NY Times, Jan. 20, 2014

By Patrick McGeehan

HOBOKEN, N.J. — The fenced-off piles of rubble at the northern end of this city bear no resemblance to the limestone towers of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. But the connection between the two plots on opposite sides of the Hudson River is at the core of Gov. Chris Christie’s latest political headache.

Hoboken’s mayor, Dawn Zimmer, has repeatedly and very publicly alleged that members of Mr. Christie’s cabinet applied pressure to get her to support a large-scale commercial development on the derelict lots in her city. Those lots are owned by the Rockefeller Group, which built Rockefeller Center and is represented by the law firm of a close associate of Mr. Christie.

Ms. Zimmer, a Democrat, said that Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno told her that federal money for rebuilding and fortifying Hoboken against another storm like Hurricane Sandy would hinge on her backing of the project. The mayor said Ms. Guadagno, a Republican, told her that Mr. Christie had sent her to deliver that message personally because the project was so important to him.

Those allegations came just days after Mr. Christie, whose second inauguration is Tuesday, apologized for the intentional disruption of traffic in nearby Fort Lee in a retribution scheme engineered by some of his associates. But the Christie administration is not conceding Ms. Zimmer’s charges. On Monday, Ms. Guadagno disputed Ms. Zimmer’s account of their meeting at a Shop-Rite supermarket in May.

“Mayor Zimmer’s version of our conversation in May of 2013 is not only false, but is illogical and does not withstand scrutiny when all of the facts are examined,” Ms. Guadagno said at an event to commemorate Martin Luther King’s Birthday. “Any suggestion that Sandy funds were tied to the approval of any project in New Jersey is completely false.”

Another state official, Marc Ferzan, weighed in on Monday to counter the idea that Hoboken had been shortchanged on its share of hurricane aid. Mr. Ferzan, executive director of the governor’s Office of Recovery and Rebuilding, said, “We’ve tried to have an objective process, we have tried to design programs with application criteria that are objective, that prioritize the communities most in need, with the least financial resources.”

Ms. Zimmer has complained that Hoboken received just two grants worth $342,000 out of $290 million the state had to pass along to municipalities for mitigating flooding and other storm damage. She pointed out that 80 percent of Hoboken, a densely packed city that encompasses only about a square mile, was underwater after the storm.

In an interview on Monday afternoon, Ms. Zimmer did not back down from her allegations, which she laid out in a meeting with federal prosecutors on Sunday. The United States attorney in Newark, Paul J. Fishman, had already begun an investigation into the Fort Lee traffic matter.

Speaking of Ms. Guadagno, Ms. Zimmer said, “I’m not surprised that she denied it.”

Ms. Zimmer said the Rockefeller Group wanted to build over two million square feet of office and commercial space on four acres it owns in the part of Hoboken closest to the Lincoln Tunnel. She said she had never opposed that proposal, but had insisted that the city must first develop an overall plan for redevelopment of the entire north end.

But Ms. Guadagno wanted her to expedite the Rockefeller Group’s plan, Ms. Zimmer said. She has produced several emails from the Wolff & Samson law firm asking for meetings with her about the project, all of which she has turned down.

Wolff & Samson is well connected in Trenton. Mr. Christie appointed David Samson, a founding partner of the firm, to be chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Lori Grifa, another partner in the firm who has been lobbying the Hoboken government on behalf of the Rockefeller Group, was Mr. Christie’s commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs for two years.

The Rockefeller Group’s presence started raising a lot of eyebrows in Hoboken last spring when the city’s planning board considered a study of the north end. The study had been paid for with $75,000 from the Port Authority, whose deputy executive director at the time was a Christie appointee, Bill Baroni. (Mr. Baroni resigned over his involvement in the scheme to tie up traffic in Fort Lee, apparently as punishment of the borough’s mayor for failing to endorse Mr. Christie for re-election last fall.)

In a draft report, the planning firm that conducted the study recommended that just three blocks out of 19 in the industrial north end of Hoboken should be designated for redevelopment. That designation would make those properties eligible for significant tax abatements.

With the exception of two gas stations, all of the lots in those three blocks belonged to the Rockefeller Group. Some residents thought it looked as if the company was getting “special treatment,” said Ron Hine, the executive director of Fund for a Better Waterfront, which has opposed some proposals for tall buildings in Hoboken.

Michael Sullivan, a principal in the architectural firm based in Trenton that conducted the study, Clarke Caton Hintz, said it was not written to favor the Rockefeller Group. “The process we used in our report and our study is no different than we used in any other redevelopment study,” he said on Monday.

A member of the Hoboken City Council who currently has a seat on the city’s planning board, Ravi S. Bhalla, said that he believed the mayor’s allegations and that residents were angered by the idea that the city’s receipt of the aid it deserved “might have been contingent upon advancing a private interest.”

Mr. Bhalla said, “The emotions are still raw in Hoboken over the damage caused by Sandy.” He added, “What I see is that those raw emotions are manifesting themselves in a lot of residents’ anger.”

Alan Feuer contributed reporting from New York, and Kate Zernike from New Jersey.

The Atlantic, Jan. 20, 2014

By Jordan Weissmann

When Americans stop to commemorate Dr. Matin Luther King, Jr. each year, we tend to do a great disservice to the man’s legacy by glossing over his final act as an anti-poverty crusader. In the weeks leading to his assassination, King had been hard at work organizing a new march on Washington known as the "Poor People’s Campaign." The goal was to erect a tent city on the National Mall that, as Mark Engler described it for The Nation in 2010, would "dramatize the reality of joblessness and deprivation by bringing those excluded from the economy to the doorstep of the nation’s leaders." The great civil rights leader was killed before he could see the effort through.

So what, exactly, was the reverend’s economic dream? In short, King wanted the government to eradicate poverty by providing every American a guaranteed, middle-class income—an idea that, while light-years beyond the realm of mainstream political conversation today, had actually come into vogue by the late 1960s.

To be crystal clear, a guaranteed income — or a universal basic income, as the concept is sometimes called today — is not the same as a higher minimum wage. Rather, the idea is to make sure each household has a certain concrete sum of money to spend each year. One modern version of the policy would give every adult a tax credit that would essentially become a cash payment for families that don’t pay much tax. Conservative thinker Charles Murray has advocated replacing the whole welfare state by handing every grown American a full $10,000.

King had an even more expansive vision. He laid out the case for the guaranteed income in his final book, 1967’s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Washington’s previous efforts to fight poverty, he concluded, had been "piecemeal and pygmy." The government believed it could lift up the poor by attacking the root causes of their impoverishment one by one — by providing better housing, better education, and better support for families. But these efforts had been too small and too disorganized. Moreover, he wrote, "the programs of the past all have another common failing — they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else."

It was time, he believed, for a more straightforward approach: the government needed to make sure every American had a reasonable income.

In part, King’s thinking seemed to stem from a sense that no amount of economic growth could provide jobs for all or eliminate poverty. As he put it:

We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty.

[…]

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.

In other words, King believed that the government was obligated to provide both work and income for those inevitably left behind by capitalism’s economic engine. Looking back from today’s vantage point, one can even imagine that King might have supported attaching a work requirement to such a program, so long as everyone could be guaranteed a job.

King’s goal wasn’t merely to alleviate poverty. Rather, it was to raise each American into the middle class. He argued that the guaranteed income should be "pegged to the median of society," and rise automatically along with the U.S. standard of living. "To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions," he wrote. Was such a plan feasible? Yes, he argued, noting an estimate by John Kenneth Galbraith that the government could create a generous guaranteed income with $20 billion a year. As the economist put it, that was "not much more than we will spend the next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious liberty as these are defined by ‘experts’ in Vietnam."

As practical economics today, ensuring every single American a middle-class life through government redistribution and work programs seems a bit fanciful. The closest such an idea ever really came to fruition, meanwhile, was President Nixon’s proposed Family Assistance Plan, which would have ended welfare and instead guaranteed families of four $1,600 a year, at a time when the median household income was about $7,400.

But as a statement of values — that it is not merely enough to lay out the tools of self-improvement in front of the poor, that such a rich society should provide every citizen some reasonable standard of living — King’s notion remains powerful. So with that in mind, I’ll leave you with man’s own words.

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

This post is based on a version we originally posted on August 28, 2013.

====

Jordan Weissmann is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic.

Truthout, Jan. 20, 2014

By Peter Dreier, Truthout

The official US beatification of Martin Luther King has come at the heavy price of silence about his radical espousal of economic justice and anticolonialism.

It is easy to forget that in his day, in his own country, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was considered a dangerous troublemaker. Even President John Kennedy worried that King was being influenced by Communists. King was harassed by the FBI and vilified in the media. The establishment’s campaign to denigrate King worked. In August 1966 – as King was bringing his civil rights campaign to Northern cities to address poverty, slums, housing segregation and bank lending discrimination – the Gallup Poll found that 63 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of King, compared with 33 percent who viewed him favorably.

Today Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is viewed as something of an American saint. The most recent Gallup Poll discovered that 94 percent of Americans viewed him in a positive light. His birthday is a national holiday. His name adorns schools and street signs. In 1964, at age 35, he was the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Americans from across the political spectrum invoke King’s name to justify their beliefs and actions.

In fact, King was a radical. He believed that America needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political power." He challenged America’s class system and its racial caste system. He was a strong ally of the nation’s labor union movement. He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers’ strike. He opposed US militarism and imperialism, especially the country’s misadventure in Vietnam.

In his critique of American society and his strategy for changing it, King pushed the country toward more democracy and social justice.

If he were alive today, he would certainly be standing with Walmart employees and other workers fighting for a living wage and the right to unionize. He would be in the forefront of the battle for strong gun controls and to thwart the influence of the National Rifle Association. He would protest the abuses of Wall Street banks, standing side-by-side with homeowners facing foreclosure and crusading for tougher regulations against lending rip-offs. He would be calling for dramatic cuts in the military budget to reinvest public dollars in jobs, education and health care. He would surely be marching with immigrants and their allies in support of comprehensive immigration reform. He would be joining hands with activists seeking to reduce racial profiling by police and ending the mass incarceration of young people. Like most Americans in his day, King was homophobic, even though one of his closest advisors, Bayard Rustin, was gay. But today, King would undoubtedly stand with advocates of LGBT rights and same-sex marriage, just as he challenged state laws banning interracial marriage.

Indeed, King’s views evolved over time. He entered the public stage with some hesitation, reluctantly becoming the spokesperson for the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, at the age of 26. King began his activism in Montgomery as a crusader against racial segregation, but the struggle for civil rights radicalized him into a fighter for broader economic and social justice and peace. Still, in reviewing King’s life, we can see that the seeds of his later radicalism were planted early.

King was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, the son of a prominent black minister. Despite growing up in a solidly middle-class family, King saw the widespread human suffering caused by the Depression, particularly in the black community. In 1950, while in graduate school, he wrote an essay describing the "anticapitalistic feelings" he experienced as a youngster as a result of seeing unemployed people standing in breadlines.

During King’s first year at Morehouse College, civil rights and labor activist A. Philip Randolph spoke on campus. Randolph predicted that the near future would witness a global struggle that would end white supremacy and capitalism. He urged the students to link up with "the people in the shacks and the hovels," who, although "poor in property," were "rich in spirit."

After graduating from Morehouse in 1948, King studied theology at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania (where he read both Mohandas Gandhi and Karl Marx), planning to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the ministry. In 1955, he earned his doctorate from Boston University, where he studied the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, the influential liberal theologian. While in Boston, he told his girlfriend (and future wife), Coretta Scott, that "a society based on making all the money you can and ignoring people’s needs is wrong."

When King moved to Montgomery to take his first pulpit at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he was full of ideas but had no practical experience in politics or activism. But history sneaked up on him. On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and veteran activist with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), decided to resist the city’s segregation law by refusing to move to the back of the bus on her way home from work. She was arrested. Two other long-term activists – E. D. Nixon (leader of the NAACP and of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) and Jo Ann Robinson (a professor at the all-black Alabama State College and a leader of Montgomery’s Women’s Political Council) – determined that Parks’ arrest was a ripe opportunity for a one-day boycott of the much-despised segregated bus system. Nixon and Robinson asked black ministers to use their Sunday sermons to spread the word. Some refused, but many others, including King, agreed.

The boycott was very effective. Most black residents stayed off the buses. Within days, the boycott leaders formed a new group, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). At Nixon’s urging, they elected a hesitant King as president, in large part because he was new in town and not embroiled in the competition for congregants and visibility among black ministers. He was also well educated and already a brilliant orator, and thus would be a good public face for the protest movement. The ministers differed over whether to call off the boycott after one day but agreed to put the question up to a vote at a mass meeting.

That night, 7,000 blacks crowded into (and stood outside) the Holt Street Baptist Church. Inspired by King’s words – "There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression" – they voted unanimously to continue the boycott. It lasted for 381 days and resulted in the desegregation of the city’s buses. During that time, King honed his leadership skills, aided by advice from two veteran pacifist organizers, Bayard Rustin and Rev. Glenn Smiley, who had been sent to Montgomery by the pacifist group, Fellowship of Reconciliation. During the boycott, King was arrested, his home was bombed, and he was subjected to personal abuse. But – with the assistance of the new medium of television – he emerged as a national figure.

In 1957, King launched the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to help spread the civil rights crusade to other cities. He helped lead local campaigns in different cities, including Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, where thousands marched to demand an end to segregation in defiance of court injunctions forbidding any protests. While participating in these protests, King also sought to keep the fractious civil rights movement together, despite the rivalries among the NAACP, the Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and SCLC. Between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles, spoke more than 2,500 times, and was arrested at least 20 times, always preaching the gospel of nonviolence. King attended workshops at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which connected him to a network of radicals, pacifists and union activists from around the country whose ideas helped widen his political horizons.

It is often forgotten that the August 1963 protest rally at the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King was proud of the civil rights movement’s success in winning the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year. But he realized that neither law did much to provide better jobs or housing for the masses of black poor in either the urban cities or the rural South. "What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter," he asked, "if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?"

King had hoped that the bus boycott, sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience would stir white southern moderates, led by his fellow clergy, to see the immorality of segregation and racism. His famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," written in 1963, outlines King’s strategy of using nonviolent civil disobedience to force a response from the southern white establishment and to generate sympathy and support among white liberals and moderates. "The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation," he wrote, and added, "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

King eventually realized that many white Americans had at least a psychological stake in perpetuating racism. He began to recognize that racial segregation was devised not only to oppress African Americans but also to keep working-class whites from challenging their own oppression by letting them feel superior to blacks. "The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow," King said from the Capitol steps in Montgomery, following the 1965 march from Selma. "And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man."

When King launched a civil rights campaign in Chicago in 1965, he was shocked by the hatred and violence expressed by working-class whites as he and his followers marched through the streets of segregated neighborhoods in Chicago and its suburbs. He saw that the problem in Chicago’s ghetto was not legal segregation but "economic exploitation" – slum housing, overpriced food and low-wage jobs – "because someone profits from its existence."

These experiences led King to develop a more radical outlook. King supported President Lyndon B. Johnson’s declaration of the War on Poverty in 1964, but, like his friend and ally Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers, King thought that it did not go nearly far enough. As early as October 1964, he called for a "gigantic Marshall Plan" for the poor – black and white. Two months later, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, he observed that the United States could learn much from Scandinavian "democratic socialism." He began talking openly about the need to confront "class issues," which he described as "the gulf between the haves and the have-nots."

In 1966 King confided to his staff:

You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.

Given this view, King was dismayed when Malcolm X, SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael, and others began advocating "black power," which he warned would alienate white allies and undermine a genuine interracial movement for economic justice.

King became increasingly committed to building bridges between the civil rights and labor movements. Invited to address the AFL-CIO’s annual convention in 1961, King observed,

The labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who today attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.

In a 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, King proclaimed, "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children." Speaking to a meeting of Teamsters union shop stewards in 1967, King said, "Negroes are not the only poor in the nation. There are nearly twice as many white poor as Negro, and therefore the struggle against poverty is not involved solely with color or racial discrimination but with elementary economic justice."

King’s growing critique of capitalism coincided with his views about American imperialism. By 1965 he had turned against the Vietnam War, viewing it as an economic as well as a moral tragedy. But he was initially reluctant to speak out against the war. He understood that his fragile working alliance with LBJ would be undone if he challenged the president’s leadership on the war. Although some of his close advisers tried to discourage him, he nevertheless made the break in April 1967, in a bold and prophetic speech at the Riverside Church in New York City, entitled "Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence." King called America the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and linked the struggle for social justice with the struggle against militarism. King argued that Vietnam was stealing precious resources from domestic programs and that the Vietnam War was "an enemy of the poor." In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), King wrote, "The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America."

In early 1968, King told journalist David Halberstam, "For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values."

King kept trying to build a broad movement for economic justice that went beyond civil rights. In January, 1968, he announced plans for a Poor People’s Campaign, a series of protests to be led by an interracial coalition of poor people and their allies among the middle-class liberals, unions, religious organizations and other progressive groups, to pressure the White House and Congress to expand the War on Poverty. At King’s request, socialist activist Michael Harrington (author of The Other America, which helped inspire Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to declare a war on poverty) drafted a Poor People’s Manifesto that outlined the campaign’s goals. In April, King was in Memphis, Tennessee, to help lend support to striking African American garbage workers and to gain recognition for their union. There, he was assassinated, at age 39, on April 4, a few months before the first protest action of the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, DC.

President Johnson utilized this national tragedy to urge Congress to quickly enact the Fair Housing Act, legislation to ban racial discrimination in housing, which King had strongly supported for two years. He signed the bill a week after King’s assassination.

The campaign for a federal holiday in King’s honor, spearheaded by Detroit Congressman John Conyers, began soon after his murder, but it did not come up for a vote in Congress until 1979, when it fell five votes short of the number needed for passage. In 1981, with the help of singer Stevie Wonder and other celebrities, supporters collected six million signatures on a petition to Congress on behalf of a King holiday. Congress finally passed legislation enacting the holiday in 1983, 15 years after King’s death. But even then, 90 members of the House (including then-Congressmen John McCain of Arizona and Richard Shelby of Alabama, both now in the Senate) voted against it. Senator Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican, led an unsuccessful effort – supported by 21 other senators, including current Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) – to block its passage in the Senate.

The holiday was first observed on January 20, 1986. In 1987, Arizona governor Evan Mecham rescinded King Day as his first act in office, setting off a national boycott of the state. Some states (including New Hampshire, which called it "Civil Rights Day" from 1991 to 1999) insisted on calling the holiday by other names. In 2000, South Carolina became the last state to make King Day a paid holiday for all state employees.

In his final speech in Memphis the night before he was killed, King told the crowd about a bomb threat on his plane from Atlanta that morning, saying he knew that his life was constantly in danger because of his political activism.

"I would like to live a long life," he said. "Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land."

We haven’t gotten there yet. But Dr. King is still with us in spirit. The best way to honor his memory is to continue the struggle for human dignity, workers’ rights, racial equality, peace and social justice.

This essay is adapted from the entry for Martin Luther King in Peter Dreier’s book, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame.

© 2013 Truthout

N.Y. Times, Jan. 20, 2014

The mayor of Hoboken, N.J., Dawn Zimmer, said that she met on Sunday afternoon with federal prosecutors who are investigating her allegation that Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno threatened to withhold federal funds that could have helped her city recover from Hurricane Sandy.
Ms. Zimmer said she met with lawyers from the United States attorney’s office in Newark and gave them diary entries and other documents that she said supported her allegations. In an interview after the meeting, Ms. Zimmer repeated her assertion that Ms. Guadagno told her in May that for the city to receive federal aid controlled by the state, she had to support a real estate project in Hoboken that was important to Gov. Chris Christie.

Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno has been accused of withholding federal aid to Hoboken. Lucas Jackson/Reuters

The United States attorney for New Jersey, Paul J. Fishman, had already begun a review of allegations that associates of Mr. Christie sought to punish the mayor of Fort Lee in September by ordering the closing of lanes of traffic leading from his borough to the George Washington Bridge. Rebekah Carmichael, a spokeswoman for Mr. Fishman, declined to comment on Ms. Zimmer’s assertions.
The explosive new allegations, which Ms. Zimmer first made on MSNBC on Saturday, spurred furious rebuttals from state officials on Sunday.
They argued that Hoboken, a small city on the Hudson River, had not been shortchanged on federal aid to help it recover from the widespread flooding it suffered after Hurricane Sandy struck. To buttress their point, they cited several types of funding that have flowed to Hoboken and emphasized that many other communities had received only a fraction of the amounts they sought.
If anything, they said, Hoboken has received special treatment. Just last week, some state and federal officials met to promote a flood-defense project that Hoboken wants the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to pay for. A public hearing about the strategy for promoting that project is scheduled for Thursday.
“Hoboken has in no way trailed similarly situated communities in the receipt of rebuilding funds,” the governor’s office said in a statement.
About $1.8 billion in federal money was allocated to New Jersey, including about $290 million for hazard mitigation. State officials could not point to any large sums that they had decided to grant to Hoboken from that $290 million. The only discretionary grants the city has received so far amounted to $342,000, a spokesman for Ms. Zimmer said.
One of those grants was for $142,000 from a program aimed at preventing power failures in future storms. But many towns received much bigger allocations from that program and some towns far from the coast, like Upper Saddle River, received as much as Hoboken did.
The complexity and protracted nature of the process for dividing up the federal funding make it difficult to prove or disprove Ms. Zimmer’s contention that Hoboken has been penalized. Further confusing the issue, state officials repeatedly pointed to aid that was beyond their control to cast doubt on her assertion.
Colin Reed, a spokesman for the governor, said Hoboken had received nearly $70 million in funding since the storm inundated the city in October 2012. But most of that money — $43 million — was the settlement of claims on flood insurance policies. Those decisions are made by adjusters hired by insurance companies, not by state officials.
An additional $8.5 million of that total came in the form of loans from the federal Small Business Administration. Ms. Zimmer’s spokesman, Juan Melli, said that the decisions about $10.6 million of the rest of that total were made by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But Ms. Zimmer continued on Sunday to contend that relief money her city deserved had been held hostage by state officials. She said Ms. Guadagno took her aside in a Hoboken parking lot in May and told her the aid was tied to her support of the development project, but that she would deny that she ever said so.
Ms. Zimmer said she came forward with the allegations eight months later because the scandal that erupted over the punitive traffic jams in nearby Fort Lee spurred her to talk.
“I probably should have come forward in May when this happened,” Ms. Zimmer said. But she said she feared Hoboken would not get its fair share of future aid for rebuilding and fortifying against storms. “This was a really hard thing to do,” she said. “My biggest concern is making sure that Hoboken gets the funding that we deserve.”
The project was proposed by the Rockefeller Group, a company represented by the law firm of one of Mr. Christie’s closest associates, David Samson. The company, which built Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, wanted to build an office tower that would have been taller than any existing building in Hoboken on a parcel in the northwest corner of the city that was marked for redevelopment. That area, which is home to a warehouse where Macy’s long kept the balloons for the Thanksgiving parade, is just about the last underdeveloped part of the mile-square city.
The planning board rejected the idea of slating the area for redevelopment, but later approved it for rehabilitation, which meant much smaller tax breaks.
The Rockefeller Group released a statement in response to Ms. Zimmer’s allegations: “We have no knowledge of any information pertaining to this allegation. If it turns out to be true, it would be deplorable.”
The lawyer at Mr. Samson’s firm, Wolff & Samson, who pressed Ms. Zimmer to meet with representatives of the Rockefeller Group was Lori Grifa. Before she sought those meetings, Ms. Grifa had left the firm to serve as the commissioner of the state Department of Community Affairs as an appointee of Mr. Christie.
Ms. Zimmer has said that Ms. Grifa and her successor as commissioner, Richard E. Constable, as well Ms. Guadagno, played roles in a campaign to get her to change her mind about the developer’s proposal. The law firm issued a statement that said, in part, that “the firm’s and Ms. Grifa’s conduct in the representation of our client was appropriate in all respects.”
The mayor said Ms. Guadagno told her that the project was important to Mr. Christie and she would have to approve it for Hoboken to get the storm relief money it sought.
State officials have said that Ms. Zimmer’s allegations are false. But Ms. Zimmer said that neither Ms. Guadagno nor Mr. Christie has explicitly said that they did not link storm aid to the Rockefeller Group proposal.