A Note on Christopher Hitchens

I woke up this morning to the news that Christopher Hitchens has died. Though I've been following him on Google Alerts, the news surprised me, what with his recent contributions to Vanity Fair and interview with Richard Dawkins in the New Statesman. I was hoping we'd have him at least through the 2012 elections.

I once thought of writing a book about Hitchens' place in contemporary culture. It would've had the subtitle, "Why America Doesn't Know What to do With Christopher Hitchens." This is what was so great about him. In a rigidly partisan era where one's views on one subject nearly always predict one's stance on 10 others, Hitchens stood apart as a bold thinker who held his moral compass up to the difficult lessons of history, philosophy and politics. The half-baked professions of Newt Gingrich only underscore what we've lost; while Newt's geopolitical musings serve cynical, predetermined ends, Hitchens was playful, irreverent, occasionally upsetting, and deeply moral.

His video critique of the 10 Commandments captures him in his droll glory. You don't have to agree with everything he says to appreciate the humor and sharpness of his intellect—and the magnitude of what we have lost.

Who's a Thug?

I've written before that, while I believe Mumia Abu-Jamal is guilty of killing Philadelphia Police Office Daniel Faulkner, his death sentence should be overturned in favor of life in prison. When this finally happened this week, Maureen Faulkner, Officer Faulkner's widow, had this to say about his leaving death row:

"I am heartened that he will be taken from the protective cloister he has been living in all these years and begin living among his own kind — the thugs and common criminals that infest our prisons.”

(Read the AP article here.)

While Faulkner's anger is obviously understandable, her comparing Abu-Jamal to "thugs and common criminals" does not help bring clarity to this contentious case.

All sides agree on a few basic facts of that terrible night in 1981. Abu-Jamal witnessed his brother in an altercation with Faulkner and ran to the scene. In the ensuing mayhem, shots were fired both by Faulkner, hitting Abu-Jamal, and from a gun registered to Abu-Jamal, killing the officer.

Given the context, that would make Abu-Jamal, the convicted cop killer, something other than a common thug. It was not cold-blooded, pre-meditated murder, or an act driven by mindlessness, selfishness or greed. It was not crass barbarism of the variety seen in urban gang violence and atrocities against innocents on the sidelines of drug feuds and sectarian warfare the world over—that is thuggery. Thuggery can be murderous or just stupid and petty, such as the recent case in Philadelphia of a bicycle rider sucker punched on Kelly Drive. It is usually driven more by a type of sociopathy than strong emotion.

Abu-Jamal is not that. He is a convicted murderer who destroyed many lives, but we should not let rhetoric allow us to look at him—or this case—with clouded vision.

Anwar al-Awlaki was no fan of freedom. Are we?

So now we're killing U.S. citizens for saying unpopular things. Inspiring strangers with your YouTube videos makes you "linked" (in words of the New York Times) to their terrorist plots and actions. By this logic, the Beatles should have been assassinated for inspiring Charles Manson to commit terroristic murder after hearing their lyrics on "The White Album."

But wait, wasn't Anwar al-Awlaki also involved in operational planning for Al Qaeda, as statements from the Obama administration have taken pains to point out? Wasn't he directly involved in plots to kill Americans, as suggested by his email exchanges with Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood?

Possibly. We will never know for sure, because Awlaki will never be brought to trial. Neither he nor the rest of us will ever hear all of the evidence against him, nor will he have a chance to defend himself. All that has been preempted by a drone strike. We simply have to take Obama's word for it.

So this action is troubling on two levels. For one thing, we have handed out a death sentence to a U.S. citizen without any due process. All we know for sure is that he said things—on YouTube, in e-mails. That's not supposed to be a capital crime. The other problem is the media's normalizing the idea that unpopular speech can be tantamount to criminality, as in the Time's statement that "... his online lectures and sermons were linked to more than a dozen terrorist investigations." Linked how? In nearly all cases, this appears to refer to people who heard his words and did bad things.

It's not freedoms that get chipped away—it's the standards, definitions and limited exceptions applied to those freedoms which can be gradually undermined. This is the dark side of the War on Terror.

Food Activists Should Look Beyond 'The System'

A group of high school and college-aged food activists recently gathered in Philadelphia for a national conference, Rooted in Community. Attendees met for four days of workshops, after which they crafted a document calling for "food justice" and healthier food production and delivery systems in the U.S.—the Youth Food Bill of Rights, which was unveiled during a protest on Independence Mall.

The preamble to the bill states: "We the youth, declare, state, and demand the following rights for people around the world with an emphasis on equality. We demand healthy, organic, local, human, affordable, sustainable, and culturally appropriate food for all people and especially low-income people of color, and low-income people in our communities, and low-income people that are the most oppressed and hurt by the current food system."

While I agree with many of the goals of the document, there was irony in the time and place of the food activists' gathering. Just a few days earlier, an Inquirer article, "West Philly grocer struggles as eating habits are slow to change," profiled the plight of a family-owned, neighborhood produce market struggling to survive in the face of local indifference. "I always dreamed of this as a black-owned business in a black neighborhood, employing young black people from the neighborhood and helping this West Philadelphia community that I've spent my whole life in," Arnett Woodall told the paper. He sunk his life savings into his store, West Phillie Produce, which opened in 2009. The store is now in danger of closing.

"Only a few people on this block support this store," Woodall told the paper. "It takes a long time to change people's eating habits. I'm only still open because of my construction and landscaping businesses."

The youth food activists might do well to give a thought to the plight of Arnett Woodall. No strategy for food justice should ignore the need for personal responsibility and educating individuals to make good choices for themselves and their children. No amount of food gatherings or proclamations will make much difference without it. While you can promote choice and access, you cannot legislate what people choose to put on their fork.

Those on the left tend to stress things that are done to people; those on the right, things people do to themselves. While, in my view, liberals do a better job of embracing the call for personal responsibility than conservatives do the call for human rights and universal justice, liberals could do a still better job of acknowledging, and factoring in, the critically important need for individuals to make smart choices. Including this in a manifesto like the Food Bill of Rights would make a lot more people take it seriously.

The Soda Tax and Jobs: What's Your 'Special Interest'?

Maybe because it's accepted as an inevitable, unchangeable part of local political culture, the influence of special interests on government is perhaps nowhere more nakedly apparent than in Philadelphia. What occurs behind the scenes and through lobbying channels in Washington is shamelessly paraded in Dilworth Plaza every time a piece of legislation designed to promote the common good runs up against the interests of a connected few. The amount of money in question may be a pittance compared to what is bandied about on the state and federal level, but in an already cash-strapped city, bad fiscal decisions hurt more.

Take the recent fight over Mayor Nutter's proposed soda tax. Designed to raise money to fill a $35 million budget hole for city schools, it was clearly progressive: tax an unhealthy, non-essential item for the sake of the city's children, and maybe strike a blow against obesity at the same time. Who could be against it? The Teamsters, and a coalition of beverage industry groups (bottlers. etc.), that's who. With claims of jobs lost and a black market for soda as a result of residents having to pay 2 cents more per ounce of sugar water, the diabetes peddlers won the day. Instead, Council voted to increase already onerous property taxes.

The Jobs Question

Taxing soda has become an issue in other parts of the country as well. It's attacked as a "jobs killer." Whatever jobs are lost from adding pennies to the price of Pepsi (my guess would be something astride zero) is NOTHING compared to the jobs that have been bartered away by lawmakers looking to benefit executives and investors by opening up trade markets with countries that maintain protectionist policies (like China) or have low consumer spending (like Mexico). This is on my mind because of an excellent piece in the Inquirer recently about the trade deficit, "Why Jobs Keep Vanishing." The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) alone turned a nearly $2 billion trade surplus with Mexico in 1993 into a massive $631 billion deficit by 2010. An estimated 1.5 million American jobs have been lost to NAFTA, while 791,000 jobs have been created—a net loss of 700,000, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1993, Sens. Orrin Hatch and Phil Gramm said Americans would look back on the trade agreement as a great wellspring of prosperity and "have a hard time understanding what was controversial" about it.

I lived in North Carolina at the time and still remember Sen. Jessie Helms' proclamations in favor of NAFTA. Has any single American politician ever supported something worse for their own state? Textiles were once one of North Carolina's most important industries. There were 738,000 U.S. textile jobs in 1989. There are now 128,000. I'd like to know how many of those laid-off workers now fold shirts at Wal-Mart.

If I were a Teamster, I'd be more concerned about American highways being opened up to Mexican truckers (a never-implemented part of NAFTA that Obama plans to greenlight) than I am about Philadelphia soda. Does this mean I'm now siding with a special interest group? In the end, every single thing government does, or doesn't do, benefits some constituency. If you're a Republican, 99 percent of the time that special interest group is the very rich. (My litmus test for any piece of legislation is, "Does It Benefit the Koch Brothers?" If yes, the GOP will support it.) Whether in Philadelphia's City Hall or the halls of Congress, I'd like us to make more decisions that benefit the less powerful — students, taxpaying city residents, those who work manufacturing jobs, teachers and firefighters, the unemployed, the uninsured. Does that make me a radical?

Privatization For Amtrak?

When I said in my recent post about Republican economic policies that privatization can sometimes be a good idea, I could have been referring to proposed solutions for improving rail service along the Northeast Corridor.

Now, I'm not sure this is the way to go. Certainly, any private operator would have a lot of convincing to do, and need a lot of public help, if necessary infrastructure improvements and service upgrades were to come to the aging rail system.

But something needs to be done. There were three system shutdowns in the last few days, one of which stranded me at Penn Station for two hours on Thursday.

These are not like airport delays, almost always caused by weather conditions. These problems were the result of stress on a system built over a century ago and chronically underfunded by Washington.

Even Republicans in Congress acknowledge that, in the Northeast, Amtrak is vital to mobility and commerce, though that didn't prevent some of the usual jackass-ery when a privatization proposal for the Northeast Corridor was floated this week. Rep. John L. Mica, head of the House transportation panel, cited "40 years of costly and wasteful Soviet-style operations." (My guess is Soviet trains probably ran better.)

Could private operators do a better job? It's worked well for freight rail. The demand is there. It should be on the table.

The Inquirer printed a useful editorial on the subject this week.

A Shield for Wal-Mart

Congratulations to Justice Antonin Scalia for trumpeting a blueprint for large corporations to get by with discriminatory practices! According to the New York Times, he had this to say this week about Wal-Mart's strategy of granting local managers great leeway in hiring and promotions while officially having a corporate policy forbidding gender discrimination:

“On its face, of course, that is just the opposite of a uniform employment practice that would provide the commonality needed for a class action. It is a policy against having uniform employment practices.”

I wonder if Scalia is aware that Wal-Mart has long been accused of using local managerial autonomy as a shield to protect itself against claims of unfair worker practices. A company that micromanages every aspect of store appearance, inventory and accounting is said to have a wink-and-nod understanding with managers when it comes to bending labor rules.

According to Nelson Lichtenstein's "The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business," the folksy, we're-one-big-family ethos promoted in stores has enabled individual managers to do things like casually tell employees to straighten up a messy department after they've clocked out, almost as if they're just asking for a friendly favor. Lichtenstein points out that Wal-Mart's high volume, low-margin business model puts enormous pressure on store managers to shave every possible penny off labor costs. Rather than being a written policy, practices like off-the-clock work are "built in" to the culture of the company.

None of this proves Wal-Mart discriminates against women, or even that the same incentives are there to avoid promoting women as are there to pay employees less. But it should raise a red flag that the lack of, as Scalia puts it, "a common answer to the crucial question, why was I disfavored?" does not mean Wal-Mart does not discriminate. It could mean the exact opposite.

For a good summation of the history and practices of Wal-Mart, see my write-up about Lichtenstein's book.

Eight things I wish people would understand about the Republican approach to economic policy.

1. Deficit reduction does not lead to economic health. Economic health ENABLES deficit reduction—a la the Clinton administration. When George W. Bush took office, the federal budget was in the black.

2. Slashing the federal budget will not lower your taxes. It shifts the burden of service provision to local and state governments, which then must pick up the slack by raising taxes—if not immediately, than eventually. Just look at the mess unfolding in Texas. Denial cannot drive their budgeting approach forever.

3. Lower taxes do not automatically equal job creation by freeing up more money. If this were true, big business in this country—flush with cash from the recent run-up on the stock market—would be on a hiring spree. They aren't.

4. Job growth from lower taxes cannot wipe out the federal deficit. It did not work in the Reagan years, and it won't work now.

5. Privatization does not necessarily mean greater effectiveness or efficiency. Look at for-profit prisons or the outsourcing of security and other contracts in Iraq. While privatization of public services is sometimes a good idea, as a blanket policy it's a terrible plan. With privatization comes a loss of transparency that can create its own web of corruption and special interests rivaling anything that has ever occurred in the public sphere.

6. Much of the rhetoric coming from Republicans in Congress is based on false assertions about the recent past. It seems ridiculous to even have to point this out, but the 2009 Obama stimulus is not the primary reason for our debt situation. That would be the two Bush tax cuts (2001 and 2003), the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the recession. Also—just to be clear—TARP passed under Bush.

7. The Obama 2009 stimulus does not disprove Keynesian economics. Nearly 40 percent of the money spent on the plan went to tax cuts. In addition, many economists feel the effort was too timid overall to achieve its goal of kick-starting the economy. More generally, drawing conclusions about the correlation between government spending and economic growth is difficult and the debate among economists continues (unlike what some conservative bloggers would have you believe). Some very good empirical studies conclude there is a positive correlation between government spending and GDP growth. Certainly, robust government spending—and even large deficits—do not necessarily prevent economic expansion, as was proven in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

8. The vaunted prosperity created by Reagan was a house built on sand. Since the '80s, our economy has been propelled by 1) The housing market; 2) The rise of two-income households; and 3) Rising consumer debt, with an added boost from ever-cheaper goods from China. Well, housing is a bust; in most households, there are no more adults to go to work (unless you practice polygamy); Americans are maxed out credit card-wise; and the price of imported goods is starting to rise. There is no Republican plan that can bring to the table what the country most needs: real wage growth. (Not coincidentally, the only uptick in real wages in the last 35 years occurred during the Clinton administration.)

Loco Motion

Someone I know well is going for a job interview in Emmaus, Pa., just south of Allentown, and it got me thinking about how improbably stupid it is that there's no passenger train service between Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley. Even in its current state, our run-down national rail service does manage to connect most metro areas of significant size, especially in the Northeast.

How then did we manage to lose the rail connection with this region less than 60 miles to the north? It will surprise no one in this area to hear it has something to do with SEPTA. Passenger trains continued to run on the former Reading RR line, from Lansdale through Quakertown and up to Bethlehem and Allentown, through the 1970s. The route was never nationalized, unlike most intercity lines, and was operated by Conrail under contract to SEPTA. In the early eighties, SEPTA eliminated all routes serviced by diesel locomotives after state and federal subsidies were pulled.

Upper Montgomery-Bucks County is one of the fastest growing, most traffic clogged areas in Southeastern Pennsylvania—as anyone who has driven up 309 or on the Northeast Extension can attest. Efforts to restore passenger rail service above Lansdale have been in the news lately, as reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Allentown Morning Call (the Morning Call's report is better). A scaled-down plan to restore trains almost as far north as Sellersville could happen.

Restoring trains all the way to Bethlehem would be much tougher. A large rail right-of-way just below Bethlehem has been turned over to recreational use as the Saucon Valley Trail—though it's leased from SEPTA, which could one day reclaim it. Some rails-to-trails projects make sense, such as Lower Merion's Cynwyd Trail, where rail restoration would be mostly redundant. This one doesn't.

Vanishing Indie Radio

We've heard a lot lately about Congress' defunding of NPR, but there's another, more troubling trend afoot in radioland. In an effort to raise money, cash-strapped colleges around the country are selling off campus radio stations to the highest bidder. Twelve have been sold recently, and another 14 are on the chopping block, according to Ken Freedman, station manager and program director at WFMU in New Jersey.

WFMU and nine other independent, freeform stations staged a minute of on-air silence April 28 to protest the sales. The most notorious is the recent sale of the University of San Francisco's legendary KUSF, which saw staffers locked out after the abrupt announcement in January that the station would become a feeder station for a national network of classical music stations. With this sale, an institution important to rock music history and a cultural bastion of the city was stripped of all local control and character (the university plans to move operations online, though in what form is not clear).

As funding for education continues to erode and colleges seek cash windfalls from selling long-held radio frequencies, outlets for eclectic, free-form music and cultural programming vanish, replaced by the sort of formula-driven fare one can find in every corner of the land—the cultural equivalent of the spreading geography of nowhere.

The KUSF situation is "a non-commercial microcosm of the the 'Clear Channelization' of the FM band," Freedman noted.

Often bidding for these frequencies are deep-pocketed religious groups, looking to replace free-form programming with preaching. Their main competition, according to Freedman, is a nonprofit group that sets up NPR feeder stations (often in areas that already have NPR), rebroadcasting news and talk produced elsewhere. To me this is telling: two monolithic cultural entities butting against each other, one from the left and one from the right, at the expense of a messy, amorphous, creative outlet for non-entrenched ideas.

This is happening everywhere. In politics, education, religion, business and the media, people seem to fear ambiguity, as if allowing some "play" poses unacceptable risks. A less insecure culture would worry less about niche audiences, targeted results and direct outcomes and want to support artistic, cultural and scientific eclecticism.

Isn't that what universities are supposed to be for?

Photo a No Show

Obama will not release photo of bin Laden

The right call—show it privately to high ranking members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, and maybe even a few media execs (such as Roger Ailes). Obama does not owe it to the world to release this photo.

Ad it Up

Does this make you want to eat cheese? According to a survey cited in Ad Age, 86 percent of people who saw this Kraft Natural Cheese ad said it did. To me it looks fake, because the ropes of cheese do not appear to actually be attached to the neighbor slice, like they would on a real pizza.

For me, this creates what I call the "cereal glue" effect, in which discovery of the processes behind food ad creation makes the product seem suddenly unappetizing. What IS that cheese attached to, anyway? Whatever it is, it aint natural.

This is no small matter! This was deemed the most successful of all recent magazine ads. Apparently, you can fool [nearly] all of the people all of the time ...

Sugar Blues

I won't be the first—or the last—to point this out I'm sure, but the article in this week's New York Times exploring whether sugar is, in fact, toxic does validate Mayor Michael Nutter's attempt to tax soda in Philadelphia, just as we tax alcohol and cigarettes.

The main support for the argument on public health grounds would be how much sugar Americans consume today over and above what we would get from just eating fruits and vegetables; the connection between excess sugar consumption, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease; and the damaging effects of sweet drinks—especially on the liver.

Taxing soda as a deterrent to unhealthy eating and as a way to help fund public health programs in a city with such a rampant obesity problem certainly makes sense. Maybe now the mayor can get City Council to go along with him on this one.

Dowd on Dylan: Blowin' Hot Air

The New York Times is no longer taking comments about Maureen Dowd's most recent column criticizing Bob Dylan for playing a Chinese government-approved set in Beijing. This means no one may ever read my thoughts on the matter, but I'll share them anyway:

It's a testament to the power of Dylan's music that, 50 years on, people are still trashing him for not being someone he never claimed to be.

If Dowd wants ideological consistency—politics in lockstep with poetry—there are other talented figures from the '60s protest movement to look to. Phil Ochs, for instance, whom Dylan is said to have told, "You're not a folksinger. You're a journalist." That the fiercely political Ochs has, over the years, inspired far fewer listeners to political action than Dylan, who is loyal only to his own artistic compass, should give her pause, however.

If Dylan weren't Dylan—iconoclastic, inconsistent, maddingly (to some) disloyal to cultural movements he helped shape—we would never have had more than the tousle haired Kennedy-era folkie he was in 1963, singing music forever associated with a particular time and place. He might today be a Civil Rights Era footnote, no more or less intriguing to people in China than, say, Peter Paul and Mary (which is to say, not very). His first heresy was to pick up the electric guitar, which in retrospect sealed his message as timeless, to be revisited and reinterpreted by each successive generation.

The music of Bob Dylan has and will continue to inspire people the world over, and his appearance in Beijing, however impolitic, will do the same for the Chinese—whether Maureen Dowd likes it or not.

The Grandstanding Old Party

Well, the house has voted to defund National Public Radio. The GOP, in the best tradition of ignoring pressing matters and shamelessly grandstanding for its base, is going after NPR with the same righteous vigor it once did flag burners and people who exercise their constitutional right to worship where they please.

The action follows Andrew Breitbart's exposure of an NPR fundraiser expressing his personal opinion, in what he thought was a private conversation, that Tea Partiers are racists. Now, if he can just catch a government-funded researcher dishing on Sarah Palin, maybe we can get busy with shutting down the National Science Foundation!

It's too bad, really, as NPR affiliates around the country engage in a type of local news coverage and public advocacy you won't get from any other source. They'll continue to do it, but it will be harder now.

Here's how the local votes went down: Dent, Fitzpatrick, Gerlach, LoBiondo, Meehan, Pitts, Runyan and Smith voted yes. Andrews, Brady, Carney, Fattah, Holden and Schwartz voted no.

The pittance saved is nothing compared to what could be achieved by a host of other initiatives ignored by the Republican-controlled congress, such as mandating Amazon and other Internet retailers collect sales tax on behalf of their customers. As noted last week by The Huffington Post's Nathan Newman, the loss in state revenues from this brand of unequal taxation translates to a greater burden on lower-income families.

If you missed it, be sure to watch this hilarious video of New York's Anthony Weiner, mocking the calling of a special session to vote on defunding NPR:

King of Prussia, By Rail

I learned today in the Inquirer that there's been talk for years of extending the Norristown High-Speed Line (the Rt. 100 trolley) to King of Prussia Mall. The proposal for a 4.9-mile spur will get a "renewed look" this spring as Upper Merion Township launches a locally-funded nonprofit planning initiative charged with researching and implementing improvements in the area.

King of Prussia Mall attracts 25 million visitors a year. Even with the current, somewhat awkward public transit set-up (I can get to the mall without a car by taking the high-speed line to the Gulph Mills stop, then a bus to KOP), a whopping 7,500 people use SEPTA every day to get to King of Prussia, according to the article.

This seems like a no-brainer in terms of viability. Many years ago, transportation companies used to put amusement parks at the terminus of their urban-suburban trolley lines to attract riders (the wonderful Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh is a surviving example). How much more of a built-in demand would there be, then, for an easy one-seat ride to one of North America's largest malls?

Make it easier and relatively stress-free to visit, and KOP might find a whole new customer base, as well as help solve intractable traffic and safety problems. I hope this line finally gets built.

The Japan Earthquake and Tsunami: Early Conclusions

Newspaper reports detail Japan's amazing infrastructure preparations for just such a catastrophe: the regular drills in coastal towns, warning systems that alert individual households, the special footpaths and escape routes leading to higher ground, state-of-the-art engineering allowing high rises and residential buildings to withstand tremors, coastal and river floodwalls, etc.

One resident of Tokyo testifies today on the New York Times website:

The shaking went on for so long that I had ample time to get up, put my shoes on and go out onto the emergency stairs. The neighborhood -- largely 3-15 story buildings -- looked like a set of children's blocks teetering on a shaken table. It looked more dreamlike than scary ... After what must have been 2 or 3 minutes, the neighborhood public address system came online with a cheerful, slightly inappropriate recorded message: "This is Sumida City. Just now, a large earthquake happened. Please be careful."

It was only when I turned on the television and saw live footage of a tsunami closing in on cars driving down the road that I understood the severity of what happened.

We seem not to have woken to the need for such infrastructure improvements in the U.S. Our entire west coast is part of the same "ring of fire" that circles the Pacific, of which Japan is a part. There is no reason—other than shortsightedness and right-wing aversion to federal spending on effective public works solutions—that we should not be able to prepare for what one day, inevitably, will come.

I-95 Should Go

Saw a show on PBS last night about Oregon's land use laws and how they have encouraged dense, urban-scale development while minimizing sprawl around the city. It mentioned how Portland used to have a freeway running alongside, and cutting the downtown off from, its river. When it was proposed that the artery be widened, residents not only rallied to stop that project, but—amazingly—got the whole damn thing ripped up and moved. It's been called the single best thing ever done for the city, and a major reason for Portland's downtown revival.

It reminded me of a very memorable front page piece in the Inquirer by Inga Saffron that ran way back in 2002. She brought up Portland as an example of how it's possible to undo what seems a permanent blight to Philadelphia's waterfront. Since that article originally ran, we've had the completion of the "Big Dig" in Boston. Even if we did not tear up 95 altogether (which, after all, doesn't even provide a direct connection to New York because it peters out in Princeton), Philly could restore its riverfront for a fraction of the Big Dig's cost simply by putting a little bit of the freeway into a tunnel.

Saffron's article was called "I-95's stranglehold on riverfront" and was published 11/17/02. Worth the $2.50 to purchase through the archives: http://bit.ly/fysYBr