Author: Marc Stier

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Mad dogs and Democrats

  By Pennsylvania, Progressive Politics

Some of the folks who commented on my post endorsing Casey for Senate made interesting arguments to which I want to res pond here. Albert pointed out that the process that gave us Casey will go on if we don’t stop it. And Liz said that the first rule of dog training is don’t reward behaviors you don’t want. These are arguments well worth reading and considering. But I think they both miss a key point about how our party works. Ask yourself, who is in control of this process we want to stop? Whose behavior do we want to stop rewarding? Continue reading

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Featured blog / steady work

  By About me

I have been so busy organizing around the 193 issue—about which much more later–that I didn’t notice I had been nominated as a featured blog at Philly Future. And, I won. I hope this is an omen for future elections. Thanks to all of you who nominated and voted for this blog. I’ve only been doing this since February, but it seems that the little essays I post here, essays that A Smoke Filled Room frequently calls “long but chewy,” have found a niche in the blogosphere. I know they are not for everyone all the time…I don’t always have the patience for reading them myself, which probably accounts for all the editing mistakes. And I certainly can’t write them everyday. So I encourage those of you who are new to my blog to dip into the archives. Aside from the posts that are announcements of political events, few of… Continue reading

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Against Independence

  By Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Political Organizing, Politics

This post is occasioned by the entry of Michael Nutter into the Mayor’s race. But it is not meant to be a critique of Nutter, who is someone I like in many ways despite my doubts about his ideas on taxation. (I’ll write about him and other Mayoral candidates soon.) It is, however, a critique of a style of politics that Michael Nutter, more than any other Mayoral candidate, exemplifies. You might call it the politics of independence. It is a style of politics that I grew up with, and that is important for some people in Neighborhood Networks. But it is a style of politics that I have come to distrust and that I hope will play less and less a role in Neighborhood Networks and other progressive circles in future. The politics of independence has an ideal for candidates and an ideal for voters. Continue reading

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Political disaster strikes city neighborhoods

  By Philadelphia, Urbanism, Zoning

The City of Philadelphia suffered a disaster this week. It was not a natural disaster or an act of terrorism, but a disaster created by our political leaders. Recent rulings by Philadelphia Common Pleas Judges have undermined the right of community organizations and neighborhood groups to appeal variances granted by the Zoning Board of Adjustment (ZBA). As a result, the right of these organizations and groups to even appear in front of the Zoning Board has been called into question. Continue reading

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The Politics of Hope

  By Philadelphia, Political Organizing, Progressive Politics

This is the third in a series of efforts to articulate in broad terms what it means to be a progressive or liberal in Pennsylvanian and Philadelphia today Hope is Brewing In the little over a year since Neighborhood Networks was founded, I have been asked again and again by reporters how I account for the growing movement for progressive reform in Philadelphia. What, they want to know, explains the development of our organization, the growth of Philly for Change, the Anne Dicker campaign, the two Ethics Reform charter changes that have been overwhelmingly approved by the voters, and the hundred or so new committee people that have come out of our organizations? One answer, that people are frustrated by corruption and poor government, is clearly mistaken. People have been frustrated by the corruption and incompetence of our government for years, perhaps since the day Richardson Dilworth resigned as Mayor.… Continue reading

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We’re all in this together in Philadelphia, too.

  By Philadelphia, Politics, Progressive Politics

This is the second in a series of efforts to articulate in broad terms what it means to be a progressive or liberal in Pennsylvanian and Philadelphia today. In the last post, I tried to show how the idea that “We’re All In This Together” enframes many of our aspirations as liberals and progressives in general. Here I want to say a more about this idea applies to politics in Philadelphia. To say that we are all in this together, is to say we have common problems and that can only be solved if our government recognizes and act on our common interest. In some ways, this claim is just obvious. But, quite often I think, Philadelphians don’t recognize the commonality of our concerns. If we don’t suffer directly from some problem, and don’t imagine we will, we may not recognize how much we suffer from it indirectly. So we… Continue reading

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We're all in this together

  By Health Care

This is the first in a series of efforts to articulate in broad terms what it means to be a progressive or liberal in Pennsylvanian and Philadelphia today. Democrats and Republicans have many differences on particular public policies. Underlying those differences, however, is a deeper difference about how we look at politics and what we think it is for. I want try to explain the key difference between us. Let’s start with slogans. We Democrats believe “We’re all in this together.” The Republicans believe “Everyone for themselves.” Our motto is “We get by with a little help from our friends.” The Republican motto is “I’m all right, Jack” We Democrats are the party of community, of people standing together. The Republicans are the party of individuals standing alone. That is not to say that we are opposed to individuals taking care of themselves or following their own path in life.… Continue reading

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What we progressives want

  By Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Progressive Politics, US

Some time ago I started a series on the future of progressive politics in Pennsylvania. In the first post in the series I pointed out that we increasingly face a Republican majority in the General Assembly that is controlled by the radical right wing. In parts two and three of this series, I lambasted Governor Rendell and progressives like myself for, among other things, trying to govern from a non-existent center instead of defending a liberal / progressive vision of a good political community. What I haven’t done yet is try to suggest how we liberals and progressives should define and defend that vision of a good political community. I have been working on it. And today and in the next few days, I am going to lay out three themes that, I think, can define the provide a thematic sythesis of the goals progressives in Pennsylvania and in Philadelphia.… Continue reading

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Learning from the minimum wage campaign

  By Pennsylvania, Political Organizing, Social Justice

I am very glad that I got back from my vacation in time for the ceremony yesterday at Sharon Baptist Church to celebrate Governor Rendell’s signing of the minimum wage bill. The Governor spoke passionately about helping the working poor. The sponsors of the bill Senator Tina Tartaglione and Representative Mark Cohen spoke as did Bill George the head of the state AFL-CIO and John Dodds, the leader of the Minimum Wage Coalition. There is an important lesson for all of us in this tremendous achievement. When I joined the Raise the Minimum Wage Coalition at one of its first meetings in April 2005¸ very few people outside of the room thought we had much chance of getting an increase in the minimum wage through a Republican General Assembly in 2006. Indeed, at the time, Governor Rendell did not even support an increase in the minimum wage. Many people thought… Continue reading

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Gar Alperovitz and the next left

  By Economic Development, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Progressive Politics, Urbanism, US

In April I had the pleasure of introducing the noted political economist Gar Alperovitz at an event sponsored by the Weavers Way Cooperative in Mt. Airy. The following essay is an expanded version of my introduction. They to point to the lessons we can learn from Alperovitz and how those lessons are already being put to work in my own community, Mt. Airy. During the Carter presidency people began to notice that liberals were running of out ideas for making our country more just and democratic. Carter may have been wrong to attribute the difficulties of his presidency to a nationwide “malaise” but as a description of liberal political thought, the term seemed appropriate. At the time, my teacher Michael Walzer wrote an article in the New Republic that explained this phenomenon. He pointed out that liberals, in fact, rarely had ideas of their own. Their ideas were borrowed from… Continue reading