democracy

On Thursday February 4, the Senate held hearings on the potential merger of Comcast and NBC Universal. During the hearings Senator Al Franken warned that we should be nervous about the companies that own our media and we should be particularly nervous when one company owns both the means to produce programs and the pipes that deliver those same programs. Senator Franken later went on to detail his dealings with Comcast CEO Brian Roberts regarding the merger, depicting either extreme dishonesty or incompetence.

Hey guys. A number of folks have asked me 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).

The Penn Project for Civic Engagement last night hosted its first of four workshops on "The City Budget: Tight Times, Tough Choices."

On Tuesday, January 27, 2009, we — the people of Philadelphia — declared our independence from casinos.