NJSpotlight, Sept. 12, 2013
By Colleen O’Dea
A housing advocacy group yesterday filed a lawsuit seeking to force New Jersey to provide information about three of its largest housing-grant programs, which are expected to provide $850 million in assistance to residents affected by superstorm Sandy. At least two of the programs must provide a majority of funds to low- and moderate-income individuals and families.
The information sought by the lawsuit may help explain why five communities in Bergen and Hudson counties rejected low- and moderate-income residents for construction grants of up to $150,000 at rates much higher than the state average.
Continue reading here …
Getting Past the Outrage on Race
N.Y. Times, Sept. 11, 2013
By Gary Gutting
George Yancy’s recent passionate response in The Stone to Trayvon Martin’s killing — and the equally passionate comments on his response — vividly present the seemingly intractable conflict such cases always evoke. There seems to be a sense in which each side is right, but no way to find common ground on which to move discussion forward. This is because, quite apart from the facts of the case, Trayvon Martin immediately became a symbol for two apparently opposing moral judgments. I will suggest, however, that both these judgments derive from the same underlying injustice — one at the heart of the historic March on Washington 50 years ago and highlighted in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech on that occasion.
Trayvon Martin was, for the black community, a symbol of every young black male, each with vivid memories of averted faces, abrupt street crossings, clicking car locks and insulting police searches. As we move up the socioeconomic scale, the memories extend to attractive job openings that suddenly disappear when a black man applies, to blacks interviewed just to prove that a company tried, and even to a president some still hate for his color. It’s understandable that Trayvon Martin serves as a concrete emblem of the utterly unacceptable abuse, even today, of young black men.
But for others this young black man became a symbol of other disturbing realities; that, for example, those most likely to drop out of school, belong to gangs and commit violent crimes are those who “look like” Trayvon Martin. For them — however mistakenly — his case evokes the disturbing amount of antisocial behavior among young black males.
Trayvon Martin’s killing focused our national discussion because Americans made him a concrete model of opposing moral judgments about the plight of young black men. Is it because of their own lack of values and self-discipline, or to the vicious prejudice against them? Given either of these judgments, many conclude that we need more laws — against discrimination if you are in one camp, and against violent crime if you are in the other — and stronger penalties to solve our racial problems.
There may be some sense to more legislation, but after many years of both “getting tough on crime” and passing civil rights acts, we may be scraping the bottom of the legal barrel. In any case, underlying the partial truths of the two moral pictures, there is a deeper issue. We need to recognize that our continuing problems about race are essentially rooted in a fundamental injustice of our economic system.
This is a point that Martin Luther King Jr. made in his “I Have a Dream” speech, one rightly emphasized by a number of commentators on the anniversary of that speech, including President Obama and Joseph Stiglitz. Dr. King made the point in a striking image at the beginning of his speech. “The Negro is not free,” he said, because he “lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast sea of material prosperity.” In 2011, for 28 percent of African-Americans, the island was still there, the source of both images of Trayvon Martin.
The poverty is not an accident. Our free-enterprise system generates enough wealth to eliminate Dr. King’s island. But we primarily direct the system toward individuals’ freedom to amass personal wealth. Big winners beget big losers, and a result is a socioeconomic underclass deprived of the basic goods necessary for a fulfilling human life: adequate food, housing, health care and education, as well as meaningful and secure employment. (Another Opinionator series, The Great Divide, examines such inequalities in detail each week.)
People should be allowed to pursue their happiness in the competitive market. But it makes no sense to require people to compete in the market for basic goods. Those who lack such goods have little chance of winning them in competition with those who already have them. This is what leads to an underclass exhibiting the antisocial behavior condemned by one picture of young black men and the object of the prejudice condemned by the other picture.
We need to move from outrage over the existence of an underclass to serious policy discussions about economic justice, with the first issue being whether our current capitalist system is inevitably unjust. If it is, is there a feasible way of reforming or even replacing it? If it is not, what methods does it offer for eliminating the injustice?
It is easy — and true — to say that a society as wealthy as ours should be able to keep people from being unhappy because they do not have enough to eat, have no safe place to live, have no access to good education and medical care, or cannot find a job. But this doesn’t tell us how — if at all — to do what needs to be done. My point here is just that saying it can’t be done expresses not realism but despair. Unless we work for this fundamental justice, then we must reconcile ourselves to a society with a permanent underclass, a class that, given our history, will almost surely be racially defined. Then the bitter conflict between the two pictures of this class will never end, because the injustice that creates it will last forever. Dr. King’s island will never disappear, and there will always be another Trayvon Martin.
Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960,” and writes regularly for The Stone. He was recently interviewed in 3am magazine.
The 8 Groups in America That Are the Most Harmed by The Economy
Alternet, Sept. 1, 2013
By Paul Buchheit
Are political and corporate leaders even remotely aware of the conditions of society beneath the wealthiest 10% or so?
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Portokalis
We live in a society that allows one man to make $15 million a day while a low-income mother gets $4.50 a day for food, and much of Congress wants to cut the $4.50.
Are political and corporate leaders even remotely aware of the conditions of society beneath the wealthiest 10% or so?
The following are some of the victims of an economic system that has forgotten the majority of its people.
Children
One out of every five American children now lives in poverty, and for black children it’s nearly one out of TWO. Almost half of food stamp recipients are children.
UNICEF places us near the bottom of the developed world in the inequality of children’s well-being, and the OECD found that we have more child poverty than all but 3 of 30 developed countries. It’s rather embarrassing to view the charts.
Students
Over the last 12 years, according to a New York Times report, the United States has gone from having the highest share of employed 25- to 34-year-olds among large, wealthy economies to having among the lowest. The number of college grads working for minimum wage has doubled in just five years.
Higher education was cut by nearly $17 billion in the years leading up to 2012-13. Through those same years large corporations were avoiding about $14 billion annually in taxes. To make up the difference, students face tuition costs that have risen almost ten times faster than median family income, leading them into their low-wage post-college positions with an average of $26,000 in student loan debt.
The Elderly
Three-quarters of Americans approaching retirement in 2010 had an average of less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts. The percentage of elderly (75 to 84) Americans experiencing poverty for the first time doubled from 2005 to 2009.
The folly of cutting Social Security is reflected in two facts. First, even though Social Security provides only an average benefit of $15,000, it accounts for 55 percent of annual income for the elderly. And second, seniors have spent their working lives paying for their retirement. According to the Urban Institute the average two-earner couple making average wages throughout their lifetimes will receive less in Social Security benefits than they paid in. Same for single males. Almost the same for single females.
Wage Earners
Workers have 30% LESS buying power today than in 1968. If the minimum wage had kept up with employee productivity, it would be $16.54 per hour instead of $7.25.
Almost unimaginably, conditions for workers have gotten even worse since the recession. While 21 percent of job losses since 2008 were considered low-wage positions, 58 percent of jobs added during the recovery were considered low-wage.
As for members of Congress who say “get a job,” only one of them was present at the start of a recent unemployment hearing.
The Sick and Disabled
Over 200 recent studies have confirmed a link between financial stress and sickness. In just 20 years America’s ranking among developed countries dropped on nearly every major health measure. Victims suffer both physically and mentally. A recent study found that unemployment, whether voluntary or involuntary, can significantly impact a person’s mental health. Even grimmer, from 1999 to 2010 the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 increased by almost 30 percent.
In the long run, the only Americans to increase their life expectancy have been seniors covered by Medicare.
Women
Recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal that women earn just 80% of men’s pay. In Washington, DC and California, Hispanic women make only 44 cents for every dollar made by white men. The only deviation from the norm is that in 47 of 50 large metropolitan areas, well-educated single childless women under 30 earn more than their male counterparts.
But the overall disparities have worsened since the recession, with only about one-fifth of new jobs going to women, and with median wealth for single black and Hispanic women falling to a little over $100. And there’s no respite with advancing age. The average American woman’s retirement account is 38 percent less than a man’s, and women over 65 have twice the poverty rate of men.
Minorities
The Economist states: Before the 1960s… most blacks were poor, few served in public office and almost none were to be found flourishing at the nation’s top universities, corporations, law firms and banks. None of that is true today.
Wrong. Much of that is true today. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), median wealth for black families in 2009 was $2,200, compared to $97,900 for white families. (Pew Research reported $5,677 for blacks, $113,149 for whites). EPI said median financial wealth (stocks, etc.) was $200 for blacks, compared to $36,100 for whites.
Since the recession, black and Hispanic wealth has dropped further, by 30 to 40 percent, while white family wealth dropped 11 percent.
Blacks and Hispanics, with 29% of the population, are also severely under-represented on corporate boards and in higher education.
One of the reasons it’s so hard for young blacks to be successful is that they’re viewed as criminals by many white authority figures. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander documents the explosion of the prison population for drug offenses, with blacks and Hispanics the main targets even though they use drugs at about the same — or lesser — rate as white Americans.
The Homeless
The super-rich want homeless people to get jobs. But they don’t want to pay taxes to support job creation. If the richest Americans – the Forbes 400 – had paid a 5% tax on their 2012 investment earnings, enough revenue would have been generated to provide a full-time minimum wage job for every person who was homeless in America on a January night in 2012.
Instead, it keeps getting worse for the homeless. North Carolina made it a crime to feed them. Columbia, South Carolina approved a plan to remove them. Tampa, Florida passed a law that makes it a crime for them to sleep in public.
So who’s left after all this? Oh yes, rich white men.
The Rich Get Richer Through the Recovery
N.Y. Times, Sept. 11, 2013
By ANNIE LOWREY
The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.
The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax.
The figures underscore that even after the recession the country remains in a new Gilded Age, with income as concentrated as it was in the years that preceded the Depression of the 1930s, if not more so.
High stock prices, rising home values and surging corporate profits have buoyed the recovery-era incomes of the most affluent Americans, with the incomes of the rest still weighed down by high unemployment and stagnant wages for many blue- and white-collar workers.
“These results suggest the Great Recession has only depressed top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s,” Mr. Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in his analysis of the data.
The income share of the top 1 percent of earners in 2012 returned to the same level as before both the Great Recession and the Great Depression: just above 20 percent, jumping to about 22.5 percent in 2012 from 19.7 percent in 2011.
That increase is probably in part due to one-time factors. Congress made a last-minute deal to avoid the expiration of all of the Bush-era tax cuts in January. That deal included a number of tax increases on wealthy Americans, including bumping up levies on investment income. Seeing the tax changes coming, many companies gave large dividends and investors cashed out.
But the economists noted that the trends looked the same for income figures including and excluding realized capital gains — implying that the temporary tax moves were not the only reason the top 1 percent did so well relative to everyone else in 2012.
More generally, richer households have disproportionately benefited from the boom in the stock market during the recovery, with the Dow Jones industrial average more than doubling in value since it bottomed out early in 2009. About half of households hold stock, directly or through vehicles like pension accounts. But the richest 10 percent of households own about 90 percent of the stock, expanding both their net worth and their incomes when they cash out or receive dividends.
The economy remains depressed for most wage-earning families. With sustained, relatively high rates of unemployment, businesses are under no pressure to raise their employees’ incomes because both workers and employers know that many people without jobs would be willing to work for less. The share of Americans working or looking for work is at its lowest in 35 years.
There is a glimmer of good news for the 99 percent in the report, though. Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez show that the incomes of that group stagnated between 2009 and 2011. In 2012, they started growing again — if only by about 1 percent. But the total income of the top 1 percent surged nearly 20 percent that year. The incomes of the very richest, the 0.01 percent, shot up more than 32 percent.
The new data shows that the top 1 percent of earners experienced a sharp drop in income during the recession, of about 36 percent, and a nearly equal rebound during the recovery of roughly 31 percent. The incomes of the other 99 percent plunged nearly 12 percent in the recession and have barely grown — a 0.4 percent uptick — since then. Thus, the 1 percent has captured about 95 percent of the income gains since the recession ended.
Mr. Saez and Mr. Piketty have argued that the concentration of income among top earners is unlikely to reverse without stark changes in the economy or in tax policy. Increases that Congress negotiated in January are not likely to have a major effect, Mr. Saez wrote, saying they “are not negligible, but they are modest.”
Mr. Saez and Mr. Piketty, of the Paris School of Economics, plan to update their data again in January, after more complete statistics become available.
The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax.
The figures underscore that even after the recession the country remains in a new Gilded Age, with income as concentrated as it was in the years that preceded the Depression of the 1930s, if not more so.
High stock prices, rising home values and surging corporate profits have buoyed the recovery-era incomes of the most affluent Americans, with the incomes of the rest still weighed down by high unemployment and stagnant wages for many blue- and white-collar workers.
“These results suggest the Great Recession has only depressed top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s,” Mr. Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in his analysis of the data.
The income share of the top 1 percent of earners in 2012 returned to the same level as before both the Great Recession and the Great Depression: just above 20 percent, jumping to about 22.5 percent in 2012 from 19.7 percent in 2011.
That increase is probably in part due to one-time factors. Congress made a last-minute deal to avoid the expiration of all of the Bush-era tax cuts in January. That deal included a number of tax increases on wealthy Americans, including bumping up levies on investment income. Seeing the tax changes coming, many companies gave large dividends and investors cashed out.
But the economists noted that the trends looked the same for income figures including and excluding realized capital gains — implying that the temporary tax moves were not the only reason the top 1 percent did so well relative to everyone else in 2012.
More generally, richer households have disproportionately benefited from the boom in the stock market during the recovery, with the Dow Jones industrial average more than doubling in value since it bottomed out early in 2009. About half of households hold stock, directly or through vehicles like pension accounts. But the richest 10 percent of households own about 90 percent of the stock, expanding both their net worth and their incomes when they cash out or receive dividends.
The economy remains depressed for most wage-earning families. With sustained, relatively high rates of unemployment, businesses are under no pressure to raise their employees’ incomes because both workers and employers know that many people without jobs would be willing to work for less. The share of Americans working or looking for work is at its lowest in 35 years.
There is a glimmer of good news for the 99 percent in the report, though. Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez show that the incomes of that group stagnated between 2009 and 2011. In 2012, they started growing again — if only by about 1 percent. But the total income of the top 1 percent surged nearly 20 percent that year. The incomes of the very richest, the 0.01 percent, shot up more than 32 percent.
The new data shows that the top 1 percent of earners experienced a sharp drop in income during the recession, of about 36 percent, and a nearly equal rebound during the recovery of roughly 31 percent. The incomes of the other 99 percent plunged nearly 12 percent in the recession and have barely grown — a 0.4 percent uptick — since then. Thus, the 1 percent has captured about 95 percent of the income gains since the recession ended.
Mr. Saez and Mr. Piketty have argued that the concentration of income among top earners is unlikely to reverse without stark changes in the economy or in tax policy. Increases that Congress negotiated in January are not likely to have a major effect, Mr. Saez wrote, saying they “are not negligible, but they are modest.”
Mr. Saez and Mr. Piketty, of the Paris School of Economics, plan to update their data again in January, after more complete statistics become available.
EPA Awards 2013 Environmental Justice Small Grants
[Posted by Bill Allen]
WASHINGTON – Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a total of $1.1 million in competitive grants to 39 non-profit and tribal organizations working to address environmental justice issues nationwide. The grants will enable the organizations to develop solutions to local health and environmental issues in low-income, minority and tribal communities overburdened by harmful pollution.
“EPA’s Environmental Justice Small Grants are making a visible difference in communities across the country,” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy who announced the grants today. “These grants help build capacity, raise awareness, and equip communities with the tools to address environmental challenges – from climate change impacts to brownfields and water pollution. I’m proud to continue to promote these important grants and advance EPA’s long-term commitment to our community stakeholders.”
The 2013 grants support activities that address a range of community concerns such as reducing exposure to indoor environmental asthma triggers, restoring and protecting waterways, educating child care professionals on ways to prevent lead poisoning, and reducing pesticide use in child care facilities.
Environmental justice is defined as the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race or income, in the environmental decision-making process. Since 1994, EPA’s environmental justice small grants program has supported projects to address environmental justice issues in more than 1,400 communities. The grant awards represent EPA’s commitment to promoting community-based actions to address environmental justice issues.
In the fall of 2013, EPA will issue a Request for Proposals for the FY 2014 Collaborative Problem Solving Grants. A schedule of pre-application community stakeholder teleconference calls will be announced at that time.
2013 EJ Small Grant recipients and project descriptions: http://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/resources/publications/grants/ej-smgrants-recipients-2013.pdf
More information about EPA’s Environmental Justice Small Grants program: http://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/grants/ej-smgrants.html
Accusing state of inactivity, environmentalists ask feds to test water in the EJ community of Paulsboro
NJSpotlight, Sept. 9, 2013
[Paulsboro, NJ is an EJ community, half people of color, with an average household income just 57% of the statewide average. –P.M.]
By Jon Hurdle
Delaware Riverkeeper sounds alarm about possible presence of PFCs in groundwater
Environmentalists are calling on the federal government to investigate their concerns that a South Jersey chemical plant may be contaminating drinking water with carcinogenic chemicals, accusing state officials of years of inaction on the issue.
Delaware Riverkeeper Network, an advocacy group that seeks to protect the river’s watershed, says public health is threatened by the presence of perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) in groundwater around Paulsboro and West Deptford where the chemical manufacturer Solvay Solexis has a factory.
The environmental group is requesting that the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to conduct a public health assessment on Paulsboro’s water after what it says was the failure of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection to conduct new tests or publish results of a previous analysis of the water near the town.
As of September 5, the federal agency had not responded to the group’s request, while New Jersey’s DEP said only that it has “recommended” that the company and the Paulsboro water department conduct their own tests.
“We turned to ATSDR because New Jersey is ignoring the problem, and we need an outside investigation to provide the attention this pollution issue requires,” said DRN’s deputy director, Tracy Carluccio.
Concerns about possible PFC contamination at Paulsboro follow the spill of toxic vinyl chloride after a freight train derailment there in November 2012, and after a local refinery has started processing heavy crude oil shipped from Canada’s controversial tar sands.
Paulsboro “seems to have any major toxic chemical problem that you could find in the country,” said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club.
PFCs, used in household products such as Teflon, and industrial applications like lubricants and pesticides, can cause testicular and kidney cancer, and increased cholesterol in humans, and are linked to reproductive and developmental problems in animals, DRN said.
The chemicals have been found in many locations throughout the state but are at their highest in Paulsboro, about two miles from the Solvay plant, and at a location in Salem County about six miles from a factory operated by DuPont Chambers Works, DRN said.
A subset of the chemicals, PFOAs, has been found at “low” levels throughout the state, according to the DEP, based on its most recent tests in 2009.
Those tests on 29 public water systems, its second assessment of PFCs in drinking water, have still not been published. Larry Hajna, a spokesman for the department, said the delay is due in part to the slow pace of the scientific process, and to the state’s seeking guidance from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on safe limits for PFCs. The EPA’s own provisional limit is 0.4 parts per billion, or 10 times higher than the state’s mark.
Hajna denied that asking the company to conduct its own tests is equivalent to the fox guarding the henhouse, saying it’s normal for other parties rather than the DEP itself to conduct such tests. He said test results will be reviewed by DEP officials.
“We suspect that Solvay Solexis is the source,” Hajna said, but added that it’s not clear precisely how the contaminants got into the water. “We don’t know what the pathway was,” he said. “This could have happened from aerial discharge.”
Solvay spokesman Chuck Jones said the company is cooperating with DEP to investigate any contamination by PFNA, a type of PFC.
“Solvay is currently working with the department to address concerns relating to PFNA and local water supplies,” he said in a statement. “We anticipate developing a technical plan to gather more data and determine further actions as appropriate. Solvay will likewise continue to keep local authorities apprised of its progress.”
DRN’s Carluccio argued that Solvay’s own sampling should be split with an outside entity, and that testing should be done by an independent body that is competent to detect the low concentrations of PFCs believed to be in Paulsboro’s water.
The delay in further testing and establishment of safe limits on the chemicals follows a three-year hiatus in the work of the New Jersey Drinking Water Quality Institute, a statutory body that advises the department on safe drinking water limits.
The DWQI has not met since 2010 because it lost its chairman and several board members, Hajna said, but it is expected to resume its work in “early fall” this year to consider PFCs and other issues. Under pending legislation, the panel is due to get additional members representing industry, a change that is opposed by environmentalists.
But DRN’s Carluccio accused the DEP of “shutting down” the institute, which she said would have recommended an official Maximum Contaminant Limit for PFCs to protect the public if it had been able to continue its work.
If an MCL is established for any contaminant, the DEP can require treatment, and utilities can apply for loans to improve water quality. Although those conditions don’t currently exist, utilities including those in Brick have been taking steps to comply with the DEP’s guidance level of 0.04 parts per billion, Hajna said.
But Carluccio said water authorities have been left “scratching their heads” on what standards to apply or how to achieve them because of the apparent shutdown of the DWQI.
In Paulsboro, some residents are worried about their water, but none are so far willing to publicize their concerns, Carluccio said.
“The evidence is clear that the public has been exposed and is likely still being exposed to dangerous levels of PFNA and is unaware of the potential health threats this poses,” DRN said in a letter to ATSDR in August.
Despite DRN’s efforts to get the federal government involved, the group said the DEP is still in a position to act on Paulsboro’s water issue.
“We really want them to do a third round of testing now for PFCs throughout the state and to focus immediately on the Solvay-affected region and the water sources there,” Carluccio said.
ATSDR did not return a phone call seeking comment on whether it will launch a public health investigation.
W. Jeffery Hamilton, mayor of Paulsboro, said the city’s water department will be testing public water supplies for PFCs “very, very soon.”
“We are very concerned about it so we are testing,” he said.
The city’s two-year-old water-treatment plant tests regularly for a variety of contaminants, Hamilton said, but they don’t include PFCs because those chemicals were not listed as contaminants by the DEP and the EPA when the plant was set up.
Hamilton said he had received no complaints from residents about any health problems related to water quality.
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Jon Hurdle is a Philadelphia-based freelance reporter who covers energy, environmental, and general news for national and regional media.
21% of New Jersey residents were born outside the U.S.
NJSpotlight, Sept. 10, 2013
There are 1.8 million people living in New Jersey who were born outside the United States. That’s almost 21 percent of the population. Even more striking is that 32 percent of them — or 579,513 people — arrived in the country in this century.
The bulk of New Jersey’s foreign-born population (45.3 percent) is from Latin America. The next largest segment is from Asia, 31.4 percent. Foreign-born Europeans make up 18 percent of the population and Africans are 4.5 percent of the state’s residents.
Poverty in NJ: officially, 10.4% (but really almost 25%)
NJSpotlight, Sept. 9, 2013
Poverty has risen in New Jersey to its highest level since the 1950s, according to a new report by the Legal Services of New Jersey’s Poverty Research Institute. The report indicates that even though the Great Recession officially ended in 2009, poverty continues to rise in New Jersey and in 2011 was 10.4 percent statewide.
The counties with the highest poverty rates are Essex, Passaic, Hudson, and Cumberland, with rates ranging from 17.6 percent (Essex) to 16.1 percent (Cumberland.) Hunterdon has the lowest poverty rate at 4 percent, but it jumped from 3.8 percent. Somerset and Morris counties also have rates below 5 percent.
The high rate of poverty is particularly troubling, according to the report, since the federal poverty line does not take into account the high cost of living in New Jersey. A better indication of poverty, the LSNJ argues, is living below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. Sadly, that is nearly 25 percent of New Jerseyans.
Editorial: Mindlessly Gutting Food Stamps
N.Y. Times, Sept. 8, 2013
By the Editorial Board
Among the many scars of the recession, the most intolerable should be the pangs of chronic hunger that still assail a stunning 14.5 percent of the nation’s households, according to the Department of Agriculture’s latest survey. A decade ago, the figure was 11 percent — a group defined as regularly suffering food “insecurity,” or having 26 percent less to spend on food than households not going hungry. The survey shows that food insecurity rose with the recession and has remained stubbornly high.
Instead of providing aid for the hungry, House Republicans want to reduce the food stamp program — the most basic part of the social safety net — with $40 billion in cuts across the next decade. A showdown vote over this cruel plan is expected this month. The House majority leader, Eric Cantor, is leading a propaganda drive that invokes reform as its cause while blaming the victims of hunger simply because the food stamp rolls had to double to nearly 48 million people in the crunch of recession.
The Cantor plan would force an estimated four to six million people to lose the food stamps that now sustain them. It would invite state governments to ratchet benefits back further because they could use savings wrenched from the pantries of the poor for various other programs, including tax cuts. The measure’s “work requirements” provide no job training funds yet mandate that able-bodied, childless adults who cannot find at least part-time employment will lose their food stamps after 90 days, even if the local unemployment rate is prohibitively high.
Even without the House conservatives’ turning of the screw, the hunger of the working poor was starkly described by Sheryl Gay Stolberg in The Times last week from Tennessee. Parents told of how they must regularly skip meals to feed their children and hunt game when the food stamp allotment falls short of monthly needs.
The falsehood that cutting food stamps is about saving government money is evident when the House plans rich increases in crop insurance subsidies for farmers. Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, a Tea Party favorite who wants food stamps cut, collected nearly $3.5 million in government farm subsidies from 1999 to 2012. Yet he declared in a debate over food stamps, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”
The Republicans play up a few abusers of the program to mask the central fact of their plan: the tens of millions of Americans who rely on food stamps are children, the disabled, the elderly and low-wage families. For their sake, Congress should reject the Cantor proposal as the national embarrassment it plainly is.
Desegregation and the Schools
N.Y. Times, Sept. 9, 2013
By Michael Winerip
In many northern cities, the 1974 United States Supreme Court decision Milliken v. Bradley killed any hopes of integrating the public schools. That ruling, involving Detroit and its suburbs, said that a mandatory plan to achieve integration by busing black children from Detroit across district lines to mainly white suburbs was unconstitutional. The result accelerated white flight to the suburbs, leaving the schools in urban centers even more segregated than they had been.
See the 10-minute video here: Retro Report: The Battle for Busing
Most famously, this happened in Boston, where court-ordered integration resulted in a busing plan that wound up mainly moving children of color around the city.
But busing had greater success in some places, particularly those where the plans were carried out countywide, reducing the chances of white flight. They included Louisville/Jefferson County, Raleigh/Wake County and Charlotte/Mecklenberg County.
This week’s Retro Report video, “The Battle for Busing,” follows the story of the Charlotte/Mecklenberg district, which became a national model for racial integration for 30 years only to resegregate about a decade ago, after a court ruling lifted the mandatory integration plan.
When the Charlotte busing plan began in 1971, there were whites who threatened to go to jail before they would let their children attend schools with blacks. The open racism voiced by whites in the Retro Report’s archival footage is vicious and ugly; students were injured when fistfights broke out between whites and blacks.
But by 1974, the district was being singled out in the news media as a national model, particularly West Charlotte High, which had previously been all black. The impact of integration was visible almost immediately at the school. When whites arrived, the facilities were upgraded, said a former chairman of the school board, Arthur Griffin. A gravel parking lot was paved, and the football stadium and the gymnasium were renovated.
Over the years, researchers like Prof. Roslyn Mickelson at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, conducted studies concluding that children of any race who attended diverse schools were more likely to succeed, in areas like graduating, avoiding crime and attending college.
But in the end, the same federal courts that had ushered in integration helped kill it. In the late 1990s, Judge Robert D. Potter of Federal District Court essentially said that the Charlotte district had met its constitutional duty by successfully creating a single school system serving all children regardless of race and that no more need be done.
In a few years’ time, West Charlotte High, which had been roughly 40 percent black and 60 percent white in the 1970s, became 88 percent black and 1 percent white. And it wasn’t just Charlotte. Today, nearly two-thirds of the school districts that had been ordered to desegregate are no longer required to do so, including Seminole County, Fla. (2006); Little Rock, Ark. (2007); and Galveston County, Tex. (2009).
The New York City system is more segregated than it was in the 1980s: half the schools are more than 90 percent black and Hispanic. For more about the nation’s “steady and massive resegregation,” see this Reporter’s Notebook from Retro Report.