News and Opinion Philadelphia Weekly

Little Jazz Man

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:14:02 PST

Nazir Ebo has a tough act to follow. His older brother, 18 year-old drummer Justin Faulkner, already has a list of credentials long and impressive enough to make musicians twice his age green with jealousy. Last year Justin finished his senior year of high school on the road while he toured with Branford Marsalis. Luckily, it seems that 9-year-old Nazir isn’t fazed by his brother’s glory, only inspired.

“When I was about five I would listen to songs Justin played in his band, and then try to remember all of them and play them,” Nazir recalls. When he had gotten enough practice on Justin’s drums—seizing any moment Justin rested as a drumming opportunity—the boys’ mother bought Nazir his own set.

Now Nazir has taken over end of the Faulkner’s living room as his own domain, and he supplies the neighborhood around 51st and Walton Avenue with the breathtaking sounds of his drumbeats. After he’s finished his homework.

Intervention: Philly

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:39:39 PST

Vincent Ceraso is standing in the living room of a posh house in the suburbs of Philly with a group of people he just met a few weeks earlier. The mood is somber as they quietly wait for the doorbell to ring. It’s a surprise party of sorts. Ceraso’s never met the guest of honor, but after weeks of investigating him, Ceraso feels like he knows him inside-out. “The only thing I don’t know at this point, is what [he] looks like,” says Ceraso, who’s likely been up the night before playing this scene out in his mind. It’s Ceraso’s job to get the target to surrender. So many things could go wrong. “They get extremely emotional, sometimes violent,” says Ceraso about the people he’s hired to confront. It’s not easy getting between an addict and his or her drug of choice.  

The bell rings and Ceraso instructs the guest of honor’s wife to answer it. From where Ceraso’s standing, he can see the woman at the door, but her husband is still obscured from everybody’s view. She takes a deep breath and opens the door.  

“He starts yelling at her, ‘Back up! Back up!’” remembers Ceraso, whose big blue eyes widen behind boxy dark-framed glasses (with mini skulls emblazoned on the sides) as he recalls the story. “So she’s like this, like it’s a stick-up,” he says, raising his hands up high in the air like in a Western. “All I see is her backing up … she looked like she saw a ghost.” In that moment Ceraso, a modern-day mercenary who travels all over the Northeast executing confrontations with addicts, envisioned a worst case scenario: the ghost holding a gun. “That was running through my mind because I didn’t know the guy, but … I knew he had some issues,” says 44-year-old Ceraso. “He just kept saying back up, back up, and then he walked her in.” With hand over heart, he says, “God as my witness, I swore I was going to see a homicide.”  

It turns out the guy was just flipping out, terrorizing his wife in typical abuser fashion. Thankfully, there wasn’t a gun, but there was indeed a showdown: a battle of wills between an addict, an interventionist and a shattered family who just couldn’t take it anymore.

The drama unfolds like an episode of Intervention, the popular television show on the A&E channel that follows addicts who supposedly believe they are participating in a documentary about addiction. Cameras tail the subjects as they cop in dubious scenarios, like the episode where a girl desperate for a fix steals morphine from her dying father’s stash. Then the addict gets high on camera and blows long streams of smoke up everyone’s ass about where he or she was all night. Meanwhile, family and friends of the afflicted have secretly hired an interventionist to help wrangle their loved one into treatment. The show rides on narrative arcs full of quick-hit exposition, montages of addicts freebasing and snorting lines and assorted can-you-believe-that-shit schaudenfraude, happy endings and big blowout fights—basically, all the spectacle that makes for addictive TV.  

Ten years ago, most Americans didn’t know what an intervention was or that there was a growing demand for the service. Popping pills on the regular has become so commonplace that the first pause brought on by an overdose isn’t surprise at drug use, but a question of whether or not the overdose was an accident. Death has become an acceptable casualty of roulette for the growing number of Americans who subscribe to the high life, as reflected in the pageant of accidental overdose celebrity deaths: Anna Nicole Smith, Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger and most recently, DJ AM, aka Adam Goldstein from Philadelphia. 

As the face of junkies continues to shift from unsavory characters scoring in the backrooms of shady countercultural hangouts and clubs to teens nicking OxyContin and Vicodin out of the medicine cabinet and Percocet- popping moms, the role of the interventionist has hit pop culture full force. There’s Intervention of course, and now MTV’s Gone Too Far , filmed with DJ AM serving as the role of the interventionist before he OD’ed himself, and the inevitable Dr. Drew show. The idea’s even parodied on sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother. 

Now, thanks to mainstream  awareness—not to mention the ever-expanding supply of middle-class and upper middle-class clients—a previously niche corner of the recovery industry has become one of the most rapidly expanding careers in addiction services.  

The change in our drug habits has not only increased the demand for interventionists, it’s changed the game itself. For one thing, pills are a more expensive habit than alcohol and users have to be stealthier to cop.  

“A lot of people don’t have $500 a day. You wake up in the hole every day and you have to make that up as you go,” says Ceraso. “With that sort of behavior you really need to be able to manipulate these people.”  

So while politicians continue to throw endless rhetoric and money at the futile, decades-old war on drugs, there’s a growing list of guys like Ceraso who are pulling bodies out of the trenches with almost military conviction: You don’t leave one of your own behind.  

Ceraso’s endearingly South Philly. He’ll tell you he’s just a married man with kids who now lives in New Jersey. But it’s the tough street-smart South Philadelphian that surges to the surface as he passionately recaps intervention war stories over coffee. 

“Somebody always holds the key,” he says, referring to intervention. “There’s always all the people [in the room], but there’s always the person that holds something extra that helps you.”  

Ceraso recalls an old man who held the key to the surrender of a 19-year-old star athlete who turned to drugs after he got benched with an injury.  

“He was a tough kid, by all standards a badass,” says Ceraso. “We went and did this intervention at the kid’s friends house.” Ceraso says when he walked in and saw the frail, elderly man, the kid’s grandfather, he was hesitant to let him participate. “I mean, he was 80, pulling an oxygen bottle. I told his son, the kid’s father, I recommend against it. The guy said, he’s a tough old man and he wants to be there.” Ceraso allowed it.  

The plan was to wake the kid up as he came off a crash on his buddy’s couch, but “he came out of his sleep and started to freak,” says Ceraso. “He got more and more violent and started taking runs at people. The kid was mostly swinging at his father, but the grandfather is the one who stopped him cold.  

“This old man, this tough old union roofer, literally lifted the kid off the couch and shook him like he was a stuffed animal,” says Ceraso. “The kid started crying at that point.” He surrendered to treatment.  

Ceraso says following the Fifth tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous—the one about carrying the recovery message to those who still suffer—ultimately led him to his peculiar job. No one knows the devil like a priest, and no one knows the addict like someone who’s kicked.  

“I think like a drug addict,” says Ceraso, blowing steam off yet another cup of coffee. (“I was a speed guy,” he shrugs.) 

Spiritually, Ceraso believes it’s his job to reach into the muck, past the elaborate fortress of an addict and rediscover the nice husband, wife or kid buried deep inside. He began facilitating interventions about nine years ago, though he didn’t think to call it intervention back then. At first, he was just giving back to the recovery community by informally working the program, helping out friends and friends of friends with their addiction problems.  

“You’re involved in many of these interventions before you figure out it’s an intervention,” he says. “It was just that the family needed you, so you go over there and get with the family and the person, and together you’d convince the addicted individual into treatment.” 

Now he says, “it’s a lot more planned, a lot more time and effort go into them.” Ceraso formalized his career by organizing recovery programs at his former job as an airline worker. Then three years ago, when he started working in recovery full-time as Northeast Regional Director of Treatment Solutions Network, a constellation of treatment centers, he began performing interventions regularly; he began studying it like an art form, convinced it was the next logical step in his own spiritual recovery. 

“Am I a born again Christian?” he asks. “No, not with my background. I’m still doing what I can do to get into heaven.” 

The packed diner is full of characters that know Ceraso, including another Vinnie, who comes by and chitchats for a while—they talk about getting their motorcycles tuned up in time for this year’s annual Toys for Tots ride. Every time his phone rings, which is every few minutes it seems, it plays the theme from The Godfather .  

Though friends and family call him Vinnie, he answers the phone as Vincent. “You can’t be Vinnie on the phone,” he explains. “They think, you know, Vinnie from South Philly ,” he says, in his best Balboa accent.  

He’s an intense, high-energy guy. He fields calls, takes basic info, arranges to speak again later then slips right back into conversation without missing a beat. Then he spots someone else he knows, a ghost of his troubled past.  

“Judge, Judge!” Ceraso calls into the diner din, and a strikingly handsome older man comes up to the table. “This is the honorable Judge Anthony DeFino,” he gushes. “This guy saved my life!” 

DeFino, retired now, was an attorney in the ’80s when a young Ceraso was running around South Philly drinking booze—Ceraso says he started drinking at 11 or 12 years old—messing with drugs and getting into trouble as a teen.  

Then, in August 1986, Ceraso got picked up and was told he’d have to spend time behind bars for sure.  

“I started thinking, how can I get out of doing time? I came up with this plan … to convince my lawyer to get me into treatment.” Ceraso campaigned to go to a rehab in beautiful Palm Beach, Florida, instead of the Roundhouse.  

The judge agreed to the deal, but warned Ceraso that if he screwed up again, the court would get their “pound of flesh.”  

“I knew what he meant,” says Ceraso. “He meant, you get arrested again, you’re going to go away.” 

Ceraso coasted into rehab, pleased that he was getting one over on the man.  

“It took me about a week there to realize I actually had a problem,” he says. A few weeks before his 21st birthday, when most kids ceremoniously pound shots until they black out, Ceraso got sober.  

Ceraso relies on the basic foundation of the program and attends meetings occasionally, but he’s already working the program around the clock with his job at Treatment Solutions Network and moonlighting interventions. The real work of an intervention is in the prep work, and the prep work takes a lot of time.  

They say the devil’s in the details. This couldn’t be truer than when planning an intervention. Prep work requires days, weeks, sometimes months of planning.  

“Without prep work, you’re nothing,” says Ceraso. “Your chances of success are slim.” 

Interventions are not cookie- cutter affairs; the interactions need to be tailored. If you’re dealing with a meth addict, for example, the intervention should be scheduled for the early morning because the last thing you want to do is get into a person’s face who needs to cop their first fix of the day.  

“I also want to know what are the good qualities about this person? I think of it as a before and after,” says Ceraso. 

Ceraso spends most of the time building up to the confrontation part of the intervention in clandestine phone calls and meetings, interviewing every participant to find out all he needs to know about the addict. He has to figure out how to unlock what he calls “the authentic self,” program-speak for the essence of a person before they became addicted.  

The education goes both ways during this phase. While he learns everything he can about the target, he schools the family in everything they never wanted to know about addiction. 

For starters, Ceraso breaks it to the families that they’re not dealing with their loved one anymore. That may look like your sweet grandson, but it’s the addiction inside that you’re battling, the chemical deficit he wakes up to each day that programs him to get high again. By the time a family reaches the stage of intervention, they’ve endured months, maybe years of agony watching as loved ones slide into the gutter parade of the hopeless undead, transforming into strangers who lie, cheat and steal like common junkies. So Ceraso’s first order of business is to take control. He becomes a drill sergeant with the family.  

“It’s my show,” he says. “My rules.”  

First rule: There’s no time for pussyfooting. 

“I tell people up front. Your family member might die,” he says. “So cut the shit with me. You call me up to tell me something you just thought of because you didn’t feel like telling me last week, I’m going to be pissed. If [the family] wants this to work, I need to know everything I possibly can about this person.”  

When he says everything, he means everything.  

“What used to make this person tick?” asks Ceraso. “Was she a good mother? A great wife? Was there sexual trauma?”  

This information is mandatory in order to prepare for the confrontation, but it also helps Ceraso to select the right rehab. Part of the job of a good interventionist is to maintain a database of treatment centers and know which ones specialize in “secondary issues” a person may have going on. He says placing people in the closest or cheapest center without considering secondary issues is one of the reasons for a high relapse rate. (The national relapse rate is somewhere between 40 and 60 percent; Ceraso, who says he monitors cases for a year, claims a relapse rate of “just over nine percent.”) 

Second rule: You can’t rush an intervention. Families in crisis often call Ceraso in a panic, desperate to arrange an intervention for the next day, that moment even.  

“They’re like, ‘You don’t understand, he’s going to kill himself. It’s Friday, let’s do this tomorrow morning!’” he says, shaking his head. “You could offer me all the money in the world and I would never do an intervention the next day.”  

You can’t rush it because you only get one shot to get it right. Pros are asked all the time to try to fix botched and makeshift interventions. It’s dangerous business. When an intervention backfires, the addict can run away, or go underground, amp up their defenses and become even harder to reach. 

The one-shot principle leads to the most important rule of all: Once the mechanics of the confrontation are in gear, there’s no going back.  

“The addict has a way of convincing you that you’re nuts,” warns Ceraso. “I tell the family, ‘Unless you’re willing to do something now, be prepared to live with this until the day you die.’ You say no, and your loved one OD’s three days later, you’ll never be able to forgive yourself.’” 

That’s the guiding light of such work: loved ones intervening on the situation, creating a custom rock bottom of sorts before the addict actually hits the rock bottom that they’re spiraling toward.  

For Ceraso, tough love means no bullshit. “I’m relentless,” he says. “I know what it’s like to go through withdrawal, I know what it’s like to sit in the Roundhouse at Eighth and Race sts. I’ve literally walked in their shoes.”  

 Though overcoming personal addiction issues isn’t a prerequisite to becoming an interventionist, old-school types like Ceraso tend to come up through the underground networks of AA and NA, building networks of referrals and rolodexes and honing their chops one job at a time. Despite the insane schedule and grueling nature of the work, interventionists are springing up everywhere since Intervention became popular. 

“People watch that show a few times and think they can do it,” says Ceraso. 

Some of the people signing up to train want to become an interventionist after they experience their own, like the new bride who wants to be a wedding planner. Then there are the academics. O.G. interventionists shrug off the former and roll their eyes at the latter.  

“You have guys who get their master’s degrees, then there are guys like me and Ken,” he says, referring to Ken Seeley, star of Intervention , one of the most well known interventionists in the country.  

Indeed, between street-smart guys who have innovated their own niche job in the recovery industry and so-called “guys with PhDs” lays a Wild West. With no real governing board or required formal degree, both Ceraso and Seeley talk with disdain about the sudden new minefield of hacks, hucksters and those who mean well, but just can’t cut it.  

“Right now, everybody is just building a website and having 20 days clean and calling themselves interventionists,” says Seeley, on the phone from his office in L.A. To that end, Seeley and co-horts from the show, lead by co-star Jeff VanVonderen, established a governing board called the Association of Intervention Specialist Certification Board in an attempt to regulate practitioners. Still, it’s only a recommendation and voluntary and serves mostly as a guide for rehabs who don’t have their own in-house interventionist.  

Even as qualifications become standardized, there’s no way to predict how a person is going to react under pressure, or when they realize that behind the telegenic cowboy confrontation lies a weird, grueling, emotionally exhausting job.  

While organizing an intervention is tough work for a family who has to make the call, it’s no picnic for the interventionist, either. The hours are long. During the week, conference calls and prep meetings take place after everyone else’s working hours.  

On weekends, a simple, close-by intervention can be a 15-hour Saturday when you add up the drive, the pre-intervention meeting, the waiting, the confrontation, escorting the target to rehab, then getting back home. Once home, Ceraso’s drained. 

“The time I put into interventions … takes away from my family,” he says. “But it can’t be done 9 to 5.”  

Ceraso says his family is more than understanding. The golden rule to retain sanity in his home life is no phone calls at the dinner table. Other than that, everyone knows Dad’s in his office on the phone after dinner. 

“It’s like you’ve built up to this highly emotional procedure, and it’s over and you can exhale,” he says. “Most of these are on Saturdays so I can get real lazy on a Sunday after an intervention.”  

Ceraso says he chills out from the stress of his round-the-clock job by cruising Jersey roads on his motorcycle—customized with Eagles colors and symbols—while puffing on a cigar.  

It’s a rare moment alone for a guy whose livelihood—and the livelihood of those around him—depends on interacting with others constantly, calming people down, talking them off the ledge.  

By nature, people usually call an interventionist when it’s almost too late. Because despite everything we know about addiction, despite watching the shows and likely knowing someone who lost the roulette to an accidental overdose, it’s always a shock when someone you love turns into an addict. People don’t call the interventionist because they want to, they do it because nothing else has worked. They do it because it’s time to hear the bells going off, open the door and confront the ghost in the room. 

“If you keep a united front, the addiction never wins,” says Ceraso. “One on one, the addiction always wins.”

Newspapers Fight the Future 

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:22:49 PST

Here’s the good news for the Inquirer and Daily News: After months of bankruptcy-induced uncertainty, the ownership situation at those newspapers is about to be settled. A Nov. 18 auction will determine whether current publisher Brian Tierney retains control, or if the two papers will become the property of Citizens Bank and a host of other creditors.

Here’s the bad news: The new—or old—ownership will still face a media landscape as unsettled and fractured as it’s ever been.

It’s not just declining readership and competition from blogs. Several national news organizations—ESPN, Huffington Post and The New York Times—have been targeting big cities around the country for experiments in local journalism. ESPN now has local sites for Chicago, Dallas and Boston. Huffington Post aggregates news from Chicago sources. And the Times (which also plans a Chicago edition) has launched a “Bay Area Edition” to compete with newspapers in San Francisco and Oakland.

These aren’t mere start-ups launched by hopeful journalists laid off from “real” jobs at local newspapers. These are big, established media companies with deep pockets and, presumably, the stomach to fight local news organizations for ad dollars and readership.And Philadelphia newspapers—demonstrably weakened by their descent into bankruptcy—would seem to make a juicy target as those companies look to expand elsewhere. 

If so, local Philadelphia newspaper editors seem unworried by the prospect, noting that newspapers already have rivals from local television and radio stations, as well as a host of smaller community publications.

“Anything is possible,” says Michael Days, editor of the Daily News. “There’s a ton of competition locally already.”

“My feeling is competition is good,” says Bill Marimow, editor of the Inquirer, recalling the days when Philly had four daily newspapers. “It spurs you on.”

None of the three organizations would comment to PW about possible expansion into Philadelphia. But ESPN’s Jim Pastor, a senior vice president, describes his organization’s recent launch of ESPNBoston.com to PW in terms that make Philly sound like a natural fit. 

“It is one of the nation’s premiere sports towns and home to one of the strongest and most passionate fan bases in the world,” Pastor says of Boston. 

“This is about our relationship with our fans,” he adds. “We’re always looking to better serve them.”

At the Boston Globe, sports editor Joe Sullivan is counting on reader habits—and traditionally strong local sports coverage—to help fend off the challenge. But that job has been made more difficult by ESPN’s decision to poach some of the Globe’s best talent, including New England Patriots beat writer Mike Reiss.  

“Younger New Englanders who are tech-savvy read Boston.com (the newspaper’s website),” Sullivan asserts. “And we’re hoping that New Englander tradition will prevail.”  

Chicago’s newspaper situation also looks similar to Philadelphia. Both daily newspapers—the Tribune and the Sun-Times—entered bankruptcy in the past year. What’s more, their new competitors have been cooperating: Huffington Post’s Chicago website features a ESPNChicago.com headline box and an ESPN Chicago calendar on its homepage. And as with ESPN in Boston, there will be poaching: The New York Times has agreed to buy some of its Chicago content from the new Chicago News Cooperative, which includes former top editors of the Tribune. It’s going to be difficult for the established newspapers to claim their new competitors are carpetbagging.  

Rather than rely on reader habits, though, the Tribune is fighting back on Huffington Post’s turf. The newspaper recently launched ChicagoNow, a website that features dozens of the city’s best bloggers. Most of the content stays at the website, but some of it has been sneaking into the pages of the Tribune.

“We take our competition seriously,” says Kate Mersman, a spokesperson for the Tribune. “At the same time, we have shown our community a new editorial vision focused on watchdog reporting, community issues, the Chicago experience, local economy and business, entertainment, culture and sports. We will remain steadfast on covering the Chicagoland market, online and in print, better than anyone else.”  

All the poaching of local talent from established newspapers should catch the attention of Philly editors. Even as the ownership situation moves closer to resolution, the labor situation has become dicey. A recent memo from the guild to its members said negotiators for the papers’ current ownership had unleashed a string of “unspeakable insults” about the work ethic of reporters from the Inquirer and Daily News.

“It appears increasingly clear that the company has no intention of actually reaching a contract with our Guild,” union leaders warned in an Oct. 14 memo posted to Romenesko, the national journalism website. 

But Marimow suggests it will be difficult for outlets like Huffington Post and ESPN to compete with his established paper. The Inky, he points out, regularly does deep “service journalism” like its series on patronage at the Board of Revision of Taxes that has led to an overhaul of that agency. 

“Those stories cannot be done with a minimal staff,” Marimow says.

And the Daily News’ Days says his paper will take a rough-and-tumble attitude into the fray with any new competitors—should they come. It’s hard to see how they won’t.

“We believe we’ll be able to hold our own,” Days says. “So let’s turn out a kick-ass product and the reader will decide that we’re the best.” ■

The Breast Defense

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:06:57 PST

One of the most disheartening things about the health care debate is the petty negotiating. All you hear is talk about the dollar amounts and the tradeoffs: very rarely do you hear people talking about the sick.

Because there's so much focus on the deal-making and making Big Insurance happy, some really shitty amendments are going into the final bill. One which passed into the House bill on Thursday, was the Eshoo-Barton Amendment. This legislation regulates how a certain class of medications called biologics -- which treat cancer, diabetes, MS, and a host of other life-threatening chronic diseases -- may be sold. Biologics are made from living organinisms and they are not cheap drugs. They can cost as much as 22 times as other medications.

Eve Gittelson, who has been one of the most vocal proponents of health care reform, writebiolog are the new "blockbuster" drugs for the pharmaceutical industry. Herceptin, for breast cancer, costs $48,000 a year, and many insurance companies won't cover it -- or people quickly hit their limits and must pay for it out-of-pocket or go without."

The Eshoo-Barton Amendment won't help. Jane Hamsher, a breast cancer survivor, reports the amendment will prohibit generic versions of the drugs for at least a dozen years -- and longer if the drug companies make slight tweaks to the formula over time to retain their "evergreening" rights. Hamsher says that ensures biologics will never become generics.

"Instead of the Waxman-Deal amendment that granted much more reasonable terms to biologic patent holders, Speaker Pelosi chose the Eshoo-Barton amendment," Hamsher writes. "And we could all be paying for that choice for the rest of our lives."

And that's a bad deal for Pennsylvania.

According to the National Cancer Institute's State Profiles database, Philadelphia reported more than 1,000 incidences of breast cancer each year between 2002-2006. As recently as 1997, the American Journal of Epidemiology found "a statistically significant and geographically broad cluster of breast cancer deaths in the New York City-Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, metropolitan area, which has a 7.4 percent higher mortality rate than the rest of the Northeast." The state ranks sixth in the nation for breast cancer, and while death rates are falling, almost 300 women die from the disease every year in Pennsylvania. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Health, "breast cancer is the leading cancer among Pennsylvania women. It is the second leading cause of overall female cancer death in Pennsylvania." How many of those women do you think are also part of the 880,000 Pennsylvania adults who don't have health insurance?

It's not like there wasn't a competing amendment proposed by Henry Waxman, which would have sped up competition from generics. Evergreening sucks for people with chronic medical conditions, and as someone with asthma, I can tell you firsthand. The company that makes the inhaler that relaxes my lungs recently changed the propellant to be environmentally-friendly. The active ingredient hasn't changed, but that didn't stop them from declaring it a new product, unavailable as a much cheaper generic. I'm glad I have insurance through my employer, because otherwise I'd be paying $40 for a month's worth of breathing.

And that's what's so infuriating about what I'm seeing in DC. Forty-seven US representatives, including Mike Doyle and Tim Murphy of western Pennsylvania, voted against putting patients first: they're literally trying to balance sick people's need for medicine and treatements against a company's desire for profit. What kind of diseased soul do you have to have to even consider such a trade-off?

People who are very sick with breast cancer don't need to be lying in the hospital bed wondering "how am I going to pay for the drugs I need to stay alive?" People with MS don't need to wonder if the cost of their meds will go up because the company changed the formula from a pill to a time-release capsule. Health care reform shouldn't be about protecting a faceless and inhuman corporation's right to gouge people that have colorectal cancer. When people are sick, what you're supposed to do is your very best to make sure they can get better, or at the very least not hurt so much. You're not supposed to be thinking about how some company can make a buck off 'em.

As you might imagine, rallies against the Eshoo-Barton amendment are scheduled for the week ahead. None of our local representatives were on the committee that voted on the legislation, but with the bill expected to come up for for debate later this week, please take a moment to call them and let them know that the Eshoo-Barton amendment is unacceptable. Give Rep: Joe Sestak a call too: it was his daughter's brain tumor that got him into politics to begin with, and I am sure he'd like to hear from you that the House health care bill stands to gouge the very people he wants to protect. Hit up Sen. Arlen Specter, whose battle with cancer is ongoing. And call Sen. Bob Casey, who helped pass the Senate bill that does contain a public option.

Making sure people with cancer, MS, Crohn's disease, diabetes and other deadly or chronic conditions can afford the medicine that keeps them well should be a no-brainer. We should make sure our representatives vote with their interests in mind.

SEPTA Fail

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:53:12 PST

Well, at least they waited until the World Series games were over.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports: "Hundreds of thousands of commuters scrambled this morning to find a way to work or school after SEPTA's largest union staged a surprise pre-dawn strike, shutting down down all subway, bus and trolley service in the city. The walkout by Transport Workers Union Local 243, which began at 3 a.m. and caught commuters off guard, also affected Frontier Division buses in Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester counties."

MyFoxPhilly reports: "Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter blasted SEPTA’s transit union for a calling a strike with little notice to commuters on Tuesday. 'People had already gone to bed. Some people were already at their job,' Nutter said. 'To find out you can’t get home is the height of the lack of consideration.'”

The strike came on what was otherwise expected to be a relatively quiet and low-profile Election Day. Today's slate features candidates for district attorney, city controller and a number of judicial positions, but by 8 am, polling place workers at Markward Recreation Center in Center City said they'd had no voters -- and attributed it, in part, to the SEPTA strike.

And it came late enough that commuters were caught off-guard. At the 22nd Street trolley station this morning, a number of people were seen trying to enter -- only to look mystified when greeted by closed doors. The inconvenience was maddening to commuters.

At PhillyBurbs.com, writer Deidre Wengen commented: "As a person who relies on public transportation, this whole ordeal really yanks my chain. The union has decided to strike over wages and pensions. It is really greedy and irresponsible.

"There are thousands of people in this city that use buses, trolleys and the subway to get to work-- many people who can't afford other alternative transportation or don't have the option of other transportation. This strike does nothing but hurt the people who are hurting the most already."

It's 2009, so much of the anger was expressed on Twitter -- SEPTA was one of the nation's top "trending topics" on the social networking site. A sampling of comments:

UPDATE 10:30 am: Hoo boy, is Michael Nutter pissed. Watch his interview with MyFoxPhilly:

“Their salaries were proposed to go up. Their pension was to be increased. They have a pension fund that is 50 percent funded, similar to ours. So no reasonable, rationale person right now is thinking about a raise, is thinking about an increase in their pension when other members of the general public and other Americans are losing their jobs. Unemployment in Philadelphia just went over 11 percent. There is no reason for this. None."

On Twitter, we asked you the following question:

Your responses:

UPDATE 11 am: There's a blogger who supports the union. Miss Bee at The Bee Side writes: "Contract negotiations are for a four year contract. No one is getting a raise right now - we all know that - but in the next four years, the economy will probably bounce back and we'll all be back to getting our merit and performance raises just like we're used to. If SEPTA goes with the city's proposal, they will end up with a 4% raise over the next four years. 1% a year. Which is not a big deal in the end. 1%. ONE PERCENT. For the next four years. So even if the economy is soaring with rainbow-colored ribbons in two years and stays steadily at that, SEPTA will still be locked into their measley raise of one percent a year.

"It's the bigwigs who are holding this thing up. Not your bus driver. Remember that."

But The Transit Pass blog isn't so forgiving: "I am a huge public transportation advocate and I have made a point on this blog in the past about treating transit workers with respect. However, I find this strike rather distasteful. First off, in a city and region that depends on transit you need to give riders greater warning than just walking off the job at 3am. If you want respect you need to give it back.

"The healthcare, wage and pension expectations seem plain greedy when 10% of the country cannot find employment at all and many of their riders are working overtime just to make ends meet. Most importantly, the union is bargaining with a semi-public agency, not a multi-billion dollar publicly held company. SEPTA is not trying to gouge its workers, rather just trying to make ends meet on an already stretched budget."

And The Monty Way is just plain irritated: "The news this morning that SEPTA decided to strike was not shocking. Remember we are dealing with a group of idiots here that are not thankful for their current jobs with benefits that they hold. I guess the employees of SEPTA do not read the Metro, otherwise they would be informed citizens and know the dire straights that the economy is in, let alone the city of Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania. A very attractive deal was extended to them late last night but that offer was still not good enough, it included pay raises and the same health benefits at no additional costs, an offer most working (and non-working) people would jump at! Again let me state we are dealing with idiots!!! I think that when they go back to the bargaining table, they should include money to cover customer service training as well as a mandatory basic course on economics to all employees!"

More to come.

UPDATE 12:52 pm: Mayor Nutter popped out of City Hall just after noon to offer thanks to the Bicycle Coalition of Philadelphia for setting up a "bicycle corral" to encourage bike riding during the strike. PW had the chance to ask a couple of questions on video:

UPDATE 2:31 pm: Ray Murphy at Young Philly Politics has a stirring call to back the union, which deserves to be quoted at length:

"More than anything you have to support this strike because you have to support unions.

"As union density has declined, we have all suffered. We should ALL be in unions. We all need the help of our co-workers sometimes to bargain with bosses who are unfair. Can you imagine how much better 'customer service' would be at just about any store if workers were paid and treated better?

"The tendency of some people who are NOT right-wing folks at all to blame workers astounds me.

"Like many Philadelphians, my own middle-class existence can be traced back to the economic stability that my father's union and his father's union before him provided to our family.

"The right to organize, collectively bargain and strike if necessary is incredibly important. Lots of us have been able to build paths out of poverty and into the middle-class because of unions. And that path should not be cut off for anyone today.

"We can have a conversation later about how much more organized labor needs to do to actually engage and organize the thousands of working class and low-income Philadelphians who have no hope right now of ever joining a union and who will suffer badly because of this strike. That's an important convo to have too.

"But today, I support Local 234."

UPDATE 3:33 pm: Video from the Bicycle Coalition of Philadelphia's "Bike the Strike" effort at City Hall.

Letters: Cash and Carry

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:04:38 PST

Regarding Joel Hoffmann’s recent story on SEPTA cashiers:

I am the wife of a “cashier” and I did not appreciate your article. This job is not an easy one. They have to deal with ignorant people everyday. No matter how polite they are to the customers, the customers are never happy with the answers. When they try to do their job—collect fares—some people refuse to pay. My husband has been called all kinds of names, spit at and threatened more times than I can count. They get no support from SEPTA. They are basically out there on their own. As far as their responsibilities, they are responsible for collecting all money, tokens and passes. They give out information and directions to people.

Also, all of the cashiers have not been injured from their original jobs. My husband drove the trolley for 20 years before having a heart attack. He would have liked to go back to driving, but the company would not allow it based on his condition.

I would suggest the next time you decide to write an article about something or someone, do your research. This was very disturbing to me and I am sure a lot of other people. I did not appreciate the assumptions made against these people who get up everyday and go to a job that is far from safe. And they do a damn good job at it!

LINDA MURPHY  via email 

Regarding Joel Mathis’ column about gun violence in Philadelphia: 

Mr. Mathis, in response to your gun violence article, in which you speak for Tom Corbett, here are my thoughts, not flavored with any bias or color: 

First and foremost, guns are not violent. Buy a .357 6-shot revolver and leave it alone in a locked room for 10,000 years, and it will do less damage than the cholesterol in a single Big Mac.  

I live in Philadelphia and have never laid my head to rest at night worried about gun violence. Check the facts and you will find some startling truths. The homicide rate is directly related to location and a certain segment of the population (i.e., young men of color, specifically African and Hispanic Americans.)  

If you’re still not persuaded by facts, take a look at Montana, where the lack of an inner city along with almost non-existent gun laws leaves behind an indelible truth.   

JOHN MALTESE  via email 

Regarding recent cover stories: 

I just want to commend you on your recent choice of feature article topics (ACORN, the don’t-snitch culture, health insurance reform). If this marks a change in editorial policy, I urge you to stick with it.  

Given the struggles of local and city newspapers, independent and alternative press is a more critical, urgently needed force than ever for vigilance in covering local wrongdoing and corruption. Readers have widely diverging opinions about these issues, but you provide an invaluable service in reporting them.  

PATTY QUINN  via email 

Regarding J. Cooper Robb’s recent review of the Wilma’s production of Coming Home : 

Robb got it perfectly in his review of the Wilma Theater’s Coming Home by Athol Fugard. Eloquent theater criticism of this play from PW is most welcome, especially in light of an inadequate Inquirer review of the same play (which fixated on one small failing), and, a week after the play’s opening, no review from the City Paper .  

Robb and PW are on a roll. Maybe it’s time for PW to do critical justice to the abundance of engaging dance in the city, which PW seems largely to ignore.  

  JONATHAN STEIN  via philadelphiaweekly.com

Q&A With ACORN's Wade Rathke

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:00:54 PST

For all the bad press that ACORN has received in the media in recent years -- according to Lexis Nexus, from 2007-2008 there were 4,468 newspaper and wire stories that mentioned ACORN -- the general public remains largely uninformed about what ACORN is and what exactly it does, outside of signing up Mickey Mouse to vote every four years. In short, ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations For Reform Now, provides a voice for the voiceless, advocating, organizing and agitating on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised -- registering them to vote, helping them obtain suitable housing, get a mortgage, protecting them from predatory lenders, helping them earn a living wage and then providing free tax preparation services to help them give back their fair share on those living wages -- providing the largely invisible underclass with something you and I take for granted every day: agency, or the capacity to make choices and impose those choices on the world.

In 1970, founder Wade Rathke opened ACORN's first office in Little Rock, Arkansas (ACORN originally stood for Arkansas Coalition For Reform Now) organizing welfare recipients and working poor families to advocate and, if that failed, agitate for free school lunches, Vietnam Veteran's rights, unemployment benefits and hospital emergency room care. After making headway in Arkansas, ACORN began opening new chapters across the south and then nationwide. As of 2007, ACORN had chapters in 103 cities across 37 states.

In June of 2008, Rathke resigned his post as Chief Organizer of ACORN in the wake of controversy surrounding his brother's embezzlement of nearly one million dollars from the ACORN coffers nearly 10 years ago. Rathke felt ACORN would not be well-served by going public and getting law enforcement involved and, like most corporations when faced with an embezzlement scandal, opted to handle it quietly and in-house. The money was replaced, but the scandal eventually went public and Rathke resigned in the hopes of shielding ACORN from further controversy. Today, Rathke lives in Louisiana, runs ACORN International -- organizing ACORN chapters in India, Kenya, Argentina, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Peru, and Canada -- and publishes Social Policy magazine quarterly. He was in town last week promoting his new book Citizen Wealth: Winning The Campaign To Save Working Families and PW took the opportunity to get his side of the story about all the controversy surrounding the organization he founded some 40 years ago.

PW: Tell me about the premise of your new book Citizen Wealth: Winning The Campaign To Save Working Families.

WADE RATHKE: Citizen Wealth is about income security. The book looks at it from a number of different ways: the living wage campaign or the work done with Community Reinvestment Act, or any number of other campaigns that unions and ACORN are involved in. It's about how families, both individually and collectively, can achieve some level of community and individual income security.

PW: When it comes to working families in this country do you think that the playing field is more level today than when you started ACORN back in the 70s or vice-versa? Or somewhere in between?

WADE RATHKE: In the working world it seems too often to be one of those two-steps-forward-two-steps-back situations, so certainly I don't know that I can glibly compare what it was like to organize almost 40 years ago and now, but The Great Recession we're in right now is sort of ripping apart a lot of those advances in terms of living wages and home equities that lower-income families were starting to gain because of home ownership. It's a real step backwards in terms of income security, so these have not been friendly decades overall for working families. I'd like to think we made progress, though. But in summary I hope it's better, but, boy, don't make me prove it.

PW: Can you speak to why the right has such a virulent hatred of ACORN and seems to take every opportunity they can to demonize the organization?

WADE RATHKE: I'm probably not the best one to speak about what in the world the right might be thinking. Certainly what ACORN was during the 38 years I was there it was designed and I think was an effective voice for lower-income families and a way for them to engage deeply on issues they needed to see resolved, as well for them to build real power to impact on their aspirations and income issues. I think this notion is increasingly troubling to this deeply rooted Taliban-like right wing we have in the country now. This whole period of Neo-McCarthyism we're confronting now is wrapped up in a whole lot of things from the Obama moment to a number of other issues. It's just virulent, I can't really explain it. You think you're making progress, but look at what we have now.

PW: Now do you think that this vitriol stems from the perception that ACORN is basically a voter registration arm for the Democratic party or is it a matter of providing a voice to people that were voiceless, which irritated very powerful moneyed interests in the financial sector, in the housing sector, and in the labor sector?

WADE RATHKE: I really think the second. I think for all their angst about voter registration -- voter registration is an essential part of democracy; if you don't like it you can change it -- to finally allow people to automatically be registered would just be more appropriate. I think the real issue is the second point you mentioned. I think there's real a resistance to changing the fact that low-income people really don't have an effective voice. All of this is educational for me. This new world of Google Alerts, you get to see on a daily basis way more of the polarizing iteration that is out there with a lot of people. It's troubling to me frankly, Jonathan.

PW: And this level of vitriol that we're seeing in the political discourse unprecedented in your experience or were there times in the past when the temperature on the discourse was this heated?

WADE RATHKE: It reminds me a lot of the late '60s and early '70s when I was first starting ACORN. I can remember in '72 and '73 resolutions passed in the Arkansas state legislature demanding investigations of ACORN, insinuating that it was all communistic and demanding copies of our membership lists, all of which were illegal and none of which went anywhere. I can remember organizing committee meetings, when were first organizing, that were broken up by the Klan and that sort of level of discourse was very raw and very polarized but we accepted it. I know when I started in Arkansas I didn't know whether I should be afraid for my life or would be embraced with open arms. A lot of this reminds me of those times, frankly, when we had to struggle to have people understand that if you were eligible for welfare that was actually a right not a gift, or that if there was a food stamp there wasn't anything wrong with you actually receiving food stamps. Unfortunately, we seem to be moving a little bit backwards in that direction.

PW: What role do you think that race plays in all of this?

WADE RATHKE: I can't believe there's much doubt that race is right at the heart of this issue, and there's no question in my mind that it is a huge part of this. There's no question in my mind that it's a stand-in for a very hard bitten group of people who are still just mortified that we have an African American president and that there is starting to be a different public posture and stance around African Americans and their integration into the overall community than what was true in the past. I think ACORN has become the whipping boy to a degree. It has a very diverse constituency of Latinos, African Americans, and whites. It very threatening to many of these hard-crusted folks who really don't believe that's appropriate.

PW: Can you clarify the voter registration fraud allegations? Looking into this, I found it's mostly a lot of smoke and not very much fire, frankly.

WADE RATHKE: Well this is a pattern, as you know, since I'm talking to somebody from Philadelphia I know it's not news to you. You know before the '08 election and the previous several cycles the Republican party of Pennsylvania filed a number of complaints in previous cycles against ACORN registration practices here in Pennsylvania, in Ohio and Florida. There was a clearly concerted strategy on the part of the National Republican party in '04 and '06 to try target these registration efforts. Not surprisingly within several months after the election there'd be a boil up point in a number of those places. Certainly, all of the stuff about firing U.S. Attorneys and Karl Rove and the resignation of the Attorney General based on that is part of this. We have the eight or nine U.S. Attorneys who were specifically asked to prosecute ACORN voter registration efforts. This is now well-documented, so this has been a pattern. I thought actually before I left in June of '08 that had sort of made the preparations to withstand the fury for the November election. As it turned it out it was at a level of intensity and focus where they clearly wanted to polarize so much around ACORN and it sort of went to a whole new level. This is an ongoing systematic strategy by the right, particularly the Republicans, to try to repress low-income and minority voting patterns in a number of battleground states in recent cycles. Pennsylvania's really been ground zero for a lot of that activity as you probably know.

PW: Can you comment on the whole hooker-sting video controversy?

WADE RATHKE: Luckily, when it all came out I was in Canada and when I'd get called by Fox News or CNN I would honestly tell people on the phone, "you know what, I haven't seen it, they don't have Internet in Canada yet." I actually haven't seen it, I certainly read enough about it. I think it's one of those terribly unfortunate tragedies where clearly in the middle of the bunker zone that the existing internal leadership was in at ACORN over a number of months, I was not closely focused on some local operations and it turned out to be pitifully easy to do this Candid Camera thing it seems. The more troubling thing to me is people make mistakes, the folks that were involved were pretty quickly terminated where it was justified. From what I understand from reading the papers there was an internal investigation with a well-known guy out of Massachusetts and they are trying to figure out what it takes to get their house in order. I think unfortunately they're not going to have a chance to really get their house in order because there's been such a stampede that has overtaken people's rational thinking about it and the funding bills, whether it's governors or Congress that decide to target ACORN or anybody who's ever been near ACORN, I think will have a chilling impact. I just hope ACORN can recover from the mistakes they made in the field.

PW: I'm curious as to how this domino effect with the de-funding thing happened so quickly without any kind of oversight, investigation or congressional hearing, it was was simply a matter of, "this is what Fox News had, lets pull the funding."

WADE RATHKE: Jonathan, that question is one I ask whenever I run into somebody still working with ACORN or still, like you, thinking about it. It's what I don't get either. It's such a herd mentality, I don't want to keep using this phrase, but it is such a clear example of Neo-McCarthyism, a rush to judgment without pretense of due process. There's this congressman out of New York who's talked about this being a Bill Of Attainder against the Constitution, but none of it's slowed them down. I know the Republican governor's website told all their Republican governors they should discontinue funding ACORN. So a couple of other states got embarrassed when they issued executive order stop all money to ACORN and then a day or two later realized they had never put a dime into ACORN anyway, so what was the point? This is just unprecedented I think, the only thing I compare it to is the Palmer Raids in 1919 against unions and others. It just and aberration of basic rights and justice principles that should protect organizations no matter how controversial they may be, like ACORN.

PW: Lastly, I want to ask you to clarify or comment the incident that led to you leaving ACORN, with the embezzlement of your brother and your actions in the wake of that.

WADE RATHKE: What comment are you asking me to clarify?

PW: Well, is the story as told accurate? That your brother...

WADE RATHKE: Years ago we discovered, our accounting contractor came to me and said there were things that weren't adding up on the credit card. I asked our outside auditors to come in and investigate, they did so. They did a forensic audit to determine what the level of the misappropriation was, we brought in outside lawyers as well as in-house council to determine what the course of action might be. We had two choices, we could either enter a restitution side to try to get repaid or we could go with the retribution side and turn it over to the police. Both of those options, we were told from outside council, were equally legal and permissible. I brought this to the management council, the management council unanimously voted, without my participation, to go with restitution as opposed to retribution. I brought it to the executive committee, the executive committee approved that and over a period of time the money was paid back as per the terms of the agreement. That's what happened. Part of the decision, at that time, 10 years ago this all came out just as the Bush V. Gore thing was happening, so it was not a period where we felt we would be well-served if it was front page news. It came up again in the middle of 2008 and was raised to a thunder and I fully disclosed to everyone, the whole staff, as well as the whole board, but there are a couple of people that weren't happy about that. I was chief organizer, I was founder of the organization, and I tried to take the responsibility by resigning, hoping that would just prove a fundamental principle we have of accountability. There was even a small minority of people that believed we made the wrong decision by not going public at that time or whatever. I took responsibility and resigned. So that's what happened. The committee actually at first tried to not accept by resignation, but I insisted it had to be. Unfortunately it didn't seem to stop the problem. The same reason perhaps that we kept the secret internal all these years, to protect the organization like it did sort of did. Once I was gone, they lost control of the story and it certainly has not been pretty how it was handled.

Will SEPTA Ruin the World Series?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:55:17 PDT

Here’s my prediction for Game 3 of the World Series: The Transport Workers Union will win another round of labor negotiations with SEPTA and baseball fans will be able to take public transportation to Citizens Bank Park as if a strike had never been on the horizon.

While that might sound like a good thing for the city, I'm not sure that it will be in the long run.

If the Transport Workers were slugging it out with a soulless corporation like Wal-Mart, I would side with the union on principal. The disparity between the pay of American CEOs and that of their blue-collar workers is perverse.

But we’re not talking about David and Goliath here. We’re talking about Tyson vs. Holyfield, and both are missing an ear. Maybe it's time for taxpayers to climb into the ring.

SEPTA is a government-authorized monopoly. SEPTA is a government-subsidized monopoly. (The authority received $610.6 million in local, state and federal subsidies in fiscal year 2008, or 44 percent of its $1.37 billion in operating expenses). This arrangement assumes that SEPTA’s actions have the tacit approval of taxpayers. It’s time to be more explicit about what we want and expect from our investment.

I admire the persistence of unions – the obstinacy of unions – in the fight against cutthroat capitalism. But it's hard for me to sympathize with them when taxpayers are held for ransom.

Spokesmen for SEPTA and TWU Local 234 have said that the riders are important to them, and that both sides want to prevent a strike on the eve of Game 3. In other words, they want to avoid a PR nightmare. (Remember the seven-day strike of 2005?)

But maybe a World Series shit storm is what they need. TWU 234's five-year contract expired March 15. SEPTA and the union have been operating without a contract for seven months. Hell, they're making the state legislature look quick and efficient.

Why the strife? Well, according to the Inky, “SEPTA management has proposed no wage increase for the first two years of a four-year contract and a 2 percent increase in each of the final two years. It also wants to increase worker contributions to health coverage from 1 percent to 4 percent and freeze the level of pension benefits.”

TWU members want “a 4 percent raise each year and health contributions to remain 1 percent.” They also want “an increase in pension contributions from $75 to $100 for every year of service” and “changes in subcontracting and training provisions to allow members to do maintenance and repair work on buses and trolleys now done by outside contractors.”

Not gonna happen. Shouldn't happen in this economy.

I can't blame Willie Brown for pitching something so unrealistic, something so distant from economic reality. I mean, his members are bringing in $2.7 million a year in union dues, according to TWU's FY 2007 tax return. Now that he's president, Brown is easily making $96,000 a year himself – that's about how much former president Jeffrey Brooks made in FY 2007, when Brown was executive vice president and earning a $79,038 salary. And let's not forget that $5,000 expense account that comes with the territory. (I couldn't find pay records for SEPTA's top brass by deadline, but I bet it's comparable.)

But SEPTA's 9,000 employees are quasi-public servants, benefiting from public subsidies. Since the managers and union workers are having such a difficult time finding common ground, maybe a coalition of taxpayers should have a seat at the bargaining table.

Yes, SEPTA employees are taxpayers, too. But they're outnumbered by other taxpayers in the areas they serve. Surely, chaos would ensue if even a few dozen taxpayers were invited into the war room. But one from each congressional voting district would be enough to ensure a fair return on our investment. I'm speaking in economic, political and social terms here.

How this would work, I don't know. I'll leave that to more orderly minds.

The point remains: We're not disinterested spectators. We have a stake in the outcome of this game, and we should raid the locker room if we have to.

Terry Oleson: The Fifth Victim 

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:31:00 PDT

Everywhere Terry Oleson goes, he thinks people are staring at him. Whispering, “Oh my God, that’s the serial killer.” Yet he goes on about his day, pretending he doesn’t feel it, trying to mask the effects.

If it’s even possible to put into words what happens when you’re painted as the shady drifter who choked four Atlantic City hookers to death and lined their heads up in a particular order, Oleson is willing to do it.

“I have nothing to hide,” says the never-charged, No. 1 person of interest in the case. “But as far as I can tell, this story doesn’t end well. My life’s done.”

Those are chilling words when you consider the context. But Oleson, who hasn’t talked publicly about the case since a photo-op press conference last March, doesn’t hide from a single question.

I’ve interviewed Oleson no fewer than 10 times since last October. Any fear that I had about being in a motel room with somebody suspected of killing people in motel rooms quickly dissipated.

In the run-down New Jersey Turnpike motel room he shared with his fiancée Carol-Ann Seaholtz and their pooch Bandit for a post-release year while trying to sustain themselves on welfare dollars, Oleson seemed world-weary and cordial, but was prone to controlled vocal outbursts when asked sensitive questions.  

Seaholtz, the high-school sweetheart who reignited their flame by sending Oleson poems in jail while police investigators tried to make their case, sees the strains on him. He gives off the aura of a struggling-to-get-by everyman who got swept up in a tempest. Yet through it all, even the decimation caused by not being able to get, or physically do, work hasn’t broken him. He’s just accepted a broken reality.

“I really don’t know what to do. We just sit here and watch TV. I’ve basically lost ties with everybody I was ever close to. It’s ruined my life. Like a knife cutting me from the inside out, that’s how I feel 24/7,” he says. “It’s all so frustrating. I don’t see a way out right now.”

The day the bodies were found, Nov. 20, 2006, Oleson was 60 miles from the Golden Key Motel, a sleazy place where he was forced to flop a few nights each week. If he had earned enough to cover the commuting costs, the mechanically gifted handyman would’ve slept under his own roof. But he didn’t, so he couldn’t.

Oleson, powerfully stacked with a hammer of a laugh despite deteriorating vertebrae that he says have already made him two-inches shorter, did what he had to get by.

But the day the motel became a crime scene, Oleson’s life started on a path from bad to seemingly unsalvageable.

By April 1, four months and a dozen days after the bodies were discovered, the law was closing in on the man they suspected of being a serial killer. So compelling was the case of four strangled Atlantic City prostitutes eroding in a marsh behind the motel—their heads all facing the neon lights, a message amid madness—that efforts were already underway to find catchy nicknames. Atlantic City Ripper. Black Horse Strangler.

But none of that was on Oleson’s mind. That night he was focused on evicting his longtime girlfriend from the Salem County house he’d built up since buying it from his family when he was 17 years old.

They were a toxic mix. Oleson says marble tiles were swung and strangers were almost run over during fights at Home Depots. Restraining orders were issued. When he asked her to take her daughter and leave, she cried harassment to the cops. He already had a judge’s order.

Oleson says his ex packed up just about everything, hers and his , before the court-sanctioned deadline. What he didn’t know then was that when he was off in Atlantic City working, neighbors had seen the police around the house. They were building a case.  

The next day when he went to the courthouse to settle a traffic ticket, police approached and questioned him. Oleson remembers the homicide investigator’s exact words: “We know you did it.” 

“What the hell are you talking about?” Oleson recalls thinking. “They were not very good at their jobs if they thought I killed those women.” 

Officers impounded Oleson’s truck and followed every step of his over 30-mile walk home from the courthouse. Three days later, news helicopters hovered over Friesburg Road in Alloway, a 12-mile maze of country roads from the Delaware Memorial Bridge that dozens of reporters somehow happened upon. 

Investigators descended on Oleson’s home searching for evidence. Baseboards were yanked from walls, swatches cut from furniture for DNA and unlocked car windows were smashed so, presumably, police wouldn’t have to enter through the door. When they found a DVD with pictures of a nude underage girl, they had what they needed to lock him up. When they walked out, they told Alloway Construction official H.F. Underwood they were “worried that if they left the house in such deplorable condition, the electric could spark and they’d be responsible [for a fire].” So the house was condemned. It was a real-time destruction of both a homestead and a man’s life.  

Though Atlantic County Prosecutor Theodore Housel’s office never offered more than just the minimal facts and off-the-record winks and nudges, the story the media unwittingly told was that Oleson was a perverted, violent dirtbag who wrapped his strong hands around four hookers’ necks and squeezed them beyond their final breaths. 

Investigators have since refused any public admission about Oleson’s guilt or innocence. Why bother? The public-opinion verdict was in. And, the press was forced to follow what few crumbs investigators offered. 

They “would never say anything about the investigation. There are plenty of reasons not to compromise the case, we’re just looking for what’s already on the public record,” says Miguel Sancho, who produced 48 Hours ’ “Beyond the Boardwalk” episode that aired in May 2007 and, to Oleson’s dismay, on cable loop since. “There was nothing for months, and then all of a sudden, this guy was arrested. And they tiptoe around the fact that they’re looking at him? They never said ‘suspect,’ but clearly he was their person of interest.” 

Watch CBS News Videos Online

That’s just semantics. The odd and tragic twists here are legion. Geraldo Rivera jumped from a van for some on-street reporting action, for crissake. 

Oleson was held on $100,000 cash bail. In Superior Court, a judge said the $100,000 bail was warranted. “Does it increase the flight risk for someone to be a suspect or person of interest in four homicides? Yes,” Judge William Forrester said. Yet prosecutors made certain to publicly state Oleson was nothing beyond a “person of interest.” The arrest and “ransom” were for illicitly photographing his girlfriend’s underage daughter in various states of undress. The running theory: investigators wanted to hold Oleson while they built a murder case—one that never came.  

On Saturday April 7, a bail bondsman phoned Jimmy Leonard, a criminal defense attorney from Atlantic City. By the time Leonard (who owns an upstart magazine for which I’ve written) got to Salem County jail, the guards were acting like “I was going to see Hannibal Lecter.” They placed an alarm device that resembled a hand grenade on the table before him. Grab in case of emergency, they instructed, as if Oleson might remove his face to wear while escaping. 

“He came in; we shook hands. Not firm. Just a normal handshake,” recalls Leonard. “After a couple minutes, I’m thinking, ‘No way. Not capable of doing it.’ Typically, I don’t get feelings like that initially, but not for a millisecond have I thought he was guilty. It takes a special kind of individual to kill with their bare hands. Then, he tells me he’d volunteered to take a lie detector and DNA test. In my mind, he was either completely not guilty or the dumbest serial killer on the planet.” 

Looking back, Oleson says he returned to the Golden Key a couple days after the bodies were found (and months before he was arrested) and mentioned to one of the on-scene investigators—he says to be helpful—that he’d seen shoes on the roof. That information didn’t seem to be of interest to officers, but Oleson was.  

Maybe it was the sex toys and kinky videos in his truck. “Something wrong with having a healthy sexual appetite?” he asked when I brought it up. Maybe he just looked rough-and-tumble and, inconveniently, lived part-time near a murder factory. Or maybe it didn’t help much when another prostitute told authorities Oleson copped to the crimes.  

The Prosecutor’s Office became fixated on Oleson, which would have made sense had the DNA evidence from the crime scene matched. Leonard doesn’t think the test produced any evidence against his client, because if it meant they could clear four nationally-noticed homicides, prosecutors would have used it—and the media extravaganza would have only just begun. 

The prosecutor didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment. (Working the A.C. crime beat from 1997 to 2000, I found this was their rote approach to public relations.) The closest I came was calling Jill Horenberger, the retired chief assistant prosecutor who worked the DNA hearing. “I would not be able to comment on that at all,” she said. 

Those who still think Oleson is responsible for the murders are likely driven to close four homicides and bring “closure” to survivors. But secrecy and an unwillingness to adapt to evidence, even from unreliable witnesses, cost Oleson dearly.  

Setting aside the medical condition that precludes Oleson from lifting anything over 50 pounds at risk of paralysis, and how he’s since had to sell the home his family built, his reputation was destroyed.  

There are four victims, and groups of survivors, in this case. On Nov. 20, 2006, two women ambling behind the motel-strip discovered the body of Kim Raffo, 35, PTA-mom-turned-prostitute. She’d been strangled to death hours earlier. When CSI: Atlantic County arrived, they found—within 110 yards—the bodies of Molly Jean Dilts, 20; Barbara V. Breidor, 42; and Tracy Ann Roberts, 23. Dilts’ body had been there for a month. Like with Breidor, decomposition made finding a cause of death impossible. Roberts, who’d been there for roughly a week, was choked like Raffo. 

“We can only hope and pray that the monster responsible for their deaths will be caught and prosecuted to the fullest extent,” says Breidor’s sister, Francine Lentes. 

It’s time to add a fifth name to the victim list. Because of how the investigation was handled all along—from botched evidence at the scene to star witnesses retracting stories—Oleson’s future, as modest as it seemed to be, was choked to death too.  

“As this progressed, Oleson was not treated fairly by the system,” says Martin Siegel, an attorney who represented Oleson until prosecutors cited the conflict of interest from representing Oleson and his ex-girlfriend before. “It was very unfair that he was publicly targeted the way he was. What the public remembers is that he was suspected. Whether called a suspect or not, the public doesn’t differentiate.” 

Oleson volunteered DNA samples in June 2007. This, after he says jail personnel wrapped his pubic hair around their gloved fingers and yanked clumps out. The prosecutors likely enjoyed the subsequent New York Post ’s “Atlantic City Strangler Suspect Admitted Killing: Hooker” story, except the part where Leonard says the witness is “a lying crack-addicted prostitute with a wild imagination and absolutely no credibility.” 

That September, Oleson’s defense turned over recordings of someone else confessing the crimes to the Prosecutor’s Office. “Thirty seconds into meeting him at the jail, I felt like he was capable, beyond a shadow of a doubt,” says Leonard of the confessor. “I told him ‘If you have something to say, say it. There’s an innocent man sitting in the Salem County Jail.’ His response to me was, ‘I know.’ He was trying to get something off his chest.”  

“They blew me off,” Leonard says of the prosecutors. 

In October, with the case stagnant, Oleson’s bail was lowered. That stung one of the dead women’s sisters, though she accepted why it happened. “I read what he was arrested for and I think it’s sickening,” Lentes said, “but it’s extremely upsetting that the person responsible for my sister’s murder is still out there free to live his life while my sister is gone forever.” 

Oleson remained free long enough to hold a press conference complete with an apology from Denise Hill, the prostitute whose information became the linchpin to bringing Oleson under suspicion. In a bizarre twist, Hill recanted after realizing it was another customer, not Oleson, who confessed to her. Meanwhile, prosecutors whispered to other reporters that they checked out, and dismissed the story.  

Hill says the man who confessed even asked her to get a copy of the 48 Hours show to watch in her A.C. apartment. “He told me he couldn’t touch me because I’m an angel,” says Hill. “I’m not ashamed to say that I’m a prostitute, and that I still [do drugs] a couple times a week. I am what I am. What haunts me every day is that they never looked into anything I told them. I can’t get that out of my head. Why can’t they just take the time to look at somebody who may have murdered four people?” 

In November, Oleson went back to jail after pleading guilty to the invasion of privacy charge. He says the pissed-off girlfriend planted those photographs knowing full well that the cops were on the way, but he ate the 364 days in jail because he didn’t want the child to face questions in a public courtroom. Is he a peeping Tom? “Maybe,” he says. But he’s “not Jack the Ripper.” With time served, he walked free in March 2008.  

After his release he spent more than a year in that motel that was frequented by people traveling selling magazines, welfare recipients and police. “It’s a motel of last resort,” says Oleson. 

He and his fiancée then moved to a stand-alone rental home in Salem. Having a home is good for the couple. It enables Seaholtz’s two sons from a marriage that hasn’t been divorced quite yet to stay with them—even if her husband tells them to be wary of Oleson. It’s bad that the family saw a crack deal going down right outside their dining room window, while eating dinner.  

“It’s just a bigger cell,” Oleson said last month, “with more fresh air.” 

Leonard remembers walking from the courthouse after the bail had been lowered. He says Oleson sported a gray T-shirt that read, “Off the Hook.” Gone were the national reporters, most of the Philadelphia TV vans and any element of perp-walks-free vindication. “In theory, that is the moment when he’s supposed to get on with his life,” says Leonard. “He turned to me and asked, ‘What happens next?’ I looked at him and said, ‘I don’t know.’ I still don’t know. He went from being Charles Manson to being Richard Jewell.” 

Elements of Oleson’s story are indeed reminiscent of what happened to Jewell after an explosion at the 1996 Olympic Games killed one and injured 111 people. He went from hero to nail-bombing suspect to dead at 44 of natural causes. Thing is, Jewell, who likened the swarm of investigators and media to “piranha on a bleeding cow,” got an apology from Janet Reno. Plus, the real bad guy, Eric Rudolph, got caught.  

Oleson on the other hand hasn’t even received a private apology as he deals with a litany of physical and financial woes, and he hasn’t gotten back a damn thing the cops took during the search.  

“I can’t stand being lied to since I don’t lie to people,” said Oleson, who has been a guest speaker in a community-college robotics class, and concocted elaborate Halloween displays complete with a pair of hearses. “The only thing they’ve ever said is, ‘We never charged or accused you, so we can’t officially clear you.’ They ruined my life. I’ve prayed for death.”  

“He’s a tragic figure. Life is a daily struggle for him,” says Leonard. “And investigators still, to this day, say, ‘I never liked him from the beginning. He’s the guy, and we’re going to get him.’ I believe that some of them still think he’s the prime suspect. Because of that, this case will never get solved. Maybe if they [the real murderer/s] get caught, Oleson can get what’s left of his life back. “If they come to me tomorrow, or in 10 years, with some iota of evidence that he did this, I would be stunned and disgusted. I believe wholeheartedly in his innocence. But, this is not a Terry Oleson case. For Terry Oleson, life goes on. This is about those four women and their families and loved ones.” 

For Oleson and his fiancée, though, the future can be broken down easily. 

“The world revolves around money and we don’t have it,” says Seaholtz, who self-published a book of her poems to Oleson entitled Heartfelt Confessions . 

A dinner at McDonald’s when the kids are in town sometimes costs $20 that they don’t have. Food stamps, SSI and perpetual disability don’t go a long way, but the relationship brings at least a glimmer of hope for a future that will sustain him. 

The Salem rental is better than the motel, but Oleson still wants to “get a little bit of property, an acre or two off the road, and build a house,” even if his ailments prevent any heavy labor. Still, “it hurt me” to have to sell the house and then get hit with a tax bill for $1,000 more than he got for it.  

For all he’s been through, Oleson has a very simple wish list: Getting property seized during the search back, and restoring enough of a good name where people he’s known for years won’t tell their children to keep the front door open when they visit Seaholtz’s kids. Those are pretty simple requests from a man left dangling in the wind. But let’s go two better: an apology for Oleson from those who destroyed his life, and some answers for the friends and family of Breidor, Dilts, Raffo and Roberts who still just want to know who killed their loved ones. ■

Uptown Dreams

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:22:37 PDT

Everybody knows the love-hate relationships mothers and daughters endure. But Manayunk family therapist Jody Miller says things get especially dicey between mothers and their only daughters.  

“That’s where you’ll see the real dynamics,” says Miller. “They tend to get into very competitive situations, and there are almost always periods when the daughter’s coming of age, especially if she’s successful or has the potential for success, where the mother will feel very threatened.” 

This makes me wonder how bestselling Mt. Airy urban lit novelist Karen Quinones Miller has managed to refrain from strangling her vivacious and talented daughter Camille.  

I’m kidding, of course, since 22-year-old Camille Quinones Miller, who stands 5-feet-nothing and weighs maybe 100 pounds, is so cute it’s hard to imagine anyone assaulting her with anything but a hug. But she’s also an ambitious fledgling movie director who’s likely headed for big things. Yet Camille and Karen get along so swimmingly, you’d think they were a pair of mallards on a glassy lake. “It’s always been me and her against the world,” shrugs Karen, an ex- Inquirer reporter, when asked to explain the tranquility. “Always me and her,” agrees Camille. “Best friends.” 

Camille thinks enough of her best friend that four months after graduating from Clark Atlanta University with a degree in film, she’s made good on a decade-old promise by putting Karen’s 2004 novel Ida B. on the big screen.  

“When Camille was 12, she told me I should start writing books so one day she could turn one into a movie,” recalls Karen, now working on her seventh, An Angry-Assed Black Woman . “That’s how my literary career began. Now she’s made one of my dreams come true. How awesome is that?”  

Camille’s maiden film, Uptown Dreams , is a no-budget indie chronicling day-to-day life inside a high-rise housing project at 128th and Lexington in Harlem, N.Y. It debuted Oct. 16 at the Inquirer Building for about 100 members of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists and, uh, me. Now, I’m not going to tell you Uptown Dreams is the best movie I’ve ever seen, or anything like that. To be honest, I thought a couple of the scenes dragged on a bit, and several members of the likeable, nonpaid cast need to discover finesse. But it’s an honest, enthusiastic effort. And I find the film’s subject matter compelling, since I used to be intrigued by the foreboding, stark appearances of long-ago imploded project towers like North Philly’s crime- and drug-ridden Raymond Rosen Homes. 

Karen, a Harlem native who acts in Uptown Dreams and serves as its executive producer, also warms to the subject of housing projects, but for a better reason: she grew up in one. Moreover, she thinks projects get a bad rap, especially in Philadelphia.  

“Here more so than in New York, there’s really a stigma attached to living in the projects, and I didn’t realize that until I moved out of New York,” she says. “I found project living kind of comforting because it’s a community within the community. I’m not denying the bad things that go on there. But in the projects, it was like you had 350 mothers.”  

Multitudinous moms couldn’t keep Karen, now 51, out of teenage trouble, however. She quit school at 13, and while she won’t disclose the specifics of her run-ins with authority (other than to maintain she never sold drugs), she admits to being “on a first-name basis with a lot of police officers.”  

At the urging of a cop, she joined the Navy in 1980, got out in ’85 and moved to Philly in ’87—the year Camille was born—to be closer to her brother, a sailor stationed at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Karen took a secretarial position at the Daily News before catching the journalism bug, graduating from Temple and landing a job at the Norfolk-based Virginian-Pilot . The Inquirer hired her in 1994, where she stayed for six years.  

In those days, little Camille was a regular presence in the newsroom, although she quickly decided print journalism wasn’t her thing. “I wanted to tell stories without writing,” she says. “I couldn’t stand writing, so I used to wander over to the photojournalism department and hang out with those guys.”  

During her teens, Camille bought her first camera, did freelance newspaper photography and enrolled at Scribe Video Center, a West Philly nonprofit that trains aspiring videographers. She then headed south for college, where she met Spike Lee when he visited Clark Atlanta to screen his 2006 documentary When the  Levees Broke . Camille told Lee he was her favorite filmmaker, and that she aspired to make powerful movies, too.  

“I asked him whether he thought I should go to NYU or UCLA for grad school,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘Look, if you want to direct films, you should just go ahead and do your first one. Why waste the money on grad school?’  

“I said, ‘You know what? You’re right.’” 

Camille plans to show Uptown Dreams (uptown dreamsmovie.com) at Utah’s Slamdance Film Festival in January. She hopes a national distributor will pick it up, and that her virgin film will, as they say in the street, blow up. But even if it doesn’t, the young director has at least one adoring fan.

“You always want your kids to do better than you, and I can already see Camille’s going to,” Karen says without a trace of envy. “I couldn’t be more delighted.” ■

Tom Corbett Chooses the NRA

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:42:00 PDT

Attorney General Tom Corbett is the top law enforcement officer in the state, and he wants to be your next governor. But he doesn’t necessarily care about life and death in Philadelphia.

That’s the only conclusion to draw from the Republican’s decision to add his name to a list of 33 state attorneys general who are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down municipal handgun restrictions across the country—depriving Philly and other big cities of a potential tool to clamp down on the gun violence that plagues them. It’s good news for Corbett’s supporters in the National Rifle Association, but bad news for the rest of us who live in a city that suffers a gun-related death every few days.

Corbett’s signature is on a “friend of the court” brief (PDF) spearheaded by Texas Atty. Gen. Greg Abbott in support of the NRA lawsuit to strike down municipal gun restrictions in Chicago. Unless those restrictions are lifted by the court, Abbott wrote, “millions of Americans may be deprived of their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms as a result of actions by local governments.” No mention, of course, of the 30,000 Americans who die each year from gun violence.

“That would have a chilling effect on municipalities,” Tricia Enright, Mayor Nutter’s communications director, said of the potential Supreme Court ruling. Philly is one of a number of Pennsylvania cities, she noted, that “have taken it upon themselves to pass gun safety laws because the state won’t.”

Indeed, the struggle between Harrisburg and Philadelphia is nothing new. The General Assembly has long banned any restrictions on private handgun ownership, even though the city has at times been under siege: In 2006, when “Killadelphia” violence was spiking, 344 of the city’s 406 homicides were the result of gun violence. While the numbers have improved somewhat, they’re still significant: Last year, 280 of the city’s 333 homicide victims were shot to death. Clamp down on guns, and maybe those numbers plummet further.

Even so, in June, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down Philadelphia’s bans on assault weapons and the “straw purchase” of handguns, asserting that only the legislature—and not the cities—has the authority to pass gun laws. The court left several other provisions in place, however, allowing Philly to require that lost handguns be reported to police and prohibit gun ownership by people subject to “protections from abuse” orders.

Last year, Corbett—whose office didn’t respond to requests for comment—received an “A+” rating from the NRA. Nonetheless, he has sometimes seemed to be on the side of angels when it comes to Philadelphia gun violence. Last year he joined Dist. Atty. Lynne Abraham in launching a program warning against “straw purchases” of guns by people with clean criminal records for convicts who aren’t legally allowed to possess guns. 

“It is not enough to investigate and prosecute criminals. We need to educate the public, especially our children, about the dangers associated with gun violence,” Corbett said at the time. 

Education only goes so far, though, without laws and the ability to enforce them. Restricting unfettered access to firearms would do even more to reduce violence, and it’s on this score that Corbett and the other attorneys general fall short. Though the case focuses on Chicago’s laws, the ruling will affect every city dealing with gun violence—and potentially put an end to Philly’s hopes that the General Assembly might one day allow us to properly deal with the situation here. The brief bearing Corbett’s signature is full of references to the Revolutionary War, the Founding Fathers and the underpinnings of Anglo-American political philosophy—but it completely ignores the problems faced by 21st century Americans.

“Unlike other enumerated rights—like free speech and religious exercise—the right to keep and bear arms carries an inherent risk of danger to the liberty and interests of others,” wrote the attorneys who are defending Chicago’s gun ordinances. “Thus, in urban environments, where handgun abuse is so rampant, the protection of a right to handguns simply because they are in common use undermines, rather than guarantees, ordered liberty. Enforcing handgun control laws can make an enormous difference in curbing firearms violence.” 

That sounds right, but Tom Corbett disagrees. Philadelphians shouldn’t be surprised by his stance. We should, however, be disappointed and offended that he so easily disregards the violence that affects our city. And we should remember it next year when we vote for a new governor.

Letters: ACORN's Discontents

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:05:35 PDT

• Earlier this month, Jonathan Valania wrote a cover story about how the Philadelphia office of ACORN had largely escaped the video-fueled controversy surrounding the national organization. On Oct. 21, BigGovernment.com, the conservative web site that sponsored the undercover video stings of ACORN, held a press conference to refute Philly ACORN’s contention that its reporters had been “tossed out” of the offices during their attempted sting. Concurrent with the press conference, Big Government posted a heavily-edited version of the hidden camera footage of O’Keefe and Giles’ visit to the offices of ACORN Philly. The video and press conference prompted this letter to the editor: 

A lot of people wasted their time reading your ACORN story. It was several pages long and the main theme was that the Philadelphia Chapter was too smart to fall for the same trick as the other chapters when helping the pimp and the prostitute out with housing. Now it turns out that they were in fact helped by the Philadelphia chapter.  

Don’t you guys have to do any homework before printing stories like this? Don’t you think you should apologize to everyone who wasted their time reading your story that turned out to be false? Is there no interest in the truth anymore or is it just about being a Democrat versus a Republican and the truth is collateral damage? I’m embarrassed for you.

SCOTT B. via email 

Jonathan Valania’s response:

In a voiceover, O’Keefe promises to run the complete unedited footage of the ACORN Philly sting, but it never appears in the video. What we do get is a version of the footage that includes O’Keefe’s and Giles’ leading questions and innuendos, but mutes the responses of Katherine Conway-Russell—the Philly rep that met with O’Keefe and Giles—to those questions. Minus Conway-Russell’s audio and the complete unedited version of the tape, it is unclear to me that this proves anything at all. Nor does it refute any of the facts stated in the PW cover story. The facts of the Philadelphia story remain the same: 

1) O’Keefe did not represent himself as he has claimed. 

2) The police were called immediately in response to the suspicious activity. 

3) Katherine did not fill out any paperwork, offer illegal advice, or misrepresent ACORN Housing programs to the fraudsters. 

• Regarding Joel Mathis’ recent column  about the Republican presence in Philadelphia: 

Mathis’ commentary boils down to one premise: “Big cities like Philadelphia need big government—and a strong social safety net—to provide all the many services that hold the town together.” This is like saying Philadelphia should keep in place the policies that have decimated the tax base over the generations, but with less corruption.  

Mayor Nutter’s vision for Philadelphia is to raise the sales tax 100 percent, end the planned reductions in the wage and business taxes and to weaken already weak pension funds. Philadelphia needs fundamental change in how it operates. The Republicans could do better.  

J. MATTHEW WOLFE Republican Ward Leader West Philadelphia

• Regarding Joel Hoffman's recent story about SEPTA cashiers.

It’s unbelievable that cashiers at city subway stations make an average of $55,000 a year. My father has been a mental health/drug addiction specialist for over 25 years, has a Master’s Degree, and has never made more than $40,000 a year. All he does is try to rehabilitate drug addicts and the mentally ill, while the Septa employees hit the button to let me through a turnstile. Man, we are so highly evolved. 

ANDREW EMMA  South Philly 

• Regarding F.H. Rubino’s article about David Milbourne, a local man living with AIDS: 

I always know when I read Mr. Rubino’s work he will take a story gone dark and illuminate it. That said, I wanted to quibble with his use of the word ‘promiscuous.’ Just because a person who is unmarried or single has sex with different people there’s no need to give them the judgmental label of ‘promiscuity.’

Straight or gay, anyone of any sexual stripe, many of us included, who fought for the concept of sexual freedom and the idea of casting off our repressions and guilts—before major disease made it a whole ’nother ballgame—appreciate the idea that one can sleep with whom one wishes, without being labeled a ho, a slut, or, yes, perhaps even promiscuous.

JANE CARNELL  Avenue of the Arts 

Privilege in Pinstripes

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:58:56 PDT

Hating the New York Yankees is a thoroughly uncreative act, as original as hating mosquitoes, leprosy, or murder. There is nothing redeeming in them, nothing to love. If the Pittsburgh Pirates’ team plane were to twirl into a hillside next spring—and, given their recent history, there’s no reason to think that it wouldn’t—the response would be gentle, watery-eyed: those poor Pirates. They seemed so polite. If only we’d known them better.

But if the same fate befell the Yankees—an emaciated C.C. Sabathia tearing at Johnny Damon’s armflesh on a frigid mountaintop—the reaction would be markedly different. There would be dancing. Singing. State-sanctioned public rutting. The party would be sweet and it would be justified. And it would last roughly a week ... until the Steinbrenners found the money they’d need for a fresh round of All-Stars.

I happen to be one of those Yankee-haters. Like many, I find their fans’ sense of privilege nauseating, their roster a cause for functional alcoholism. But unlike most in Philadelphia who despise all teams New York, I am the keeper of a dark and filthy secret: as a child, I loved the Yankees.

I grew up in Essex County, N.J., fifteen miles west of Manhattan. It was the mid-eighties, and, strange as it might now seem, the Mets, not the Yankees, were the toast of New York. It was the era of Doc and Straw and Nails, of El Sid and HoJo, of Mookie Wilson and a ground ball to Buckner. They were youthful, brash, and coked to the gills, truly a team for their time. Up in the Bronx, meanwhile, the Yanks were paddling along, finishing five-and-a-half games behind Buckner’s Sox in 1986.

By 1990, the Yankees had become a laughingstock; Anthony Quinn in a Cherokee suit. A man named Stump managed them into last place that year—the team’s second such finish since the Taft Administration. Dave Winfield was traded midseason for Mike Witt. Andy Hawkins lost a no-hitter. Steve Balboni hit .192. But despite the decline, I found myself drawn to them. They still had the great Don Mattingly, above it all, even as his back betrayed him. There was Steve Sax, Roberto Kelly, Kevin Maas; Dave Righetti was still in the bullpen. It wasn’t much to go on, but the pinstripes retained their allure, mystique trumping reality.

Just six years later, the Yankees had cleaned themselves up and won the World Series. My childhood idols had long since departed, giving way to Bernie Williams, Paul O’Neill, and a rookie named Jeter. They were able, fearless, proud to be Yankees. I was a freshman in college when Charlie Hayes caught the final out, and I exploded with joy: finally, my own Yankee championship. But they weren’t done there: they won in ’98, and again in ’99. For good measure, they pummeled the Mets in 2000. I moved to Philadelphia in June of 2001, four months before they cruised to their 38th pennant. For the first time since kindergarten, I found that I didn’t care.

The problem wasn’t their dominance, though it had become numbing. And it wasn’t the money; they had always spent freely. It was that the two were mixing with a belief that this precious new soufflé should never fall, no matter the cost. By the time they were sucking up Roger Clemens and A-Rod and Gary Sheffield and Randy Johnson, the team was staggering with bloat, a Miyazaki heavy absorbing all in its path. To all but their most myopic supporters, this hyperbolic “excellence” was hurting the game.

The Phillies, meanwhile, seemed far more interesting. I picked up the thread in 2003, when Jim Thome joined a team that was young, flawed, and fun to bitch about. Jimmy Rollins, Pat Burrell, and Bobby Abreu were gifted but frustrating; David Bell seemed faintly diarrhetic. Kevin Millwood was a mistake, Vicente Padilla a headcase, Jose Mesa a waste of good cleats. But despite its imperfections, the club won 86 games that year, then traded for Billy Wagner. Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, and the can’t-miss Gavin Floyd would soon be playing in a gorgeous new park. A sports-battered city allowed itself a small degree of hope. Five years later, astonishingly, that hope was rewarded.

For a fan, the years when a team straddles the gap between also-ran and contender are the most emotionally raw. It’s when the hunger for victory is at its most visible and pathetic. It’s when you’re most likely to wobble up from your seat and scream at a middle reliever: Don’t fuck this up, you fuck; we’re almost there! Even as a Phillies neophyte, I felt it acutely: the hunger of someone who doesn’t truly expect to eat. And it gnawed more intensely the closer they got: Craig Biggio’s season-killing home run off Wagner in 2005 left me face-down on the kitchen floor, moaning like a hostage.

Those days are behind us now, of course. The Phillies have ascended in a manner that recalls those ’96 Yankees: with a core of homegrown stars and a well-chosen cast of imports. Philadelphians like to say that this team has been built “the right way”: native baseball intelligence, not the frantic heaving of cash, has led to its success.

The same cannot be said about the group they now must face. The Phillies will need to play crisp, near-perfect ball to drop this Goliath—and even then, much luck will be needed. If they do win, they will have earned the right to be considered among the truly elite. And we’ll have little reason to care, a few years from now, that they’ve become what we once despised.

Slow Down on Sestak

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:35:51 PDT

You might think by the way Joe Sestak has presented himself that he's some sort of liberal foil to Arlen Specter, but the truth is a bit more complicated. As Booman Tribune put it back in August, although the Netroots may claim that "Sestak is twice the progressive that Ned Lamont ever was," Pennsylvania Democrats may "wind up preferring Bob Casey on every issue that isn't related to reproductive rights and stem-cell research." I'll add "don't ask/don't tell" and "health care reform" to that list, but not much more.

When it comes to matters or war and peace, Sestak is not a progressive. Although he campaigned in 2006 on ending the war in Iraq, and supported several supplementals that included a timetable for withdrawal, in the end Sestak voted in favor of HR 2206, a blank check to George Bush which continued to fund the Iraq war with no deadlines for drawing down troops. Two of the largest defense companies in the country are in his top five campaign donors. As recently as February 2008, Sestak participated in a "leadership conference" affiliated with the NDIA, a lobbying group that works to "ensure the continued existence of a viable, internationally competitive national technology and industrial base and strengthening the government-industry partnership through dialogue and interaction with the Congress and the Executive Branch". And while individual donations from single-issue voters make up a large percentage of his donors, defense industry PACs are only second in support to labor.

In 2007, Sestak sided with Dick Cheney, voting against defunding the vice-president's office when Dick tried to claim he was exempt from laws governing classified materials. I don't know if I like that kind of support for the imperial presidency.

That same year, Sestak participated in a meaningless vote to condemn an ad by MoveOn, the very group that raises funds and provides volunteers for Democrats. Was the "General Betray Us" ad the brightest idea MoveOn ever had? Probably not. On the other hand, what is the point of kicking your allies in the teeth? An offensive ad wasn't impetus for Congressional condemnation, but Sestak jumped into the fray anyway. This year, based on a bullshit stunt by conservative activists, Sestak voted to defund ACORN. Again, biting the hand that feeds.

Worst of all, Sestak voted to throw our Fourth Amendment rights in the garbage can, voting not only in favor of warrantless wiretapping, but in favor of extending special rights to corporations like Verizon and AT&T. These special rights prohibit prosecuting these companies for willfully breaking the law on Bush's say-so. On a recent conference call, in which the aformentioned Ned Lamont boosted Sestak's progressive cred, I asked Sestak about this vote. He told me that while the legislation he voted for did indeed extend these protections to the telecom industry, it left the government officials who ordered the wiretapping open to prosecution. What he did NOT mention was the radical Bush-Obama policy of state secrets, which effectively blocks those prosecutions too.

Now, it is certainly true that Arlen Specter voted for much of this as well. But when it comes to Fourth Amendment issues, one gets the distinct sense that Specter feels very badly about this. In fact, he has tried repeatedly to undo the damage he helped cause. Sestak defends his vote to this day.

And then there are questions of Sestak's temperament, which is legendary: as reported in 2007, Sestak is known as a taskmaster with one of the worst staff turnover rates in DC. Last October, DelCo Republican Craig Williams made hay of Sestak's rep, "highlighting Congressman Joe Sestak’s 128 percent staff turnover rate during his first 18 months in office, nearly quadruple the state average of just 33 percent."

I got to see a hint of Sestak's temper very briefly at the health care forum he hosted a few months back. One of his staffers was dealing with a particularly unruly speaker in private, and interrupted Sestak's train of thought to ask a question. Sestak wheeled to face the man, his face twisted into a snarl, before he quickly regained his composure and returned to the audience. It was bizarre. Specter's got a reputation too -- they don't call him "Snarlin' Arlen for nothing. But you don't hear the same kind of stories about staff turnover at Specter's office.

Given that so much of Senate wheeling and dealing is based on personal relationships (as Joe Biden and the late Ted Kennedy understood), what does this kind of turmoil suggest about a Senator Sestak? Don't we already have an egotist in Snarlin' Arlen, and one with a lot more clout? Because, as Booman correctly points out, "if [Specter] succeeds in winning reelection as a Democrat, his seniority will be restored. That would make him a cardinal on the Appropriations Committee, where he would steer untold amount of benefits to the people of Pennsylvania... he'd have enough seniority to take over the Veteran's Affairs, Aging, or Environment & Public Works committee. Sestak, by contrast, would take a seat behind Al Franken."

I've obviously spent a lot of time attacking Arlen Specter. I'm not a fan, as you've probably noticed. And on the surface, I think Joe Sestak looks like the better choice, which may be so.

But Pennsylvania progressives have been burned before, most notably by Chris Carney. Carney outright lied to progressives for their support in 2007, and now we're stuck with him. So I'm leery of Sestak's moves to the left. This is a typical pattern during primaries, after which the winner typically tacks right during the general, which I totally expect of Sestak as well as Specter. The difference is that Specter knows he has no chance with the right, and seems to be taking his leftward drift all the way. Furthermore, if re-elected, in all likelihood it'll be his last term. Even before Sestak entered the race Specter was no less reliable than quite a few Democrats as Nate Silver has noted, remarking "Specter appears to be just as capable of reacting to pressure from his right as to his left... there was also something of a breaking point while he was still a Republican". And as for whether he'll pull the same crap Lieberman pulled on Connecticut voters when he was re-elected, think about this: Lieberman owes his seat to the GOP, and bears a grudge against the Democratic party that didn't support him, which is why he's such a pain in the ass. With Specter, it's the opposite: he owes the Democrats, BIG TIME, and he has no love left for the Pennsylvania GOP.

Do I think Arlen Specter is a better Democrat than Joe Sestak? No. (Although he's a damn sight better than majority leader Harry Reid.) All I'm saying is before we elect someone to what amounts to a lifetime position, shouldn't we be asking the same hard questions of Sestak that we're asking of Specter?

Hippocritic Oath

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:41:55 PDT

I never thought I would find myself on the brink of bankruptcy. Never envisioned a time when I would be asking the government for food stamps, utility assistance and medical aid. But that’s exactly where I stand today: A 30-year-old, well-educated, formerly able-bodied professional woman who is now dependent on the government for a “public option.”

I wouldn’t be in this position if I’d had access to reasonably affordable health care in the first place. But I didn’t, and now I’m here.

Today, I’m checking into the emergency room at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for a routine treatment that is only vaguely connected to my usual ailments: In less than an hour’s time, a nurse practitioner will use a small scalpel and a particularly menacing pair of medical scissors to lance and then drain three grotesque abscesses that have been festering underneath the surface of my armpits, in various stages of regression and regeneration, for nearly six months now. I can’t even begin to count the number of medical treatments, procedures and surgeries I’ve undergone at hospitals just like this over the past 10 years, ever since surviving a car accident that nearly cost me my life.

This is not one of my better days. I feel a tinge of self-pity when I realize I’m starting to fit in quite well with the cornucopia of insanity surrounding me in the waiting area: wheezing and sweaty grandparents in wheelchairs wearing surgical face masks; a bedazzled Bible-toting schizophrenic boxer; an uncontrollably belligerent drunk; and an utterly tragic Iraq war veteran—clearly in the throes of withdrawal—who hasn’t stopped badgering the triage nurse for pain killers since my arrival.  

In most cities across the nation, emergency rooms have become de facto primary care clinics—where those without health insurance, or without enough health insurance, show up on a regular basis. They do this because they have no choice.  

For nearly two years now, my fiancé, Dan, and I have counted ourselves among these unfortunate souls. We are self-employed and uninsured, just as we have been, on and off, since we lost our group health insurance coverage nearly two years ago. We have seen our livelihoods and our financial  security shredded to pieces by a health care industry that is often lauded by conservative pundits and medical lobbyists as being the very best in the world. We represent a voice that has been curiously absent from the raging debate over President Obama’s proposed health care plan: The typical young, ambitious, upper-middle-class couple you see in prosperous urban sprawls everywhere. Dan’s a freelance journalist. I’m a too-sick-to-work, full-time freelance graphic designer. We have credit cards we don’t need and a mortgage we can’t afford. Like many Americans we have been silently destroyed by the behemoth known as the American health insurance industry. We’re not looking for handouts. But here we are, reaching out for public assistance aka socialized medicine. If wanting affordable, quality health care makes us communists, socialists or flag-burning anti-patriots, then so be it.  

 I have developed an unusually high tolerance for pain over the last few years, but today my armpits are aching and throbbing so bad I can barely manage to lift my purse from the conveyor belt as Dan and I pass through security on our way to the ER registration desk.  

As we make our way through the security doors, I feel my cheeks redden and my anxiety spike. Thanks to the particularly embarrassing nature of my visit, not to mention my extraordinarily disheveled physical appearance, I can’t help but feel a little self-conscious.  

Thanks to the now-overripe abscesses festering in my pits, I haven’t been able to wash my hair for almost a week. What’s more, I can’t even remember the last time I so much as touched a stick of deodorant. I’m awash with gratitude as Dan interrupts my mumbled explanation to the ER’s admin staff. Thankfully, I only have to provide a few additional details before my name is entered in the hospital’s network-wide computer system. But it isn’t until an employee behind the check-in desk provides me with my very own restaurant-style pager, and then a sheet of label stickers, each one complete with a personal barcode that will help the doctors and nurses document my progress today, that I find myself in a state of complete and total awe.  

“This is better than the Olive Garden!” I whisper to Dan, while attempting to disguise the overwhelming excitement that a simple pager and a sheet of stickers are clearly causing me. But Dan, who’s stayed by my side through months of nightmarish experiences with lackadaisical doctors and double-speaking health insurance bureaucrats, is just as excited as I am. “This is fantastic ,” he says, “I think you’re finally going to be OK now.” 

I hope so. Because after all that we’ve suffered and paid through the nose for over the past couple of years, I honestly don’t know how much more we can take.  

 As we wait for the pager to go off my mind starts drifting to what it’s like to be young and uninsured in America. I recall all the experiences I’ve had with the health care industry over the past decade, beginning with the Saturday night in February of 2000 when a drunk-driving accident propelled me through the front windshield of my roommate’s car at 70 miles per hour. I was a 20-year-old, often hard-partying design student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. After the accident, I was told that as my body sailed out of the passenger’s seat that night, and immediately after my head and shoulders tore through the glass of the windshield, my right knee somehow jammed into the car’s glove box, thereby saving me from an almost certain death or permanent paralysis.  

My thoughts return to every last one of the surgeries, procedures and courses of physical and occupational therapy I endured when I actually did have health insurance—and relatively decent insurance at that, with low co-pays and complete coverage. As a matter of fact, the health coverage I had at the time of my car accident was so comprehensive it even covered the majority of the cosmetic facial procedures I needed in order to have the thousands of pieces of glass removed from my skin.  

That was then.  

The company that provided that relatively decent health insurance happily accepted my premium every month for years—during which I rarely needed any medical care—only to take out a lien against me after the accident. This was done, I later learned, so that if I were to be awarded any financial compensation from, say, my auto insurance company, the health insurance company would then be able to recoup the cost of the accident-related health care they provided me.  

I held on to that insurance until I graduated from college and took a job with an I.T. and web design firm that offered health insurance to its employees. Eventually I left that position to manage a boutique interior design company with a man who at the time was my boyfriend. We shared a group insurance policy, but when we parted ways, my insurance coverage departed with him. I’ve been self-employed ever since, and because of my pre-existing conditions, I have yet to secure private health insurance. No matter how much I’ve been able or willing to pay in premiums, not a single health insurance carrier has been inclined to cover me.  

Then there’s Dan. Up until just a few months ago, he was the proud recipient of a health plan offered by Blue Cross. Unfortunately, the company wouldn’t extend its coverage to me because of my pre-existing conditions—namely the nerve damage and chronic knee problems I developed as a direct result of the car accident. No matter, of course, that my pre-existing conditions are precisely what I need insurance coverage for.  

In the roughly two years since then, Dan and I have spent literally tens of thousands of dollars on doctor visits, prescription medications—Effexor, Lyrica, Subutex, Ibuprofen, nutritional supplements—and a bevy of other experimental treatments, all in an attempt to keep me healthy, sane and active.  

 Being uninsured wasn’t our only problem, as one of our most recent family doctors illustrated to us. He didn’t accept insurance at all. He explained to us that the process of billing is either too costly or too time-consuming for a small practice such as his, especially now that it has become increasingly difficult for independently operating clinics to receive payments from insurance companies. This particular doctor requires patients to pay cash for their appointments up front. And naturally, it’s the patient’s responsibility to then seek reimbursement from their health insurance carrier, assuming they have one.  

It would require much more space than I have here to list all of the descriptions used over the years by various health care providers to explain exactly why I am uninsurable. Or to tell the story of our former family doctor, a man who charged $200 monthly for my primary care, only to provide me with sexual harassment in return. After Dan and I made it clear his flirting and inappropriate comments needed to stop, he denied me treatment. 

The level of deception and outright greed that I have experienced from doctors—who take the Hippocratic Oath, not to do harm or injustice— since becoming uninsured is unacceptable.  

 After I lost my insurance, Dan and I applied numerous times for adultBasic, a public assistance program offered by the state to uninsured, low-income earners. Each time we applied, we were fully and soundly rejected. The reason? We made too much money to qualify. The program wasn’t available to me when I needed it most.  

And then, last month, when my health had finally deteriorated to the point where I could no longer bring in any meaningful income at all, and where almost every cent the both of us earned was going toward doctor bills and prescriptions, we received a letter from the county’s public assistance office on Spring Garden Street. It was good news.  

Sort of.  

 I’m incredibly nervous as I squeeze myself into a chair in front of the ER’s registration counter. A line of three or four cubicles sits in front of me, each one staffed with the sort of dazed and bored-looking civil servant that can usually be found in the administrative bowels of hospitals almost anywhere. 

After verifying my name and date of birth, the guy behind the desk pounces, ever so slightly, with The Big Question: “So … what kind of insurance do you have?” 

“I have no idea,” I say, answering honestly. “I’m hoping you can tell me.”  

I open my purse and rifle through my files. “Found it!” 

I hand over the insurance papers while explaining, as simply as I possibly can, The Situation. It’s not pretty, and I can tell he’s already confused.  

“Now, here’s where things get really confusing,” I say to the registration guy, who at this point appears to be completely bewildered. “You’ll see on the acceptance letter from the public assistance office that we were approved for adultBasic coverage, whatever that is. But we’ve also been put on some kind of a waiting list, with the option of paying a monthly premium of $313.18 to receive the insurance immediately.”  

“Umm … I guess I’ll just copy all of this for your file so billing can review it later,” the guy finally says. 

I jokingly inform Dan that we’ll be moving to Toronto as soon as we get back on our feet.  

 Dan scans the waiting room to look for a couple of seats as I’m buzzed over to triage. Again, there’s only one chair in front of the triage nurse, but I don’t mind not having Dan for backup since I can pretty much give my medical history in my sleep. 

I was actually sent here today after calling UPenn’s physician referral line in search of a new family doctor. The very kind woman who answered the phone not only provided me with the names of several primary care physicians who were actually accepting new patients and had immediate appointments available, but she also suggested I try the ER’s “Fast Track” unit. Usually open from around 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, the Fast Track is a program that allows patients with non-acute injuries and illnesses—even those patients without adequate insurance, or without any insurance at all—to be seen and treated quickly in doctors’ office-style exam rooms.  

Naturally, I explain all of this to the triage nurse, a dark-haired maternal type who exudes patience and understanding. I feel the need to explain to her that even though I’ve had some insurance troubles, I did have a regular family doctor up until maybe two or three months ago. I also explain how I actually saw this doctor on two separate occasions for these very lumps, and how he told me they would “go away on their own.” He wasn’t so keen on examining them though, as I think they probably didn’t help with the sexual fantasies he was having at the time, the details of which he shared with me on an all-too-regular basis. Hence the misdiagnosis, and my eventual arrival at the ER.  

I provide her with a sheet detailing my existing conditions and most recent surgeries: right knee nerve damage; numerous arthroscopic and other surgeries including both PCL and ACL reconstructions; meniscus repairs; hardware adjustments and removals (three steel screws still intact); fluid drainage; Cortisone injections; frequent urinary tract infections; bladder and kidney infections due to nerve damage; Keloid scarring; nerve damage of the face; some glass still remaining under the skin. 

 In the world of health care and hospitals, there is quite possibly no experience more anticlimactic than being discharged from the drama and insanity of an emergency room. There is, however, a whole lot of waiting: waiting for medications and prescriptions; waiting for at-home care and treatment instructions; waiting to make follow-up hospital appointments. While Dan uses the time to bang away at his laptop, I’m left in a bit of a mental daze. All of the fear, anxiety and adrenaline that tends to take over my body before a procedure begins has now slowly given way to complete physical exhaustion. It seems almost unnatural to admit it at this point, but it’s starting to seem as if my nightmare might actually, finally, be coming to an end. How ironic then that the single most controversial aspect of the president’s proposed health plan—a “public option,” or a government-supported health care system—is exactly what is bringing closure to this terrifying chapter of my life. In other words? We already have a public option—it’s called Medicare.  

 I would visit the Fast Track unit at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania three more times to have the packing and dressings of my wound changed, and to have even more gunk drained out of my armpits, before I was finally sent home with a clean bill of health. Aside from my very last visit, where I admittedly arrived much later than the staff recommended, I was in and out of the emergency department, financial counseling and all, at an impressive speed and with an even more impressive level of care.  

I’m here in a hospital with competent and caring staff. I’m going through a system designed to ease the burden that uninsured patients can put on an emergency room. I’m in a hospital with financial counselors who understand public health insurance, and who are going to help me get my coverage intact. I’ve just had my first positive health care industry experience in nearly a decade. ■ 

UPDATED: Philly's ACORN Office Under Fire

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:00:43 PDT

Earlier this month, Jonathan Valania wrote a PW cover story about how the Philadelphia office of ACORN had largely escaped the video-fueled controversy surrounding the national organization. On Wednesday, the leaders of BigGovernment.com, the conservative web site that sponsored the undercover video stings of ACORN, held a press conference to refute Philly ACORN's contention that its reporters had been "tossed out" of the offices here during their attempted sting. Valania responds:

Yesterday, Big Government.com, the conservative web site behind the ACORN hooker sting videos, issued a press release that reads in part:

After suing Breitbart.com, Mr. O'Keefe and Ms. Giles in Maryland over the release of the Baltimore tapes, ACORN has issued public statements denying any wrongdoing in its Philadelphia office and lying about what happened there. Mr. O'Keefe and Ms. Giles are now prepared to respond.

According to Mr. Breitbart, "ACORN representatives claim James and Hannah were kicked out of Philadelphia. They also said publicly that unlike Baltimore, Washington D.C., Brooklyn, San Bernardino and San Diego, James and Hannah never even mentioned prostitution before they were told to leave. James and Hannah will be joining me to set the record straight. After Wednesday, everyone will know what really happened in Philly.

The press release goes on to announce a press conference that was held Wednesday morning at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. featuring James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles (who pretended to be the pimp and the prostitute in the videos) and Andrew Breitbart, the conservative operative behind Big Government.com. I have been told by a reporter who attended the press conference that, for the most part, only representatives from the right wing media (Washington Times, Fox News) were called upon to ask questions, most of which could be characterized as softballs. Questions that could be characterized as hostile or skeptical were deflected by Breitbart and, ultimately, went unanswered, citing ACORN's lawsuit against Breitbart/O'Keefe/Giles for violating Maryland's two-party consent laws.

Concurrent with the press conference, Big Government posted a heavily-edited version of the hidden camera footage of O'Keefe and Giles visit to the offices of ACORN Philly. In a voiceover, O'Keefe promises to run the complete undedited footage, but it never appears in the video. What we do get is a version of the footage that includes O'Keefe's and Giles' leading questions and innuendos, but mutes the responses of Katherine Conway-Russell, the ACORN Philly rep that met with O'Keefe and Giles, to those questions. A disclaimer cites ACORN's legal action as the reason for muting Conway-Russell's audio. Minus Conway-Russell's audio and the complete unedited version of the tape, it is unclear to me that this proves anything at all. Nor does it refute any of the facts stated in the PW cover story I wrote about ACORN Philly.

UPDATE: I asked Ian Phillips, legislative director ACORN Pennsylvania, who works out of the ACORN Philadelphia office and as such has become de facto spokesman for ACORN Philadelphia on the hooker-sting video, to respond to the video. Hi:

There seem to be three main things they needed to corrected:

On not dressed like a pimp/purporting to be a pimp (per Katherine):

O'Keefe refutes this by saying he had on white pants and a satin tie.

Whether this dress constitutes standard pimp attire, I will leave to the experts. Nonetheless, it is in marked contrast to how he appears when appearing on numerous Fox shows (Hannity), with a derby, bug-eyed glasses, a fur coat and even a cane. In even their edited tape there seems to be no reference to him being a pimp, or her pimp, but merely a boyfriend trying to help her out of a dangerous situation.

On the amount of minutes spent in office (Neil Herrmann, Philadelphia Head Organizer stated they were in office for a 'few minutes'; Katherine always stated she believed it to be between 20-30 minutes):

O'Keefe and Giles claim to have been in the office for 32 minutes. They claim to have videotape for 26 minutes and additional audio after that.

This is a bizarre semantic argument. But on the face of it is appears also to be untrue.

Their edited video claims to have entered the Philly ACORN office at 9:30am (their timestamp lists 9:58 as they cross the street). Yet, O'Keefe called Ian Phillips on his cell phone at 9:40 (who told him not to come in), not yet in the ACORN Housing office. They thank the receptionist (who appears to be ignoring them) on the way out (last timestamp lists 10:25.)

It is unclear how this proves that ACORN or Katherine acted "criminally". Katherine recalls the first part of the conversation as a rather lengthy description of how to improve one's credit and ACORN Housing's first time home buying program.

On being "thrown out" or "kicked out" (per various spokespeople, not Katherine):

It is unclear how the edited tape proves or disproves this. There is simply O'Keefe voicing over saying it didn't happen, and referencing the amount of time as proof.

Another argument over semantics here. Katherine, in her video on ACORN Housing's website, said that she attempted to get rid of them by giving them a flyer and telling them she had another meeting (the second-time successfully). If one's definition of 'kicked out' is a physical act or threat of a physical act then no, that did not occur. It is a well-known and common technique to get rid of someone by handing them something and telling them to read it over and/or call back with questions, which is what Katherine does. This makes sense given two aggressive questioners especially.

All of the points they attempt to make are in the context of an edited video made originally on July 24th. All of the points they attempt to make are tangential to the accusation that ACORN is a 'criminal enterprise'. On our own semantic point, what laws did our counselor break in Philadelphia, or even in previous cities? However, it is clear that they recorded Katherine without her consent and then used those tapes with malicious editing to attempt a character assassination, as they did against front-line staff in other cities. Their acts are clear-cut felonies in several of the states they visited.

The facts of the Philadelphia story remain the same (and the ACORN story for that matter see attached transcript analysis):

1) O'Keefe did not represent himself as he has claimed.
2) The police were called immediately in response to the suspicious activity.
3) Katherine did not fill out any paperwork, offer illegal advice, or misrepresent ACORN Housing programs to the fraudsters.

SEPTA’s Loco-motion

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:41:55 PDT

Riddle me this: When is a cashier not a cashier?

If you answered: “When the cashier is a union-protected SEPTA employee who isn’t healthy enough to perform the job for which s/he was hired, and so SEPTA has assigned that cashier to a booth along one of the city’s subway lines,” then please, applaud yourself.

Under a collective-bargaining agreement forged with the Transport Workers Union 20 years ago in March 1989, SEPTA is required to find another position for bus and train operators who’ve been injured on the job and “medically disqualified” by the medical office, according to Rich Burnfield, SEPTA’s chief financial officer.

“Rather than have that individual on workers’ compensation, we put them in a job without the same physical requirements,” says Burnfield.

This is no doubt a better arrangement for SEPTA than putting workers on disability and watching the company’s insurance premiums spike. No one wants to see a rash of layoffs when nearly 10 percent of the population is unemployed and the recession has no end in sight. But the contract lacks accountability and that should concern taxpayers, many of whom are struggling to balance their own expenses.

“There is no formal job description for the position,” according to C. Neil Petersen, SEPTA’s open records officer, and “job performance is not evaluated in the context of specific standards per se or an annual merit review.”

According to a right-to-know request, SEPTA does not fill cashier positions with outside applicants. All 346 of the full-time cashiers that staff glass booths along the Broad Street and Market-Frankford subway lines come from the medically disqualified pool. Since they were injured while performing their original jobs, no one should expect them to be tackling purse-snatchers. But the contract seems to permit cashiers to sit idly for hours, requiring little of them other than to show up. What’s more troubling is that SEPTA has not developed a mechanism to make sure the cashiers are earning their keep.

“It’s definitely unusual for an organization of this size to not have a job description for this,” says Zack Stalberg, director of the Committee of Seventy, a nonprofit government watchdog. “At the very least they should be in productive jobs, and one way to assure that is to have a job description.” 

Nonetheless, Burnfield says cashiers are paid $55,000 per year on average (or 1.5 times the city’s median household income, according to a 2007 U.S. Census Bureau survey). According to SEPTA’s December 2008 wage manual, cashiers are supposed to make between $29,684 and $49,473, depending on their years of service. But the contract with TWU Local 234 allows cashiers to carry with them wage rates from their days as bus and train operators and guarantees cashiers a yearly raise regardless of job performance. Do the math and you’ll find that SEPTA is spending $19 million per year to keep them on board. Much of that comes from taxpayer money—federal, state and local government subsidies made up about half of SEPTA’s operating expenses in fiscal year 2008—but it doesn’t seem that taxpayers are getting much of a return on the expenditure. Still, Burnfield doesn’t think SEPTA cashiers are getting a free ride from taxpayers. He admits the term cashier is outdated—none of them can give change (a security measure) and passengers can purchase tokens at only 21 of 50 subway locations—but Burnfield believes the cashiers will continue to have “an important role” at SEPTA. 

“Just as fare payment has changed and evolved over the years, the role of cashiers has changed and evolved over the years,” Burnfield says.  

Cashiers are responsible for helping senior citizens and disabled passengers navigate the subway system, he says, and they “play a very important role to deter fare evasion.” They also help out-of-town passengers find  their way around the city, he says. This rationale might make sense if SEPTA didn’t have 256 transit  police patrolling the subway system (12 more will hit the pavement after graduating from the next officer-training class). It might make sense if SEPTA weren’t installing security cameras throughout its public-transportation system, giving the authority the ability to monitor the whole system from a central location. It might make sense if street and subway maps weren’t so widely available. 

Samuel Estreicher, director of the Center for Employment and Labor Law at New York University, acknowledges the nonsense. 

“City government is not very efficient, and they should be insisting that everyone on the payroll is doing something useful,” says Estreicher, who wrote his master’s thesis at Cornell University on New York’s Transport Workers Union. Although Estreicher has never studied TWU 234 directly, he has found in his research that the kind of contract SEPTA made with TWU 234 is common. When asked what SEPTA gets out of the deal, Estreicher suggests the benefits might not come until cashiers start retiring in droves, putting SEPTA in a better position to leave the jobs vacant. 

But it doesn’t look like those jobs are going anywhere.  

Willie Brown, president of TWU 234, is hardly a SEPTA cheerleader, but he agrees with Burnfield that the cashiers should stay on the payroll. 

“Token machines can’t take care of the disabled or the elderly,” he says. “Token machines can’t tell you if there’s a fire in the station or if someone’s getting robbed.” 

Brown believes the cashiers are critical to passenger safety because they “provide extra eyes and ears” and because SEPTA doesn’t have “nearly enough cops to cover the subway system.” 

But, Brown confesses, “We leave a lot to be desired in terms of customer service.” He blames SEPTA work regulations for that—especially a regulation that encourages bus drivers to keep conversation with oncoming passengers to a minimum—but many passengers agree that SEPTA struggles with customer service. 

“My experience with the subway is never usually a pleasant one,” says Tara Cattell, a Camden County College student and South Jersey resident who uses SEPTA services three days a week to get to fundraising jobs for the American Civil Liberties Union.  

In order to be reimbursed for travel expenses, Cattell has to get a receipt from SEPTA each time she takes public transportation in the city. But she estimates that she and her colleagues have been able to get receipts from bus drivers and subway cashiers only 33 percent of the time. In other words, she hasn’t been reimbursed for the majority of her trips with SEPTA. 

“I pay $8 to get here every day,” she says. “I don’t want to be paying more than I have to.” 

Burnfield would tell her to consider buying a weekly or monthly transpass because she would receive a discount and it would be easier to get a receipt. That being the case, Cattell questions the sense of having cashiers in the subway system. 

“I don’t know what their exact purpose is,” she says. “Sometimes it’s good because I can get receipts, but they don’t really do anything.”

SEPTA and TWU 234 should consider this a call to action. It’s not that Cattell or other critics are insensitive to those with disabilities. What they want is for SEPTA cashiers to be held accountable for their job performance like the vast majority of the city’s workforce.

“It makes people who work hard feel bad,” she says.

After a brief pause, she adds: “Jersey Transit is a lot better anyway.”

Now that’s got to hurt. ■

(In)Specter Maggot

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:41:55 PDT

Who is Arlen Specter? Six months after he left the Republican Party, we still don’t know the answer to that question. To be sure, our state’s senior senator sure looks like a progressive Pennsylvania Democrat these days. He’s joined his colleagues—Bob Casey, Joe Sestak, Chaka Fattah, Bob Brady and even blue dog Patrick Murphy—in supporting a “public option” that is the best route to meaningful health reform that expands coverage and lowers costs. This is good news, as well as being a political necessity: Off-year elections are on the horizon, and while they tend to have historically low participation, it’s worse when no one has anything to show the voters. Specter doesn’t want to face Democratic voters empty-handed next year.

The numbers even show Specter to be a reliable vote for Democrats. Polling blogger Nate Silver notes that Specter has voted with Dems 97 percent of the time since Sestak decided to challenge him in the party primary. Before that, though, Specter voted with Democrats only 44 percent of the time.

“The real question,” Silver asks, “is how Specter will behave if and when he wins the primary challenge, and the pressure from the left is off.”

Possible answer: Joe Lieberman.

The parallels are eerie: In 2006, Lieberman was a pro-war Connecticut senator who got into real trouble with his Democratic base. He faced a challenge from the more dovish Ned Lamont, but got backing from the Democratic establishment—even after Lamont won the Democratic primary. He managed to win the seat with the help of the GOP, which abandoned its own candidate. 

The schmuck has been a thorn in the side of the Democratic Party ever since, campaigning for John McCain, talking smack about Barack Obama on the trail and even speaking at the GOP convention. 

His punishment after Obama and the Democrats stomped all over McCain and the GOP? Less than nothing. The Democrats, including Obama and our own Sen. Bob Casey, voted to let Lieberman keep his committee chairmanship. “He’s with us on everything except the war” has been the refrain since 2007. Except he’s also been with the GOP on approving waterboarding, weakening habeas corpus, blocking suits against phone companies that illegally tapped our phones on Bush’s say-so and God knows how much more. 

So who’s to say Arlen Specter isn’t  a Lieberman redux? 

Specter has spent 40 years as a Republican, and admits his switch to the Democratic party had everything to do with naked self-interest. His first few months as a Democrat were, to put it mildly, turbulent. He proclaimed, “I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat,” and boasted that he voted against the president’s budget. Seeming to go out of his way to piss off the unions, Specter declared he would vote against the Employee Free Choice Act, which makes it easier to unionize. Then he flipped, saying he would support the bill after all. The list goes on and on. 

Ned Lamont, incidentally, endorsed Sestak on Monday. It’s a seven layer cake of ironies. 

Liberal blogger Susie Madrak thinks Specter might be for real. She sees a parallel to Specter’s renewed loyalty to the GOP after Bush saved his ass from a primary challenge in 2004. And Specter seems to have really come around on health reform. 

Madrak notes progressives are worried Specter will run to the right against Republican Pat Toomey if he gets the nomination, “but I don’t see that as making political sense. With the economy a mess and people worried sick about their jobs, the Republican message will only resonate with their hardcore base, and their base is shrinking,” she writes. “What I think is, Sestak’s poll numbers prove the opening is on the left and Arlen’s smart enough to take it all the way.” 

This, of course, is all speculation. Specter may be making the right noises now, but there’s no guarantee the man has had a real change of heart or political philosophy. Look at the heartburn Lieberman’s causing over the public option, which he may or may not support. Is there anything in Specter’s history to suggest he has any core convictions beside his own career? 

Political decisions have consequences. It would be nice if we knew for sure what we were getting in Arlen Specter. ■

Letters: Snitch Hitter

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:41:55 PDT

Regarding Mike Newall’s recent story about the unspoken code of the streets:

Don’t tell is just a typical abusers weapon against the abused. I hurt you, don’t tell; I rape you, don’t tell; I molest you, don’t tell; I rob you, don’t tell; I kill you, don’t tell. There’s nothing honorable or loyal about it. It’s just duping or scaring the victim into protecting the victimizer.  

If everyone that was victimized would follow Ragland’s example and stand up and say no more to the abusers, they would run the abusers out of the community real quick. I wish the best for Mr. Ragland. The hood ought to get behind him and protect him, because he’s really helping them all. 

M  via philadelphiaweekly.com 

Even though he’s no angel, Ragland is doing a great service for his neighborhood and our city as a whole. The fact that Kidney’s brother died by being murdered the same way Kidney intended to murder Ragland is a perfect example of the cycle of senseless violence in our neighborhoods—and the sickening consequences of individuals acting without conscience or any trace of humanity. People, stop and think. 

SPEAKEASY  via philadelphiaweekly.com  

Regarding Joel Mathis’ recent column about the lack of a Republican presence in the city:

I am a Democrat in part because of the national Republican party’s failure to show any significant level of concern for big city America. However, this shoe simply does not fit Al Schmidt, the Republican candidate for City Controller, for two reasons.

First, Schmidt’s objective is to run a Controller’s Office that will identify the waste, fraud and corruption so the city can continue to provide vital services without having to, for example, threaten layoffs of police and firefighters and repeatedly forestall the city’s pension obligations. This is hardly the platform of a Republican bogeyman who eliminates city services with glee.  

Second, at his or her core, the Controller must be independent. Unfortunately, the current Controller is a consummate insider who too often protects his fellow party insiders over the average Philadelphian. Schmidt, on the other hand, is willing to condemn improprieties at his party’s last vestige of power, the Parking Authority. Irrespective of party   affiliation, Al Schmidt is the best candidate for City Controller, and I will happily cross party lines to vote for him.  

JOE DOHERTY  Philadelphia 

The entrenched Democrats do need a contender to stay agile and the article rightly says Republicans aren’t the party to do it. Why not aim for what San Francisco has—a strong and popular Green Party. The city has a sufficiently progressive voter base but an insufficiently progressive city council and ward system. A series of strong Green contenders could light fires under the Dem’s behinds to shift in the progressive direction not the direction that appeals to the small and fractured Republican base. 

Of course, this can’t succeed without a 50.01 percent majority vote rule, or preferably an instant runoff voting system. There’s no need to send the city down in flames with a Katz or Knox mayor term, but it would happen if the progressive vote got sufficiently fractured in the currently insufficient system.  

STEVEN FELDMAN via philadelphiaweekly.com

Tell-Tale Truth

Regarding J. Cooper Robb’s recent review of Haunted Poe : 

Although your article was thrilling, it proved to be sadly incomplete. Mr. Brian Chacon, the Production Manager for Poe was never mentioned. The general public doesn’t have the entire feel for what really went into taking this project from creative concepts into full manifestation. And this project is all about feeling! 

I attended Haunted Poe along with my 23-year-old daughter on opening night. I can attest that this event held the acute attention of all ages. I screamed more than she did! 

So let us include our worthy appreciation to Chaucon of Philadelphia. His resume is long and impressive. Alltop and Brat Productions were lucky to have him.

JEAN RAWLS  Plainfield, N.J. 

15 Minutes with NYT’s Nicholas D. Kristof

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:52:45 PDT

Pulitzer Prize winning journalists (and married couple) Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have achieved something arguably more challenging than worldwide gender equity—they’ve written a reader-friendly, mainstream page-turner of a book about it.

Half the Sky is a meticulously assembled lightning read that, beneath colorful vignettes and white-knuckle narratives, explores foreign aid methodology. This doesn’t sound like anything that should keep you up reading past bedtime, but will.

The revolutionary aspect of the project is that Kristof, the New York Times columnist with a cult following and WuDunn, ex-editor of Times’ energy coverage (she was first Asian American woman to win the Pulitzer), take a look at global poverty through the lens of gender inequality. With that one seemingly simple paradigm twist—which leads to surprising correlations like the one between gender inequity and terrorism--they successfully recast so-called “women’s issues” as an economic issue of mainstream importance.

Suddenly, caring about girls’ suffering in the developing world doesn’t seem like a far-away cause only fit for bleeding hearts and unabashed feminists. It becomes obvious that investing in the education of girls and women in the developing world is sound economic and political strategy.

Nicoholas Kristof will be speaking for the Cheltenham Forum at Cheltenham High School on Tuesday, Oct. 20, at 8 p.m. $20 per ticket.

Hey, we’ll take it. Especially since striving toward gender equity on moral grounds is an angle that frankly never has piqued the interest of the majority of first-world policymakers and never will -- at least until more global policymakers are women.

Meanwhile, Kristof and WuDunn acknowledge and address that fact that a lot of funds funneled into foreign aid are wasted because clumsy programs don’t work in tandem with indigenous cultural practices or beliefs, spend too much money on overhead and overlapping services -- or simply look at problems the wrong way.

As a result, some people feel -- as the late Jesse Helms so eloquently put it -- that foreign aid is like “pouring money down a rat hole.” An extreme (and racist) sentiment to be sure, but one that echoes whenever issues like gender inequity and global poverty are dismissed as hopeless or worse, a natural, inevitable state of affairs.

The authors envision Half the Sky as a sort of handbook for people who want to do something to help solve these problems, but aren’t sure exactly where or how to begin. They call on “social entrepreneurs” to make changes that can’t be enacted through policy. To that end, they offer lists of vetted organizations and contacts, as well as a companion website www.halftheskymovement.org to serve as a clearinghouse for interested readers to connect with organizations and one another.

Finally, someone is calling global gender inequity—as evidenced in the lack of education, the mass military rapes of the Congo, harrowing maternal mortality, the rise in sexual trafficking and forced prostitution and so on--the cause of our time and giving it the serious, strategic consideration. It's about time.

My conversation with Kristof:

I’ve read that you had to shop this idea to publishers for a few years, which seems pretty odd, seeing as you and your wife are Pulitzer Prize winning journalists. Why do you think that was?

[Publishers] worried about how commercial it might be, and they wanted to have a book, you know, that would sell very well. I think that it has found a great market, but I think that is partly because as time has gone on the issue has gained more traction.

It think we benefited by waiting a couple of years, because this is an issue that everyone from the Pentagon to aid organizations to the government now realizes is central to fighting poverty and extremism.

When did you first start thinking about writing Half the Sky?

We first started thinking about the issues in the beginning of the 1990s when we were in China. We weren’t thinking as much about a book, but we became aware that gender was a really useful and neglected prism with which to look at development. There were so many missing girls in China, yet conversely, one of China’s great strengths in industrializing was that it was able to use the female half of the population much more effectively than a lot of other poor countries. So that got us thinking about these issues generally and appreciating them. Then once you began to look through that prism, you saw things absolutely all over.

I’ve seen positive reviews, but have you gotten any negative feedback? I think the challenge would be to talk about how even though it’s so-called women’s issues, it doesn’t mean it’s a book against men.

I think that’s important. Once something becomes a “women’s issue” then it risks being marginalized right away. At the end of the day, the Holocaust wasn’t a Jewish issue, civil rights weren’t a black issue and when tens of millions of women going missing around the globe, that’s not a women’s issue. I think there’s an appreciation of that. There are certainly people who don’t like this or that in the book or think that one emphasis or another is misplaced, but the reception has just been fabulous. There are some reviews that my mother couldn’t have written nicer.

An issue you’ve had to deal with that you’ve written about a bit on your blog is when you’re put in the position where you can purchase a girl from a brothel or pay for a woman’s surgery that you just met as she lie dying on a gurney. Can you tell me your thoughts on the roles of journalist versus an activist?

Traditionally, journalists are supposed to be on the sidelines and observers, but it doesn’t make any sense to sit on the sidelines and take notes while you watch these women die unnecessarily in childbirth, so at some point your human impulse overwhelms your journalistic impulse there.

Throughout the book, you champion the concept of the "social entrepreneur." Can you talk about your perspective of working “on the ground” versus, in another phrase of yours, “shouting from treetops” to effect change?

In general our sense is that Americans often exaggerate the degree to which change comes about by changing laws or holding U.N. conferences… The social sector has generally had productivity that is way behind that of the business sector, but as social entrepreneurs are applying what are classically business skills to humanitarian needs, it’s accomplished amazing things. We think an important part of the solution and one of the really positive trends in the world involvement in the last decade or two.

Specifically in circles concerned with human trafficking, there’s been hope that President Obama, as a black man, will have sympathy and empathy for an abolitionist movement. What do you think?

I have talked to Obama about trafficking, and I think he intellectually gets it. So far, we haven’t seen him embrace a particular policy. I think Hillary Clinton gets the issue too, but we haven’t so far seen any major new efforts or initiatives from the administration. But in fairness, it’s pretty early in the administration.

Your book is a call to arms for citizens, but on the policy end, is there a hope that the United States will lead that charge, or not?

We hope so! There are some special signs. Hillary Clinton did appoint a special ambassador for women’s issues, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations has started a new subcommittee on global women’s issues. I think that’s all promising, but all I’ll add to it is that it’s too early to say.

What are future projects in the works to track progress on these issues that you’ve presented?

I’m not sure. We’re kind of trying to figure that out right now. We hope the website will be a clearinghouse for people who want to get more involved, who want to go maybe volunteer for a year somewhere. We hope the book will do that also, connect people with needs abroad with people who have money or time that they can supply. We’re still trying to figure out how we can best fill these needs, and also write two columns a week.

I found it interesting how the book focused on selling solutions instead of selling the problem, and that to that you addressed the importance of not exaggerating problems. If you can talk about that a little bit. For me, that’s where formal undergraduate women’s studies failed. We were sort of sold a problem, and then you think, “OK. I’m in. I see that there’s a problem now.” And then there wasn’t much offered in the way of solutions.

I think in general humanitarians tend to turn people off by exaggerating the problems and by leaving a sense of negativity, or trying to get people involved through guilt. I don’t think that works. So it’s striking to me that CEOs tend to be unbelievably positive and optimistic--even when their companies are going completely down the drain.

I think that’s because frankly optimism is a way of engaging people and I think it’d be good if the humanitarian sector picked up some of that. I think that people are getting back at finding solutions. They’re also applying more rigor to the process of figuring out what kinds of solutions are most cost-effective, but there’s some more work to be done there.

You write several times that someday people will look back and today at our practices and policies and wonder, what were they thinking? What’s your realistic-optimistic hope for when that would be?

It will happen bit by bit. Sheryl’s grandmother had her feet bound, and that was a practice that had been deeply rooted in China for hundreds and hundreds of years. Then it ended, roughly in one generation. I’m hopeful that some of these other practices can also be uprooted in about a generation. It won’t be any utopia, there will still be problems -- the United States underscores that == but boy, can’t we make progress.

And how’s writing a book together for marriage?

The stresses of writing a book are nothing like the stresses of raising kids! Putting a book together is a little like raising a child together, but the book doesn’t play you off each other, it doesn’t not go to bed on time, doesn’t talk back, it never becomes a teenager. So all in all, I’d say it was incomparably easier.