New York Times, July 21, 2013

By Michael Kimmelman

NEWARK — Perhaps few places in America represent the urban trauma of the 1960s more than this city. Deindustrialization, corruption, suburban flight and calamitous planning gutted its core, tore up neighborhoods and helped fuel rebellion in the streets. The whole toxic environment was encapsulated in the desecration of the Passaic River, which borders Newark. It became a dumping ground for dioxin from the defunct Diamond Shamrock Chemicals Company, which manufactured Agent Orange.

But a quiet upheaval is turning that river, polluted as it may be, into a front line of reclamation. It’s a common approach these days, from Seoul to Madrid to San Francisco: upgrading cities by revamping ravaged waterfronts. Urban renewal strategies from decades past, which did so much to destroy places like Newark, are being turned on their heads. The idea here is to make the Passaic a point of pride. You can see the sign of change in a new stretch of fluorescent orange boardwalk along the riverfront, an eye catcher for passengers on trains rumbling over the bridge into Newark Penn Station.

Phase 1 of Riverfront Park, as it is called, was completed last summer: a $15 million complex of playing fields on formerly derelict land, a couple of miles north of a giant sewage treatment plant, in the Ironbound district. This traditionally Portuguese working-class neighborhood avoided urban renewal 50 years ago and has thrived, partly as a consequence.

The Ironbound also sidestepped the redevelopment movement of the 1980s, which produced alien, corporate sites like Battery Park City. Residents and vigorous neighborhood groups like the Ironbound Community Corporation welcomed the new fields, which, since opening, have become a citywide attraction.

Phase 2 is set to open on Aug. 3, just upriver from the fields: the 800-foot-long, $9.3 million orange boardwalk, designed by the veteran landscape architect Lee Weintraub, in collaboration with the city’s planning office.

In this cash-starved city, nearly half the money has come from the state, the rest from federal and county sources, along with private contributions solicited by the mayor, Cory A. Booker, and the nonprofit Trust for Public Land.

The ultimate goal, said Damon Rich, Newark’s planning director, is to create more than three miles of greenway, a riverfront ribbon with bike and walking paths stretching all the way through downtown to residential neighborhoods in the north.

Accomplishing that will require decades of political perseverance. “It doesn’t get more challenging than a waterfront park on a brownfield next to a Superfund site,” as Adrian Benepe, the director of City Park Development at the Trust for Public Land, and a former commissioner for New York City parks, put it. This is an especially tall order in a poor city notorious for unreliable governance. A timely coalition of environmental groups, Essex County leaders and Mr. Booker came together to complete the first phases. The mayor is now running for United States Senate. Whether early successes with the park will propel the project onward, whoever ends up in charge, is an obvious question.

Another is whether big change can happen here without gentrification driving out the very people the plan tries to help. The city administration says it wants to avoid exactly that. Many residents, accustomed to broken promises and fearful of investments that only produce quarantined office parks, are already wary.

“When the city center was destroyed by urban renewal, it became a place to avoid, a place to pass through,” said Mindy Fullilove, a professor at Columbia University and a New Jersey native who writes on urban affairs. “Now the riverfront can become an urban edge shared by everyone — a point from which to build the city back. The problem of urban renewal has been that when we’ve had an idea, it usually isn’t a good one, and when we have a good one, we don’t put money into it. The hope this time is that things will be different.”

These are changing times. Cities, which banked so much on fancy buildings, are increasingly finding new life and a fresh identity in public spaces that connect neighborhoods and communities. Planning gurus for years preached that waterfronts were no more than working ports and dumping grounds for industrial waste and the poor. Canals were paved with concrete and riverbanks lined with highways, factories, housing projects and railroads. According to this gospel, cars and freeways were good for failing cities, and urban density was bad.

The notion that industry might someday dry up, that economic development and public health would depend on clean, leisure-oriented waterfronts seemed almost inconceivable not even half a century ago. But environmental concerns and digital revolutions have reversed thinking. The proof is on the streets. Downtowns are coming back where residents and cities are stressing public transit over cars, density over sprawl, diversity over suburban flight.

In Newark’s case, repairing the damage will not be easy. Mr. Rich, the planning director, led the way on foot the other morning from the train station to the new boardwalk. The trip required crisscrossing streets with meager accommodation for pedestrians, clambering up the exit ramp of an old bridge and hugging the gutter of a four-lane boulevard that lacks traffic lights allowing people to cross into the park. Along the way, he pointed out a riverside brownfield, the former Market Street Gas Works, now a cleanup project for PSE&G, the utility company. Next door, a grim mirrored-glass office building, headquarters for New Jersey Transit and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, squatted atop a multistory garage.

It’s hard to envision how Riverfront Park will get around those obstacles.

And then there is the river. A state court ruled two years ago that Occidental Chemical Corporation, the successor to Diamond Shamrock, was principally liable for the costs (from $1 billion to $4 billion) of cleaning up the Passaic, but the company has contested the ruling. The next phase of Riverfront Park, to be completed in the spring, envisions the boardwalk stretching toward Penn Station. Restoring parts of the riverfront in the ethnic and racial mix of northern neighborhoods, for equity’s sake, will present a whole fresh set of hurdles.

Still, what has been built so far goes a long way. If a single downtown building like the Blue Cross Blue Shield headquarters separates the city from its river, a modest stretch of boardwalk knits them back together. At a ball field across the boulevard from the new park, Marcelino Arce, a youth baseball coach, described how some children in the Ironbound neighborhood had no idea the river was even there. Now, they must dodge traffic on the boulevard; but once across, he told me, it’s “a whole new world.”

That world includes a few zigzagging walking paths, with signs, by MTWTF, a graphic design firm, recounting the history of the river and its industries. There is an osprey rookery built into a copse of trees at an overlook onto the river. The city still needs to install those traffic lights and the park needs more seating.

As for the boardwalk, made of recycled plastic, its bright orange can summon up what Christo and Jeanne-Claude called “saffron” to describe the color of their “Gates” in Central Park. But police cones may leap to mind. Or Agent Orange. For his part, Mr. Weintraub said the orange was picked after eliminating various gang-related colors. Whatever. It is not ideal.

Newark deserves an elegant waterfront. That said, the orange boardwalk also acts like a giant highlighter, drawing attention to the park — as the project hopes to draw people from all over the city back to the Passaic, one patch of recuperated riverfront at a time.

© 2013 The New York Times

The Atlantic, July 19, 2013
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

My earlier criticisms notwithstanding, I think these comments (brought to you by my label-mate Garance Franke-Ruta) by Barack Obama, given his role as president of the United States of America, strike precisely the right note.
I could nitpick about a few things, but I think it’s more important that people take this in. As far as I know, these are Barack Obama’s most extensive comments regarding the impact of racism since he became president.
I would like to highlight this:

“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.
“There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.”
“And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.
“The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws — everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.”

I think this this is a very good primer on how it feels to be black and consider your relationship to law enforcement. Or people who think they are law enforcement.
I have had my criticisms of this president and how he talks about race. But given the mass freak-out that met him last year after making a modest point about Trayvon Martin, it must be said that it took political courage for him to double down on the point and then advance it.
No president has ever done this before. It does not matter that the competition is limited. The impact of the highest official in the country directly feeling your pain, because it is his pain, is real. And it is happening now. And it is significant.
============
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.
 

By Peter Montague
Last evening at the statewide meeting of the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance (NJEJA), we had a brief discussion of the NJ Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP’s) “Licensed Site Remediation Professional” or LSRP program.  This program allows private contractors to oversee cleanup of the state’s 16,000 contaminated sites — which tend to cluster in communities of low-income and communities of color.  (See this large PDF report.)  Site remediation used to be overseen by public employees within NJ DEP.  Now those government jobs have been privatized.
Why would Governor Christie want to privatize government?
Here (below) is a short piece by New York Times columnist (and Nobel-prize-winning economist) Paul Krugman explaining what people like Mr. Christie gain by privatizing government.  But even Krugman’s essay misses some key points.
Krugman fails to mention that privatizing government programs also serves a second important function for the “powers that be” — eliminating an important source of good jobs for people of color.   Private industry has little trouble discriminating against Blacks and Hispanics.  Government has much less leeway to exclude people of color.   So privatization is a good way to throw Blacks and Hispanics out of good jobs with full benefits, reducing the economic (thus, political)  power of the Black middle class — who tend to vote, and who tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
Anyone examining the LSRP program should be asking, (a) Has it actually saved taxpayer’s any money, as it was supposed to do?  (b) Has is made information about toxic chemicals more difficult for the public to get its hands on?  (c) Has it cleaned up — REALLY cleaned up — more toxic waste sites than government employees were able to do?  (d) Are the pay, benefits and anti-discrimination hiring policies of LSRP contractors being carefully scrutinized — with what results? (e) Have any of the LSRP contractors made political contributions to help re-elect the privatizers?

Now, here is Krugman:
New York Times June 12, 2012
Prisons, Privatization, Patronage
By Paul Krugman
Over the past few days, The New York Times has published several terrifying reports about New Jersey’s system of halfway houses — privately run adjuncts to the regular system of prisons. The series is a model of investigative reporting, which everyone should read. But it should also be seen in context. The horrors described are part of a broader pattern in which essential functions of government are being both privatized and degraded.
First of all, about those halfway houses: In 2010, Chris Christie, the state’s governor — who has close personal ties to Community Education Centers, the largest operator of these facilities, and who once worked as a lobbyist for the firm — described the company’s operations as “representing the very best of the human spirit.” But The Times’s reports instead portray something closer to hell on earth — an understaffed, poorly run system, with a demoralized work force, from which the most dangerous individuals often escape to wreak havoc, while relatively mild offenders face terror and abuse at the hands of other inmates.
It’s a terrible story. But, as I said, you really need to see it in the broader context of a nationwide drive on the part of America’s right to privatize government functions, very much including the operation of prisons. What’s behind this drive?
You might be tempted to say that it reflects conservative belief in the magic of the marketplace, in the superiority of free-market competition over government planning. And that’s certainly the way right-wing politicians like to frame the issue.
But if you think about it even for a minute, you realize that the one thing the companies that make up the prison-industrial complex — companies like Community Education or the private-prison giant Corrections Corporation of America — are definitely not doing is competing in a free market. They are, instead, living off government contracts. There isn’t any market here, and there is, therefore, no reason to expect any magical gains in efficiency.
And, sure enough, despite many promises that prison privatization will lead to big cost savings, such savings — as a comprehensive study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded — “have simply not materialized.” To the extent that private prison operators do manage to save money, they do so through “reductions in staffing patterns, fringe benefits, and other labor-related costs.”
So let’s see: Privatized prisons save money by employing fewer guards and other workers, and by paying them badly. And then we get horror stories about how these prisons are run. What a surprise!
So what’s really behind the drive to privatize prisons, and just about everything else?
One answer is that privatization can serve as a stealth form of government borrowing, in which governments avoid recording upfront expenses (or even raise money by selling existing facilities) while raising their long-run costs in ways taxpayers can’t see. We hear a lot about the hidden debts that states have incurred in the form of pension liabilities; we don’t hear much about the hidden debts now being accumulated in the form of long-term contracts with private companies hired to operate prisons, schools and more.
Another answer is that privatization is a way of getting rid of public employees, who do have a habit of unionizing and tend to lean Democratic in any case.
But the main answer, surely, is to follow the money. Never mind what privatization does or doesn’t do to state budgets; think instead of what it does for both the campaign coffers and the personal finances of politicians and their friends. As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations capturing the politicians, or the politicians capturing the corporations? Does it matter?
Now, someone will surely point out that non-privatized government has its own problems of undue influence, that prison guards and teachers’ unions also have political clout, and this clout sometimes distorts public policy. Fair enough. But such influence tends to be relatively transparent. Everyone knows about those arguably excessive public pensions; it took an investigation by The Times over several months to bring the account of New Jersey’s halfway-house-hell to light.
The point, then, is that you shouldn’t imagine that what The Times discovered about prison privatization in New Jersey is an isolated instance of bad behavior. It is, instead, almost surely a glimpse of a pervasive and growing reality, of a corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage that is undermining government across much of our nation.
 

New York Times, July 18, 2013

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

In 2003, State Senator Barack Obama spearheaded a bill through the Illinois legislature that sought to put the clamps on racial profiling. Obama called racial profiling “morally objectionable,” “bad police practice” and a method that mainly served to “humiliate individuals and foster contempt in communities of color.”

Obama was not simply speaking abstractly. In his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope,” the future president wrote that he could “recite the usual litany of petty slights” directed at him because of his skin color, including being profiled by the police. “I know what it’s like to have people tell me I can’t do something because of my color,” he wrote. “And I know the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger.” That same bitterness probably compelled Obama, as president, to speak out after Prof. Henry Louis Gates of Harvard was arrested, and to famously note last year, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

That is why it is hard to comprehend the thinking that compelled the president, in a week like this, to flirt with the possibility of inviting the New York City Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly, the proprietor of the largest local racial profiling operation in the country, into his cabinet.

Kelly’s name has been floated by New York politicians of both parties as the ideal replacement for Janet Napolitano, who resigned last week. The president responded by calling Kelly “well-qualified” and an “outstanding leader in New York.” He sounded a pitch for bringing the commissioner into the White House’s fold.

“Mr. Kelly might be very happy where he is,” said the president. “But if he’s not, I’d want to know about it.”

There are some other things that the president should want to know about. Chief among them would be how his laudatory words for Kelly square with the commissioner’s practices and with the president’s deepest commitments.

The N.Y.P.D.’s stop-and-frisk program has been well-covered in this newspaper and elsewhere. It is now public knowledge that the police department, each year, stops hundreds of thousands of citizens, largely black and Latino men, for reasons as thin and subjective as “furtive movements.” Very few of those stops lead to actual charges, much less arrests, and according to the commissioner that’s fine.

“If you don’t run the risk of being stopped, you start carrying your gun, and you do things that people do with guns,” Kelly recently told The Wall Street Journal.

It’s certainly true that some number of people who are looking to carry guns will be less likely to if they know they are going to be searched. But Kelly’s formulation leaves out the hundreds of thousands of people who have no such intent and are simply unlucky enough to be caught in the wrong skin. Those unfortunates must simply pay the tax of societal skepticism.

The dragnet tactics don’t taper at the borders of black and brown communities. If anything, they expand. Last year, The Associated Press reported that the N.Y.P.D. has organized a network of agents and informants strictly for the purpose of spying on Muslim communities. The appropriately dubbed “Demographics Unit” has extended its reach along the Northeastern seaboard, sending informants to spy on Muslim rafting trips, mosques in Newark and Muslim organizations at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. The Demographics Unit did not discriminate, at least among Muslims: second- and third-generation American citizens were subject to profiling. Despite this sprawling fishing expedition extending up the Atlantic coast, N.Y.P.D. officials admitted in a subsequent court case that the unit’s work had not yielded a single lead, much less the opening of an actual case.

It is often said that Obama’s left-wing critics fail to judge him by his actual words from his candidacy. But, in this case, the challenge before Obama is not in adhering to the principles of a radical Left, but of adhering to his own. It is President Obama’s attorney general who just this week painfully described the stain of being profiled. It was President Obama who so poignantly drew the direct line between himself and Trayvon Martin.

It was candidate Obama who in 2008 pledged to “ban racial profiling” on a federal level and work to have it prohibited on the state level. It was candidate Obama who told black people that if they voted they would get a new kind of politics. And it was State Senator Obama who understood that profiling was the antithesis of such politics. Those of us raising our boys in the wake of Trayvon, or beneath the eye of the Demographics Unit, cannot fathom how the president could forget this.

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, is a guest columnist. David Brooks is off today.

© 2013 The New York Times

Attorney General Eric Holder recently described how he had been stopped twice, and his car searched, for no apparent reason on the New Jersey Turnpike. Here is the relevant section of his talk, delivered July 16, 2013 to the NAACP Convention:
[snip]
"Even as this convention proceeds, we are all mindful of the tragic and unnecessary shooting death of Trayvon Martin last year – in Sanford, just a short distance from here – and the state trial that reached its conclusion on Saturday evening. Today, I’d like to join President Obama in urging all Americans to recognize that – as he said – we are a nation of laws, and the jury has spoken. I know the NAACP and its members are deeply, and rightly, concerned about this case – as passionate civil rights leaders, as engaged citizens, and – most of all – as parents. This afternoon, I want to assure you of two things: I am concerned about this case and as we confirmed last spring, the Justice Department has an open investigation into it. While that inquiry is ongoing, I can promise that the Department of Justice will consider all available information before determining what action to take.
"Independent of the legal determination that will be made, I believe this tragedy provides yet another opportunity for our nation to speak honestly – and openly – about the complicated and emotionally-charged issues that this case has raised.
"Years ago, some of these same issues drove my father to sit down with me to have a conversation – which is no doubt familiar to many of you – about how as a young black man I should interact with the police, what to say, and how to conduct myself if I was ever stopped or confronted in a way I thought was unwarranted. I’m sure my father felt certain – at the time – that my parents’ generation would be the last that had to worry about such things for their children.
"Since those days, our country has indeed changed for the better. The fact that I stand before you as the 82nd Attorney General of the United States, serving in the Administration of our first African American President, proves that. Yet, for all the progress we’ve seen, recent events demonstrate that we still have much more work to do – and much further to go. The news of Trayvon Martin’s death last year, and the discussions that have taken place since then, reminded me of my father’s words so many years ago. And they brought me back to a number of experiences I had as a young man – when I was pulled over twice and my car searched on the New Jersey Turnpike when I’m sure I wasn’t speeding, or when I was stopped by a police officer while simply running to a catch a movie, at night in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C. I was at the time of that last incident a federal prosecutor.
"Trayvon’s death last spring caused me to sit down to have a conversation with my own 15 year old son, like my dad did with me. This was a father-son tradition I hoped would not need to be handed down. But as a father who loves his son and who is more knowing in the ways of the world, I had to do this to protect my boy. I am his father and it is my responsibility, not to burden him with the baggage of eras long gone, but to make him aware of the world he must still confront. This is a sad reality in a nation that is changing for the better in so many ways."
[snip]
You can read the full text of Mr. Holder’s July 16, 2013 speech here: http://goo.gl/pUmKl

New York Times, July 17, 2013

By John Eligon

University City, Mo. — Tracey Wolff never had a problem with her 19-year-old son’s individualism: his “crazy” hair and unshaven face. But this week, his look suddenly seemed more worrying.

When she thinks of Trayvon Martin and his cropped hair and smooth face, Ms. Wolff says, she wonders, “If that can happen to the clean-cut kid who looks like a good student, then what’s going to happen to my son, who dresses sloppy?” She is considering talking to him about reconsidering his look.

“I don’t want to tell him how to dress,” she added. “He’s a grown man; do what you want to do, but keep in mind these are the things going on.”

On cable news programs and in protests around the country, the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Mr. Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in Sanford, Fla., has been fodder for an intellectual discussion on race and justice. But for many black residents, the verdict has spawned conversations far more personal and raw: discussions of sad pragmatism between parents and their children.

The intimacy of the Martin case for black Americans was drawn into the spotlight this week when Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said during an N.A.A.C.P. convention that he had had a conversation with his 15-year-old son about the case, much the way his father once counseled him about how to interact with the police.

Similar conversations are being held across the country, including here in this racially mixed St. Louis suburb.

On Wednesday afternoon, people of various races sat side by side in the cafes, restaurants and boutiques that line the town’s main road, blocks from Washington University. Longtime residents said racial tensions were not historically a problem in University City, where just over 50 percent of the residents are white and 41 percent are black. But some said the Martin case had rattled their sense of security.

Missouri, like many states, allows residents to carry concealed weapons with a permit. It also allows people to use deadly force in defense of their homes or vehicles without a duty to retreat. On Wednesday, fliers depicting a hoodie, the type of sweatshirt Mr. Martin wore on the night of his death, were taped to poles along the main road. They read, “No more dead youth no matter who’s holding the gun. One love.”

“They’re still showing racism is powerful and still alive,” Ashley Gaither, 22, said, referring to the acquittal of Mr. Zimmerman, who had said he was acting in self-defense. Speaking of her 3-year-old son, Isaiah, Ms. Gaither added: “It’s just sad. It’s already going to be hard for him being a young black male growing up.”

Her fiancé, Eddie Kirkwood, 24, said of their son, “I don’t want to let him walk to the store by himself, especially after that.”

The whole situation, added Ms. Gaither, a nurse’s assistant, “would just make me skeptical about what crowd of white people I put him around.”

Lesley Grice, 35, who was visiting a friend here but lives in Kirkwood, a St. Louis suburb that has a history of rocky race relations, said she had asked her 18-year-old son to stop wearing hoodies, a request that did not go over so well. “He’s like, ‘That’s what I like to wear,’ ” she said.

Ms. Grice, a housekeeper, said she had also told her son that when he was talking to adults, to keep his hands in place so it was clear that he was not reaching for anything.

Christian Hayes, 24, said he did not know what he would tell his 7-month-old twin sons about the Martin case when they were older. For now, he described a sense of being trapped in his own neighborhood. If someone were following him, he said, “I’m not going to run; I’m going to ask him what he’s following me for.” But, he added, “It just makes me feel like you can’t do nothing or go nowhere.”

As he walked down the street in rubber sandals on Wednesday afternoon, Rashaun Cohen, 17, said he carried himself differently since the shooting. His gray sweat shorts hung well past his knees, but he said he tended not to let his pants sag anymore. His mother also offered some advice, he said.

“Just, like, don’t walk into any neighborhood like I’m hard,” he said. “Just always be respectful and humble.”

Mr. Cohen, a high school junior, said Mr. Zimmerman’s acquittal was troubling because he believed that “it’s giving people the O.K. to do that.”

Shannon Merritt, 35, said the Martin case provided a larger teachable moment for her 19-year-old brother and 18-year-old son. One of the first things she did after the verdict, she said, was to tell her brother: “Please stay in school; just work, try not to be a statistic.”

Her daughter cried, Ms. Merritt said. Her daughter also became curious about the historic struggles blacks have faced in this country. They researched that topic and the uphill battle women have waged for rights like the freedom to vote.

“I’m going to help with the movement,” Ms. Merritt said her daughter told her.

© 2013 The New York Times

New York Times, July 18, 2013

By Sabrina Tavernise

The gap in life expectancy between black and white Americans is at its narrowest since the federal government started systematically tracking it in the 1930s, but a difference of nearly four years remains, and federal researchers have detailed why in a new report.

They found that higher rates of death from heart disease, cancer, homicide, diabetes and infant mortality accounted for more than half the black disadvantage in 2010, according to the report by the National Center for Health Statistics, the federal agency that tracks vital statistics for the United States.

Still, blacks have made notable gains in life expectancy in recent decades that demographers say reflect improvements in medical treatment as well as in the socioeconomic position of blacks in America. Life expectancy at birth was up by 17 percent since 1970, far higher than the 11 percent increase for whites over the same period.

Demographers credit declining rates of AIDS and homicide, which ravaged black neighborhoods in many American cities in the 1980s and ’90s, as well as reduced death rates from heart disease. Blacks, who have higher rates of heart disease, have benefited disproportionately from improved treatment of it, said Samuel Preston, a demographer and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. But there is still a lot of room for improvement, especially to prevent heart disease in blacks, experts said.

Life expectancy for blacks rose to 75 years in 2010, up from 64 years in 1970. For whites, it rose to 79 years from 72 years in the same period. In 1930, life expectancy stood at 48 for blacks and at 60 for whites.

Higher infant mortality among blacks also contributes to the gap, but less than it used to. The infant mortality rate for blacks fell by 16 percent from 2005 to 2011, compared with a 12 percent drop for whites, said Kenneth M. Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

Heart disease was the single biggest drag on black life expectancy, accounting for a full year of the 3.8-year difference between whites and blacks. The second-biggest factor was cancer, accounting for about eight months of the difference.

The report’s lead author, Kenneth D. Kochanek, said that 1994 was the last time his office published a report that focused on what was driving life expectancy disparities. At that time, researchers were exploring a surprising decline in life expectancy for blacks between 1984 and 1989 that was driven in part by AIDS and homicide among black men, and AIDS and diabetes among black women.

The new report analyzed data from 2010. Preliminary statistics for 2011 show that the gap has continued to narrow to 3.7 years.

Whites have suffered a setback in a category known as unintentional injuries, which includes the surge in prescription drug overdoses that has disproportionately affected whites since the 1990s.

Blacks also had lower death rates than whites from suicide, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, and respiratory diseases like emphysema, as well as chronic liver disease.

Sam Harper, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at McGill University in Montreal who has done extensive work on disparities in life expectancy, said some drivers of black disadvantage are preventable, like heart disease. Public health efforts should focus on reducing risk factors like smoking, poor diet and hypertension, he said.

Policy makers should also make sure that blacks are benefiting from improvements in medical treatments for cancer and heart disease, he said. “Redoubling our efforts on these two diseases would go a long way toward reducing the black-white life expectancy gap further.”

© 2013 The New York Times

NJ Spotlight, July 17, 2013

[The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program pays less than $1.50 a meal, but some critics contend that spending is out of control.]

By Hank Kalet

As Congress debates the best way to pass a federal farm bill, advocates for New Jersey’s food-aid recipients are concerned that efforts to slash funding for nutrition programs could overburden family budgets at a time when the state’s economy remains fragile and its unemployment rate remains above the national average.

Those receiving food aid say they will need to make tough choices if money from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is cut — choices made all the more difficult because most are already buying only what they consider to be the necessities.

Critics of food-aid programs like SNAP, however, say reductions are required to rein in an out-of-control entitlement and that eligibility rules need to be changed to protect those truly in need.

The farm bill, known officially as the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act, is the chief funding mechanism for the federal Department of Agriculture. It funds grain and milk price subsidies, food inspection, and most of the nation’s nutrition and emergency food programs for families and low-income seniors.

Members of the Senate and House from both parties have been pushing for reforms that would update price supports and food aid but have been unable to reach an agreement. A Senate bill that included a 10-year, $4 billion reduction in SNAP passed, while the House bill, which called for $20.5 billion to be sliced off over a decade, was defeated 234-195 when members of both parties balked at the SNAP cuts — Democrats because they were too large and Republicans because they were not large enough.

On Thursday, the House approved a version of the bill covering farm programs but not food aid. The vote was 216-208, with New Jersey Republicans Rodney Frelinghuysen, Scott Garrett, Leonard Lance, Jon Runyan, and Chris Smith voting yes and Republican Frank LoBiondo joining all six New Jersey Democrats in voting no.

A food-stamp bill is expected later in the year, though there is no timetable for action, staffers say. Food programs traditionally have been included in the farm bill to win urban votes for what have been viewed as rural spending and have not been voted on as separate bills for about 40 years.

A temporary benefit boost enacted as part of the 2009 Recovery Act will expire on November 1, which will decrease benefits for most SNAP recipients by $20 to $25 a month, according to estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C.

Benefits and Beneficiaries

Nationally, about 50 million people receive SNAP benefits, some 40 percent of whom are children and about 8 percent seniors.

In April, 859,353 New Jersey residents received SNAP benefits, nearly one out of every 10 people who live in the state. Almost four in 10 of those receiving SNAP live in Essex, Hudson, and Passaic counties. The number of SNAP participants has more than doubled since April 2008, just before the national financial collapse, with growth concentrated during the height of the crisis in 2009-2011 and slowing the past two years.

“[SNAP participation] is about as high as it has ever been,” said Diane Riley, director of advocacy for the Community Food Bank of New Jersey, the state’s largest food bank. "You have to remember that New Jersey still has quite a high unemployment rate, higher than the national average. You will see less SNAP participation as a natural effect of a better economy.”

Shawn Sheekey, director of the Camden County Board of Social Services, said agencies are still dealing with the increase in clients – and that the jump in numbers has come from a new segment of the population.

“It has doubled in size, but what is amazing to me is . . . we obviously deal with the inner-city poor, but what is so different about this whole Great Recession is seeing families that were traditionally not on any kind of assistance come in,” he said. “Families where the mom and dad were working at $90,000 jobs and the company downsizes.

“We are seeing more of that type of activity,” he added. “People need the benefits to keep the family fed.“

The growth in SNAP participation, which tracks closely with the growth in unemployment nationally and in the state, shows how important federal nutrition programs are, advocates say. The programs are needed to prevent hunger and to ensure that hundreds of thousands of Americans, including a record number of New Jersey residents, can continue to put food on their tables.

Ray Castro, senior policy analyst at the liberal New Jersey Policy Perspective, called SNAP benefits necessary for New Jersey’s low-income families.

“Without the supplementary programs for the childless and for families, it is hard to see how they would survive in New Jersey,” he said.

The November cuts, he said, would reduce the amount provided per meal under SNAP from $1.48 to $1.40.

“That is not much to live on,” he said. “Any additional cut beyond that will be a major problem, particularly in New Jersey because our economy has not recovered as quickly as others have.”

Riley said food banks and soup kitchens will not be “able to pick up the slack."

“We are supposed to be for emergency and not this kind of support,” she said.

Too Generous

But critics of the program say that food aid is too generous and that better controls are necessary to ensure that the programs only serve those who need help the most. Groups like the conservative Heritage Foundation have been critical of the program for fostering what it calls a dependency culture.

Rachel Sheffield, a research assistant at the foundation, said on the organization’s blog that “food stamp spending should be rolled back to pre-recession levels when the employment rate recovers” in an effort to “get spending under control.” The program, she added, needs to “be restructured to promote work instead of discourage it.”

“Smart cost reforms accompanied by efforts to promote self-sufficiency through work would take food stamps off its reckless spending spree and put it on a road to fiscal responsibility,” she said.

Runyan, a South Jersey Republican, was one of two New Jersey Congressmen — Frelinghuysen was the other — to vote in favor of the farm bill in June. He called its failure “another example of Washington making the perfect the enemy of the good.”

The legislation passed the House Agriculture Committee with bipartisan support and would have “included over $40 billion in savings to the taxpayer,” he said in an email. The $20.5 billion in “reforms to the SNAP program” would have been “the first major changes since the welfare reforms of the 1990s,” he said.

“I have yet to see a federal program that doesn’t at some point need to be updated, both as a means of protecting the taxpayer, and ensuring these programs can be sustained, and are meeting their intended purpose,” he said.

U.S. Rep. Donald Payne Jr., who represents Essex and parts of Hudson and Union counties, said in a press release that SNAP was a “vital program that helps families that are struggling to make ends meet” and that the proposed House cuts were “completely unconscionable.”

“In the best nation on Earth, it is astonishing that millions of people, many of whom are children, still go hungry,” he said. “As leaders we have a responsibility to protect our children and promote the well-being of the most vulnerable.”

Payne added in a second release Thursday that “separating supplemental nutrition assistance from the Farm Bill went against a four-decade precedent.” Congress, he said, has “completely turned their back on starving children and the most underserved in this country.”

Fellow Democrat Albio Sires, who represents parts of Essex, Hudson, Union, and Middlesex counties, called the passage of a Farm Bill “critical” to the nation’s food supply. But Sires voted against the bill, he said in a press release, because he could not “support measures that achieve that goal by slashing nutrition assistance to our nation’s most vulnerable citizens.”

Both Payne and Sires — along with Democrats Rob Andrews and Bill Pascrell and Republicans Chris Smith and Frank LoBiondo — voted for an amendment that would have restored full funding for SNAP in the bill. The amendment was defeated before the June vote.

A separate amendment that would have increased the SNAP cuts by nearly $11 billion to $31 billion over 10 years was also defeated. Republican Scott Garrett, who represents Warren and parts of Sussex, Passaic, and Bergen counties, was the only New Jersey Congressman to support the amendment.

Forced Reductions

Studies by liberal groups say that the House bill would have forced as many as 2 million people off SNAP, nearly 60,000 of them in New Jersey. The Senate bill cuts $4.1 billion over 10 years by imposing new eligibility requirements tied to energy assistance — the so-called heat-and-eat programs — and making other cuts. Those state-level programs allow low-income people to deduct payments they receive from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program from their overall income when calculating their SNAP benefits.

SNAP also is facing more direct cuts, as are other nutrition programs, like Meals on Wheels, Senior Congregant Care, and a federal farmer’s market program that enables low-income families and individuals to shop cheaply at local produce stands.

Jim Sigurdson, executive director of Community Services, Inc. of Ocean County said the larger senior programs like his could be affected if the nutrition programs are cut. If that happens, he said, it would have a geometric impact.

Seniors who rely on agencies like Community Services for some of their primary meals and who rely on the federal farmer’s market program would need to plug those gaps with what is left of their SNAP benefit or their own resources.

“The fresh produce is significant for someone who is of low income,” Sigurdson said. “Oftentimes, there is a trade-off. You have to purchase things that are of less nutritional value because you have to have your belly full. Can of pasta costs a whole lot less and it has a longer shelf life.”

Senior congregant meals help seniors “stretch that food stamp budget,” he said, and “contributes to the overall health of these individuals and allows them to remain living in their own homes and their own communities. And it keeps them out of institutions that put a greater tax burden on the public.”

Riley said the eligibility and income changes being proposed by both houses will only further chip away at food programs that keep many above water. Under current rules, a family of four earning about $42,000 could be eligible for food aid; eligibility changes, however, would put the ceiling at about $23,000 for the same-size family, leaving a lot of families without assistance.

“Imagine living on [$42,000] in New Jersey and not needing help,” she said. ”To take it back to $23,000, that is going to send more people into a desperate situation.”

Breaking the Budget

Carolyn Biondi, executive director of the Crisis Ministry of Princeton and Trenton, said that SNAP benefits affect the entire family budget. Recipients, she said, “rely on food stamps to meet food needs, but also to offset those costs so they can pay their other bills.”

Castro agreed. He said that about 80 percent of food-aid money is spent within the first two weeks of the month, which leaves families in a bind.

“They have one family budget to live on and, if they have less money for food in food stamps, that means they don’t pay their rent that day to make up the difference,” he said. “That is the choice they have to make: whether they want to become homeless or go hungry.”

Mirian Contreras, a single mother of three in Trenton, has been receiving food aid through SNAP for three years and still has to visit food pantries periodically to ensure she has enough food in the house. Her SNAP benefit, she said through a translator, is $429 a month. She works full time earning about $1,000 a month after taxes, but pays $650 for a small, one-bedroom apartment next to a liquor store in the city. She doesn’t have a phone and uses state-backed charity care when she needs to see the doctor.

SNAP allows her to buy the basics — bottled water, meat, rice, milk, juices, and occasionally fresh fruit. She generally shops at one of the small food stores in the city because she lacks transportation, but they are more expensive than the larger supermarkets in neighboring Ewing or Hamilton.

She tries to put a little away each week “for emergencies,” though she generally has to “tap into that at the end of the month,” she said. She received about $2,500 from the Earned Income Tax Credit last year, she said, though most of that has been spent.

“If you take away food stamps or cut what I get, it would be much worse,” she said. “With $650 for rent and the check I get, it is not enough. Everything comes and goes so quickly.”

Judith Elboraa, of South Brunswick, says the SNAP program has allowed her to keep food on the table since being stricken with cancer several years ago. She works when she can, but she is limited in the kinds of jobs can do because of her health and a lack of stamina.

“I was working a full-time job in retail when I got cancer,” she said. “After that, I couldn’t go back to retail anymore, because it was too strenuous. Then I had to go on Medicaid, welfare, and SNAP because I couldn’t go back to work.”

She has worked sporadically since, though her wages have never been enough to maintain a household that includes her son and her elderly mother and regularly has to find ways to cut back on expenses.

“We’ve had to make a lot of cuts,” she said. “When I was working, I took my son out to eat now and then. We’ve cut back to necessities, cut out all the luxuries.”

And she coupon shops.

“I have to be more careful in checking the stores to see what is on sale,” she said. “Now, it is ‘don’t buy something until it goes on sale somewhere else.’ If I’m going to splurge and spend a little extra on a chicken that is not on sale, it is going to hurt us by middle of month, because we will have nothing left.”

Elihu Froomess, a senior citizen living in Brick Township, said his SNAP benefits — “somewhat less than $100 a month” — often do not last beyond the third week of the month. If they were cut, he said, the five days per month that he has to scrape by would be much longer, though he said he is lucky to qualify for various senior services.

“I’m very fortunate that because of the federal programs still intact I don’t have to make some of these choices, because my medical and healthcare are provided through federal and state programs,” he said.

Still, there are five days a month, “when I have to seriously consider what to do,” he said. “It is a mix of prayer and fasting or relying on others.”

By Tom Toles (June 16, 2013)

Boston Review July 15, 2013

By Simon Waxman

At the rally for Trayvon Martin in Boston last night, one speaker earned a raucous applause for sneering at the jury that set George Zimmerman free on Saturday. Was that panel of six women, five of them white, the speaker asked, a jury of Martin’s peers? He chuckled and shook his head, and the 500 or so onlookers clapped, booed, and raised hands in agreement.

The impulse to blame the nearly all-white jury is understandable. American history is full of such juries rendering injustice. And there is no question that the result in the Zimmerman trial was injustice. The course of events is beyond doubt: Zimmerman, fearing for the security of his neighborhood with a young black man at large, pursued Trayvon Martin, got in a fight with him, and then shot Martin when his quarry got the better of him.

Thus it has now become an article of faith among many: had the skin tones been reversed, had George Zimmerman been black and Trayvon Martin white, Zimmerman would surely have been found guilty.

This speculation is impossible to test, but it’s probably wrong.

For one thing, the jury was not the source of the injustice. It made a rational decision based on Florida law and the facts it was allowed to consider. One would like to believe that in the speculative scenario, black George Zimmerman would have been subject to the same laws, trial rules, and deliberative process.

But, as long as we are engaged in speculation, we should consider the more likely and therefore more instructive scenario: had George Zimmerman been black, there would never have been a trial.

Had Zimmerman been black, he would have been arrested immediately and charged within days. Because Zimmerman is white — those who wish to suggest he is Latino and therefore the racial “overtones” of the case are exaggerated simply do not understand the difference between race and ethnicity or how race is constructed in America — he was detained for five hours and released without charge or further investigation. Only after six weeks of protests, mostly by black citizens, was he charged, after which he turned himself in.

Recall that in August 2012, Zimmerman claimed to be indigent. His supporters bought his high-priced legal team, but had Zimmerman been typical of the black men who pass through our criminal justice system, as opposed to a cause célèbre, he would have been declared indigent as requested and assigned an underpaid, overworked public defender. After having been charged, black Zimmerman would have languished in prison for several weeks before his lawyer came to him to discuss his case for a half hour or so. This would have precipitated a lengthy process of delays. The lawyer would have sought continuances in order to gain time to make a few more half-hour visits and prepare a case.

Black, indigent Zimmerman would have been denied bail, or else his bail would have been set so high that he would never have been able to pay it. While white Zimmerman prepared his trial from the comfort of his home, black Zimmerman would have spent more than a year behind bars awaiting trial.

But that trial would not have come. As time droned on, the prosecutor — herself overworked, underpaid, and hoping to clear cases by any possible means — would have offered a plea bargain. Black Zimmerman’s lawyer, with a hundred or more defendants vying for his attention, would have encouraged black Zimmerman to take the plea, accept a relatively lenient sentence, and serve his time.

And black Zimmerman would have taken that plea, as 95 percent of American defendants do. A black man knows that, faced with a second-degree murder charge in the killing of a white teenager, he doesn’t stand a chance at trial.

But because the real Zimmerman is white and had money for a private legal team dedicated exclusively to his needs, he was afforded the full range of advantages that a criminal trial can offer a defendant. He was able, for instance, to benefit from the rules of exclusion relevant to the manslaughter charge. These rules apparently narrowed the scope of admissible facts to those of the physical altercation itself, which meant that Zimmerman’s pursuit of Martin, his 46 police emergency calls, and his hateful words recorded by the 9-1-1 dispatcher on the night he killed Martin were all out of bounds as far as the jury was concerned. These rules saved George Zimmerman from a jail sentence.

Black Zimmerman would not likely have been in a position to benefit from these rules. And herein lies most glaringly the racism of the system of law enforcement and criminal justice, which essentially guaranteed that for Trayvon Martin, like so many black men, justice could not be served.

The Constitution tells us that everyone has a right to a speedy trial, with competent counsel, before a jury of his peers. But in practice, indigent black men almost never receive such a trial and the protections it offers.

In the case of black Zimmerman, a jury of six klansmen would have meant as much as a jury of six NAACP Image Award winners because that jury would never have been empaneled. If you are a black man charged with a crime, you had better be O.J. Simpson because otherwise you probably will not have your day in court. You will not have a chance to get away with it, as George Zimmerman did.

Update: This story was corrected to reflect the fact that the jury in the Zimmerman trial was not entirely white, but included, according to news reports, one Latina woman. We apologize for the error.