At least the pro-fluoride Healthy Kids, Healthy Portland campaign could have showed this clip a few times:

(The piece was picked up by Gawker too.)

I’m sure Rutgers, Camden and Temple have equivalents. (I know Drexel does.) But where?

“The view is nice from here; not scenic or nothing, but nice,” says West Philadelphia resident Curtis Lipscomb, glancing out the second-story window of the Fresh Grocer at Walnut and 40th streets. “This is a social spot, and a lot of people come here. It’s something to do.” The 24-hour supermarket provides seating for customers in a lounge outfitted with floor-to-ceiling windows. It’s almost never empty, drawing workers on break, neighborhood couples on dates and regulars who work on their laptops, play chess and chat.

…

More importantly, the hours are consistent and far longer than those of Philly’s cash-strapped libraries. The branch across the street from Fresh Grocer is open just five days a week; on three of those days, it closes at 5 p.m. “That’s why I came up here today. I was going there but the library wasn’t open,” says Lipscomb. The Fresh Grocer, by contrast, is open every day, and doesn’t clear the lounge until around midnight — depending on the whims of management, of course.

Huge thanks to Next City for giving me the time and resources to explore the city and write a long form article on Atlantic City: It’s history, the industry’s current struggle (as casino gaming spreads across the nation), and the uncertain future. Buy a copy of the piece from Next City, but here’s an excerpt that goes into the arrival of casino gaming in AC and its effect upon the rest of the city.

By the mid-1970s elites promoted legalized gambling within the city as a panacea. In 1976, they succeeded in passing a statewide referendum that allowed casino gambling only within the confines of Atlantic City. A “CITY REBORN,” the Press of Atlantic City crowed the morning after the 1976 gambling referendum passed. The owner of local hotspot Luigi’s Restaurant, Curis Kugel, predicted that “[t]he city will turn around and be what it was in the twenties and thirties.” Gambling in Atlantic City was a massive success — for the industry. From 1978 to 2007 the gaming industry raked in profits, with 30 to 35 million people visiting every year and spending their time almost exclusively within the casinos. Most customers came from New Jersey, New York or Eastern Pennsylvania, and until 2007 the city controlled a total monopoly on casino gambling in the region. But monopolistic industries tend to be complacent and, as the money flowed in, the casinos blithely isolated themselves from the rest of Atlantic City. Customers were funneled from the Atlantic City Expressway to the hulking parking edifices which, if they weren’t directly attached to the casinos, are outfitted with glass-encased bridges allowing gamblers to walk from their cars to the slot machines without setting foot on the sidewalk below.

Outside the insular confines of the casino complexes, Atlantic City rotted. Those who predicted the industry and the city would grow together were bitterly disappointed. Kugel’s revenues were cut in half after the first casino opened, and by 1986 his restaurant was a parking lot. Luigi’s didn’t suffer this fate alone. A 1999 National Gambling Impact Study Commission report quoted a local witness, who testified, “in 1978 there were 311 taverns and restaurants in Atlantic City. Nineteen years later, only 66 remained, despite the promise that gaming would be good for the city’s own.” The city’s last movie theater closed in 1983. Dead space in the northern neighborhoods grew worse, as a wave of “landlord lightening” rolled over properties in the neighborhoods adjacent to the casinos, which were suddenly worth more as potential parking lots than as rental housing. The decline of small business and the rise of vacant land reduced foot traffic. Crime remained persistent and much of the city housed intense concentrations of poverty.

The early casinos built during the gold rush of the late 1970s and 1980s actively discouraged customers from exploring the Boardwalk, let alone the rest of the city. There are no windows on the ground floor, exits are difficult to find and beach access was made nearly impossible without traversing the casino floor, on which children were expressly forbidden from setting foot. The industry profited from what The Master Plan delicately terms the “lack of non-gaming investment and a widely held perception that the City requires significant improvements in safety, cleanliness and the street-level experience.” Why wander into the scary, depressed wasteland, when a customer could just sit there and pull a lever again?

“Donald Trump, Steve Wynn… I don’t think they conscientiously thought ‘let’s make sure Atlantic City looks like a dump,’ but they quickly realized that Atlantic City’s dumpiness wasn’t a crucial economic factor for them,” Simon says. “That’s what people missed from the get-go. As long as there was no competition, having a vibrant casino area in the midst of a sea of squalor wasn’t really a problem. It enhanced the value of the casinos because they didn’t have competition for people’s discretionary income with the rest of the city.
They let the fabric of the city decay so extensively that building an urban resort with gambling, rather than a bunch of casinos in the middle of a decaying city, will defy all odds.”

How did Montana become a socialist hellscape? The same way most laws are passed: With the backing of the organized business community. In early 1982 the Montana Supreme Court decided that an implied covenant of “good faith and fair dealing” exists when an employer hires someone. Later rulings determined if an employer disregarded that tacit agreement, the spurned worker can sue to recover lost wages and benefits, along with compensatory and punitive damages. The court, in effect, killed employment-at-will in all but name, and workers started suing the hell out of the bosses. (Much of the historical and legal background on the law is found in Barry Roseman’s American Constitutional Society’s legal paper on the law and its effects on employment in Montana.)

“One of the reasons why the bill was necessary is that we did not have employment-at-will in Montana, even though the law said we did,” says Gary Spaeth, former Democratic legislator and lead sponsor of the 1987 law. “There were some outstanding judgments in the neighborhood of $200,000 to $400,000 that were passed down by juries. It was very inhibiting to how you operated your business in the state of Montana, creating almost a fear [of firing] among employers.”

Some members of the business community decided a specific “just-cause” law would be preferable to the court’s de-facto elimination of employment-at-will. But despite the law’s less-than-leftist origins, the protections for Montana workers still go far beyond those offered to non-union employees in any other American state (although both Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands also have just-cause laws).

Into Darkness relies too heavily on slick action sequences and not enough on the excellent cast, including Benedict Cumberbatch who just glowers his way through the film (and,  yes, everyone on the Internet guessed his identity correctly). Into Darkness simply doesn’t give him enough to do, or any space to demonstrate his considerable charisma. And, again, Cumberbatch’s few lines have largely been included in the trailers. It’s a complete waste of a great actor and a great villain.

In the meantime, you should read Matt Yglesias’ overview of the series as our culture’s vision of what a socialist utopia might look like.

The continuing existence of high transfer fees is a big reason for protest.

For those who don’t live close to the trolley lines that spider out across West Philadelphia, or the city’s two principal subway elevated lines, transfers are a persistent, costly, and completely unnecessary expense. In fact, for these riders SEPTA’s cheap fares are only so much of a boon: Transfers cost $1, so in the best case scenario, if they have access to tokens (which are inexplicably difficult to access outside downtown hubs), their fare is effectively $2.55. If they use cash it’s $3.00 each way. And that’s before July’s fare hike.

“If you are living far away … chances are your bus route is designed to take you to Broad Street or the El and that’s the way SEPTA wants you to travel because it’s more efficient ,” says Irv Ackelsberg, who was CEPA’s lawyer in a number of fare fights beginning in 1989. “It’s transit 101: The more people on the fast dedicated vehicles, the better off everybody is. Less traffic and everyone moves faster, but they’ve set up the fare structure to penalize the people who are riding the way you are supposed to ride.” The transfer cost gives riders an incentive to take the slower buses all the way downtown, adding to congestion and slowing their own trip, instead of hopping on a subway-elevated line.

In the past SEPTA could argue that the transfer slips could be abused, sold to other riders and the like. But with the implementation of the New Payment Technologies later this year, transfers can be documented in each individual’s account with a swipe of a smart card or phone. Now the only reason left to keep transfers is for the miniscule amount of revenue they bring in, which cannot be worth the inconvenience and congestion engendered by transfers.

“The connection is not an added product or service, rather, it’s an inconvenience imposed on the customer by the geometry of the transit system,” writes Jarrett Walker in his book Human Transit. “Transit agencies can’t eliminate this inconvenience but they can certainly avoid adding to it by including a free connection.”

The article looks at the rise, fall, and continued absence of domestic left-wing terrorism in America. While writing the piece I was reading The Moro Affair, which really drove home how much worse the problem was in Italy (and Germany).

The more exact analogy was probably the violent radical groups in Western Europe which, while just as ineffectual, were far deadlier than their American counterparts. From 1970 to 1981, the Italian Red Brigades killed “three politicians, nine magistrates, 65 policemen, and some 300 others,” according to Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. A former prime minister, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped on the day of his greatest political victory and held hostage at a “People’s Prison” in Rome. His body was found seven weeks later in the trunk of a car parked in the city center. The Red Army Faction robbed 30 banks, took 162 hostages and killed 28 people including the West German attorney general.

Contrast that with the Weathermen, who only killed each other. On March 6, 1970 a cache of bombs ripped apart a Greenwich Village townhouse, killing three Weathermen before they could deploy the bombs at a dance for officers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Bill Ayers (who was not present) says in the 2001 profile of Boudin, who survived the blast, “The townhouse knocked us back and forced us to reassess ourselves, pulling us back from that particular abyss.” Before the group broke up in 1976, they carried out over two dozen bombings across the nation, including attacks on the U.S. Capitol building and the Pentagon, but issued warnings beforehand and avoided killing anyone.

Here’s why:

EDUCATION

Corbett’s first budget, for 2011–2012, proposed a $1.2 billion reduction in public-education funding and succeeded in getting $860 million excised, with the majority of cuts hitting low-income school districts. Cuts to basic education funding equaled $410 per child in the 2011–2012 budget and the $128 million in basic education funding the legislature wrested back mostly went to wealthier school districts. As the Education Law Center reports, “Since 2008, school districts have lost nearly $1.5 billion in total funding previously received from the state or from federal stimulus… The cuts have been up to ten times larger in poor districts on a per student basis.”

That’s also where layoffs were concentrated, depriving some areas of scarce middle-class jobs. That year in Philadelphia alone 1,600 teachers and 2,100 other staff positions were eliminated. A budget crisis in Philadelphia is leading the city to close 23 schools. State universities and colleges lost almost one fifth of their funding to the budgetary scalpel in 2011, although Corbett initially wanted 50 percent. (He tried again in 2012 and although the Republican-dominated legislature stopped him, they did nothing to roll back the previous year’s cuts.)

MEDICAID

Corbett managed to escape notoriety because his budgets have focused on the group where political blowback is least likely: the poor. In the second half of 2011, at least 150,000 people, including around 89,000 children, were ejected from Medicaid in Pennsylvania. As Laura Katz Olson shows in her exhaustive The Politics of Medicaid, states often try to edge people out of the program by drowning them in time-consuming paperwork. Pennsylvania makes people reapply every six months (twice the federal requirement). Corbett ensured that the mid-2011 application would be particularly stringent. If recipients didn’t respond within 10 to 15 days they were automatically dropped from the rolls, even if the fault lay with the understaffed Department of Public Welfare, which issues the paperwork.

According to the Pennsylvania Partnership for Children “Many families indicated they returned the forms on time, and have receipts to prove it, but their children were still dropped.” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that many families never received their freighted renewal papers and that the DPW failed to issue 30-day warnings to recipients that were to be excised from the rolls. Public outcry got some recipients reinstated, but this March, the Associated Press reported that there are still tens of thousands people wrongly being kept from receiving healthcare through Medicaid. The latest Inquirer reporting said that despite reinstatements of some wrongly terminated recipients, “ [child] enrollment [in state-run healthcare] has dropped by 93,000.”

But Corbett’s most questionable decision might have been rejecting billions of federal funds that were to provide health care to all low-income Pennsylvanians. (Chris Christie, Ohio’s John Kasich, and Jan Brewer all took the money.) The generous terms of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion would cover the entire costs of Medicaid for 600,000–800,000 eligible Pennsylvanians, although the state would gradually have to pay for a tiny portion (capping out at 10 percent of the newly eligible enrollees’ coverage by 2020).

Head to Vice for the rest.

BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist in Birmingham Alabama on September 15, 1963 was an unprecedented act of “domestic terrorism” long before the term would ever be applied. Countdown to “BOOM” We All Fall Down captur[es] the music, the look, the feel and the movements of a Sunday morning in the South.

WE THINK: The highlight of Kariamu & Company’s Countdown to “BOOM” is a beautiful scene of four mothers preparing their daughters’ hair before church while struggling to explain why the world is such a cruel place. The production works best in this intimate little moment, as parents try to ready their children for the harsh realities of the world without draining them of hope. We are made to feel their reality, rather than just being shown it.

The production is disjointed and not concerned with linear narratives, which is confusing at first but works better as the scenes unfold. Countdown falters when it tries to convey the Civil Rights-era South with too heavy a hand. The montage of still photographs and newspaper clippings that accompany almost every scene can distract from the actual performers and lose their power due to overuse. But the dancing, which is less prominent than expected, is stunning.