6 months after Sandy, thousands homeless in NY, NJ

http://www.legitgov.org/6-months-after-Sandy-thousands-homeless-NY-NJ

6 months after Sandy, thousands homeless in NY, NJ

27 Apr 2013

Six months after Superstorm Sandy devastated the Jersey shore and New York City and pounded coastal areas of New England, the region is dealing with a slow and frustrating, yet often hopeful, recovery. Tens of thousands of people remain homeless. Housing, business, tourism and coastal protection all remain major issues with the summer vacation — and hurricane — seasons almost here again.

The Ghetto Is Public Policy

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~3/iFkSlubEqAk/story01.htm

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I’m away this week, reporting. For the past few months I’ve been exploring the wealth gap through New Deal-era policy with a particular focus on housing. I’m in Chicago this week talking to victims of that policy, and attempting to grapple with its broader implications. I’ll be out for a few days.

For those keeping count, the current exploration involves the following books:

1.) Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

2.) Tom Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty

3.) Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto

4.) Beryl Satter, Family Properties

5.) Antony Beevor, The Second World War (I didn’t feel like I could really understand New Deal policy without understanding World War II)

6.) Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself

7.) Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid (just started on the plane out here)

For those new to this I would start with Wilkerson’s book. And I’d add two more that I read a few years back: Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis, and Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White.

I think what amazes me about all of this is the degree to which we blind ourselves to policy. I remember coming to Chicago in the mid-90s, riding down the Dan Ryan and assuming that the wall of projects (there’s no other way to describe them) was somehow "natural."

It never occurred to me that segregation — without "Whites Only" signs — was actual policy. We are living with the effects of that policy today. And we likely will be for many years.

N.J. Environmental Justice Advisory Council: Sandy Recommendations

March 21, 2013
Commissioner Robert Martin
NJ Department of Environmental Protection
401 East State Street
Trenton, NJ 08625
Dear Commissioner Martin,
During the Environmental Justice Advisory Council (EJAC) meeting on March 5, EJAC members identified a number of serious EJ concerns related to the recovery from Superstorm Sandy. We are writing to urge you and other members of the Department, in your various roles, to take these concerns into account and to manage the recovery so as to protect our state’s most vulnerable communities during the recovery from Sandy and from the threats posed by future storms, severe weather events, and other climate change-related phenomena.
Our points are as follows:
• Improve emergency communications systems and invest in community- level communications capacity. Emergency communications systems in EJ communities should be improved, to warn residents whose first language is not English and who lack access to wireless communications about threats to their health and safety due to issues such as toxic exposures, sewage treatment plant malfunctions, and other environmental health threats. Evacuation and emergency preparedness/response procedures should also be improved. To strengthen these communications capabilities, we recommend that DEP and other state agencies invest primarily in building relationships and networks for this purpose with community leaders in nonprofit, community-based, faith-based and other neighborhood organizations, and not primarily in billboards or other electronic communication networks. Local institutions on the ground in EJ communities are the primary means through which information is shared, particularly during and after disasters.
• Prioritize funding to implement ‘green infrastructure’ projects in urban communities at a meaningful scale. As repairs and changes are made to various forms of infrastructure, the state should make substantial investments in ‘green infrastructure’ in addition to the traditional ‘hardening’ of infrastructure. For example, reducing the amount of impervious surfaces in heavily paved urban areas can reduce and mitigate flooding potential in these communities. In cases such as the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission and other water and sewerage facilities, the upgrading of these facilities should include green infrastructure features at scale – not as demonstration projects – as a supplement to berms and seawalls. Also, investments in greening urban waterfronts such as the Passaic River waterfront would provide flood protection, storm water improvement measures, and much needed recreation space for environmental justice communities in the area.
• Conduct an analysis on EJ issues resulting from climate change. We know for certain that New Jersey’s EJ communities will experience more extended heat waves, rising sea levels, increasing numbers of severe storms and floods and other climate-related impacts. DEP should identity the most likely EJ impacts related to climate change and develop plans to address these.
• Use existing data to identify EJ communities most likely to be at high risk of toxic contamination. Allocate disaster-response resources to these communities when weatherrelated disasters strike. DEP should use the Cumulative Impacts Tool to identify communities likely to be at high risk, and to prioritize toxics assessments, clean-up and disaster response in these neighborhoods. In addition, DEP should use its existing databases to catalog environmental hazards in EJ communities, such as toxic, brownfield or superfund sites, and should have a response plan in place when a flood, storm or other disaster strikes. Active brownfield and superfund sites were breached by Sandy’s floodwaters and it is likely that EJ communities were at increased risk due to this.
• Proactively establish protocols to reduce toxic hazards in EJ communities in the wake of floods and severe storms. Given the certainty that EJ communities will experience increased incidence of flooding as precipitation and storm patterns continue to intensify, DEP should create processes to expedite and prioritize the removal of toxic substances and household hazardous waste in the wake of these occurrences as well as respond to and remove floodwaters containing fuel oil in residences. The DEP should coordinate these efforts with the US EPA and act quickly in the aftermath of storms to deploy response and assessment teams to EJ communities with high densities of residential and industrial activities in close proximity.
• Maintain, and do not weaken, existing permitting requirements in EJ communities. Amend permitting processes to address threats to the integrity and security of permitted sites due to climate instability. Regulatory and permitting processes in EJ communities should not be weakened or compromised to expedite storm clean-up, as this would represent endangerment of public health. We are aware that DEP has, in certain cases, used the Waiver Rule to expedite permitting and that the Recovery & Rebuilding Plan recommends that the state should "streamline" the permitting processes. EJAC members urge DEP to not engage in activities that endanger EJ communities solely to expedite rebuilding.
In addition, permitting processes and requirements should be amended to include an additional level of scrutiny to ensure that companies seeking permits in EJ communities provide information about their plans to protect the surrounding community from harm due to the compromising of their facility during severe weather events. All facilities in an EJ community and within a flood zone should revise their Emergency Preparedness Plans or Spill Prevention Control and Countermeasure Plans (SPCC) to factor in consideration of storm surges or other extreme climate events.
• Conduct public health monitoring in EJ communities in the wake of severe weather events. EJ communities suffer from dangerously high levels of toxic substances. Floods, hurricanes and severe weather events threaten to re-distribute these substances around EJ communities, putting community members at risk. EJAC recommends that public health monitoring and screening be conducted in the wake of major storms, floods and other disasters to enable the identification of disease clusters or other impacted groups in EJ communities. NJDEP should partner with the Department of Health and Senior Services to also track exposure to indoor mold and other indoor contaminants resulting from Sandy and conduct a grassroots outreach effort to assess and inform residents and workers about how to mitigate these exposures after a storm.
While Superstorm Sandy caused extensive devastation, it presents an opportunity for the state to implement a recovery and rebuilding plan that doesn’t replicate some of the hazardous conditions which subjected certain populations to disproportionate pollution burdens, making them more vulnerable to the impacts from severe weather events, such as Superstorm Sandy. EJAC urges DEP to take a systematic approach to incorporate green infrastructure and technology into EJ communities, and to ensure that polluting facilities proximate to EJ communities use inherently safer technology and take added precautionary steps to protect these communities from harm when severe weather occurs again.
Sincerely,
Valorie Caffee
Chair

Martin Luther King and the Call to Direct Action on Climate

http://thinkprogress.org.feedsportal.com/c/34726/f/638933/s/2ab44923/l/0Lthinkprogress0Borg0Cclimate0C20A130C0A40C140C16961910Cmartin0Eluther0Ekings0Eadvice0Eto0Eclimate0Eactivists0E20C/story01.htm

By Joe Romm

Van Jones and I have published the following op-ed in “The Miami Herald” and many other McClatchy newspapers. It will be the first in a series on the moral dimensions of climate change.

* * *

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. from a Birmingham jail on April 16, 1963. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

The Atlanta-based King was explaining why he was in prison for nonviolent demonstrations so far from home, responding to a critical public statement by eight Southern white religious leaders.

His words are timeless and universal in part because King was a master of language but primarily because he viewed civil rights through a moral lens. The greater the moral crisis, the more his words apply.

The greatest moral crisis of our time is the threat posed to billions – and generations yet unborn – from unrestricted carbon pollution. Now more than ever, we are “tied in a single garment of destiny,” cloaked as a species in a protective climate that we are in the process of unraveling.

Many have criticized the demonstrations against the Keystone XL pipeline, which would open a major spigot to the Canadian tar sands, as unwarranted and untimely – unwarranted given our broad dependence on fossil fuels and untimely because of our struggling economy. We disagree. We think there has been far too little direct action, given the staggering scale of the threat.

As the International Energy Agency has explained, we must leave the vast majority of fossil fuels in the ground if we are to preserve a livable climate and avoid levels of warming that “even school children know” will be catastrophic for us all.

The tar sands would be near the top of any list of the largest, dirtiest pools of carbon that must be forsaken for the sake of humanity.

King explained in his letter, “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action.”

Has there ever been a problem where more facts from more unimpeachable sources have been collected and ignored than climate change? Every major scientific body and international group has taken to begging and pleading for action. Last fall, the World Bank – no bastion of eco-consciousness – issued a report aimed to “shock us into action.” It warned that “we’re on track for a 4-degree Celsius [7.2 degree Fahrenheit] warmer world marked by extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.”

If we don’t act now, then, within decades, a large fraction of the world’s 9 billion people will find themselves living in places whose once stable climate simply now can’t sustain them – either because it is too hot or arid, the land is no longer arable, their glacially fed rivers are drying up, or the seas are rising too fast.

The overwhelming majority of those suffering the most – in this country and especially abroad – will be people who contributed little or nothing whatsoever to the problem. This would be the greatest injustice in human history, irreversible on a time scale of centuries.

Has there ever been a problem subject to more failed negotiations? The international climate talks have been going on for a quarter century, full of sound and fury, but thwarted in large part by a U.S. Senate that itself talks to death every serious climate bill.

By “self-purification,” King meant preparing the group of protestors for the rigors and trials of nonviolent demonstration. But it’s his thoughts on another group that strike nearest now:

“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate,” he wrote in words that apply to today’s moderate, status quo intelligentsia of every color. “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

We understand why the fossil fuel industry works to block Congressional inaction and funds what has become the most effective disinformation campaign in history. We are bewildered by those who claim to accept climate science, but feel no urgency to act. As King put it, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

Especially relevant are King’s words about time: “All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills.” As King explains, time “can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will.”

We feel the same. Certainly nothing compares to the centuries of racial injustice King was impatient about. But each year brings an ever-worsening array of megadroughts and superstorms juiced by global warming like a baseball player on steroids. Each year brings higher emissions and ever more dire studies.

We know we’re fast approaching climatic tipping points — the loss of Arctic sea ice, the disintegration of the great ice sheets, the release of vast amounts of carbon from the permafrost, Dust-Bowlification of much of the world’s arable land – that are irreversible and catastrophic. Even once-reticent climatologists are speaking out because, as Dr. Lonnie Thompson has written, “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.” Others, like James Hansen and Jason Box, have themselves joined direct action and been arrested for it.

It is past time for many more to speak out, and for many more to join direct action. We end with King on the need to act now: “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”

==============

ABOUT THE WRITERS: Van Jones is president of Rebuild the Dream and author of “Rebuild the Dream.” Joseph Romm runs ClimateProgress.org and is author of “Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga.”

State lotteries prey on the poor

Alternet, April 5, 2013
State lotteries amount to a hidden tax on the poor. They eat up about 9 percent of take-home incomes from households making less than $13,000 a year. They siphon $50 billion a year away from local businesses—besides stores where they’re sold. And they are encouraged by state-sponsored ads suggesting everyone can win, win, win!
State lotteries, which once were illegal, now exist in most states [3]. What many people don’t know about lotteries is that they prey on those who can least afford it; most people never win anything big; and 11 states raise more money from lotteries than from corporate taxes. Beyond the moral, mental health or religious debates over gambling, lotteries are another example of how society preys on the poor and the working-class.Continue reading