NJ Spotlight, Jan. 20, 2014

By Sarah Gonzalez and Matt Katz

Hoboken Mayor Zimmer says Lt. Gov. Guadagno told her she would ‘deny’ having said anything

Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer has alleged that her city was shortchanged on the amount of Sandy recovery aid it received because she refused to go along with a redevelopment deal being pushed by the Christie administration.

According to Zimmer, she was approached by Lieutenant Mayor Kim Guadagno and Department of Community Affairs commissioner Richard Constable III, who told that she had to support the plan in order to receive Sandy aid.

Zimmer claims that Guadagno told her in no uncertain terms that the deal and Hoboken’s Sandy funding were connected, adding "I know it’s not right, these things should not be connected, but they are."

She says Guadagno added, "If you tell anyone, I will deny it."

Read the full story and listen to the audio report by Sarah Gonzalez and Matt Katz on WNYC, an NJ Spotlight partner.

Sarah Gonzalez is the northern New Jersey enterprise reporter for WNYC and NJPR.

Matt Katz is a reporter for New Jersey Public Radio covering state politics. NJ Spotlight, in partnership with NJPR, is running his in-depth stories.

NY Times, Jan. 18, 2014

By Greg Grandin

In 2009, shortly after Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the White House, the McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan organized a display of about 50 books that Mr. Obama had read as a young man. The titles were eclectic, with a good number by African-American authors, including Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama demonstrated a remarkable rhetorical ability to present himself as both inhabiting and escaping from the worlds created by these writers. He even modeled his much praised memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” on Ellison’s 1952 novel, “Invisible Man.” Yet where Ellison’s young, idealistic black protagonist remains anonymous — the book ends with him alone in his underground apartment — Mr. Obama won the White House, inaugurating what many at the time hoped was a new, “postracial” America.

That optimism turned out to be premature. Today, anti-Obama signs with racist language accompany Tea Party rallies; a Confederate flag is unfurled in front of the White House to protest the government shutdown.

Looking back, there was one book in the McNally Jackson display, overlooked at the time, that could have helped us anticipate all this. That book was “Benito Cereno,” a largely forgotten masterpiece by Herman Melville. In today’s charged political environment, the message of Melville’s story bears rehearing.

“Benito Cereno” tells the story of Amasa Delano, a New England sea captain who, in the South Pacific, spends all day on a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans who he thinks are slaves. They aren’t. Unbeknown to Delano, they had earlier risen up, slaughtered most of the crew and demanded that the captain, Benito Cereno, return them home to Senegal. After Delano boards the ship (to offer his assistance), the West Africans keep their rebellion a secret by acting as if they are still slaves. Their leader, a man named Babo, pretends to be Cereno’s loyal servant, while actually keeping a close eye on him.

Melville narrates the events from the perspective of the clueless Delano, who for most of the novella thinks Cereno is in charge. As the day progresses, Delano grows increasingly obsessed with Babo and the seeming affection with which the West African cares for the Spanish captain. The New Englander, liberal in his sentiments and opposed to slavery as a matter of course, fantasizes about being waited on by such a devoted and cheerful body servant.

Delano believes himself a free man, and he defines his freedom in opposition to the smiling, open-faced Babo, who he presumes has no interior life, no ideas or interests of his own. Delano sees what he wants to see. But when Delano ultimately discovers the truth — that Babo, in fact, is the one exercising masterly discipline over his inner thoughts, and that it is Delano who is enslaved to his illusions — he responds with savage violence.

Barack Obama may have avoided the fate of the protagonist of “Invisible Man,” but he hasn’t been able to escape the shadow of Babo. He is Babo, or at least he is to a significant part of the American population — including many of the white rank and file of the Republican Party and the Tea Party politicians they help elect.

“Benito Cereno” is based on a true historical incident, which I started researching around the time Mr. Obama announced his first bid for the presidency. Since then, I’ve been struck by the persistence of fears, which began even before his election, that Mr. Obama isn’t what he seems: that instead of being a faithful public servant he is carrying out a leftist plot hatched decades ago to destroy America; or if not that, then he is a secret Muslim intent on supplanting the Constitution with Islamic law; or a Kenyan-born anti-colonialist out to avenge his native Africa.

No other American president has had to face, before even taking office, an opposition convinced of not just his political but his existential illegitimacy. In order to succeed as a politician, Mr. Obama had to cultivate what many have described as an almost preternatural dominion over his inner self. He had to become a “blank screen,” as Mr. Obama himself has put it, on which others could project their ideals — just as Babo is for Delano. Yet this intense self-control seems to be what drives the president’s more feverish detractors into a frenzy; they fill that screen with hatreds drawn deep from America’s historical subconscious.

Published in late 1855, as the United States moved toward the Civil War, “Benito Cereno” is one of the most despairing stories in American literature. Amasa Delano represents a new kind of racism, based not on theological or philosophical doctrine but rather on the emotional need to measure one’s absolute freedom in inverse relation to another’s absolute slavishness. This was a racism that was born in chattel slavery but didn’t die with chattel slavery, instead evolving into today’s cult of individual supremacy, which, try as it might, can’t seem to shake off its white supremacist roots.

THIS helps explain those Confederate flags that appear at conservative rallies, as well as why Tea Party-backed politicians like Sarah Palin and Rand Paul insist on equating federal policies they don’t like with chattel bondage. Believing in the “right to health care,” Mr. Paul once said, is “basically saying you believe in slavery.”

As for Mr. Obama, he continues to invoke fantasies that seem drawn straight from Melville’s imagination. One Republican councilman, in Michigan, attended a protest carrying an image of Mr. Obama’s decapitated head on a pike, which happens to be the very fate that befalls Babo once his ruse unravels. Another Republican ran for Congress in Florida with a commercial featuring Mr. Obama as the captain of a slave ship.

Over 60 years ago, Ralph Ellison began “Invisible Man” with an epigraph drawn from “Benito Cereno.” It’s a pleading question that Delano asks Cereno after the revolt is put down and Babo is executed: “You are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?” Though Ellison purposefully omitted it from his epigraph, in today’s America it is still worth recalling Cereno’s answer: “The Negro.”

Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University and the author of “The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World.”

NY Times, Jan. 18, 2014

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff

Growing up poor has long been associated with reduced educational attainment and lower lifetime earnings. Some evidence also suggests a higher risk of depression, substance abuse and other diseases in adulthood. Even for those who manage to overcome humble beginnings, early-life poverty may leave a lasting mark, accelerating aging and increasing the risk of degenerative disease in adulthood.

Today, more than one in five American children live in poverty. How, if at all, to intervene is almost invariably a politically fraught question. Scientists interested in the link between poverty and mental health, however, often face a more fundamental problem: a relative dearth of experiments that test and compare potential interventions.

So when, in 1996, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains opened a casino, Jane Costello, an epidemiologist at Duke University Medical School, saw an opportunity. The tribe elected to distribute a proportion of the profits equally among its 8,000 members. Professor Costello wondered whether the extra money would change psychiatric outcomes among poor Cherokee families.

When the casino opened, Professor Costello had already been following 1,420 rural children in the area, a quarter of whom were Cherokee, for four years. That gave her a solid baseline measure. Roughly one-fifth of the rural non-Indians in her study lived in poverty, compared with more than half of the Cherokee. By 2001, when casino profits amounted to $6,000 per person yearly, the number of Cherokee living below the poverty line had declined by half.

The poorest children tended to have the greatest risk of psychiatric disorders, including emotional and behavioral problems. But just four years after the supplements began, Professor Costello observed marked improvements among those who moved out of poverty. The frequency of behavioral problems declined by 40 percent, nearly reaching the risk of children who had never been poor. Already well-off Cherokee children, on the other hand, showed no improvement. The supplements seemed to benefit the poorest children most dramatically.

When Professor Costello published herfirst study, in 2003, the field of mental health remained on the fence over whether poverty caused psychiatric problems, or psychiatric problems led to poverty. So she was surprised by the results. Even she hadn’t expected the cash to make much difference. “The expectation is that social interventions have relatively small effects,” she told me. “This one had quite large effects.”

She and her colleagues kept following the children. Minor crimes committed by Cherokee youth declined. On-time high school graduation rates improved. And by 2006, when the supplements had grown to about $9,000 yearly per member, Professor Costello could make another observation: The earlier the supplements arrived in a child’s life, the better that child’s mental health in early adulthood.

She’d started her study with three cohorts, ages 9, 11 and 13. When she caught up with them as 19- and 21-year-olds living on their own, she found that those who were youngest when the supplements began had benefited most. They were roughly one-third less likely to develop substance abuse and psychiatric problems in adulthood, compared with the oldest group of Cherokee children and with neighboring rural whites of the same age.

Cherokee children in the older cohorts, who were already 14 or 16 when the supplements began, on the other hand, didn’t show any improvements relative to rural whites. The extra cash evidently came too late to alter these older teenagers’ already-established trajectories.

What precisely did the income change? Ongoing interviews with both parents and children suggested one variable in particular. The money, which amounted to between one-third and one-quarter of poor families’ income at one point, seemed to improve parenting quality.

Vickie L. Bradley, a tribe member and tribal health official, recalls the transition. Before the casino opened and supplements began, employment was often sporadic. Many Cherokee worked “hard and long” during the summer, she told me, and then hunkered down when jobs disappeared in the winter. The supplements eased the strain of that feast-or-famine existence, she said. Some used the money to pay a few months’ worth of bills in advance. Others bought their children clothes for school, or even Christmas presents. Mostly, though, the energy once spent fretting over such things was freed up. That “helps parents be better parents,” she said.

A parallel study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also highlights the insidious effect of poverty on parenting.The Family Life Project, now in its 11th year, has followed nearly 1,300 mostly poor rural children in North Carolina and Pennsylvania from birth. Scientists quantify maternal education, income and neighborhood safety, among other factors. The stressors work cumulatively, they’ve found. The more they bear down as a whole, the more parental nurturing and support, as measured by observers, declines.

By age 3, measures of vocabulary, working memory and executive function show an inverse relationship with the stressors experienced by parents.

These skills are thought important for success and well-being in life. Maternal warmth can seemingly protect children from environmental stresses, however; at least in these communities, parenting quality seems to matter more to a child than material circumstances. On the other hand, few parents managed high levels of nurturing while also experiencing great strain. All of which highlights an emerging theme in this science: Early-life poverty may harm, in part, by warping and eroding the bonds between children and caregivers that are important for healthy development.

Evidence is accumulating that these stressful early-life experiences affect brain development. In one recent study, scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis followed 145 preschoolers between 3 and 6 years of age for up to 10 years, documenting stressful events — including deaths in the family, fighting and frequent moves — as they occurred. When they took magnetic resonance imaging scans of subjects’ brains in adolescence, they observed differences that correlated with the sum of stressful events.

Early-life stress and poverty correlated with a shrunken hippocampus and amygdala, brain regions important for memory and emotional well-being, respectively. Again, parental nurturing seemed to protect children somewhat. When it came to hippocampal volume in particular, parental warmth mattered more than material poverty.

The prospective nature of both studies makes them particularly compelling. But as always with observational studies, we can’t assume causality. Maybe the children’s pre-existing problems are stressing the parents. Or perhaps less nurturing parents are first depressed, and that depression stems from their genes. That same genetic inheritance then manifests as altered neural architecture in their children.

Numerous animal studies, of course, show that early life stress can have lifelong consequences, and that maternal nurturing can prevent them. Studies on rats, for example, demonstrate that even when pups are periodically stressed, ample maternal grooming prevents unhealthy rewiring of their nervous systems, favorably sculpting the developing brain and making the pups resilient to stress even in adulthood.

Yet in observational human studies, it’s difficult to rule out the possibility that the unwell become poor, or that some primary deficiency stresses, impoverishes and sickens. This very uncertainty is one reason, in fact, that Professor Costello’s findings are so intriguing, however modest her study size. A naturally occurring intervention ameliorated psychiatric outcomes. A cash infusion in childhood seemed to lower the risk of problems in adulthood. That suggests that poverty makes people unwell, and that meaningful intervention is relatively simple.

Bearing that in mind, Randall Akee, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a collaborator of Professor Costello’s, argues that the supplements actually save money in the long run. He calculates that 5 to 10 years after age 19, the savings incurred by the Cherokee income supplements surpass the initial costs — the payments to parents while the children were minors. That’s a conservative estimate, he says, based on reduced criminality, a reduced need for psychiatric care and savings gained from not repeating grades. (The full analysis is not yet published.)

But contrary to the prevailing emphasis on interventions in infancy, Professor Akee’s analysis suggests that even help that comes later — at age 12, in this case — can pay for itself by early adulthood. “The benefits more than outweigh the costs,” Emilia Simeonova, a Johns Hopkins Carey Business School economist and one of Professor Akee’s co-authors, told me.

Not all changes in the Cherokee’s “natural experiment” were benign, however. For reasons neither Professor Costello nor Professor Akee can explain, children who were the poorest when the supplements began also gained the most weight.

Another analysis, meanwhile, found that more accidental deaths occurred during those months, once or twice a year, when the tribe disbursed supplements. The authors attributed that, in part, to increased drinking, as well as to buying cars and traveling more.

Then there’s the broader context of gaming, an often contentious issue around the country. Opponents often cite the potential for increases in crime, problem gambling and bankruptcies. And some early studies suggest these concerns may have merit.

But Douglas Walker, an economist at the College of Charleston who has done some consulting for pro-gaming organizations, says many of the studies on gaming have methodological problems. Increased criminal behavior may simply be a function of more visitors to the casino area, he says. If the population increases periodically, it’s natural to expect crime to rise proportionally. “The economic and social impacts of casinos are not as clear, not as obvious as they seem,” he said.

So Professor Costello’s findings are not necessarily a sweeping endorsement of Native American gaming, and casinos generally. Rather, they suggest that a little extra money may confer long-lasting benefits on poor children. And in that respect, the Cherokee experience is unique in several important ways.

First, this was not a top-down intervention. The income supplements came from a business owned by the beneficiaries. The tribe decided how to help itself. Moreover, the supplements weren’t enough for members to stop working entirely, but they were unconditional. Both attributes may avoid perverse incentives not to work.

Also, fluctuations in the casino business aside, the supplements would continue indefinitely. That “ad infinitum” quality may both change how the money is spent and also protect against the corrosive psychological effects of chronic uncertainty.

And maybe most important, about half the casino profits went to infrastructure and social services, including free addiction counseling and improved health care. Ann Bullock, a doctor and medical consultant to the Cherokee tribal government, argues that these factors together — which she calls the exercising of “collective efficacy” — also may have contributed to the improved outcomes. She describes a “sea change” in the collective mood when the tribe began to fund its own projects. A group that was historically disenfranchised began making decisions about its own fate.

“You feel controlled by the world when you’re poor,” she said. “That was simply no longer the case.”

Professor Costello and Professor Akee don’t entirely agree. They think cold hard cash made the real difference. For one thing, Professor Akee says, outcomes started improving as soon as the supplements began, before many of the communitywide services went into effect.

If that’s the primary takeaway, then we have some thinking to do. Some people feel that “if you’re poor, it’s because you deserve it,” Professor Costello said. “If you’re sick, it’s because you deserve it,” she said.

But if giving poor families with children a little extra cash not only helps them, but also saves society money in the long run, then, says Professor Costello, withholding the help is something other than rational.

“You’re not doing it because it pains you to do it,” she said. “That’s a very valuable lesson for society to learn.”

Moises Velasquez-Manoff is a science writer and the author of “An Epidemic of Absence.”

NY Times, Jan. 18, 2014

By Michael Barbaro and Kate Zernike

ORLANDO, Fla. — A swing through Florida proved no sunny retreat for Gov. Chris Christie on Saturday, as well-organized protesters hounded him outside a Republican fund-raiser here, a powerful ally in the New Jersey State House rebuked the governor’s office and new allegations emerged that his administration tried to intimidate a New Jersey elected official.

Mr. Christie’s trip, which was supposed to showcase his political resilience after the rockiest period of his governorship, was overshadowed by claims from the mayor of Hoboken, N.J., Dawn Zimmer, a Democrat.

In a television interview on Saturday, she said that two high-ranking aides to Mr. Christie had threatened to withhold money for Hurricane Sandy recovery to her hard-hit city if she did not support a real estate development that the governor wanted built in her jurisdiction.

Speaking on MSNBC, she produced journal entries that she said documented conversations in which Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno and Richard E. Constable, the commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs, told her that if she wanted the money, she had to approve the project. The financial assistance, Ms. Zimmer said, was held “hostage.”

She recalled documenting her disappointment in Mr. Christie the day of her meeting with Mr. Constable. “I thought he was something very different,” she wrote at the time. “This week I found out he’s cut from the same corrupt cloth that I have been fighting for the last four years.”

Despite being almost entirely submerged during the hurricane, Hoboken has received a small fraction of the recovery money it requested from the state, Ms. Zimmer said.

In a statement, Mr. Christie’s spokesman, Colin Reed, did not directly address the mayor’s claims of a threat, but said that she and the governor “had a productive relationship” that was delivering the relief money Hoboken needed.

Mr. Reed took the unusual step of denouncing MSNBC, on which Mr. Christie is a frequent guest, as “a partisan network that has been openly hostile to Governor Christie and almost gleeful in their efforts attacking him.”

Attempting to cast doubt on the new allegations of political payback, which have always been a part of American politics, Mr. Christie’s aides pointed to Ms. Zimmer’s history of praising Mr. Christie, such as a Tweet last summer in which she wrote, “I am very glad that Gov. Christie has been our governor.”

On MSNBC, Ms. Zimmer hinted at the pressure many mayors felt not to speak out against the governor, saying, “This is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Soon after Ms. Zimmer’s interview aired, Stephen M. Sweeney, a Democrat, the president of the New Jersey Senate and a key ally of Mr. Christie’s, issued an unexpected rebuke to the governor’s office.

Calling the latest allegations “extremely disturbing” and promising an investigation, Mr. Sweeney said that Ms. Zimmer’s experience, combined with the lane closings on the George Washington Bridge, “suggest a pattern of behavior by the highest ranking members of this administration that is deeply offensive to the people of New Jersey.”

In Florida on Saturday, Democratic activists unleashed a partisan assault on Mr. Christie. Protesters waved placards calling him a “bully,” telling him to “go home” and, in a reference to the gridlock at the George Washington Bridge, declaring that their own “traffic is bad enough.”

Mr. Christie shunned public appearances in Florida, where he is raising money for Gov. Rick Scott, a fellow Republican.

Instead, the New Jersey governor was whisked into an event at the Country Club of Orlando, and, later, a fund-raiser at a Palm Beach home owned by the heir to a sugar fortune.

Inside, Mr. Christie found what must pass, at this difficult moment, as an oasis for him: a group of Ferrari and Jaguar-driving Florida Republicans for whom traffic in New Jersey is a distant thought.

Getting into his Bentley after the fund-raiser, one guest, Geoffrey Leigh, called the controversy over the lane closures “little flies on the wall, quite frankly.”

Michael Barbaro reported from Florida and Kate Zernike from New Jersey. Nick Madigan contributed reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.