Shanaia Rivera's List: Philadelphia Politics

• Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Sen. Arlen Specter got a preview Sunday of the tough sell lawmakers  will face over health care as audience members booed and jeered them during a town hall meeting in Philadelphia.

  Among  those at odds with the officials touting the $1 trillion, 10-year plan was a woman who earned loud applause when she said  she doesn't want Washington interfering with her health care choices.
• "The  Senate bill isn't written so don't boo the senator for not reading a bill that isn't written," she said.

• To stir the Philadelphia pot still further, the person who actually won the 1856 Presidential election was James Buchanan, a Democrat from Lancaster County. Just about everything political was happening right here, all at once. Lots of deals were made. The Pennsylvania Republican delegation emerged as Abraham Lincoln's king-maker, and Lincoln as President rewarded Pennsylvania for its keen insight. Appointing cabinet members from Pennsylvania, the new administration naturally steered war contracts to our local industries.  Philadelphia politics immediately became Republican in a big way, and after the war the Republicans were then in charge of the national government for fifty years. Philadelphia had created a political machine, and it made no sense patronage-wise for many decades, for it to profess allegiance to any other party than the one it started with.
• But Party unity is periodically stimulated (some would say simulated) when the national figures must come back home from Washington seeking voter approval, searching out support in the clubhouses, fire stations and taprooms that are firmly in control of local warlords. Those warlords care little about foreign affairs, interest rates at the Federal Reserve, or globalization, becoming uneasy when the national politicians to whom they owe nominal fealty drag them into messy subjects like abortion and civil rights. In the clubhouses, there is a tendency to measure national leaders by patronage and pork barrel. In return, the national representative wants to be re-elected. He wants voter turnout, campaign funds, and gerrymandered districts. It's mostly the same in both parties, and in all regions.

• Cecil Bassett Moore (1915 – 1979) was a Philadelphia lawyer and activist during the U.S. Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

   

  Born in West Virginia, Moore served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II. In 1947, after his discharge at Fort Mifflin, Moore moved to Philadelphia and studied Law at Temple University. He earned a reputation as a no-nonsense lawyer who fought on behalf of his mostly poor, African-American clients concentrated in North Philadelphia. From 1963 to 1967, he served as President of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP. He also served on the Philadelphia City Council.
• "I was determined when I got back [from World War II combat] that what rights I didn't have I was going to take, using every weapon in the arsenal of democracy. After nine years in the Marine Corps, I don't intend to take another order from any son of a bitch that walks."

• Matthew Countryman's Up South<!--__/Smallcaps__--> arrives at just the right time. Historical interpretations of the civil rights movement are undergoing a profound shift. Urban history is enjoying a renaissance. And political history is again receiving its due. Countryman sits astride all of these developments and contributes in ways both remarkable and subtle to an emerging historiography of race and politics in the post–World War II United States. His study of the "Philadelphia movement," as he calls the city's civil rights and Black Power politics, traces an arc from the Popular Front of the immediate postwar years through the civil rights liberalism of the 1950s to the nationalist insurgency of the 1960s. He argues for a political continuum that no longer privileges the national movement and does not presume that a liberal civil rights coalition was natural and inevitable. Instead, Countryman shows that the Philadelphia movement was shaped by a decades-long battle over liberal strategies to achieve racial justice and the tension between rights-based reform and communal or group interests. The result is a marvelous book that extends Aldon Morris's observation that the civil rights movement was in fact a series of linked "indigenous" movements that emerged in specific local contexts and institutional environments.<!--_noteRef_-->¹

• A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits.
• A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.
• America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us.
• America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.

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• In June 2002, as councilman, Nutter introduced a measure requiring college students under 23 years old in Philadelphia's Fourth Council District (students at Saint Joseph's University) to register their address, license plate, car registration and insurance with the University, which would then put a sticker on that car as a "student" car, subjecting the student to triple the usual fines for traffic or parking tickets or any other offense. The ordinance also forced students in off-campus housing to inform their landlords of their "student" status.^[

• Street was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and grew up as a member of a farming household. He graduated from Conshohocken High School, received an undergraduate degree in English from Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, and his law degree from Temple University, which he had to apply to several times before he was accepted. Following his graduation from law school, Street served clerkships with Common Pleas Court Judge Mathew W. Bullock, Jr. and with the United States Department of Justice from which he was quickly terminated for poor performance. In his first professional job, Street taught English at an elementary school and, later, at the Philadelphia Opportunities Industrialization Center. He also practiced law privately prior to entering into public service. He is married and has four children. He is also a practicing Seventh-day Adventist.
• During Street's first term, much emphasis was placed on the "Neighborhood Transformation Initiative." The Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI), which was unveiled in April 2001 was an unprecedented effort to counter the history of decline in the City of Philadelphia and revitalize its neighborhoods. The program was designed to revitalize and restore communities, to develop or restore quality housing, to clean and secure streets, and to create opportunities for vibrant cultural and recreational facilities.
• Street also made children and their welfare a focus of his first term in office. In his first inaugural address in January 2000, Street officially proclaimed the year 2000 "The Year of the Child" in Philadelphia. He sought to increase funding for after-school programs, and formed the Philadelphia Children's Commission, a diverse group of government, civic, business, and faith-based leadership, whose job it was to advise Street on policies and programs that would have a positive impact in the lives of Philadelphia's children. He also sought to fight truancy among school aged children. ^[6][7]

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• T. Milton Street, Sr. is an entrepreneur and former politician from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the brother of former Philadelphia mayor John F. Street. Originally a street hot dog vendor, he rose to prominence as an activist challenging the city's vending and housing ordinances.^[1] He was elected to the 181st District of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1978, and to the Pennsylvania State Senate as a Democrat in 1980. However, shortly after his election, he switched parties to a Republican in order to give the Republicans control of the State Senate. He was rewarded with a committee chairmanship and a finer office the was previously State Senator Vince Fumo's.^[2] He was an unsuccessful candidate for U.S. Congress against incumbent Rep. Bill Gray in 1982, and an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for re-election as State Senator in 1984. He later returned to prominence during the 1990s through his many business ventures, including a local amphibious tour bus company and vending and consulting contracts with the city and Philadelphia International Airport.^[3] Often accused of impropriety by the local media, in 2006 he was indicted under charges of corruption and tax evasion.^[4]
• Street had announced that if 5,000 people did not attend a noontime rally at City Hall plaza on March 1, 2007, he would give up his candidacy for mayor. Media reports placed attendance at about 200, many of those curious passersby. Street was undeterred, saying he "underestimated" his passion and vowed to continue in the race, not wanting it to be considered a "publicity stunt."^[7]
• Five days later Milton Street withdrew, announcing his intention to run for one of the five Democratic at-large council seats on the last day to file nominating petitions. This would place him in contention with his nephew, Sharif Street, son of the former mayor of Philadelphia. Milton Street himself pointed out that the city residency requirement for a council candidate is one year instead of the three years for a mayoral candidate. There has been some question as to where Street officially resides, in Philadelphia or Moorestown, New Jersey.^[8]. On March 12, 2007, Street's petition's was challenged in court by a voter, since Street turned in only 894 validated signatures into City Hall and the requirement to be placed on the ballot is 1,000, meaning most likely he will be unable to make the Democratic Primary ballot. [4] He did get on the ballot and was unsuccessful in his bid.

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• During the primary election of 1982, Green decided not to seek re-election when his wife, Patricia, became pregnant with their youngest child. Goode jumped into the race and defeated former Mayor Frank L. Rizzo in a racially polarizing primary election. Goode went on to win the general election over former Green fund-raiser and Philadelphia Stock Exchange Chairman John Egan, the Republican Party nominee.

   

  Goode continued his heavy public schedule as Mayor. However, he failed to sell City Council on the necessity of a trash-to-steam plant to avoid using landfills, and the economics of landfill use soon changed, lowering landfill costs and raising incineration costs, making a trash-to-steam plant too expensive to be feasible.

   

  Goode's tenure as mayor was marred in the summer of 1985 by the MOVE confrontation, in which police attempted to clear a building in West Philadelphia inhabited by a radical back-to-nature group whose members, under the leadership of founder John Africa, had long been a nuisance to the city by shouting out slogans and statements from a megaphone at all hours of the day and night, ignoring city sanitation codes and barricading themselves in houses when law enforcement came to enforce them. During the final assault on the building, the police dropped an improvised bomb made of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex, an explosive gel used in underwater mining. This however caused the house to catch fire, and ignited a massive blaze which eventually consumed almost an entire city block, killed 11 people (including 5 children), and left 240 people homeless.
• During the Green Administration, the city budget had been balanced; the first few years of Goode's reign caused the city to go into debt again, this time deeply, and the fiscal irresponsibility continued throughout his tenure. In an attempt to re-balance the city's budget, Goode pushed through tax increases that raised the city's wage tax to an all-time high of 4.96 percent. Yet despite this record tax increase, on the day Goode finally left office Philadelphia was only twenty-seven days away from being insolvent--bankrupt--and Moody's gave its municipal bonds junk bond ratings. His successors, Edward G. Rendell and John F. Street were able to gradually though incrementally reduce the city wage tax and impart a degree of fiscal health to the Philadelphia city government.

• In the election of 1991, Goode was unable to maintain Philadelphia's black vote as a unified bloc. A well-funded and highly-publicized attempt to purge Philadelphia City Councilman-at-Large David Cohen, a leading critic of Goode's trash-to-steam proposal, backfired as Cohen came in first in total votes in the 1987 Democratic primary for the five council-at-large seats to be filled, setting an all-time record for most votes received for that position in a Democratic primary. (Fourteen years later, Goode was the only former Mayor of Philadelphia to attend Councilman Cohen's funeral. Goode's son and Cohen's City Council colleague, W. Wilson Goode, Jr., eulogized Cohen at a special memorial service held in Philadelphia's City Council.)

   

  In the race to succeed Goode as mayor in 1991, three blacks – former Councilman Lucien E. Blackwell, a strong Goode loyalist; George Burrell, a Goode critic allied with Congressman William Gray; and James White, Goode's managing director – faced white candidates Rendell and Peter Hearn, a former chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association. White withdrew before the primary and Rendell won the nomination, getting 10 percent of the black vote as Blackwell and Burrell divided the rest.

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