Philadelphia Community Access Coalition
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MS. HUMPHREY: Good afternoon. My name is Maddie Humphrey. And Chairman Cohen, I'd like to commend your endurance because you and I have talked across this room for some 30 years. I do commend you.

On this issue, I would like to fill in a little bit because we started from 1983. But the issue with me started from the mid-'60s. In the main, I learned about cable television from some other city that I was consulting with. But when I learned about it and came back, I found out that it started in Pennsylvania, with a couple young salesmen, engineers who couldn't sell TVs in the mountains and valleys around Pennsylvania. So they went up on the top of a mountain and put up an antenna, ran the signal down and out the mountain, and they could sell their televisions, and reception was better than we were getting in the cities.

One of those young men was Milton Gerald Shapp (ph.) -- And I think it's important for us to know that that is the story of cable -- who went on to become our governor. And I consider him a friend. Even now, I feel a lot that we are due to him for a lot of what he did.

But cable itself is a new technology at that time for information. And when I started inquiring in the mid-60s as to why we didn't have it in Philadelphia, it was the same noise that we're hearing today. So I agree that it's an issue of democracy.

I approach it from the ninth amendment of the Constitution that says the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. Therefore -- that's the sum total of the amendment -- what that means to me is that I have a right to adequate, timely, relevant information as to my civic duties and as to my civic obligations from the government. And to disallow me information about public policy is to violate my constitutional rights. And I hope that that ninth amendment begins to have some bearing on this issue, because the first amendment, which, of course, refers to freedom of speech enables the corporate media to sue everybody who accuses them of mal speech and generally win, because there's a great deal of legal expertise in that area.

So just like Philadelphia's a mecca for corporate media, I would like to see it become a mecca for the people.

And the people do have a right to information. That's my interpretation, and I don't think anybody here today denies that. We just have not affirmed it, and that's what makes it an issue of democracy.

The other thing I'd like to fill in is that pain is not about failing to hear our stories or failing to see our images. The pain has to do with life and death.

This ordinance was passed in 1983. This city incinerated the John Africa family in 1985. And in federal court, the testimony given by City officials and the victim Ramona Africa was that the only reason they used the bull horns was so that they could inform their neighbors of their unfulfilled expectations of the government. That was a valid reason to use bull horns. Had we implemented the 1983 ordinance, that fire in 1985, seen around the world on electronic TV, would not have been justified. I don't think it's justified yet, but you understand why I'm sick about this issue of information.

The other part, I personally voluntarily went on a local small family radio station with what I call "public access radio," appealing to people in Philadelphia as well as the leadership to give us that information because the FCC had frozen the 40 largest markets -- that's the federal government -- because the media, the networks, and there were only three of them at the time, were so threatened by losing market shares that they had lobbied -- and I would believe that the leadership in Philadelphia was a part of that lobby because we had people like Clark and Scott down in Washington. And they generally, you know, were on the winning side. So that we in Philadelphia have been involved all along in the federal changes that have obstructed the development of cable.

And so it's not an issue for a 1999 question about who, what, why or where. The fact is, democracy is being destroyed because without the opportunity to talk over back fences or to one another in some other way, you will not get good public debate, you will not get one generation understanding the previous generation, and you will not get individual citizens having the same opportunity that you give corporations for a freedom of speech because speech is no longer fee when you have to have expensive technology in order to share.

(Applause.)

MS. HUMPHREY: I have a lot of passionate things, but I just want to identify what I feel are some of the critical things.

Right now, I would say that local information available to Philadelphia, which is not through cable television, but the other information that we get is diminished, unclear, incomplete, misleading, untimely, and inadequate. There's a lot of false stuff on the media. Some of it is ridicule, some of it is humor, but you don't know what's what, because you got people over there pretending to be Bill Clinton's voice, you got people over there mimicking Hillary. You have such abuses of, I say, "courtesy" that passes for media because it's not obscene. Well, there's a lot to be considered short of obscenity that is misleading and misinforming.

We have intergovernmental strategies that are not clear to the people. When the federal government broke up HEW, we got confusion in our cities because then you could educational money to arts and culture, you could send health money to educational people. Do you understand? We broke up the coherence that we had at local communities.

Democracy does not get imported or exported. It gets grown in local community, and that's why information is very important. The women I represent do not have a father land and they do not have a mother tongue because they originated with the United States of America on this land. And that means that we have to be guided by other people's opinion about what should be and what is.

Therefore, I believe that had we had better information, we would not have downsized welfare under the pretext that these people should go and work in some minimum-pay job and then we pay other people more money to take care of their children. That's bad math. And we're going into data management, but it's taking from those who have the least and giving to those who have the most.

(Applause.)

MS. HUMPHREY: So the misinformation contributes to that inequity.

The local public policy that it operates is without the consent of the government -- the governed.

I hear that we are in a five-county regional oversight situation. Is that correct? That they say that the fiscal budget of Philadelphia is oversighted by the five-county region?

COUNCILMAN COHEN: No, it's oversighted by a State board.

MS. HUMPHREY: Which, I understand, is a five-county region.

COUNCILMAN COHEN: No, it covers only Philadelphia.

MS. HUMPHREY: No, Philadelphia's the only one oversighted, but the participants who do the oversighting --

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Oh, well, they can come from anywhere in the five counties, yes.

MS. HUMPHREY: And that's my point. My definition of a colony is any jurisdiction that is essentially influenced, controlled by a larger jurisdiction to which they have no voice. So there is a one-way situation which may account for the situation about the mayors and the Council people.

And that, again, is because the public does not understand that arrangement, and I would say that we have a region operating around here that's not valid because we didn't vote for it. So we have to speak back to that Southeastern Pennsylvania -- whatever -- and I'm glad you said it was a board 'cause I used to think it was like an authority, like the Port Authority or the --

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Well, it is.

MS. HUMPHREY: It is an authority then?

COUNCILMAN COHEN: It's an authority.

MS. HUMPHREY: But we don't vote in it, right?

COUNCILMAN COHEN: We don't vote.

MS. HUMPHREY: And so the decisions that come down may not meet with your representation of your constituents.

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Right.

MS. HUMPHREY: Okay. The public needs to know that so that we can get in harmony and get in accord with you and understand how you're being infected (sic.) by the dis -- it's tyranny when information is messed with, it's tyranny.

Candidates for public office express no awareness of the major local -- well, if the candidates themselves don't know what the policies are or have no input into the policies, then how can we expect for the people to get what they want from the election process?

Corporations promote community involvement over community development, and there is an important difference. Because you know, in the '60s, when we were developing community, it was much more progressive for everyone -- business people, the City. But once we stopped developing community, which goes through information, then we began to get real strange cleavages between business and residents, and that's when -- crime goes up as charity goes down. And charity is the good will that we share with one another that enables us to cope with the least privileges of all as long as we have common courtesy and human harmony.

We are losing these things because of our inability to communicate. Neighborhood infrastructures are fragmented, incoherent, and not in good accord with one another. In my neighborhood of Germantown, somebody in Baltimore can send a bunch of money over here to handpick some people and they can run a project, am I right?

And that might insult me. Right now, there are people within a few blocks of where I live who have a project to think everything done in the home should be paid for with wages, that the earning or the time that people spend in their homes should be considered gross national product, should get into the accountability for monies. I believe that loving and mothering and caring for your home and family is a privilege, it's an opportunity, and most mothers want to do it.

But here we are penalizing those mothers who cannot do it expensively. If you understand what I'm saying. Because it should not be people getting budgets to run programs promoting that philosophy if I and the other mothers don't feel that we're working for the gross national product. We are loving our children, our homes, and our families.

And we don't want I don't want government 501c.(3)s going to those people who are promoting that love's for sale -- I mean, that women are taking care of their children, and that should be put down as a salary, and the government should pay them because if the government pays you, it can take it back from you. So that's the problem with welfare for me.

Philadelphia is a population center that's geopolitically very, I'd say, confused. And I might say here too an historical fact, that I just learned that in 1938, Czechoslovakia and about 11 other nations came over to Philadelphia to sign their pledge of national independence at our Liberty Bell, at our, you know declaration of -- I think that's significant because they're the Balkans and it seems like we're the Balkans too if we don't straighten out this -- you know what I'm saying? This thing has got people confused about one another and is solving the problem through death and destruction. So I think we need to look at where we stand in human development and quality of life and all of that.

Academic and profit-making corporations freely solicit unsuspecting folks for drug research, biological testing, disease research, and behavior studies. I want to know how much of that is government-financed and how much of it is 501c.(3) because I just suspect that a lot of academic fellowships and grants are involved with a lot of this genetic and other kinds of research that is -- well, we know that when they were doing research on Holmesburg prisoners in 1971, that wasn't right 'cause now Mr. Hornblum (ph.) wrote a book and exposed it.

But Philadelphia is a major research center, and the research is getting more and more bold, and we're not able to -- I'm a nurse, I'm a business administrator, I'm a lawyer. We are not able to interact with our peers and neighbors about some of these things that are happening over the media.

So, again, we need to police it as a matter of democracy, as a matter of equity, and as a matter of whether or not Philadelphia is going to continue to be a center of human growth and development or is just going to become a research center for how to make profits off of fragmenting the lives and the bodies of human beings. So the issue is life and death for me.

Thank you.

COUNCILMAN COHEN: Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

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