The Philly Casino Fight, and the World

(Crossposted at Young Philly Politics.)

I work on a lot of things now, and they are all interconnected in many ways, although it’s not always obvious. What holds all of the things I work on together is the principle that the public should have the power to make decisions for itself, without intermediary, and that structures and places that allow and facilitate the necessary discussion and decisionmaking should be free, and protected by law.

I want to write about the casino fight because, as with so many things, the public conversation has become a little amnesiac about what has really happened here.

The casino fight in Philadelphia, and to some extent Valley Forge, is so much more than a traditional NIMBY fight that the comparison (which I sometimes still hear) is downright laughable. For the people who have been involved in this fight over the last 4 years now, our world has been like descending into the depths of political hell and traveling through a seedy, dark underworld of corruption, arrogance, creepy casino operators who make their living impoverishing seniors and bankrupting families, backroom deals, complete lack of respect on the part of elected officials for their own constituents, disgusting short-sightedness on the part of old people who are willing to flush Philly down the toilet on their way to retirement, Gaming Board officials with ties to the mob, open lies, votes at midnight on a vacation weekend, the failure of our business and political leadership to come up with a sustainable economic vision for the city that doesn’t involve creating a morass of crime and social problems, the silencing of the public voice, casino operators pitting neighborhood against neighborhood to incite class and racial hatred in a city they don’t care about because God knows they don’t live here, a failure to talk about property taxes and what really needs to change in our state tax structure…you name it. It has been awful to watch, even when I wasn’t able to actively participate, because it was so anti-democratic, really.

And that’s not even counting the ballot measure.

Did you forget about this?

In the winter of 2007, a number of grassroots groups with no money came together, gathered something like 13,000 signatures to get a measure on the city primary ballot that said basically, no casinos in neighborhoods. It didn’t say no casinos at all, it just said you could only build them where they were 1500 feet from homes and schools. (Which would mean the casinos would essentially have to move to the Navy Yard or the airport.)

This was a really really big deal. The process to get a measure on the city ballot via signatures is very difficult to do in a grassroots fashion. For one, the period to gather the signatures comes before the period to get signatures for candidates – in other words, it’s even colder, and standing outside of a grocery store is even more excruciating.

Two, it’s really hard to get 13,000 people to do anything unless you have a lot of money. Which they didn’t have. REALLY hard. You have to have a lot of angry people for that to happen. In fact, it’s so hard to do this, and requires so many people to do this, that the only other time this has ever happened in recent Philadelphia history was the petition drive to Recall Rizzo – which garnered a similar number of signatures – more than 20 years ago.

So… they got it on the ballot…. City council, to its credit, gave approval… and then we’re all rolling along nicely in the primary when the PA Supreme Court takes it off the ballot because Foxwoods and Sugarhouse sued, and said our vote was illegal.

No reason given. Nothing else was struck from the ballot.
Just the ruling: Philadelphians do not have the right to vote on whether we have casinos in our neighborhoods.

After that, sheer fury ensued. Casino Free Philadelphia ran their own election day operation at 30-plus polling places on May 15 anyway. It was pretty amazing, especially taking into account that this was over and above a huge number of rebellious/progressive political types who were already running/working on 20-plus other challenger city council campaigns at the same time. Not to mention the mayoral volunteers. Lot of energy, that year.

The Supreme Court decision was awful. It is the real knot in all this, that decision. That decision effectively said to me, and to all of us, that the casino owners were afraid. They were afraid of letting us choose, because they know they would lose. For all their rhetoric about it ‘being just a few neighborhoods that are anti-casino,’ those in power were really just bluffing.

Because this is the deal. Almost half the neighborhoods in the city have been threatened by a casino now, and had to organize against it, and have seen their comments and sentiments and their very self-determination about their homes and businesses mowed over by a cabal of casino operators and the people who work really really hard to see they get what they want, while the desperately needed public policy concerns that would help their neighborhoods – education, gun control, affordable housing - languish and die in Harrisburg. The other half of the city may not have been personally threatened, but they have been waiting for a really long time for someone to help them out, and they know that a casino sure as hell isn’t designed to help them. It kills me to hear the governor and the mayor get up there and say things like, “finally, we can move forward, isn’t it wonderful,” as if casinos were health care reform.

Chinatown, Fishtown, Fairmount, Pennsport, Queen Village, Society Hill, Richmond, Old City, Tioga, Center City, Wash West, Nicetown, Germantown, 9th Street, Bella Vista…and now CFP is organizing in West Philly.

Why am I writing about this? I am writing about this because I am beginning to realize that this battle is as important as I thought. I’ve moved to DC for a while to work on democracy (through opening up the media), and one of the things that I have quickly learned in DC is that the United States still sets the standards for democracy globally. I had no idea about this, but this is what people in the State department say – that when we craft any policy that is about democracy, it gets copied in other countries. I was really surprised when I heard this.

But then I realized what a huge responsibility we have. If we are the gold standard, we really have to be the gold standard. That is tremendous power to change the lives and fortunes of people around the globe – based on what goes down in a little casino battle in Fishtown. I think Bill Clinton is even coming to the National Constitution Center next week to talk about this – I don’t think it’s open to the public – but I do wish they would invite the PA Supreme Court.

There is a lot more to say about this – for example, the counterargument that cities and states are really at the mercy of global capitalism and we shouldn’t get mad at them etc etc. There is so much to the picture that I can’t cover it all, and I haven’t gotten to half the stuff I intended to.

But in the end – I just feel like - enough talk, it's time we really got to vote.

Philadelphia should have the right to vote on whether we should have casinos in our neighborhoods.

That's a campaign I would very much be down for.

Hannah

On Magic vs. Power, Continued.

There was another reason that I started using the word magic in place of the word power: sheer self-preservation.

Many times when I met powerful people, or were exposed to their organizations, I was always shocked and disturbed at how power had deformed them over the years – personally, spiritually, socially, and often even physically.

The behavior, paranoia, secrecy, and control mechanisms required to maintain their own personal power seemed to remove so many of them from the basic realities and joys of being a human being - appreciating mystery, enjoying spontaneity and humor, or being able to have a conversation free of any underlying transactional subtext.

It was deeply disturbing, and very sad, because so many of the people I met in Philadelphia had had ideals: justice, peace, freedom, equality. Generally the system that they had become a part of had done them such violence, and so they replicated it with their own subordinates. Not everyone was like this, but I saw a lot of confusion out there.

Paolo Coelho in 'Brida' wrote that there are two types of creators: those who build, and those who plant. And that those who build become trapped by the structure they have built - while those who plant are continually amazed by the new stages and shapes that appear.

I have thought about running for office in the past, because I would be very smart about it, probably win, and then would have power to accomplish progressive goals. I have struggled with this a lot, but in the end I know I cannot do this. I do not want to end up like those folks. It seems like the worst and the loneliest way to live. My job is to carry the ring of power without putting it on. To fragment and destroy all centralization of power, and return the magic (which I guess is just power broken into atomized golden dust) to those who should have it.

I consider myself exceptionally lucky to be able to do this. I have been let into the group of people who truly change the world. It is a heavy thing, but quite amazing, and quite a heavy burden. I have to really earn my stripes, if they are going to let me stay in.

I do not know precisely how power is broken into magic. Sometimes it is force, and sometimes it is music, and sometimes it is just knowing where the cracks are. It is still very mysterious to me. It is sometimes hard, to be that which grounds power – I transfer power through me to others without keeping it for myself - a conductor. But I wouldn't wish for anything else.

On Magic vs. Power.

One of the odd things about my political writing and commentary in Philly over the last few years (mostly on Young Philly Politics) is the fact that I used the term magic. I used it over and over again in place of the word power, eschewing the word power itself almost completely and creating, over two years of writing, an alternate universe in which I recast everything around me in a fantastical light. Candidates or campaigns or political acts either had magic or did not - political actors were pirates or wizards – my political intuition and professional assessment of a campaign’s chances were couched in terms of whether they had good voodoo or bad voodoo.

I did this over and over again, on a public blog, and in conversation as well, without ever really thinking about what I was doing, or why I preferred to talk about politics in terms of spell casting (which is, really, all a campaign is – the concentrated repetition of powerful words.)

I’ve asked myself lately why I did this. And I found that the answer was actually incredibly important and complicated – that I did this because it was my negotiation with the political world I was entering, the action I took to set the terms. When you first get into politics there is a reeducation-camp thing where you learn where the power centers are and where they are on the scale. And ‘power’ in those terms, I found, meant really only one thing: having access to a lot of money. That was it. At first I just hated this, and I didn’t understand it. I was very mad, and it seemed unfair, and I was just full of disgust.

The most amazing and powerful political feats are accomplished not by those with access to money, but those who have very little, and still make things happen. They have to be smarter than anyone else, and they have to work harder, but in the end they are the only people who really change the world. And that is power. This I knew in my heart, but I did not see it reflected in the way that journalists would write about politics. So what I did was come up with my own way to talk about it. They had cleaned out all the meaning of the word ‘power’ – which is, in reality, a very complicated algorhythm. So I had to use another word. The word I chose was magic.

I liked it for a number of reasons. One – magic is entirely too complicated and mysterious for people to fully understand, which is in keeping with reality. If I had to sit down and make a list of the most powerful people in Philadelphia, I don’t know if I could do it, because there are simply too many factors for which to control – is someone born into money, do they have a familiar last name, etc. Even then, I would miss people like Amy Dougherty, the Executive Director of the Friends of the Free Library, who runs a grassroots organization that operates in every neighborhood in the city, and just ran one of the most amazing campaigns I’ve ever seen with a staff of three. Power is much more fluid that people think. I used the word magic originally as a naming device, but I was right in more ways than even I knew. Power behaves, really, more like magic. It is odd, and very fleeting, and sometimes the window opens and sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes you can push and it won’t work anyway. Sometimes you are ten years ahead of your time. The word just means “to be able to do something.” That doesn’t reside permanently in any organization or operation or person.

The word itself also causes harm when it comes to organizing. Within the ‘power vs. powerless’ matrix, you have to spend a tremendous amount of time and energy convincing the ‘powerless’ that they do, in fact, have power. It would simply take too much time, it seems, to break apart the whole falsity of this silly word and the brainwashing that goes with it. Maybe that is what I will do down the road, I don’t know. So you have to go out there and say over and over again, you do have power, you do, even though you don’t have any money and very little time and the game is set up so that you can’t participate or are scared or intimidated. It takes so much work, it really does, and I am always so moved by the incredible bravery that people find within themselves. But power is such a foreign word. It has become a word that prevents us from making progress.

I am learning what I refer to as ‘Chinese magic’ now, which is basically the principles as laid out in the Tao Te Ching. This really proves my point about timing – knowledge is very much a form of power, and sometimes it comes to you and sometimes it doesn’t. Books find me when I am ready for them. I tried to read it fifteen years ago and gave up, I even lived in China, and I never got any of this. But it’s a way of talking about power that I love and that speaks to my heart. I am very lucky, at age 33, that I am at a place where I can understand this.

from Chapter Eight of the Tao Te Ching:

The sage’s way,
Tao,
Is the way of water.
There must be water for life to be,
And it can flow wherever.

And water, being true to being water,
Is true
To Tao.

. . .

The sage rules with compassion ,
And his word needs to be trusted.

The sage needs to know like water
How to flow around the blocks
And how to find the way through without violence.

Like water, the sage should wait
For the moment to ripen and be right:

Water, you know, never fights

It flows around
Without harm.

The Media Bill of RIghts

This is the foundational document of the Media and Democracy Coalition, the organization for which I work. Current signatories here.

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The Media Bill of Rights

Preamble

A free and vibrant media, full of diverse and competing voices, is the lifeblood of America’s democracy and culture, as well as an engine of growth for its economy.

Yet, in recent years, massive and unprecedented corporate consolidation has dangerously contracted the number of voices in our nation’s media. While some argue we live in an age of unprecedented diversity in media, the reality is that the vast majority of America’s news and entertainment is now commercially-produced, delivered, and controlled by a handful of giant media conglomerates seeking to minimize competition and maximize corporate profits rather than maximize competition and promote the public interest.

According to the Supreme Court, the First Amendment protects the American public’s right to “an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will prevail” and “suitable access to social, political, esthetic, moral and other ideas and experiences.” Moreover, it is “the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.”

But too often, our nation’s policymakers favor media conglomerates’ commercial interests over the public’s Constitutional rights, placing America’s democracy, culture, and economy at risk. Instead, guided by the principles that follow, policymakers must ensure that the Constitutional rights of present and future generations to freely express themselves in the media, and to access the free expression of others, using the technologies of today and tomorrow, are always “paramount.”

We ask you to join the broad coalition of consumer, public interest, media reform, organized labor and other groups representing millions of Americans in proposing the following Bill of Media Rights.

Media That Provide “An Uninhibited Marketplace of Ideas”

The American public has a right to:

Journalism that fully informs the public, is independent of the government and acts as its watchdog, and protects journalists who dissent from their employers.

Newspapers, television and radio stations, cable and satellite systems, and broadcast and cable networks operated by multiple, diverse, and independent owners that compete vigorously and employ a diverse workforce.

Radio and television programming produced by independent creators that is original, challenging, controversial, and diverse.
Programming, stories, and speech produced by communities.

Internet service provided by multiple, independent providers who compete vigorously and offer access to the entire Internet over a broadband connection, with freedom to attach within the home any legal device to the net connection and run any legal application.

Public broadcasting insulated from political and commercial interests that is well-funded and especially serves communities underserved by privately-owned broadcasters.

Regulatory policies emphasizing media education and public empowerment, not government censorship, as the best ways to avoid unwanted content.

Media That Use The Public’s Airwaves To Serve The Public Interest

The American public has a right to:

Electoral and civic, children’s, educational, independently produced, local and community programming, as well as programming that serves Americans with disabilities and underserved communities.

Media that reflect the presence and voices of people of color, women, labor, immigrants, Americans with disabilities, and other communities often underrepresented.

Maximum access and opportunity to use the public airwaves and spectrum.

Meaningful participation in government media policy, including disclosure of the ways broadcasters comply with their public interest obligations, ascertain their community’s needs, and create programming to serve those needs.

Media That Reflect And Respond To Their Local Communities

The American public has a right to:

Television and radio stations that are locally owned and operated, reflective of and responsible to the diverse communities they serve, and able to respond quickly to local emergencies.

Well-funded local public access channels and community radio, including low-power FM radio stations.

Universal, affordable Internet access for news, education, and government information, so that the public can better participate in our democracy and culture.

Frequent, rigorous license and franchise renewal processes for local broadcasters and cable operators that meaningfully include the public.

Conclusion

These principles are not meant to be all-inclusive. Rather, they illustrate an American media structure that is the American public’s present and future right under the Constitution of the United States.