NBC News, Jan. 31, 2014

"They’re not spending the money on the people that they’re supposed to be spending," a Sandy victim says

By Chris Glorioso

Gov. Chris Christie’s administration is again facing questions about how Sandy aid was distributed in New Jersey after it was revealed $4.8 million in relief funds went to help build an apartment tower in New Brunswick, a town that saw relatively little storm damage. Chris Glorioso reports.

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Gov. Chris Christie’s administration is again facing questions about how Sandy aid was distributed in New Jersey after it was revealed $4.8 million in relief funds went to help build an apartment tower in New Brunswick, a town that saw relatively little storm damage.

New Jersey’s Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency approved the disbursement as part of the state’s Fund for Rebuilding Multifamily Housing. The program is intended to speed the construction of new affordable housing in communities ravaged by the storm.

But New Brunswick lost relatively little of its housing stock when Sandy stormed through the state, and a Rutgers University study ranked New Brunswick 188th on a list of communities that suffered the most hardship due to Sandy.

"They’re not spending the money on the people that they’re supposed to be spending," said Doris Narkum, a storm victim whose family lost their house on the Jersey Shore.

Anthony Marchetta, executive director of the housing and mortgage agency, defended using Sandy relief funds to help build the New Brunswick apartment tower. Although New Brunswick itself was not heavily damaged by Sandy, Marchetta stressed the municipality exists in Middlesex County, one of the nine counties declared a disaster area after the storm.

"We’re always in short supply of affordable housing in New Jersey," Marchetta said. "But those impacted counties have been further aggravated."

The New Brunswick project is one of 36 developments intended to increase the state’s stock of affordable housing in the wake of Sandy. In all, Marchetta said the state has committed $157 million, which is expected to generate 2,369 affordable housing units.

As for the location of those units, Marchetta said a lot of that depends on where developers propose to locate their projects.

"We made an announcement to the development community that if you have any projects in those nine counties that will generate affordable housing, bring them on."

Forty-eight of the 238 apartments in the New Brunswick apartment tower will be classified as affordable housing.

The developer, a firm called Boraie, boasts the building will have 8,000 square feet of retail space, a parking deck and a fitness center.

Adam Gordon, a lawyer for the nonprofit Fair Share Housing Center, said most of the 36 development projects awarded through the Fund for Rebuilding Multifamily Housing appear to directly benefit communities heavily damaged by Sandy, but the New Brunswick tower appears to be more questionable.

"I just don’t think building anywhere in any of the nine counties is equal, especially when you have a project that doesn’t seem to have any connection to Sandy," Gordon said.

He has also criticized a senior housing development in Belleville, which won millions in Sandy relief funds. Belleville was not hit particularly hard by Sandy; it ranked 254th on the list of New Jersey communities suffering hardships after Sandy.

Despite the relatively low level of need, the HMFA approved $6 million to help the developer build 137 affordable senior housing units.

At a ceremonial groundbreaking in May, Christie did not mention how the senior center would benefit Sandy victims, but he did say he considered the project a priority for the seniors of Belleville and spoke about how he personally urged his appointed officials on the phone to approve the financial assistance.

"We saw the governor made remarks that basically directed his top cabinet officials to make sure this development got money. That was really troubling," Gordon said.

After the Sandy aid was approved, Belleville Mayor Raymond Kimble, a Democrat, crossed party lines to endorse Christie’s re-election bid. Kimble did not respond to the I-Team’s request for comment.

Another endorsement secured by Christie came from former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal. He has invested with Boraie on other real estate projects.

Five months after the HMFA approved the Boraie application for Sandy funds, O’Neal appeared in a commercial endorsing Christie.

Earlier this month, Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer said Christie’s lieutenant governor, Kim Guadagno, pulled her aside last year and told her Sandy recovery funds — from a program separate from the multifamily housing funds — would be freed up for her city if she signed off on a certain real estate development. Guadagno has denied that this conversation took place.

Representatives for O’Neal did not respond to the I-Team’s request for comment. Calls to Boraie Development were not returned. It is unclear if O’Neal has invested directly in the New Brunswick apartment tower.

A spokesperson for Christie did not respond to inquiries about the political endorsements from O’Neal or Kimble.

© 2014 NBCUniversal, Inc.

NJ Spotlight, Jan. 30, 2014

The economy is improving. New Jersey has among the country’s best policies aimed at decreasing poverty and increasing opportunities for low- and moderate-income residents. But still, 40.2 percent of New Jerseyans feel they are in a state of persistent financial insecurity, according to a new study by the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), Washington, D.C.

That’s because many New Jerseyans have little or no savings to cover emergencies or build toward a better life. They are considered “liquid asset poor” — and even one in six households that earn up to $120,000 have less than three months of savings.

Although the numbers seem bleak, they are better than last year’s 44.6 percent. And the state was ranked third in the country for policies aimed at solving the problem for low- and moderate-income families.

The study ranked each state according to policies aimed at healthcare, education, housing and homeownership, business and jobs, and financial assets and income. New Jersey scored first in the country for healthcare and education. It’s ranking for housing and homeownership was 19th, primarily due to the high foreclosure rate and policies to solve it. The state was ranked third for business and jobs policies, mostly due to an increase in the federal minimum wage. And the Garden State ranked ninth when it came to policies related to financial assets and income.

CounterPunch, Jan. 30, 2014

by Ramzy Baroud

In a recent radio interview with a National Public Radio affiliate in Juneau, Alaska, I was asked if I had advice for a 16-year-old Palestinian student, Haitham. He had just arrived in the US as part of a school exchange program, and, admirably began reaching out to his peers in his and other schools to teach them about Palestine, its people and its ongoing struggle for freedom and rights.

There was not enough time to convey much to Haitham, whose voice expressed the personality of a gentle, smart and driven young man. And since I have been asked that question on more than one occasion, mostly coming from young people in Palestine, here are a few thoughts that are an outcome of my own experiences, and nothing else.

Beat your ego to a pulp. “Ego” is Latin for “I”, but its implications are common to every language. If an activist doesn’t learn to control his ego, he is likely to suffer numerous consequences, and perhaps ultimately fail in his mission. An activist, especially one who represents causes deemed ‘controversial’, will find himself under repeated attacks and unwarranted accusations targeting his ‘self’ not his ideas. And while there are those who will try to thrash your confidence, there are also those who will hail your perceived success and heroism even. Both are dangerous to the ego, for they could upset the balance necessary to keep us focused and involved as members of a larger community, and moral in our behavior and conduct.

Define and internalize your message. It is easy to get pulled into all sorts of directions that may separate you from your original mission. To ensure that you will always find your way back, you must be clear on what you stand for and why. Thus it is essential that you define your cause, first and foremost to yourself before you present it to others. Internalize it as an enduring part of your character before you stand in front of a crowd, hold a microphone, or carry a banner. If you are not fully convinced of your message, you will not be able to influence others.

Be guided by universal values and human rights. Even if your message pertains to a local cause, find the universal aspect of your drive to bring about change, and embrace it. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” said Martin Luther King Jr. If you adhere to this notion alone, you know that you will remain true, not just to your cause, but to the underlying values that give it meaning. Universal human rights can always serve as a gauge by which you can assess matters within a larger moral framework.

Find a frame of reference – relate to your audience. The onus is not on your audience to relate to you as much as it is on you to relate to their frame of reference: their history, their political reality and other dynamics that operate within and control their society. Only then, can you tailor your words and expectations – but never the morality of your message – in ways that they may understand, relate to, and act upon.

Humanize –But don’t sanctify your subject. It doesn’t matter how worthy a cause is, if it is too distant or disconnected from people. It is essential that you allow your audience the chance to relate to your cause as that of people, with names and stories, beautiful, inspiring, but also disheartening and complex. But it is important that you don’t provide a sanctified, thus unrealistic narrative either, for your audience will disown you and question your credibility. Humanize your subject, but remain truthful in your presentation.

Be educated, strive for intellect and be wary of ideology. Education will give you access to otherwise inaccessible platforms. It will empower you and your message with the articulation you need to widen your circle of support. But you are also an intellectual. The right education could further develop your intellect. And when it is done with sincerity, both education and intellect will feed on one another. While there is no harm in adhering to an ideology that you may perceive to hold the answers to the dilemmas with which you contend, be wary of becoming an ideologue, a slave to stubborn dogmas. That will stifle your intellect and will make your education a mere platform to serve unworthy, elitist causes.

Keep an open mind. No matter how powerful your argument may seem, how high your education and how insurmountable your intellect is, remain humble and open-minded. If you close your mind, it will cease to grow. Your ideas will eventually become outdated, and your ability to imagine a world beyond your own will wither and die under the weight of your own sense of self-importance.

Have an action plan. It is not enough that you want to change the world. Sure, do that, but you must have a clear notion of what that actually means, and how you wish to bring it about. Such a roadmap can always help you reexamine your work and reassess your actions, and, if ever necessary, alter or entirely change your direction.

Don’t get swayed by success. The fight for justice is unending, as is the struggle against racism, and inequality. So ‘success’ in this context, by definition is relative. While you must acknowledge, even celebrate achievements along the way, let ‘success’ be a milestone towards another goal, and not an end in itself. This way you can always keep moving forward, with a vision that passes the immediate goal, on to a greater one, where the ‘rendezvous of victory’ is an idea, so coveted, yet unattainable.

Live a balanced life. Only by living life you contribute to it. Don’t estrange yourself from your surroundings. Learn from the mistakes others make, and from your own. Don’t be afraid or feel guilty if you try to find balance in your life. Enjoy a sustainable life, but without excess. The fight is long, at times arduous, but you are here, along with millions of others, for the long haul.

They say people who live for a higher cause are happier than those who don’t. May you always find your happiness in alleviating the pain of others by standing up for what is right and honorable.

Ramzy Baroud is editor of PalestineChronicle.com. He is the author of The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle and “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London).

Mother Jones, Jan. 30, 2014

By Erika Eichelberger

On Wednesday morning, Republicans won a years-long battle over whether to slash or spare food stamps when the House passed the farm bill, a $500 billion piece of legislation that funds nutrition and agriculture programs for the next five years.

The farm bill has been delayed for more than two years because of a fight over cuts to the food stamp program, which is called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Last June, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) forced a vote on a bill that would have cut $20 billion from SNAP. But conservatives said the cuts were not deep enough, Democrats said they were far too deep, and the bill failed, 195-234. That September, House Republicans drafted new legislation slashing $40 billion from the food stamp program. That bill passed the House with Republican votes only. After months of negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate, which wanted much lower cuts of around $4 billion, the House finally passed a farm bill 251-166 Wednesday that contains a "compromise" $9 billion in reductions to the food stamp program.

Both the Senate and President Barack Obama are expected to approve the legislation.

Here’s why the compromise level of cuts is a Republican win:

In addition to the $9 billion in food stamp cuts in this five-year farm bill, another $11 billion will be slashed over three years as stimulus funding for the program expires. The first $5 billion of that stimulus money expired in October; the rest will disappear by 2016. In the months since the first $5 billion in stimulus funding was cut, food pantries have been struggling to provide enough food for the hungry.

Poverty remains at record high levels, and three job applicants compete for every job opening.
And yet, despite the $5 billion in cuts that already happened and the guarantee of $6 billion more, Republicans succeeded in getting their Democratic peers to cut food stamps further. This is the first time in history that a Democratic Senate has even proposed cutting the program. Now the upper chamber is expected to pass cuts twice the level it approved last year.

"It’s a net loss" for Democrats," Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, tells Mother Jones. "It’s absolutely a GOP win," agrees a House Democratic aide.

How did the GOP do it? In November, Dems said that Boehner was interfering with House-Senate negotiations on the farm bill, rejecting proposed legislation that contained shallower food stamps cuts. (Boehner’s office denies this.)
But Dems deserve much of the blame, the Dem aide says. Last year, House liberals were scheming to get progressives to vote against any farm bill that contained SNAP cuts. The idea was that if enough progressives voted no along with the House conservatives who think the cuts are too low, Democrats could defeat the bill. In that case, food stamp funding would be preserved at current levels. A "$9 billion [cut] is too much… It hits in the gut," Rep. Gwen Moore (R-Wis.) told Mother Jones earlier this month.

When the final bill came up for a vote in the House, the Congressional Progressive Caucus advised its 76 members to vote against the bill. But not enough Dems voted to block the cuts. 103 Democrats voted against the farm bill, but 89 voted in favor. If 43 more Democrats had voted no, the farm bill would have failed. "Dems are…complicit in changing [the] law, when they could just [block the bill] and let that status quo continue," the Democratic aide says.
Democrats in the House and Senate agreed to cut nutrition aid for poor Americans because they "have shifted to the right on SNAP politically," the staffer adds. "

If Dems were as absolutist as the tea party, this bill would be dead on arrival and SNAP would continue as-is."

But the assault on the food stamp program "could have been much, much worse," argues Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. Stacy Dean, the vice president for food assistance policy at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), agrees. Democrats succeeded in stripping many draconian GOP provisions from the bill. Republicans wanted to impose new work requirements on food stamp recipients; allow states to require drug testing for food stamps beneficiaries; ban ex-felons from ever receiving nutrition aid; and award states financial incentives to kick people off the program. None of those measures were in the final legislation, Dean notes.

The cuts to the food stamp program come from closing a loophole that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed needed to be addressed. A household’s level of monthly food stamps benefits is determined by how much disposable income a family has after rent, utilities, and other expenses are deducted. Some states allow beneficiaries to deduct a standard utility charge from their income if they qualify for a federal heating aid program called the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), even if they only receive a few dollars per year in heating aid. The arrangement results in about 850,000 households getting a utility deduction that is much larger than their actual utility bill. Because the deduction makes these families’ disposable income appear to be lower than it actually is, they get more food stamp money each month. The farm bill that passed the House on Wednesday saves $9 billion by closing that loophole.
The savings from closing the heating aid loophole could have been returned to the food stamp program. Instead, Republicans succeeded in prodding Dems to accept $9 billion in new cuts on top of the $11 billion in expiring stimulus funds. That extra $9 billion in cuts means that close to a million households will see their benefits slashed by about $90 a month—enough to pay for a week’s worth of cheap groceries for a family of four.

Racism Review, Jan. 29, 2014
The President’s State of the Union speech last night focused on the theme of “opportunity” in the U.S. Obama also renewed his pledge to close the prison facility at Guantanamo, the prison-of-no-return that the U.S. maintains in Cuba.  However, he made no reference to the persistent racial inequality in the U.S., and the machine that drives much of that inequality.  If there is one institution which (re)produces racial inequality in the U.S. like a machine, it is the institution of mass incarceration.
Between 1970 and 2005, the prison population in the U.S. has risen by 700%.  Most of that increase has been due to the failed “war on drugs” and most of those who are locked up are there for non-violent, drug-related offenses.  
Even though whites use drugs at higher rates, it is black and brown people who are more likely to be locked up.

CounterPunch, Jan. 29, 2014

By Tanya Golash-Boza

In a recent interview, David Leonard argued that white people do not suffer from the structural violence that white supremacy creates. He contends: “As it relates to the criminal justice system, health, economic security, wealth, or education, white people are not hurt by racism.”

I have tremendous respect for David Leonard as a scholar and critic, and have learned a great deal from his writings. Moreover, I greatly appreciate most of what he has to say in this insightful interview, conducted by activist and writer, Suey Park. And, the arguments that racism primarily affects people of color and that whites benefit from structural racism are hard to disagree with.

However, I take issue with the claim that racism does no harm to white people. Racism is a scourge on our society, and white people are part of our society. Moreover, eradicating racism will require a multi-racial coalition. If white people are not hurt by racism, why would they fight against it? It is from this standpoint that I felt compelled to write this piece on racism and white America. Once we see the harm that racism causes all people in our society, it will be easier to form multi-racial coalitions to eliminate racism.

What is Racism and How Does It Affect Us?

Racism refers to both (1) the belief that races exist and some are better than others, and (2) the practice of subordinating races believed to be inferior. For example, an employer can think African Americans are less competent than whites – this belief constitutes racial prejudice. When that employer decides to hire a white person instead of an equally qualified black person, that decision may be considered racial discrimination.

Both racial prejudice and discrimination are widespread.

In one study, sociologist Joe Feagin found that three-quarters of whites agreed with prejudicial statements about blacks, such as “blacks have less native intelligence” than whites. In 1995, researchers conducted a study in which they asked participants to close their eyes for a second and imagine a drug user. Fully 95 percent of respondents reported imagining a black drug user. The reality is that African Americans account for only 15 percent of drug users in the United States and are just as likely as whites to use drugs. However, Americans have an unconscious bias toward blacks and imagine them to be more likely to use drugs. These and other studies show the widespread nature of racial prejudice. They also show that many white Americans believe racist lies: blacks are not inherently less intelligent than whites nor are they more likely to use drugs. One way racism affects white people negatively is that racism distorts whites’ worldviews. When you buy into racism, you are buying into and propagating a set of harmful lies.

Researchers have also consistently found that racial discrimination is pervasive. One study of Department of Defense employees revealed that nearly half of the black respondents had heard racist jokes in the previous year. Another survey revealed that 80% of black respondents had encountered racial hostility in public places. An African American secretary interviewed by sociologists Joe Feagin and Karyn McKinney details the consequences of constant discrimination: “I had to see several doctors because of the discrimination, and I went through a lot of stress. And, then, my blood pressure … went on the rise.” This woman, like many other African Americans they interviewed, displayed high levels of stress due to mistreatment in the workplace and consequently had health issues. A recent study from the University of Maryland even shows that black men are likely to die earlier than whites because racism speeds up cellular aging.

It is undeniable that racial prejudice and discrimination are widespread and that these beliefs and practices negatively affect non-whites. But, do they negatively affect white people?

Racism Holds Us Back

In some cases, it is clear that racially discriminatory practices benefit white people. When an African-American is passed over for a job for their perceived incompetence, a white person can directly benefit from that racial discrimination by getting hired. When teachers presume that Latino students are not interested in attending college, white students in that classroom may benefit from extra mentoring and encouragement. So, yes, I agree that racism is beneficial to whites insofar as it gives whites unearned benefits and privileges – especially in those situations where we are talking about finite resources – one job or a teacher’s attention.

However, racism has also created a situation where highly qualified people of color are passed over for important opportunities. In this schema, mediocre white people are teaching our children, leading community businesses, and fixing our telephones. Sure, this benefits the mediocre white people who get the jobs, but, when we prevent talented people of color from succeeding, we are holding back our society as a whole. When half of black children in the United States grow up in poverty, we have to wonder how many brilliant minds are unable to reach their full potential.

In 1869, philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that “the legal subordination of one sex to the other — is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.” In 1949, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote that the “slavery of half of humanity” was preventing humanity from reaching its full potential. One could apply Mills and de Beauvoir’s reflections on sexism to racism: by subordinating nearly half of the children in the United States, we are holding back the whole country. Racism is especially detrimental to people of color, but has negative repercussions for everyone insofar as it is a hindrance to human development.

The Structural Advantages of Whiteness

Individual discriminatory actions can be distinguished from structural racism – policies, laws, and institutions that reproduce racial inequalities. On the whole, it seems quite obvious that whites benefit from structural racism: it creates racial inequality, which puts whites at the top in terms of wealth. In 2009, African Americans and Latinos had less than 8 percent of the wealth of whites. The figures for Native Americans are similar: in 2000, the average Native American born between 1957 and 1965 had only $5,700 in wealth, compared with his or her white counterpart, who had amassed $65,500 in wealth. And, in 2009, Asian families had about half the wealth of white families. In 2009, one-third of black and Latino households had zero or negative wealth. To the extent that wealth is a zero-sum game (which is not entirely true), whites benefit directly from the structural racism that leads to wealth inequality.

Through racist policies and practices, white people are able to concentrate wealth into their own hands. In this way, racism benefits those white people with access to this wealth.

However, most people in the United States do not have access to wealth: 1% of Americans own nearly half of the wealth in this country. And, the top 20 percent of the population controls over 80 percent of the wealth. Globally, the figures are even more alarming: the 85 wealthiest people in the world control the same amount as wealth as half of the global population.

The rest of us are fighting over the crumbs.

The People United?

One might expect high levels of inequality in the United States to lead to massive unrest. Yet they have not, in large part due to racism. This works in two ways. 1) Racism divides workers from one another, preventing multi-racial coalitions that might lead to workers working together for better wages and benefits. 2) The United States government has created a complex system of social control designed to prevent unrest. This system is the punitive arm of the state: mass incarceration.

Mass incarceration is a system rife with structural racism – from laws designed to punish blacks more severely to racial profiling to discriminate sentencing and discriminatory judges. This structural racism creates a situation where whites are less likely to be incarcerated than blacks and Latinos. However, the country as a whole does not benefit from the fact that misguided racist ideologies provide the justification for the United States government to waste billions of dollars every year putting people behind bars.

The negative effects of incarceration are not limited to people behind bars – incarceration also affects their families and communities as well as every taxpayer whose taxes pay for mass incarceration. Michelle Alexander, for example, recently argued that we have spent a trillion dollars waging the War on Drugs, and could use that money to improve our schools and libraries. Neill Franklin made a similar argument here. Instead of spending billions of dollars each year putting black men in prison, we could be using that money to better our communities.

The United States has more people in prison than any other country and incarcerates people at a higher rate than at any other time in history. Our crime rate, however, is neither higher than in other countries nor greater than it has been historically. Why, then, are so many Americans behind bars? One major reason that we have large numbers of people in prison is that many people in this country operate under the misguided belief that mass incarceration reduces crime. Furthermore, this misbelief is grounded in racialized fears, particularly of black and Latino men – who are disproportionately affected by mass incarceration.

Between 1970 and 2000, incarceration rates in the United States increased five-fold, due in large part to legislation designed to fight drugs. (The War on Drugs has a much longer racist history, by the way.) Drug offenders represent “the most substantial source of growth in incarceration in recent decades, rising from 40,000 persons in prison and jail in 1980 to 450,000 today.” The irony is that the incarceration of drug offenders is a highly ineffective way to reduce the amount of illegal drugs sold in the United States. When street-level drug sellers are incarcerated, they are quickly replaced by other sellers, since what drives the drug market is demand for drugs. Incarcerating large numbers of drug offenders has not ameliorated the drug problem in the United States. (For an example of drug policy that actually works, we can look to Portugal, which saw a massive reduction in drug use once it was decriminalized.)

Zealous enforcement of drug laws disproportionately affects people of color, even though whites are actually more likely to use and sell drugs. In the United States, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at thirteen times the rate of white men, yet five times as many whites as blacks use illegal drugs.

Do white people benefit from black people being sent to jail? The answer to this question would only be “yes” if you think that there are a finite number of jail beds. This, however, is not the case. Instead, the federal and state governments went on a building frenzy in the 1980s and 1990s to create jail beds to lock up drug offenders. This rush to build jails was based on the misguided and racist belief that drug offenders are dangerous.

One of these drug offenders was African-American Cornell Hood II. In February 2011, he was convicted of attempting to distribute marijuana and sentenced to life in prison. Does the average white person benefit from the lifetime incarceration of Cornell Hood? Or, are we all worse off because of this unnecessary government expenditure? The recent legalization of marijuana in Colorado makes Hood’s life sentence all the more outrageous.

Mass incarceration has been condoned by American voters in large part because of entrenched racism. And, of course, white people are not fully protected from the War on Drugs. Even though white people are less likely to be arrested, charged, and sentenced to prison, when they are sentenced, they face the same mandatory minimum sentences that everyone else does. And, therefore, white people can also end up serving life sentences for marijuana distribution.

Racism is an ideology that makes us believe that some people are less worthy than others. This, in turn, causes us to condone our local, state, and federal governments spending money to protect us from these other, less desirable people. This is a massive waste of resources and is harmful to everyone – including white people.

Part of fighting against racism involves understanding that racism affects each group differently. Racist drug policies mostly harm African Americans; and racist immigration policies mostly harm Latinos. However, these racist policies ultimately affect everyone in society because the laws are – at least on paper – color-blind.

It is in the best interest of white people to join forces with people of color and fight for a society free of racism – a society that would be ultimately better for everyone. When white people fight against racism, we are fighting to end a system that provides structural advantages to whites, yet does so at the expense of our society and our humanity.

Tanya Golash-Boza is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of: Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach, Yo Soy Negro Blackness in Peru, Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions and Deportations in Post-9/11 America, and Due Process Denied: Detentions and Deportations in the United States. She blogs at:http://stopdeportationsnow.blogspot.com

Tweets: (twitter handle: @tanyaboza )

NY Times, Jan. 28, 2014

By Rafael Moure-Eraso

WASHINGTON — The United States is facing an industrial chemical safety crisis. The horrifying chemical spill that recently contaminated the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people in West Virginia is the latest in a relentless series of disasters and near-misses across the country.

It is clear to me, as chairman of the independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents, that urgent steps are required to significantly improve the safety of the nation’s chemical industry — an industry vital to our economy, yet potentially dangerous to those who live near the thousands of facilities that process or store hazardous chemicals.

Those facilities include ones like the Chevron refinery in Richmond, Calif., where aging, corroding pipes resulted in a huge fire in August 2012, and the fertilizer plant in West, Tex., where stores of ammonium nitrate exploded last year and laid waste to a large part of the town, killing more than a dozen people.

Sifting through chemical-plant rubble from catastrophic accidents year after year, our board has long called on regulators to require — and for industry to adopt — what is known as inherently safer technology. By this, we mean using safer designs, equipment and chemicals, minimizing the amounts of hazardous chemicals stored and used, and modifying and simplifying processes to make them as safe as practicable.

While there is now, at last, a strong current within industry to adopt this safer technology as a best practice, many still oppose any actual regulatory requirements, arguing they are too costly and prescriptive. We can’t wait for corporations to volunteer, because the accidents continue, often with devastating consequences.

What we need is comprehensive regulatory reform. But achieving safety reforms is complicated and time-consuming. In the interim, the Environmental Protection Agency should step in and use its power under the Clean Air Act’s general duty clause to compel chemical facilities to take steps to make their operations inherently safer. The law assigns owners and operators of these facilities a general duty to identify hazards, design and maintain safe facilities and minimize the consequences of leaks. The E.P.A. should follow up by adopting specific regulations to meet those goals.

Twelve years ago, the E.P.A.’s administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, proposed regulations that would have encouraged producers and users of high-risk chemicals to find safer alternatives or processes.

But her proposal stalled in the face of strong opposition from American companies, which are already required to use safer technologies and other risk reduction methods at their European operations. (Insurance data indicate that losses from refinery accidents, for instance, are at least three times lower in Europe than in the United States.) In 2012, Ms. Whitman urged the agency to use the Clean Air Act to require safer technology “before a tragedy of historic proportions occurs.”

The E.P.A. said recently that it was considering such an approach. The agency’s own National Environmental Justice Advisory Council has urged it to issue new rules to reduce the “danger and imminent threat” posed by chemical plants, manufacturing and transport. Across the nation, an estimated 13,000 facilities store or process chemicals in amounts hazardous enough to endanger the public, according to the E.P.A.

But that estimate understates the dimensions of the problem. For example, the West Virginia facility implicated in the recent spill, which stored chemicals used in the coal industry, would not fall under criteria used by the agency to come up with its estimate.

Consider how a requirement forcing safer practices and technologies might have prevented the three accidents I’ve mentioned.

The Chevron refinery would have been required to replace aging, corroded pipes with safer corrosion-resistant material that almost certainly would have prevented the rupture that endangered 19 workers caught in the initial vapor cloud, not to mention the smoke plume that sent 15,000 Bay Area residents to hospitals. The refinery industry accident rate overall is unacceptably high.

The agricultural chemical company in West, Tex., would have used safer storage practices and safer fertilizer blends, and kept far less ammonium nitrate on site. The lives of more than a dozen firefighters and residents might have been spared, and the widespread damage to homes, schools, a nursing home and other structures would not have occurred.

And the decades-old chemical storage tank in West Virginia that leaked as much as 10,000 gallons of chemicals used in coal processing into the nearby Elk River, contaminating the water supply of some 300,000 Charleston-area residents, would have been moved and replaced by modern, anti-leak storage tanks and safer containment.

After the West, Tex., explosion, President Obama issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to review safety rules at chemical facilities. I am strongly encouraged by the White House leadership on this issue. The E.P.A. is working with other agencies to comply. But in the meantime, the agency has the authority to act now, on its own, to require inherently safer design, equipment and processes that would go a long way toward preventing more catastrophes.

Rafael Moure-Eraso is the chairman of the United States Chemical Safety Board.

Ecowatch, Jan. 28, 2014

Climate impacts are likely to lead to drastic increases in the prices of common food-stuffs over the next few decades, according to a series of new studies from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

The studies strongly suggest that the agricultural industry won’t be able to adapt fast enough to the shifting climatic patterns to prevent a decrease in production — hence rising prices.

The research also addresses the concerns that some have that expanding biofuel production could also lead to higher food prices. Such an expansion could indeed lead to increases in food prices according to the new research, increases of up to five percent by the year 2050. While such a rise is quite significant, it is absolutely dwarfed by the rise that is now expected to be caused by climate change. The new research predicts increases in food prices as high as 25 percent by the year 2050 as a result of climate impacts. That means up to 25 percent higher without even including important secondary effects, such as increased war/conflict, increasing levels of disease/plant diseases, increasing populations of common pests, etc.

In total, three separate studies were completed — one assessing the impact of climate change on demand for cropland, one assessing the impact on crop yields and one assessing the impact of second-generation biofuels on the transport sector.

The lead researcher on the cropland study, Christoph Schmitz, notes that climate impacts are “likely to lead to a drastic increase in demand for cropland.” Continuing: “We find most models projecting an increase in cropland by 2050 that is more than 50 percent higher in scenarios with unabated climate change than in those assuming a constant climate,” adding that the “increase meant the world would require 320 million hectares instead of about 200 million hectares by 2050 — a difference equal to an area roughly three times the size of Germany.”

Business Green provides more:

He warned that with most of the demand for new cropland likely to come in South America and Sub-Saharan Africa, there was a real risk that climate impacts would have a knock-on effect of pushing up greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the reasons why demand for cropland is likely to increase was explored in a separate study, which concluded that while climate change may lead to higher agricultural yields in some regions, others will be hit by steep declines in food production.

“Potential climate change impacts on crop yields are strong but vary widely across regions and crops,” stated lead-author Christoph Müller. Adding that “for rice, wheat, maize, soybeans and peanuts, the study finds a climate-induced decrease in yields of between 10 percent and 38 percent globally by 2050 in a business-as-usual scenario of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, compared with current conditions.”

Müller argues that in order to deal with these changes that it will be necessary to create “a more flexible global agricultural trading system would be needed” — something that is very unlikely to happen. A far more likely response to vastly diminished agricultural productivity in many parts of the world will be mass-migration and/or war.

The new studies were just published in the journal Agricultural Economics.

Alternet, Jan. 28, 2014

by Amy Goodman, Bill Moyers, Democracy Now

Moyers, "We should know who’s buying our government."

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Bill Moyers, the legendary broadcaster and host of Moyers & Company. Earlier this month, his program, Moyers & Company, aired the documentary report, State of Conflict: North Carolina. He is the former host of Bill Moyers Journal. He has won more than 30 Emmy Awards. He’s also a founding organizer of the Peace Corps, press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson, publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News. His most recent book is Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, as I hope it continues right here. Quite a report, and it isn’t even the whole thing. You go on in this report on the state of conflict in North Carolina to talk about the whole issue of voting rights. [Watch the documentary here, with full transcript published on AlterNet earlier this month].

NJ Spotlight, Jan. 28, 2014