Congestion pricing was sold as a green fix for New York City. One year in, a Columbia University and South Bronx Unite study of 19 air quality sensors found four locations in the Bronx showing significant increases in fine particulate matter — the kind the EPA links directly to cardiovascular disease, respiratory failure, and premature death.
The South Bronx was already called 'Asthma Alley' before the toll launched. City health data puts adult asthma rates at 20.7% there — versus 14.2% citywide. About 1 in 5 kids in Mott Haven–Port Morris has been diagnosed with asthma. The scheme generated $526 million in its first year, which MTA chief Janno Lieber called proof it's 'already succeeding.' Success for who?
The boardroom got cleaner air below 60th Street. Working-class families in the Bronx got the diverted truck traffic and the bill. That's not a policy failure — that's how rigged policy works.
Braddock, Pennsylvania — a steel town that once fed this nation's industrial spine — has shed nine in ten of its residents over the decades, according to a recent account from the town's former mayor. What deindustrialization and neglect built there is a monument to what happens when Washington serves the boardroom and forgets the mill.
The Founders understood that a republic rests on the dignity of its working people, not on the comfort of distant creditors. Lincoln called labor the superior of capital. When whole communities hollow out and stay hollow, the question is not whether the market spoke — it is who rigged the auction.
The long memory of the American experiment does not forget Braddock. Duty demands we ask which policies, which trade deals, which captured regulatory agencies wrote that town's obituary — and whether we have the honor to write something different.
On May 1, Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commissioner Moshe Marvit got a single email from a Trump aide: his job was terminated, effective immediately. No cause cited. No hearing. The government cut off his work phone the same day, and the commission laid off staff over the following weekend.
Federal law says mine safety commissioners serve six-year terms and can only be removed for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." Said Marvit's lawsuit: "Congress gave the President the authority to remove commissioners in a delimited set of circumstances."
The Supreme Court is set to rule this summer — in a parallel case involving a fired FTC member — on whether those removal protections are constitutional at all. Until then, coal and hard-rock miners are left asking who's minding the shaft. Working folks don't get due process when the boss fires them either, but the law said this one did.