José Lara just wanted a job. A company working in the natural gas fields needed a man to power wash wastewater tanks. Clean off the debris. Make them shining again. And so José Lara became a power washer for the Rain for Rent Co. “The chemicals, the smell was so bad. Once I got ...

In July of this year, Walter Brasch, award-winning journalist and longtime contributor to the old Shared Sacrifice page and politicalcontext.org currently, filed four Right to Know requests with the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors, for documents pertaining to state government issues. The Association fought the requests, and the issue ...

Politics continues to threaten the health and welfare of Pennsylvanians. The latest is how the Republican-dominated legislature and Gov. Tom Corbett separated one of the wealthiest and more high-tech/industrial areas of the state from the rural areas.   Less than a week before the 2011–2012 fiscal year budget was scheduled to expire, June ...

A national animal welfare organization has filed an ethics complaint against a Pennsylvania district attorney. SHARK (Showing Animals Respect and Kindness) charges Bucks County DA David Heckler with conflict-of-interest, favoritism, and failure to fulfill his professional responsibilities. The ethics complaint was filed with the Disciplinary Board of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. SHARK, ...

If the first year gross anatomy class at the Penn State Hershey medical school needs spare body parts to study, they can visit the cloak room of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. That’s where most of the legislators left their spines. The House voted 124–69, Dec. 13, to send an animal ...

Although more than one million Pennsylvanians are members of labor unions, and the state has a long history of worker exploitation and union activism, neither of the two largest university systems has a labor representative on its governing board. The only labor representative on the Board of Governors of the State ...

The Penn State Board of Trustees may have several times violated state law for its failure to publicly announce meetings and how it handled the firing of Coach Joe Paterno. However, these violations may be the least of the Board’s worries, as it scrambles to reduce fall-out from the scandal ...

by Walter Brasch Take a pigeon. Now put that pigeon, along with thousands of others, into small coops that don't give the bird much freedom to move. Don't worry about food or water. It won't matter. Take some of the pigeons—who are already disoriented from hours, maybe days, of confinement—and place a couple of ...

by Walter Brasch Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett may be the most adept politician in America. With the nation focused upon the union-busting Tea Party-backed Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Corbett has snuck in a plan to mine the state's resources, increase employment, reduce educational problems, and whack unions upside the head at the ...