A tugboat pushing nine loaded coal barges chugged up the Ohio River, toward the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers.
It eventually passed the McConway & Torley steel foundry along the Allegheny, likely headed for one of the few coal-fired power plants left in America.
Hold on to that imagery: It is part of the left-behind community of Americans whose struggles with the we-know-what's-best-for-you elite will be central to the fight over our direction in the next presidential election.
Workers in the coal industry and at McConway & Torley are in the cross hairs of the progressive left. The left rails against McDonald's for not paying a salary that sustains a family of four, as it simultaneously tries to snuff out the manufacturing base that provides well-paid middle-class jobs.
McConway & Torley has been in Pittsburgh for nearly 150 years. It is one of the few places in the city where laborers can earn enough to stay out of poverty, own a home and provide security for their families' futures.
All of that is what both Democrats and Republicans are preaching in the run-up to the 2016 election; each candidate promises to rebuild the manufacturing base that evaporated from the industrial Northeast and Midwest and shifted overseas, where labor is cheaper.
Since the Civil War era, McConway & Torley has made couplers that link railroad cars, a once-deadly task performed manually by brakemen; what it produces here accounts for 60 percent of the North American market.
