Today, Main Street Action announced its role as a grassroots partner in the Battleground Alliance, a $50 million effort to flip control of the U.S. House by organizing in more than 35 key districts. The campaign will focus on places where the GOP’s brutal budget cuts, especially to healthcare, are hitting families hard.

Main Street Action will lead organizing efforts in Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina, Iowa, Minnesota, and Michigan, where small business owners are stepping up as trusted messengers and community anchors.

“We’re not here to play pundit. We’re here because Americans can’t afford their meds, the employees of small businesses are losing healthcare coverage, and our communities are barely hanging on,” said Richard Trent, Executive Director of Main Street Action. “Small business owners talk to hundreds of people a week—and when they speak out, people listen. They’re perfectly positioned to ensure politicians can’t hide behind spin while working families pay the price.”

The Battleground Alliance, a coalition of more than 30 labor and grassroots organizations, is tapping directly impacted people to lead this fight—workers, caregivers, immigrants, and small business owners who’ve watched Congress put billionaires and lobbyists ahead of everyday Americans.

Main Street Action’s contribution to the coalition is clear: cutting through the noise with the kind of local credibility no TV ad can buy.

“Small business owners aren’t political insiders—they’re the folks running the coffee shop, the barber shop, the corner store,” said Shawn Phetteplace, National Campaigns Director of Main Street Action. “But we see what these policies do in real life, and we’re done staying quiet. If our Representatives vote to gut Medicaid or reward corporations while the rest of Main Street struggles, we’re gonna make sure every voter knows it.”

With this bold new partnership, Main Street Action is doubling down on what they do best: turning the voices of everyday entrepreneurs into political power. By organizing in the communities where small businesses are most vital and most vulnerable. Main Street Action is not just fighting for votes, they are fighting for a future where working families shape our democracy.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

After spending over a quarter of a billion dollars on Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign, Elon Musk is pouring money into a Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. Musk has spent more than $18 million to support Trump-backed candidate Brad Schimel over liberal Susan Crawford and has been paying Wisconsin voters $100 to help flip the state’s top court. This election could impact abortion rights, unions and Republicans’ ability to keep gerrymandered districts in place to control Congress. “The level of corruption at play here, the level of money at play here, really is a warning sign for what’s happening to our democracy,” says Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The coalition, which included Article 19 Mexico and Central America, Protection International Mesoamerica, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP), and the Association of Journalists of El Salvador (APES), collaborated with civil society groups and journalists to address pressing challenges faced by the press during the pivotal electoral period.

On February 1, the coalition announced the mission to El Salvador and called upon the government to foster an environment conducive to journalistic endeavors, safeguard citizen’s right to be informed, and reinforce the media’s role in strengthening democracy. Read the full statement here.

On February 5, after the elections, the coalition expressed concern that the government used emergency measures to control information and stigmatize critical media during the elections and highlighted instances of self-censorship and other obstacles faced by journalists. Read the full statement here.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“We welcome this overdue conviction as a necessary victory against impunity in crimes against journalists in Colombia,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ´s program director, from New York. “Colombian authorities should adopt the necessary measures to ensure no other journalist ever has to endure the persecution that Claudia Julieta Duque faced.”

On November 20, the court convicted Ronal Harbey Rivera Rodríguez, a former detective of the now-defunct state intelligence agency Department of Administrative Security (DAS), and sentenced him to 12.5 years in prison, according to news reports, a copy of the decision, and a statement by the Bogotá-based Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP).

The court determined that Rivera was guilty of psychologically torturing and harassing Duque, making intimidating phone calls, and spying on the journalist between 2001 and 2004 in retaliation for her reporting on the 1999 murder of journalist Jaime Garzón. The decision came after Duque appealed a lower court ruling in June 2023 that acquitted Rivera.

The Bogotá superior district court also declared that Rivera’s actions against Duque constituted a crime against humanity carried out with the knowledge of the state. It ordered that Colombia’s president issue a public apology to Duque.

Rivera is a fugitive from justice, and the FLIP statement called for his immediate capture.

Duque had been harassed and received anonymous death threats in the early 2000s following her reporting on the murder of Garzón, whom she alleged may have been killed by the DAS. In 2014, a Bogotá criminal court sentenced a former high-ranking intelligence official to 11 years in prison for carrying out a campaign of aggression and death threats against Duque.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Image by Matt Palmer.

I retired in 2020 after decades as a mental health outreach worker. My job involved going out to my clients’ apartments – usually in sprawling housing projects or in “section 8” apartments in run down neighborhoods. Some of my clients slept in backyard sheds or abandoned factories and I met with them on playgrounds, parking lots or street corners. Poor people are a more diverse group than most of us realize – a few of my clients had a significant number of college credits, and some had been born into relative privilege before the invisible trap door to the bottom opened up. Childhood trauma and later addictions often lubricate the hinges of this portal.

Trauma can mean many different things – a nine year old girl told me, rather matter-of-factly, that she had seen several men knock her neighbor unconscious after he intervened in a domestic dispute. Another child with a swollen lip explained that his step father had slapped him. Anyone can experience trauma, but poor children endure an outsized share.

We hear a lot about upward mobility but little about downward mobility – the much more crowded lane for America’s two way class traffic. There are tens of millions of poor people in America, generally sequestered from the awareness of more fortunate members of the public. The manner in which an enormous and growing segment of the population can be kept from plain sight involves public policy “slight-of-hand.”

In Greenfield, Massachusetts, where I worked, three large housing projects, each with several hundred units, had been discreetly carved into the woods along the bubbling Green River. Two of these were owned by private real estate corporations. One of these privately owned complexes, built in the river valley abutting adjacent hills, had been constructed almost directly beneath the razor wire and concrete structures of “The Franklin County Jail and House of Corrections,” Prisons and housing projects share a similar mystique – both are usually set back from the road and both provoke lurid fears. The children that I worked with would commonly point to the prison and casually name the relatives incarcerated there – “my uncle, my step-dad, my older brother.”

People living in housing projects have little floor space and almost nowhere for storage. One guy had a pile of spare car parts and batteries crammed behind the couch. A profusion of unopened plastic soda bottles often dominated the kitchen areas in the homes that I visited and these would, if necessary, spread out into other rooms. The man with the stashed car parts carefully placed four 2 liter bottles on every step leading to the second floor. You had to carefully tip toe past them. Dollar stores sold these for 79 cents each. It was hard to resist.

Sugar addiction has a choke hold on poor communities and I would typically see Little Debby’s or Hostess pastries piled on countertops. Little Debby’s must hold the world record for cheap calories. One particular frosted bun has 500 calories without a molecule of nutrition, and sells for 50 cents. This poisonous confection contains a wallop of high fructose corn syrup held together with a sprinkle of flour, corn starch, and the notorious, invisible dollop of palm oil – the scourge of both rainforests and poor people  It almost seemed like Little Debby’s had a mandate to hook in impoverished children on behalf of the global corn, palm oil and sugar industries.

Many of my clients had lost all or most of their teeth by age 30. Poor people, famously struggle with sky high rates of obesity and diabetes. One women in my caseload had such severe osteoporosis that, by age 50, she had suffered a hip fracture. Both poverty and high sugar consumption correlate with low bone density Tooth loss is often a harbinger of early mortality, and, life expectancy in the poorest towns in Franklin County is 15 years shorter than in the wealthiest towns of Middlesex County.

I was acutely aware that my job offered an intimate, panoramic peek into the underbelly of capitalism, but I never thought at all about how the lives of my clients fit into the larger context of climate overheating. If I had thought about it years ago I would have likely dismissed any connection at all. Most of my clients did not drive – having no drivers’ license is often one of the defining features of those living in poverty – and they inevitably had very modest habits as consumers. The story of climate change, we have come to understand, does not entirely center on fossil fuels – the industrial aspiration to build an empire of pseudo-nutrition requires the appropriation of unspoiled habitat. The diseases overrepresented in impoverished communities – obesity, diabetes, emphysema, osteoporosis, HBP, asthma, coronary blockage, mental illness, etc. – are deeply entwined with shrinking habitats and overheated climate. We might even think of poverty and climate as a single, indivisible issue.

Those living below the poverty line have so little that one might easily conclude that there are no resources left to hoover out of people who have already been turned upside down to shake out the last few coins. But that sort of thinking is a disservice to the resourceful persistence of corporate schemes. The increasingly privatized and highly profitable “prison industrial complex” proves that billions of dollars can be squeezed from the poorest communities.

Consider, also, bank overdraft fees that, in 2019, drained over 15 billion dollars from America’s poorest citizens into the coffers of wealthy bankers. My clients sometimes showed me bank statements with savings under a dollar. Those with depleted accounts often have to pay “maintenance fees.” A trickle extracted from each poor person gathers into torrents and oceans of banker profits. Wherever there is rampant, unregulated corporate plunder there is environmental ruin.

The plastic soda bottles on my client’s staircase might be conceptualized as a point on a large circle connecting his obesity and life threatening asthma to Coca Cola profits and rain forest destruction.  65 million acres of moist, tropical lands have been stolen from the carbon absorbing plans of mother nature, and given over to the cause of sugar cane – the essential ingredient in soft drinks and ultra processed foods. It is a lose/lose situation for all of us who are not executives of food conglomerates. While I must emphasize that poor communities suffer the worst injuries from industrial food marketing, it is important to recognize that people from all social classes suffer and die for the bottom line of Cargill

In the homes of most of my clients ( at least for those who could intermittently afford to pay for cable) the TV was almost always on as a sort of semiconscious background murmur. Material wealth is inversely proportioned to TV watching time – thus, a ghastly paradox: those with the least money view the most advertising. The lords of capitalism obviously know that most of their TV addicted targets have no means to purchase Porsches and Rolex watches but have just barely enough to buy meat, fast foods, soda and cheap baked items loaded with salt, palm oil and high fructose corn syrup. Of course, all these things come wrapped in plastic.

Plastic waste is particularly problematic in poor areas, and my clients often stored mountains of empty plastic bottles to return for a couple of dollars. The plastics industry, a branch of the fossil fuels empire, generates nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars in annual, global profits. It is beyond my scope here, to detail the medical and environmental destructiveness of plastic, but these compounds, like climate overheating and nuclear war, represent an existential threat to life on earth.

I think of “free surface hydraulics” as being the most apt metaphor for capitalism. Liquid water conforms to the contours of geological structures and the dictates of gravity – water never exhibits free will. It cannot flow uphill or form lakes where no lakebed exists. So too, capitalism clings to predetermined principles always aligned with the quest to maximize profits and expansion. History has proven that capitalists will exploit child labor, work people to death in systems that grant corporate access to slave labor, or poison the totality of living things with tetraethyl lead unless forced to stop by popular will or governmental decree. Engineers do not beseech water to flow in an advantageous direction – they build canals.

We deceive ourselves if we imagine that capitalists ruminate over moral issues and struggle to find some sort of ethical compromise in which the preservation of the environment and the feeding of humanity can both be accomplished. Capitalism, by nature, kicks ethical constraints aside, just as water runs down hill. The CEO of Hormel is not about to renounce ultra processed foods and reduce profits – there are no belated moral epiphanies. Ebenezer Scrooge does not inhabit the real world. Processed foods are cheap and addictive, and the rain forest is an obstacle to the sugar, fat and beef needed to make them.

Nothing has laid bare the intent and the soul of capitalism like tobacco. Only massive government intervention has slowed the murderous aspirations of big tobacco.  The hydraulic nature of capitalism can be seen in the way that this industry, – blocked from its former commercial domination – hones in (like water seeking a streambed) on the solitary remaining market, poor people. While the US has largely banned tobacco advertising, tobacco products are highly visible in franchised, convenience store chains that hawk what I call, “the addictive trio” – junk food, lottery tickets and cigarettes.

Tobacco and nicotine vaping go hand in hand with Little Debby’s snacks, as poor people – often confined to food deserts – have little choice other than to use convenience stores as a nutritional hub. Most of my clients smoked and several suffered from emphysema and asthma. One of my clients was hospitalized ten times in a single year for asthma, and the prednisone prescribed to treat his lung inflammation added another fifty life-threatening pounds to his frame. The added weight destroyed his knees, and, at age 45 he walked with a cane.

Smoking is overwhelmingly more common among poor people. The tobacco industry may be so renowned for mass murder that we barely give it credit as a source of greenhouse gasses, but annually this industry belches 84 megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere while poisoning ecosystems and occupying lands that would otherwise support dense forests.

In a world of constant warfare, angry fascist movements and self serving political regimes, it may be hard to get worked up over palm oil. But palm oil is often the saturated fat of choice to create the desired consistency of sugary, processed, commercial foods like the above mentioned Little Debby’s and it also has an outsized role in deforestation, animal cruelty and human rights abuses of indigenous Indonesian populations.

According to a 2015 investigative piece in the Wall Street Journal, a Malaysian plantation sold palm oil harvested by slave laborers to a number of multinational food conglomerates. It is indeed telling that a powerful institution can spike global carbon, exploit slave laborers, harden arteries of untold millions, and wipe out endangered species, all while getting caught (but not punished) attempting to silently tip toe past the mass media.

All seed oil production – soybean, sunflower, peanut, canola and several others – contributes to deforestation. As ultra processed foods (UPFs) have become one of the primary commodities to increase industrial agriculture’s profits, the urgent impulse to hack away at rain forests increases.

Fast foods – a huge niche in the UPF industry – created two problems for my clients: (1) Venues like McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King sell extremely addictive, high fat, high sugar, low nutrition meals that have been appropriately called heart attack food. (2) The overpriced and addictive offerings of industrial fast food chains put a crushing burden on poor people’s precarious financial status.

The looming possibility of rent default colored almost all family relationships for the people in my caseload – on countless occasions I listened to back and forth accusations directed toward spouses, partners, children, housemates, parents or grandparents who had allegedly imperiled the family solvency with a binge on fast foods.

Keep in mind that a two bedroom apartment in western Massachusetts averages well over a thousand dollars monthly, and that Social Security checks ran along a continuum between $600 and $800 monthly – in single parent households, one check might have to support an entire family. Many disabled people are denied social security and waiting lists for subsidized housing often cause people to languish for five years or more. Against this backdrop of impossible budgeting, poor people struggle with fast food addictions – the cravings for these iconic American menu items may be as potent as those associated with heroin. To make up for the monthly shortfall many of my clients worked “under the table,” but local, informal employers pay only a fraction of the minimum wage.

An average meal at McDonald’s orendy’s costs $13. For my clients, every impulsive indiscretion threatened to bounce back and cause rent default. But the sins of McDonald’s far exceed the ruin that this company brings to the peace of mind and health of their disadvantaged customers. McDonald’s contributes some 53 million metric tons annually of CO2 to the biosphere, and was one of the primary clients of Brazilian farmers who burned down 7.5 million hectares of Amazon rain forest in 2019.

If poverty and climate comprise a single, inseparable challenge to humanity, does that change how we envision the climate movement?  Many climate activists have identified climate mitigation as a call to abolish capitalism. That perspective is here, and here, and here, and here, and here – and I could fill endless pages with links to writings that propose that the absolute first critical step to saving the planet is the destruction of capitalism.

But capitalism has long been seen as the primary cause of poverty and this short piece by noted Marxist economist, Richard Wolff reminds us all that, long before climate change proved that capitalism is even more sinister than we had ever imagined, many had seen the end of a market economy as a precondition to establishing equity, human rights and universal access to adequate housing, nutrition and medical care. Marx did not formulate his economic principles in response to environmental destruction, but as a means to address inequity, exploitation and suffering.

My clients had no political power. Most of them were not even registered to vote, and the few that were usually didn’t. I once asked one woman if she had registered to cast her ballot, and after a long withering look – that I perceived as pitying – she softly uttered, “why?” The population of my caseload represents a great many millions of people nationally, and just recently I have been thinking about an improbable alliance between the very poor and the climate movement. Historically, the most dispossessed and forgotten populations have organized and mounted resistance in Europe. In Greenfield, just a few years ago, a group of homeless people occupied the town green for weeks to protest against unresponsive authorities.

Many activists have argued that the climate movement must broaden its base, form alliances and coalitions, and – this is critical – develop the sort of rhetorical gravitas commensurate with the task of redirecting human fate. If poverty has deep systemic ties to climate catastrophe, does that compel us to expand our collective vision, and to protest all of the hostile societal forces that punish poor people?

Should Extinction Rebellion not merely confront MacDonald’s over the issue of meat, methane emissions, and rain forest destruction, but also for unfair labor practices, excessively high prices, massive profits and the practice of inflicting addictive, ultra processed, carcinogenic, artery clogging poisons upon poor communities? Should housing, universal basic income and universal health care be essential components of the climate activist platform? Is climate change a class issue (with poor people hurt most by climate heating, and more privileged people comprising the base of the movement) and, if so, how can these class issues be addressed? Not that long ago the idea of working class solidarity drove leftist ideology..

How much of an imaginative stretch is it to picture climate activists demanding that MacDonald’s pay reparations to those people harmed by their products in much the same way that tobacco and opiate manufacturers were held accountable for criminal deeds? I believe that these are important things to consider – the climate movement cannot stand alone and expect to make sea changing economic and political transformations. One should be encouraged by Extinction Rebellion’s recent focus on building alliances. I am particularly enthusiastic about Extinction Rebellion’s embrace of “sortition” or citizen’s assemblies – the most democratic institution ever imagined. Sortition is a radical response to class inequity. Climate overheating intersects with many kinds of human (and animal) suffering – these intersections must be the points of contact for alliances.

If the goal of the climate movement is to replace capitalism – perhaps with a decentralized, grass roots system of worker run cooperatives and farms – this will take an enormous, heroic and almost inconceivable effort to bring working class and poor people into the climate movement, and into leadership roles. I have described my clients in terms of their suffering and poverty, but poor people have a superior sense of community, generosity and altruism. I repeatedly saw people risk eviction in order to take in unhoused family members and even utter strangers. We don’t generally think of poor people as being a critical constituency within the climate movement, but I believe that there will be no climate solution without the participation of those who have been most harmed and alienated by the architects of future extinction.

This piece was first published at Resilience.

The post Poverty and Climate Overheating: Flip Sides of One Coin appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Phil Wilson.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Karolina Kluczewska.

About 7:10 p.m. on Sunday, October 16, in the northern town of Montelíbano, two men aboard a motorcycle fatally shot Moreno while he was at the fast-food restaurant that he owned, according to news reports and Bogotá-based Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP).

Moreno was the director of independent online news outlet Voces De Córdoba, which published local news reports on Facebook, and a well-known community leader who received years of threats for his reporting on political corruption and drug-trafficking groups, FLIP Executive DirectorJonathan Bock told CPJ via WhatsApp. The Colombian newsmagazine Cambio said Moreno recently investigated illegal gold mining by a powerful drug-trafficking group known as the Gulf Clan.

The Colombian government’s National Protection Unit (UNP) had assigned a bodyguard to protect Moreno and gave him a protective vest and an early-warning panic button, Jhon Murillo, a UNP spokesman, told CPJ via WhatsApp. However, at about noon on the day he was killed, Moreno, who didn’t believe protection was necessary while working at his restaurant, told his bodyguard that he could take the rest of the day off, which he did, Murillo said.

“The brutal killing of Rafael Emiro Moreno clearly demonstrates the deadly risks for Colombia’s most threatened journalists,” said Natalie Southwick, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean program coordinator, in New York. “Colombian authorities must investigate Moreno’s killing to determine if it was related to his work, bring those responsible to justice, and urgently overhaul the country’s protection program to ensure that it keeps those under its care safe.”

Murillo said the UNP provided protection for Moreno for the past six years and that the journalist recently asked for a second escort and a vehicle since he was often left unprotected when his bodyguard ended his work shifts. But Murillo said UNP’s evaluation of Moreno’s security situation had not yet been completed at the time of his death.

Col. Jhon Fredy Suárez, the police chief of the northern Córdoba department, which includes Montelíbano, told Bogotá’s W Radio station that since 2019, Moreno had reported at least 20 death threats against him and that his department was investigating Moreno’s killing. Colombia’s attorney general’s office said it had assigned a special investigative unit that was taking “urgent action” to solve the crime and identify those responsible.

FLIP’s Bock said that it was the first time that a Colombian journalist under government protection had been killed.

On Friday, October 21, Moreno was scheduled to take part in a panel discussion in Bogotá, the capital, on the dangers facing regional journalists in Colombia, Jaime Abello, director of the Gabo Foundation, the nonprofit journalism foundation that organized the event, said.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman handily defeated Rep. Conor Lamb in the Democratic primary for the battleground state's open U.S. Senate seat on Tuesday, pitting the progressive against whichever right-wing candidate prevails in the deadlocked GOP contest between Mehmet Oz and Dave McCormick.

"We're going to win in November the same way we won tonight—by fighting for every county, and every vote."

In a statement following his 33-point victory over Lamb, whose campaign was endorsed by right-wing Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and bankrolled by Wall Street financiers, Fetterman thanked his supporters for sticking with him, particularly after he suffered a stroke just days before the election.

"The fact that so many of you entrusted me with your vote means the world to me, and it's something I'll never take for granted," said Fetterman, who underwent successful pacemaker implant surgery on Tuesday. "I'm feeling better every day, and I'm going to be back on the campaign trail to thank you all in person soon."

Fetterman—who has vowed to be a decisive Senate vote in favor of abortion rights, pro-labor legislation, and abolishing the filibuster—went on to emphasize the stakes of the upcoming contest between him and the Republican nominee, a race that will determine who fills the seat left open by Sen. Pat Toomey's (R-Pa.) retirement.

The winner, Fetterman noted, could determine which party controls the U.S. Senate next year.

"This is the most important race in the country," he declared. "Control of the Senate is going to come down to Pennsylvania, and we have to flip this seat. We have a hard fight ahead of us—but Pennsylvania is worth fighting for. We're going to win in November the same way we won tonight—by fighting for every county, and every vote. Because every place matters, and no place deserves to be written off."

Conceding defeat, Lamb promised to do "everything I can to help Democrats win" in the general election.

"Our entire democracy is on the line in November," said Lamb. "Democrats need to be unequivocally united in our defense of this democracy, and we will be. John's vote in the Senate is essential to protect this democracy, and he will have my vote in November."

President Joe Biden, who stayed on the sidelines in the closely watched Pennsylvania race, said in a statement that Democrats "are united around John, who is a strong nominee, will run a tough race, and can win in November."

Meanwhile, the GOP primary race between Dr. Oz—a television personality widely viewed as a crank and a peddler of dangerous misinformation—and McCormick, a former hedge fund executive, is likely headed for a recount as the latest tally showed Oz leading by just 0.2 percentage points with 94% of the vote counted.

Kathy Barnette, a far-right GOP candidate with a long history of bigoted rhetoric against Muslims and gay people, surged in the final weeks of the Senate campaign but ultimately fell behind Oz and McCormick, ending up with just under 25% of the vote.

"John is the perfect candidate for 2022—regardless of who the Republicans nominate tonight."

Former President Donald Trump endorsed Dr. Oz in the race, claiming that "people love him, otherwise he wouldn't have been on air for 18 years."

Fetterman's small-donor-funded campaign said late Tuesday that no matter who emerges as the Republican nominee, the lieutenant governor and former Braddock mayor is well-positioned to win in November.

"In a tough midterm election in which traditional Democrats are going to struggle, John doesn't have to convince people he’s not like other Democrats or other politicians—they can see it for themselves," the campaign said in a statement. "John is the perfect candidate for 2022—regardless of who the Republicans nominate tonight."

"To win in 2022, Democrats will have to do things differently," Fetterman's team added. "It won't just come down to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Margins in rural areas will matter. Democrats will have to focus on turning out voters across the state—in rural towns and cities."

Speaking at an election-night rally as the Democratic nominee continued his recovery in the hospital, Fetterman's wife Gisele told supporters that the November contest is "a race for the future of every community across Pennsylvania."

"For every small town, for every person who calls those small towns home, and for every person who's considered leaving because they didn't see enough opportunities," she added. "It's a race for a better Pennsylvania and for a better country."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.