16 per hour, with a $1,000 end-of-season bonus if guards submitted their applications by April 15.
Just how desperate do they have to be to find lifeguards if the city has to first train people who don’t even know how to swim?
Toney said the background checks and drug testing needed for lifeguards are a big barrier for some neighborhood youths. All candidates are required to submit to background checks and must pass a drug screening if they are over 18, according to Andrew Alter, a spokesperson for Parks and Recreation.
“When there are opportunities like this where they could be making a great income or helping out the community, helping out themselves, they’re not able to,” Toney said. “They can’t be a part of that because they’re involved in things that they’re not supposed to be doing and it’s hindering them from actually helping themselves and others.”
Heaven forfend! You mean that city employees who would be responsible for rescuing swimmers in distress, and be able to perform CPR, would be expected to be clean and sober, expected to not use drugs?
The ‘progressives’ seem to think that our social problems are caused by government not doing enough, and Mrs Flaherty has been frequently mocked for saying that part of the solution is to have more public libraries open, for longer hours, I guess so the gang-bangers and wannabes could sit in there are read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books.
If, of course, they could read at all. Mrs Flaherty has bragged how she saved the Edward T Steel Elementary School from ‘going charter,’ but the school is ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, 1% of students scored at or above the proficient level for their grade in math, and 8% scored at or above that level in reading.
But, like lifeguards, there is a shortage of librarians, and a shortage of money to pay for more of them and keep libraries open longer. Mayor Jim Kenney, if not as hard-left ‘progressive’ as Mrs Flaherty, would have loved to keep the libraries open longer, and the City Council would have appropriated money for it, if the city had the money!
Note that even the Editorial Board of the Inky stated that Philadelphians were very highly taxed, and that has contributed to slower job growth and economic opportunities.
I will admit it: while I’d like to see the City of Brotherly Love saved from the looming disaster of progressivism, there’s a little part of me which wouldn’t be all that upset if Mrs Flaherty won, because then Philadelphians, Pennsylvanians, and the whole nation would be able to see what an utter failure progressive policies would be. Coupled up with the police-hating defense lawyer who is the city’s District Attorney, and adding to that a police department crippled by inept leadership and a huge shortage of officers, Philly would become the disaster area of the eastern seaboard, and perhaps, just perhaps, teach the well-to-do liberals who have been voting for Democrats for so long that being soft-on-crime and supporting the bad behavior that makes and keeps people poor harms our society and our country.
‘Progressive’ San Francisco defense attorney who wants to be District Attorney thinks people should just suck it up and accept crime to live in the city
Every once in a while, I come upon something which leaves me shaking my head. This is from John Hamasaki on Twitter. Mr Hamasaki is saying, basically, that in order to live in an urban environment, you must simply accept being a crime victim!
Mr Hamasaki is saying that a loss of “thousands of dollars” is pretty much just something you have to expect, and living in the suburbs, living somewhere more reasonably safe, shelters people so very much that they just aren’t tough enough for “city life.”
Of course, it is hardly just a “property crime” problem, as though the loss of property for which people worked hard to obtain — something else that’s part of “city life” — is mostly a nothingburger. Car break-ins have surged dramatically in Mr Hamasaki’s home town, but he doesn’t care. Catalytic converter theft is becoming more and more common, especially in states where emissions testing is required as part of an annual inspection, and they can cost up to $3,500 to replace. If you live in Philadelphia, where the median household income is $52,649, that’s a big chunk of change, though as a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco, perhaps it’s not quite as big a chunk of change for him. As a candidate to replace ousted San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, he had the support of the same ‘progressive’ allies — translation: soft on crime — as the recalled Mr Boudin.
Car thefts have increasingly become carjackings, because newer vehicles require a separate key fob for the vehicle to start, and the easiest way to get that is to hijack the car while the owner is present with the fob. Of course, carjackings are robberies by force, most frequently armed carjackings in which owners are confronted with a gun in their faces.
The bad guys don’t always stick with simple larceny. The crime wave which really got started in 2020 is a huge murder rate as well. Mr Hamasaki believes that you’ve got to be tough to live in the city? Well, in Pennsylvania, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which did not include Philadelphia and Pittsburgh increased by 1.18% between 2018 and 2021, while in Allegheny County — Pittsburgh — it jumped 33.77%, and in Philly, a whopping 59.21%. 54.72% of all murders in Pennsylvania occurred in Philadelphia, which has just 12.37% of the commonwealth’s population. With 78.11% of the state’s population, the counties outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh saw only 33.30% of the killings.
Mr Hamasaki complained that those of us who complain about unchecked crime simply hate cities. No, it’s what our major cities have become that people hate. But when kids get gunned down near their schools in targeted gang hits, and city parents refuse to send their kids to those schools, it’s people in the cities themselves who are concerned and scared. When applications for concealed carry permits more than sextupled in Philly, it’s not because people aren’t ‘tough enough’ for ‘city life,’ but because they’re just plain scared.
Robert E Howard, the 1930s author of the Conan stories, wrote in the Tower of the Elephant, “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” Mr Hamasaki appears to be sanctioning the new savagery in our cities, without realizing that it can get your skull split, in the more modern form of getting your brains blown out by a Glock 9mm.