If 2024 feels a bit familiar to you, and not in a good way, it should. It was basically 2016 on steroids.
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker
AP photo
By Denise Clay-Murray
Stop me if you’ve heard this before.
In 2024, American voters decided that when given the choice between an accomplished woman and a man who had no business running a dog park, much less the country, they’d go with the person who would mismanage the dog park.
If it sounds like the same choice that Americans made in 2016, you’d be correct. And while the only thing that’s changed is the woman in question — in 2016 it was Hillary Clinton, this year, it was Vice President Kamala Harris — they both lost to former President Donald Trump, who will be moving back into the White House in January.
Despite being convicted on 34 felony counts, looking at charges related to the 2020 Election in Georgia, charges related to the trove of classified documents he kept in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago and for inciting the riot that occurred on Jan. 6, 2021 to try and stop the election from being certified for President Joe Biden, Americans decided to send Trump back to the White House.
While the news media parroted the Trump campaign’s assertion that the Biden economy was making things too tough for consumers and that what the economy needed to improve was some good old-fashioned tariffs, the campaign commercials that played to a combination of homophobia and other prejudices told a different story.
Among the states where those commercials had an impact was Pennsylvania. In fact, the impact they had extended to a Senate race in which longtime Senator Bob Casey lost his seat to Dave McCormick, something that will most likely have an adverse impact on Philadelphia because, unlike Sen. John Fetterman, Casey returned the city’s phone calls.
Meanwhile in Philadelphia, the first term of the City’s 100th Mayor, Cherelle Parker, began in 2024. In her first year, she and new Council President Kenyatta Johnson have had to deal with the drug problem in Kensington, gun violence, and the economy. They also had to deal with the proposed 76 Place Arena project, which was contentious, to say the least.
As if that wasn’t enough, this was the year that we learned more about Sean “Diddy” Combs than we ever wanted to know and much of it surrounded ways to use baby oil that made many of us wonder if he majored in chemistry while at Howard University.
This year was also a year where we lost a lot of folks that figured prominently in the culture in ways both good and bad.
It’s time to look back on 2024, a year that embodied something my late father used to say a lot.
“A hard head makes a soft behind.”
The First Lady
When she took the oath of office in January, Cherelle Parker became the first woman to serve as the city’s mayor in the city’s history. The fact that she was also the city’s 100th mayor only underscored the historical nature of her entering the office.
Councilmember Kenyatta Johnson was also sworn in as Council president in January, replacing former President Darrell L. Clarke, who had decided to retire.
When you consider what Parker and Johnson had to face once they got to work, no one could blame Clarke or former mayor Jim Kenney for leaving.
Parker walked into the mayor’s office with a plate so filled that things were already falling off of it. Her first fiscal year budget and five-year plan were due in March.
Residents and businesses in Kensington were crying out for help with a long-standing problem with people battling both homelessness and addiction. Councilmembers Quetcy Lozada, Jim Harrity, Mike Driscoll and Mark Squilla, all of whom either live in or represent parts of Kensington, formed a caucus to try and put together solutions for the problem that could be applied to other sections of the city.
Stopping gun violence, which was a central theme of Parker’s campaign, was a challenge waiting to be met.
And a decision would have to be made about 76 Place, the $1.3 billion arena that the Philadelphia 76ers wanted to build near Chinatown. In-person meetings held by Councilmember Squilla between Chinatown residents and the team were so contentious that developers opted to hold virtual meetings to discuss the project.
Parker put many of her solutions to make Philadelphia the “cleanest, greenest, big city in America with economic opportunity for all” in place. Trash collection is now twice a week in some neighborhoods. More money has been allotted to crime prevention.
But some of Parker’s solutions haven’t gone over well with members of Council. While the cleanout of encampments on Kensington Avenue provided relief to people in those neighborhoods, those living in the encampments moved into other sections of Kensington and went as far as 30th Street Station.
She also had some solutions fall short because she didn’t speak with Council. For example, Councilmember Jeffery Young didn’t know that Parker ’s plan to put those taken from Kensington’s streets in search of treatment into the former Philadelphia Nursing Home until he read about it in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which not only didn’t go over well, but it also led to a bill being passed that would prohibit the city from leasing the nursing home from the Commonwealth after the current lease runs out.
But Parker did have some wins. Her budget passed. And to wrap up the Council session, the package of bills and resolutions needed to create 76 Place was passed. In order to get the latter done, Parker went to churches, community centers and gathering areas around the city to talk up the plan, which included a $60 million community benefits agreement that put lots of money into many of her pet projects. There was also another $20 million added to the package toward affordable housing for Chinatown.
But getting it passed wasn’t without incident as members of the No Arena Coalition attempted to shut down the Council session and had to be removed. They have promised legal action against the project.
One of the issues that came up as part of the series of public hearings regarding the 76 Place project was the issues facing SEPTA. The transit system announced that due to its financial problems, not only would have to raise fares effective Dec. 1, but riders could also look forward to cuts in service, and increased fares beginning this summer.
For a transit system that hadn’t quite recovered from the loss in ridership caused by the COVID quarantines and was facing a $240 million deficit, the fact that the Sixers were counting on 40% of the team’s fans getting to their games via mass transit to alleviate traffic was just piling on.
So, City Council called on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro for help.
Shapiro took $153 million in federal funds designated for roads and bridges and gave it to SEPTA to stave off a 21.5% fare increase scheduled for January. The idea behind the stopgap is to give the Pennsylvania Legislature more time to put together a more permanent solution to the Commonwealth’s mass transit woes.
From repairing a section of I-95 in Philadelphia following a tractor-trailer fire to finding funds for SEPTA, Shapiro came in to save the day for Pennsylvanians for much of 2024. Which is why much of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party got kind of upset with Vice President Kamala Harris when she didn’t make him her running mate in the 2024 Presidential Election.
How the election ended up showed that might not have mattered all that much.
“Siri, what’s a tariff?”
When voters in England decided to get out of the European Union thanks to the right-wingers who convinced them that Brexit was a good idea, they found themselves going to Google after the vote to see exactly what they voted on.
Once many of them found out that among the things that separating from the EU would do is lead to tariffs on certain goods, make traveling through Europe a little more difficult and possibly cause the devaluation of the British pound, they were, well, rethinking their decision.
But it wasn’t like they weren’t warned. Anti-Brexit campaigners told the public what they could expect, but no one listened to them.
I was reminded of Brexit shortly after a majority of American voters decided to put former president Donald Trump back in the White House. The day after the election, one of the trending search requests on Google was the word “tariffs.”
Once Americans figured out that in spite of Trump’s promise to cut the prices of everyday goods, tariffs — the practice of a government imposing a tax on imported goods — were going to make matters worse for them, they realized, as they did in 2016, that America’s problem with women being in charge was going to, once again, come back to bite them.
When the first presidential debate made squeamish Democrats decide that President Joe Biden — a man who was old when he was Vice President Joe Biden, by the way — was too old to remain in the office, he decided that instead of allowing folks to push Vice President Kamala Harris completely out of the way, that he’d throw his support behind her for president instead.
She picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. Some felt that Harris made the decision based on antisemitism, while others knew that Shapiro wasn’t interested in being a second in command.
Throughout the campaign we learned about such things as “Black Jobs” (In the case of the Trump administration, it appears that job will always be the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development), that it’s not safe to be a pet in parts of Ohio due to the desire of Haitians to allegedly eat them, and that schools have in-school surgical centers that will allow your child to change his or her sex between class periods.
(The list of things contained in that paragraph comes from campaign ads and the single most surreal presidential debate I’ve ever covered. The sarcasm is mine.)
If that wasn’t enough, the endorsements that Trump got from such notables as bad electric car salesman and South African apartheid reenactor Elon Musk and the Kennedy who admits to killing bears, serial adultery, and— this is my personal favorite — a worm in the brain, Robert Kennedy Jr., also attracted a lot of attention.
So in the end, as America is occasionally wont to do, it decided to send a cast of characters including the aforementioned and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance to Washington to enact a plan for America that will have as its blueprint the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and will finish the job of making America safe for oligarchs that former president Ronald Reagan started in 1981.
Yep. America’s woman problem won again. Yay.
Among the people who will be joining Trump and Vance in giving those of us who actually want to practice journalism more to work with than we could possibly imagine are Musk, who is currently arguing with his co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy on whether or not the planned mass deportations should include folks with HB-1 visas, and Kennedy Jr., who has decided to remake the Department of Health and Human Services in his own anti-vaxxer image. So, you might want to get those vaccinations while you can.
Among the other people that Trump was hoping to make a member of his cabinet was former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz. Gaetz, one of the Republican kingmakers who has helped the current Congress be one of the least accomplished in American history, was a bit of a non-starter with even some Republicans because of a House Ethics Committee report looming in the background.
He removed his name from consideration, but the report was released by the ethics committee in late December. I guess that’s because much of it had already been leaked to the media.
It also helps to lead us into the Scandals of 2024.
MeToo Part II
For many casual observers, some of the revelations in the House Ethics Committee report on former Congressman Matt Gaetz were kind of shocking.
But if you’re like me, and you watch the show “American Greed” religiously, you’re surprised it took folks this long for Congress to learn about Gaetz’s alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl because it came up during an episode of the CNBC show on his friend Joel Greenberg. Greenberg, former Seminole County, Florida tax collector, pled guilty to sex trafficking, identity theft, and stalking a political opponent, among other things.
Apparently, because these folks are usually never the sharpest knives in the drawer, Gaetz is alleged to have used Venmo, CashApp and PayPal to pay $90,000 to 12 different women, including the 17-year-old, between 2017 and 2020.
While he won re-election to his seat in Congress before being nominated for Trump’s attorney general spot, Gaetz has decided not to come back to Congress.
But at least he can head out to Mar-A-Lago for Trump’s New Year’s Eve party.
Sean “Diddy” Combs will be ringing in the New Year from a federal prison cell.
In an indictment that detailed some serious physical and sexual abuse and made it so many of us will never look at baby oil the same way again, Combs was arrested on charges including sex trafficking and racketeering in September and has been consistently denied bail.
The indictment was issued shortly after a raid at his homes in Los Angeles and Miami and his settlement of a lawsuit filed by former girlfriend Cassie Ventura, whose beating in a hotel lobby was caught on tape.
There have been several lawsuits filed against Combs by former staff members and others who have been impacted by what went on during the “freak-offs” that he allegedly forced people to participate in according to the indictment. There’s no word on when Combs’s trial will begin.
One of the people who has accused Combs of sexual assault has named Jay-Z in a Jane Doe lawsuit, accusing him of sexual assault. A judge recently ruled that she could remain anonymous during the early part of the lawsuit, but would have to reveal her identity at some point.
But while the bigger scandals in 2024 centered on young women, physical abuse and product misuse, the wives of scandalized politicos had their crosses to bear, especially locally.
Former IBEW Local 98 business manager and president of the Philadelphia Building Trades Council John Dougherty reported to prison on Oct. 1 to begin his six-year federal sentence on bribery and theft charges. He tried to delay going to prison due to his wife Celia’s longtime illness, but Judge Jeffrey Schmehl rejected his plea. The sentencing wrapped up the Dougherty saga, which began with a 2019 federal indictment alleging that Dougherty had used funds embezzled from the union to do, among other things, bribe City Councilmember Bobby Henon to do the union’s bidding.
Another local politico, former New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, was convicted in July on charges including bribery, extortion and acting as an agent for the Egyptian government. When the FBI raided the New Jersey home of the former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, they found, among other things, $480,000 in cash and $150,000 in gold bars. His wife Nadine, who Menendez tried to throw under the bus despite her also battling breast cancer, is scheduled to go to trial on many of the same charges in late January. Menendez is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 21.
Toward the end of the year, Camden, New Jersey powerbroker George Norcross took a front-row seat at the press conference where New Jersey Attorney General Matt Plotkin announced a 13-count indictment against him on racketeering charges related to development along the Camden Riverfront.
Those we lost
As I began to wrap up this Year In Review column, news came that former President Jimmy Carter, a man who made as much of a mark after he left the office by doing such things as winning the Nobel Prize and creating humanitarian agencies such as Habitat for Humanity as he did while he was president, died. He was 100.
Like 2016, 2024 has been a year of monumental loss.
Judith Jamison, the face of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater for many years, left us this year, as did poet and activist Nikki Giovanni, the musical virtuoso that gave us such musical classics as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” Quincy Jones, Tito Jackson, who went on to have a great career of his own outside of being a member of the Jackson Five, Cissy Houston, whom in addition to being the mother of Whitney Houston, was a great singer in her own right, and Philadelphia’s own Frankie Beverly, whom Philadelphia City Council honored with an honorary street naming shortly before his death.
In the world of politics, Congressmembers Sheila Jackson Lee, Eddie Bernice Johnson, and Donald Payne left us this year. Ethel Kennedy, one of the last remaining members of the Kennedy political family elders, also left us this year.
We lost the voice of Darth Vader (James Earl Jones), James Evans (John Amos), an Officer and a Gentleman (Louis Gossett Jr.), Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), the Dowager Countess of “Downton Abbey” (Dame Maggie Smith) and one half of “Starsky and Hutch” (David Soul).
Phil Donahue, whose talk show set a standard that no one is actually following anymore, left us this year. One of his more frequent guests, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, gave America the sex education it didn’t know it needed. And another one of his guests, Hydeia Broadbent, showed us the challenges of being born with HIV/AIDS and how a child navigates them.
The man who exposed the Tuskegee Experiment, Peter Buxton, also left us this year.
In the world of sports, we lost several Baseball Hall of Famers, “The Say Hey Kid” (Willie Mays), the stolen base king, (Rickey Henderson), a pitcher who created his own following (Fernando Valenzuela), the man whose likeness became the NBA Logo (Jerry West), and a man who became more famous for a car chase than he was for his Hall of Fame NFL career (O.J. Simpson).
Locally, we lost former Sixers center (and the Jimmy Carter of the NBA), Dikembe Mutumbo, Philadelphia Eagles greats Bill Bergey and Roman Gabriel, ballerina Michaela DePrince, and a man who informed us for many years on 6ABC, Wally Kennedy.
As we go into 2025, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens next as we begin Trump 2.0 (This Time It’s Personal!). Who will actually be running the country? What will that look like? Will Gov. Josh Shapiro begin his campaign for re-election or begin Shapiro 2028?
And what does all of this mean for the Delaware Valley in general and Philadelphia in particular?
No matter what happens, the SUN will be here to help you understand it.
That’s if we can even understand it ourselves.
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the article belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, The Philadelphia Sunday SUN, the author’s organization, committee or other group or individual.
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