On Wednesday evening, caregivers at Broomall Presbyterian Village, a nursing home in Broomall, Pennsylvania, voted to form a union with SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania, which represents over 22,000 health care workers statewide.  These workers celebrated their first moments as proud union members by sharing their stories with Sharita Rollins, a certified nursing assistant from Philadelphia and a longtime member of SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania.  She interviewed the workers and asked them what they hoped to win in their first union contract.

The mining accident in the coal region of West Virginia is a tragedy. The loss of 25 lives in what amounted to the worst explosion in a mine in the past 25 years, along with the death of four miners who were found this past weekend, is inexcusable. We now know that the mine where this incident occurred was riddled with safety violations that the Massey Coal corporation skirted and ignored.

 
The nurses at Temple University Health System are in their third week on the picket line. These nurses, who are a part of the union PASNAP, are on strike to protect their right to advocate for patients and ensure that there are enough nurses on the floor to properly care for patients.

Like the progression of any disease making its hearty way through stages of infection and incubation before being treated and eventually annihilated, things have to get worse before they can get better. Such is the story of casinos.

Nurses and other healthcare professionals share stories that expose the impact on patients when Temple Hospital maximizes profits by cutting medical supplies, understaffing and decreasing patients' length of stay at the hospital. PASNAP (Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals) are striking over a contract that would institute a 'gag clause,' effectively barring these health professionals from advocating for patient safety.

Camden County New Jersey has announced plans to shut down a tent city encampment that has stood in Camden for over the past year. Fifty people currently live there, supporting themselves through ties with community members who offer aid and support, and looking out for one another. 
Camden officials state they will use federal stimulus funds to provide social service support to those living in the tent city. The amount of aid being offered, and how the relocations will impact residents remains unclear. 

On Tuesday, a U.S. Appeals Court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission did not have the authority to order Comcast to stop blocking peer-to-peer sharing on the Internet in the name of network management. While the ruling seems small, it has big implications. The basic message is that the FCC cannot enforce Network Neutrality, which is the principle that our corporate Internet Service Providers cannot block content or treat different pieces of content differently. The concern is that without network neutrality in place, companies like Comcast and Verizon will decide what we see, hear and read on the Internet, in much the same way that Fox News (The New Corporation) and NBC (Viacom... soon to be Comcast) do with our TV.