Hannah Sassaman — Banned from the National Association of Broadcasters Since 2002

hi internet friends, i wrote another blog post about the media.  you can find it here:  http://hannahjs.wordpress.com/2006/11/07/it-matters/.

please check it out, and if you think that we have a chance to craft comments to the FCC that describe the real international, national, and local death toll that accrues as media becomes crappier, let me know, because i want to work on that tack with you.

with love and solidarity,
hannah s.
prometheusradioproject

in my continuing tradition of using my friendster blog to bring folks to my ‘real’ blog — check out my rant on what the hell the FCC is going on at http://hannahjs.wordpress.com .

while you are at it, if you think it is stupid that comcast prevents sattelite TV customers from watching phillies games at home, file a comment here — http://freetheflyers.com/ — and learn more about the campaign here – http://josh.fm!

xo.

my special guy josh marcus and i will be in the portland area, building a radio station with the pineros y campesinos unidos del noroeste, in woodburn, oregon, august 18-20.  we’d love to see our portland peeps so consider coming down/chilling out with us!  there’s also a small chance that we’ll have a few hours in portland before we fly out that night to san francisco, for a week of hanging out in the bay (we want to see you, bay friends, do call us or email us or friendster us, etc!)  we’ll be there until the 29th.

i may have to hide my laptop so i actually take a vacation after the barnraising, please distract me so we get the rest we need.  we enjoy playing games, eating foods, going on bike rides, drinking beers.

love to you all,
hannah s.

ps — you can read my blog of Thoughts and Things at http://hannahjs.wordpress.com

hello please.  i have moved most of my blogging activities over here — http://hannahjs.wordpress.com/ — my post today features a long rant against clear channel and a way for you to take action, by filing comments at http://nohateradio.org.  catch you soon my friends.

last night i was doing some thinking about the effects that the loss
of ‘net neutrality’ would have on groups in philadelphia. in
discussions with a colleague i came upon the benefit bank, a
local for-profit that does some pretty outstanding work for the city
and the nation.  what is net neutrality, you ask?  a stupid name for an
important principle.  it means that the big telecommunications
companies, like verizon, that own the wires through which we get the
internet, can’t erode or block any content they don’t own or like, just
because they feel like it.  if we lose those principles, the internet
will be a lot like cable TV — companies like verizon will be able to
prioritize whatever content they like and degrade access or outright
block the rest.  this blogger dude says it best –

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/008289.php

"Think of it like Cable TV. Anybody can start a cable channel. But if
you can’t get on TimeWarner Cable here in Manhattan, for me you might
as well not even exist. The Internet could work like that."

as an activist working on commercial, residential DSL to get the word out to thousands of people around the world i find this a scary prospect.  no net neutrality would suck for me, dude!

but even worse, it would suck for the benefit bank and the thousands of philadelphians who did their taxes on it this year.  read on:

I’m Hannah Sassaman at the Prometheus Radio Project
(http://www.prometheusradio.org).  We build community radio stations around the
world, but are based in a diverse residential neighborhood in Philadelphia.  An
erosion or defeat of net neutrality principles would hurt communities and
businesses in Philadelphia.  Here’s one example.

1)  The Benefit Bank, a project of for-profit technology innovator Solutions for
Progress (http://www.solfopro.com), filed over $4 million in taxes this year for
low and moderate income families, while also helping them apply for heating, food,
housing, and a variety of other government benefits specifically available to them.
In over 50 functioning Benefit Bank sites in Philadelphia, not to mention hundreds
across the country, Philadelphians can get their taxes prepared for free in the
neighborhoods where they live, and invest their new benefits and tax returns back
inside their own communities, which need them most.  These community members then
also find a new reason to patronize the wonderful not-for-profits that help make
our city a place where we want to live.

If we lost net neutrality principles, we have no guarantee that Comcast or Verizon
wouldn’t choose to block or erode access to The Benefit Bank, a for-profit company,
if they wanted instead to make a deal with Intuit (owners of popular
tax-but-no-benefit software Quicken or Turbotax) to prioritize their access over
the lines and make their pages load lightning quick.  Even worse would be a
sweetheart deal with H&R Block and other ethically bankrupt competitors for tax
preparation services.  These massive companies are broadening their operations to
self-service online preparation services.

Many, if not most, shelters, churches, and community centers across this city are
working with slow connectivity and slow machines.  Putting local entrepreneurs like
Solutions for Progress in the internet’s slow-or-no-go lane could mean the loss of
a local company that is tailoring their business to the needs of the local
community.  It would mean that regular folks, struggling to get by, would have to
pay out the nose to do their taxes.  And it would mean that the innovation of
benefits coming to people who need them over the Web would die by the side of the
information superhighway.

Please don’t close the internet, and enforce strong principles of freedom on this
vital information conduit for all of us in today’s America.

i feel like i am a stealth adult-type person when i capitalize and punctuate my sentences correctly.

if i find more examples of how we’d get screwed by a loss of net neutrality here in philly i’ll post them.

hello all,

just a heads up — tomorrow (wednesday)is the last big hearing that the city is organizing on the municipal wireless project.  the city is about to enter into a formal contract with wireless philadelphia, the nonprofit set up by the city to manage a wireless network built by earthlink. please consider stopping by — wednesday, april 26, 2006, at 2:00 pm, in room 400, city hall.  please come if you can, and forward widely!

there are many, many questions about how our community needs will be served by this new network.  will wireless philadelphia and earthlink make it possible for community organizations to help get their neighbors online? how many of us will need to buy expensive wireless devices to
supplement the wireless coming from the streetlights? and will the important community content - like the videos produced at scribe video center, the content hosted at the IMC, and the community newspapers and websites scattered across the city - be marginalized or promoted to
users of the network.

immediately after the hearing, city council’s joint committees on technology & information services, and public property & public works will vote on whether to authorize the city’s plan, so there should be a pretty big crowd.  this is a big chance for the earthlink executives to see to see that we are watching them — and that we’ll be there to make sure they deliver the Internet service our city needs.

to learn more about the contracts between the city, the wireless philadelphia nonprofit, and earthlink, visit becca vargo dagget of the municipal telecommunications project’s website:
http://www.newrules.org/info/philly-earthlink-contract.html .  and read IMC and mediatank organizer josh breitbart’s blog here –
http://breitbart.wordpress.com/tag/wireless.

for indymedia activists — this is a good opportunity to ask questions directly of the decisionmakers in this process, and to interview people in the audience on what they’d want from a wireless service.  hope to see some of you there.

hannah s.
prometheusradioproject

ps — kiss kiss kill is playing a show with the juanita family at the sattelite (50th and baltimore) at 7pm friday night.  this show is FREE.  yeah!

well this dude josh breitbart who i respect a good deal is going to link to my blog, so i thought i’d say something nice about him.  josh is generous with whiskey and well thought out advice!  also he is really paying close and considerate attention to the private wireless buildout happening in philadelphia, and brainstorming ways for our movement to study it and learn from it and make future massive buildouts more effective. 

read the above link for his thoughts on the official and unofficial power the city of philadelphia has in what is ostensibly a fully private wireless buildout — between the corporation earthlink and the nonprofit wireless philadelphia.

yeah josh!  way to be thinking about stuff!

look, here’s a note about something that i am doing for the prometheus radio project , they are very nice when they are not stressed out.  (by ‘they’ i mean ‘me’)

how am i?  hMmmMm i am okay.  i don’t really feel like working very much.  my sister moved to dundee, scotland, which is the sister city to nablus in the west bank.  we got asked to strategize on radio station building with a neat group there, and it would be cool to work with my sister, yo.

more on foods:  if you are making a shepherd’s pie, do not follow the instructions that tell you to use only mashed potato for the crust rather than traditional dough.  now, you should use mashed potato — it will be a component in your dish — just not a solo ‘crust replacement’ as they say on baltimore avenue.

instead, get about 7 bigass potatoes from the fu-wah at 47th and baltimore on your way home from work.  boil them, while frying garlic, carrots, and onions in bacon fat (or olive oil if you are some kind of way).  when they are done boiling and the roots are done crisping, mash up the potatos with butter or oil and milk or water.  you can use a blender on a stick if you have one, they work well!  blend up the boiled and fried roots together.

then line your baking pan with the potato mash, and cover the mash with sauteed collards, more carrots, corn, and maybe some organic beefs.  or not.

then cover that with pie dough that has been chilling in the fridge!  bake at 400 degrees for 1 hour.  baste the combination with oil or butter.

now for the work.  see some of you soon when you come to philadelphia.

* * * * *

please forward this note.

hey all, can you let me know re:  effective organizations in NYC who might wanna host a workshop on community internet and media?

there’s a pretty big movement afoot — community organizers are building wireless networks and advocating for cities to subsidize cheap/free/universal wireless connections.  bigass companies like verizon, SBC, and comcast are making it illegal for cities and communities to build wireless networks, which is pretty crappy when so much vital public information is only readily available over the web.

the group i work with, prometheus radio project, is interested in going around the region and the country, demonstrating the technology and letting communities know their rights in defending their freedom to use it.

we’re looking to hold big workshops in and around philadelphia and across pennsylvania (which has made it illegal to build wireless networks though we can overturn the act — http://mediatank.org/Issues/wireless/act183/ ), and in places where wireless is taking hold (new haven is going to build a municipal wireless network for the whole city to use, just like philly — http://tinyurl.com/dyk38 ).

we can make the workshops benefits for excellent local tech or media initiatives, and we definitely make them lots of fun.  it is great if you have a university group or what have you that can sponsor our trip, but often we can subsidize one trip with another.

if you’ve never been to a prometheus workshop — heh.  they are pretty rad, you get to use neato technology and debate how it impacts your organizing, and strategize on the right tools for smashing the state and how to get them in your hands/the hands of other people who need them.

check out some prometheus activities here — http://media.prometheusradio.org/gallery/main.php — workshops, barnraisings, and other awesome events.

and if you can help out, email me at hannahjs (at) prometheusradio.org.  thanks a ton people.

i made a friendster blog!  i couldn’t help it, it was better than auditing the prometheus website.  it’s cold and snowy right now and i’ve made some soup.  miso with carrots, potatoes, onions, and tofu.  also rice, and potato pierogies.  inadvertently veganish!  really i want to fry up some bacon ends and eat the fatty bits like so many pieces of caramel.  have i disgusted you yet?

the house of the future is a lovely place, even when we have to meet struggles face to face.  outer space is not the case of homebrewed pilsener with a trace of