(I'm speaking for myself here, not for any organization)

Hey guys. A number of folks have asked be to write about my experiences in jail yesterday with the other activists from Casino Free Philadelphia. Most questions have been focused on the "what was it like" track – how did they treat us, where were we locked up. That stuff was interesting and hard and frustrating, but let’s get through it quickly.

A short while after 6am Tuesday morning, fourteen protesters, including me, blocked the entrance to the Sugarhouse Casino construction site (or, as Casino Free Philadelphia likes to call it, the site of Neil Bluhm, the casino’s financier’s, future bankruptcy).

crossposted at Philly Labor blog.

Janice Churchill sat at the front of the bus by 7.30 Thursday morning, wearing her purple shirt representing that she’s a proud member of SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania. She was joining 2,000 other union members, health care workers and citizens from across the state to fight for quality, affordable healthcare for everyone. She was ready with snacks, comfortable shoes -- and stories of how lacking affordable health care affects her and the people she supports every day.

I work every day with home care attendants - workers who support people with disabilities and seniors who live independently at home. As we come to a climax in our national conversation about how to provide every person with quality, affordable health care coverage, I find myself thinking a lot about home care attendants like the folks covered in this front page story in last week’s Philadelphia Weekly.

Here's the statement the Coalition to Save the Libraries sent out to press just now.

Hope everyone can make it to the 3.30 PM celebration at Kingsessing Library tomorrow!

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BREAKING NEWS: Judge Idee Fox rules against Mayor Nutter's decision to close branch libraries without the approval of City Council.

Contact: Katrina Clarke misskatrina@mac.com (215) 272-7091
Milena Velis milena.velis@gmail.com (215) 200-3876

The Coalition will sponsor a New Year's Eve celebration of the past, present and future of Philadelphia's libraries at the Kingsessing branch, 51st and Kingsessing, beginning at 3:30 pm, Wednesday, December 31st.

As I've been able to build personal capacity for organizing here in Philadelphia, I have been really honored to work with one of the most shockingly beautiful groups that has come onto the scene in a really long time -- the Media Mobilizing Project. They are focused on two things which we've needed desperately (and in some cases, found) during this struggle to fight the budget cuts and save the libraries here in the city:

1) Building networks of trust among groups, neighbors, and communities in the city, and helping them realize and take action on their shared struggles

and 2) Creating the capacity for those networks to tell each others' stories using their own media and power in existing media outlets throughout the region.

MMP has played pivotal roles in the fight for digital inclusion in this city, in the network building and success of the movements fighting casinos, and in the development of new leaders in the growing labor movement in Philly.

We all have limited budgets this year, but if we are going to win next year's fights to protect and build programs that bring us freedom, power, and justice, we need to support MMP.

Click here to donate to MMP right now, or read their pitch below:

I'm at a big workshop in Harrisburg until late tomorrow, but I wanted to give a quick shout-out to Isaiah Thompson, a journalist at the City Paper whose work has been instrumental in getting out powerful untold stories in Philly on everything from home evictions to the underpinnings of the casino struggle to the lives of scrap collectors in the city. He just wrote a good short piece about the online writing and organizing that has happened at this blog and at a few other places in the city around the library cuts and other budget fights.

It's really awesome that he his noting that the poll that YPP put together with Research 2000 is actually penetrating up to the top, with Mayor Nutter fielding questions about it at one of his last budget forums:

... but asked about the poll at a town hall meeting Tuesday, the mayor said, "This is not about a poll. This is about running an enterprise." He suggested the poll questions may have been leading.

WHYY's Radio Times asked city spokesman Stephen Agostini about the poll, too, and it got some good coverage in the Inquirer a couple days back as well. I've been shocked but pretty stoked at the impact of the poll -- we can put non-corporate, non-government-funded research on what Philadelphia thinks at the very center of debates about fundamental city issues.

The poll wasn't perfect, and I'm not clear yet on what impact it will have on pushing City Council to listen to community proposals on meeting our budget deficit without cutting services. But I think that community fundraised research is a potentially powerful tool we can wield in our arsenals. How can we make it better? How can we make ourselves better ready to conduct polls like this, and ready, aim, fire? How can we make sure that the communities most impacted by changes like budget cuts are crafting the questions asked in polls like this?

If we do find a way to freeze library, firestation, swimming pool shutdowns -- can we use this data, or a poll designed by a good network or swath of community members, to give City Council the cover they need to fully fund city services? Can we effectively reframe the debate to make the questions we ask the fairest and most relevant in the public eye, rather than 'leading', as the Mayor describes?

EDIT: To clarify: I don't mean to say that I think the poll was 'leading'. What I mean to say is that I think that the questions we asked were clear and in so many ways the questions in the back of everyone's mind. The fact that a city official can say a poll is 'leading', just because the questions were asked by community members rather than weird official polling companies, is depressing at best. But we can fight that trend and tendency by creating data like this -- and community-created and conducted research -- and by putting it out there regularly, when battles like this come up. We can speak truth to power and make the media and our elected officals use our frames, rather than traditional corporate frames, or the ones our government wants us to use, to run our city and our lives.

Just a quick post to let folks know that the Friends of the Library are organizing to save our 11 branches -- and gathering Saturday to plan how to fight back. Learn more here -- http://libraryfriends.info/ -- and below:

Breaking News
The Free Library will take significant budget cuts that include the permanent shuttering of 20% of its buildings or 11 branches; 71 layoffs and a $1.6 million reduction to the materials (books, tapes, DVDs, periodicals, graphic novels, etc.) budget that has not been increased in 8 years. These library buildings, some of which were built with funds from Andrew Carnegie will revert back to the public properties division to be sold. The time to take action is now.

I'm learning now that of the 11 branches they want to close, about half of them are in economically depressed parts of the city. They include:

Durham, Eastwick, Fishtown, Fumo, Haddington, Holmesburg, Kingsessing, Logan, Ogontz, Queen Memorial, and Wadsworth

I'm hearing this from a librarian who says that even though this information probably isn't supposed to be public yet -- she wants the city to know what these budget cuts are doing to their communities.

Philadelphia has spent a lot of money to attract people like my unnamed librarian friend to this city. She came here to study at one of the best Library Science schools in the nation -- Drexel -- and stayed for years after earning her degree, waiting for a position in one of the cities' libraries.

Over here at my new job at SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania, health care workers across the state are locked in tight battles for healthcare for themselves and for every family in the Commonwealth. Last week, a major bill crossed the Governor's desk – banning mandatory overtime for nurses, certified nursing assistants, and the other bedrock health care professionals that keep us alive and thriving in hospitals or nursing homes. After a unanimous Senate vote and an overwhelming majority support vote in the House, the Governor signed it – forcing our health care institutions to hire enough workers to care for patients adequately, and keeping exhausted workers from making mistakes on the job.

And, while we're waiting until next term to continue the battle for the Governor's Prescription for Pennsylvania plan – bringing health care coverage to 800,000 Pennsylvanians, and fighting to prevent the hundreds of preventable deaths that happen to uninsured families every year in the state -- we can take action Thursday to hold Congress accountable to pass national health care reform! Hannah Miller has written eloquently on this Thursday's rally! See you there.

I'm working hard to support these campaigns, but my heart is especially invested in the struggle for home care workers, people with disabilities, and seniors across the state. I'm helping with a lot of efforts with the http://www.choosehomecare.org coalition – to establish a Consumer Workforce Council in Pennsylvania.

Our friends and neighbors at Casino-Free Philadelphia, as part of a struggle they've shared with groups like NABR and other community organizations fighting casinos in the city, have just won a huge victory -- they've gotten Foxwoods to consider moving from the Philadelphia waterfront.

They visited Governor Rendell today and yesterday, as he prepared to meet with Mayor Nutter, Senator Fumo, and Representative Evans and the executives of Foxwoods. Casino-Free does it right, every time -- they continue to demonstrate that public pressure and accountability from ordinary neighbors can break down even the most established power blocks.

In their email that they sent out to supporters, Casino-Free Philadelphia reminded us that it isn't just the riverfront neighborhoods -- but every neighborhood that deserves the right to be free of gambling parlors and the problems they introduce. CFP has asked us to sign on to principles that the Governor, and the casino operators, must consider in any resiting plan:

1) The resiting process must be fair, transparent and inclusive. The process used by the PGCB was unfair, secret and exclusionary. Any effort to resite the casinos must be the opposite.

2) Casinos cannot be built in or near any neighborhood. Act 71's and the PGCB's lack of social standards in its decision-making resulted in untenable sites. Around-the-clock 5,000 slot parlors with multiple liquor licenses, attracting tens of thousands of cars each day are uses that are incompatible with neighborhoods.

3) Any resiting process must consider the "no casino" alternative. No one needs two casinos in Philadelphia. A cost-benefit analysis should be performed. Prior assumptions deserve to be revisited.

4) Casino companies are not to receive bailouts. They did not merely participate in a system riddled with mistakes but they actively tried to undermine the system. (Governor Rendell suggested today that no state money would be used.)

CFP will get this letter to Rendell, Nutter, Evans, and Fumo.

We have to celebrate this as a huge step forward -- and think hard about how we can use the media attention, the deep thinking on accountable use of our neighborhoods' and communities' land, and the organizing infrastructure to engage with housing issues and other land use issues in Philly.

We also need to step up and support groups like CFP and other neighborhood champions. Bread and Roses is honoring them this October with their Community Empowerment Award. But I'm not going to wait to donate more to one of the most effective groups I've ever seen in Philly.

There's a few articles popping up online about this victory -- read them, celebrate for a minute, and then -- on to Sugarhouse and no casinos in any neighborhoods!

Al Dia: http://www.pontealdia.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=917&Itemid=1

KYW: http://www.kyw1060.com/Rendell-Says-Foxwoods-May-Bend-on-Waterfront-Site/2829622

Editorial in the Inky: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20080821_Editorial__Riverfront_Casinos.html

Wow folks -- what a victory for people fighting to make sure that we get casinos moved out of any Philadelphia neighborhood that doesn't want them --

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/20080704_Evans__Fumo_give_casinos_a...

House Appropriations Chairman Dwight Evans and State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo said at a news conference that they would draft legislation to remove the casinos' tax breaks if they did not abandon their proposed sites on the Delaware River waterfront.

The locations, which were decided upon 21/2 years ago, are "untenable and contrary to the public interest," the Democrats said in a statement.

"We are sending a message to citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that we are trying to fix the problem," said Evans, joined by nine Philadelphia-area lawmakers in addition to Fumo. "We didn't think it would be the problem it is today, but it has created tension for people in the community as well as politically."

Hi folks -- I've seen lots of debate about whether or not the information that my colleagues and friends released Friday about the police action at 17th and Ridge was enough for folks. There's been much conversation and support bubbling up from the city for the folks who were evicted Friday. Over the weekend they developed this press release, and decided to organize a press conference to answer questions and to hammer home the point -- the city can't use the police, L&I, or any other instrument to stop us when residents ask questions about the rising police presence and surveillance in the city. Hope to see you at the press conference.

RELEASE: Homeowners Fighting Police Brutality Illegally Arrested, Never Charged
Home Closed by Dept. of Licensing & Inspections, Property Seized by PA State Police
Press Conference: Tuesday, June 17th, 1 pm, Outside West Side of City Hall

Media Mobilizing Project and local broadband activists are urging Philadelphians to call Mayor Michael Nutter on Wednesday May 21, (today!) to demand that the city step in to save the Wireless Philadelphia network and keep digital inclusion as part of its agenda.

Earthlink plans to begin dismantling the $17 million network June 12, after failing to convince either the city or a non-profit to assume ownership. If you are making this call, you could say:

My name is ___________, and I live at __________ here in Philadelphia. Please tell Mayor Nutter to halt Earthlink's dismantling of the municipal wireless network. Before Earthlink breaks its contract with our city, we need a full conversation about how to get everyone online!

Or something of that nature.

Call now! (215) 686-3000 or (215) 686-2250.

For more info and background, click here.

In case you missed it: on Wednesday, Philadelphians who want to check out just how new Mayor Nutter's "new day" is have a chance to do just that, by asking the city to make sure that Earthlink does not dismantle the 17 million dollar wireless network affixed to Philadelphia's lightpoles. Beth McConnell posted the news release from the Media Mobilizing Project yesterday:

Media Mobilizing Project and local broadband activists are urging Philadelphians to call Mayor Michael Nutter on Wednesday May 21, to demand that the city step in to save the Wireless Philadelphia network and keep digital inclusion as part of it's agenda. Earthlink plans to begin dismantling the $17 million network June 12, after failing to convince either the city or a non-profit to assume ownership.

When: Wednesday, May 21st 9AM-5PM

Phone Number: (215) 686-3000 or (215) 686-2250.

"A new day?" you say? But it was John Street who put Philadelphia on the wireless map by saying that our city would be one of the first, and the biggest of the wireless hotspots in the country. "Out with the old," you might say -- or "I don't know anyone who uses this network anyway, and it's a waste of money."

Well, I'm here to tell you that if Mayor Nutter wants Philadelphians to get online and to enjoy all the benefits that affordable, ubiquitous access can provide, abandoning Wireless Philadelphia is exactly the wrong start. Plus -- Mayor Nutter is letting Earthlink break a contract it made with our city to operate this network for at least ten years. Letting an out-of-state company walk away from a deal to put our city online, just because the deal is inconvenient, sounds a lot more like yesterday than a new day to me, Mayor Nutter.

Mayor Nutter talks about the concerns he has when it comes to the costs of operating a wireless network -- he doesn't want city residents to pay 3 million dollars a year to subsidize this internet service. Fair enough, I guess, but we should remember that we haven't spent anything at all, yet, on installing or operating the network. The investment and the risk here in the Philly market were Earthlink's. After endless debate in City Council and in the court of public opinion, the city decided to choose a wireless network builder that would build and operate a network at its own cost, and build a profit off of the customer base that it would attract. That didn't work out for a bunch of reasons -- but Mayor Street, and now, Mayor Nutter, have their heads screwed on sideways if they think that a city as big and diverse as Philadelphia can break the digital divide without any investment at all.

On top of that -- instead of committing to being an anchor tenant in the network, paying for city accounts and service and taking some responsibility for using it, the city chose to build a quasi-private nonprofit, Wireless Philadelphia, that would somehow figure out how to force Earthlink to provide reliable, cheap internet to folks without computers or experience using them -- while also raising money to subsidize those computers and that training. With dollar signs and technology-minded fame in his eyes, Mayor Street ran forward, promising no cost to the city, and profit to Earthlink -- forgetting that real investment is needed for real digital inclusion.

Greg Goldman and Wireless Philadelphia should be praised for working hard to raise money and to pilot that training, as Earthlink started to shutter its wireless projects nationwide. He should also be congratulated for sticking to his post and his battleground -- he and Wireless Philadelphia seem to be fighting hard to make the city and Earthlink stop their rush to dismantle the $17 million dollar network.

Whether or not we think that wireless is the right way or the wrong way to provide service to thousands of people who otherwise would have to wait hours at the library to get access to blogs like this, we have to face facts -- if we let the city shut the door on Wireless Philadelphia, we're saying that getting our neighbors online doesn't matter. Instead of bowing to Earthlink's tantrum, the Mayor should be fighting to keep the network online while negotiating a real settlement with Earthlink, Wireless Philadelphia, and the dozens of community groups and institutions who want a seat at the table.

For starters: Earthlink, breaking its contract to serve the city for at least ten years? The Mayor and the City Solicitor need to keep our wireless equipment on our poles and Earthlink's service running, at least for the time being. Next: Earthlink, suing in federal court to keep their contract-breaking liabilities to $1 million dollars or less? If we decide to let Earthlink go, we need a compensation package and a real deal that puts the city on its next steps towards real digital inclusion.

And that's the real point. When it comes to folks and their basic human right to communicate, the technology is a lot less important than all of us coming together to decide what we need and to implement it. The municipal wireless negotiations were notorious for cutting out immigrant communities, independent media makers, and neighborhoods that Comcast and Verizon never visited with cable modems or DSL. And, with no wireless network or organized base of community members clamoring loudly for digital inclusion, Comcast and Verizon will feel well within their rights to smack down any other attempt at the city fighting to serve our community with a network that it owns. Remember: Verizon got the legislature to pass a law keeping municipally-controlled broadband and communications out of every other city in the state back in 2004. Verizon got the right to veto any other community and its plans -- and Rendell signed it.

We got a pass because of Wireless Philly, because we fought to make the decision ourselves -- and I hope we all intend to fight for our right to serve our city with communications any way we damn well please.

Starting with our calls to the Mayor tomorrow, and the Media Mobilizing Project's wireless forum on June 3rd at Temple, we can start fighting to make sure that Philadelphia, and the communications companies who profit here, provide us with communications that are worthy of our great city.

Both the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote stories in the past two days discussing the financial support that Sugarhouse Casino majority-owner Neil Bluhm has provided to the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama. As the Inquirer tells us:

The Obama campaign said yesterday it saw nothing inconsistent in the senator's accepting support from Neil G. Bluhm, a Chicago-based real estate developer. According to the Washington Post, Bluhm has bundled together $78,000 in contributions from himself and his family.

Mr. Obama's position on casino gambling seems confusing at best. He made one oft-mentioned quote to the Chicago Defender back as a State Senator, fighting the then-Governor of Illinois Rod Blogojevich's hopes to patch up a budget deficit with casino receipts, saying that the "moral and social cost of gambling, particularly in low income communities could be devastating." But during and after his hard-fought race for the presidential primary win in the Nevada caucus, he defended himself against Clinton camp attacks on his gambling positions by saying:

Asked in February about his views, Obama told The Associated Press that Nevada should be proud of how it's used gambling as a "very successful economic model."

"The concerns that I had in Illinois related to the way in which those who own these (gambling river) boats had a very exclusive monopoly, were making enormous contributions to the state Legislature and were having a disproportionate influence on the legislation," Obama said.

Obama also was a critic of lawmakers accepting political contributions from gambling interests that were seeking permits from the Illinois Legislature.

The Senator said he continued to believe there is "certainly a potential moral and social cost to gambling, if it's not properly regulated, if children have access to it. It's something I continue to be concerned about."