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.

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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

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.

NJ Spotlight, Jan. 20, 2014

By Sarah Gonzalez and Matt Katz

Hoboken Mayor Zimmer says Lt. Gov. Guadagno told her she would ‘deny’ having said anything

Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer has alleged that her city was shortchanged on the amount of Sandy recovery aid it received because she refused to go along with a redevelopment deal being pushed by the Christie administration.

According to Zimmer, she was approached by Lieutenant Mayor Kim Guadagno and Department of Community Affairs commissioner Richard Constable III, who told that she had to support the plan in order to receive Sandy aid.

Zimmer claims that Guadagno told her in no uncertain terms that the deal and Hoboken’s Sandy funding were connected, adding "I know it’s not right, these things should not be connected, but they are."

She says Guadagno added, "If you tell anyone, I will deny it."

Read the full story and listen to the audio report by Sarah Gonzalez and Matt Katz on WNYC, an NJ Spotlight partner.

Sarah Gonzalez is the northern New Jersey enterprise reporter for WNYC and NJPR.

Matt Katz is a reporter for New Jersey Public Radio covering state politics. NJ Spotlight, in partnership with NJPR, is running his in-depth stories.

NY Times, Jan. 18, 2014

By Greg Grandin

In 2009, shortly after Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the White House, the McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan organized a display of about 50 books that Mr. Obama had read as a young man. The titles were eclectic, with a good number by African-American authors, including Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.

As a candidate, Mr. Obama demonstrated a remarkable rhetorical ability to present himself as both inhabiting and escaping from the worlds created by these writers. He even modeled his much praised memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” on Ellison’s 1952 novel, “Invisible Man.” Yet where Ellison’s young, idealistic black protagonist remains anonymous — the book ends with him alone in his underground apartment — Mr. Obama won the White House, inaugurating what many at the time hoped was a new, “postracial” America.

That optimism turned out to be premature. Today, anti-Obama signs with racist language accompany Tea Party rallies; a Confederate flag is unfurled in front of the White House to protest the government shutdown.

Looking back, there was one book in the McNally Jackson display, overlooked at the time, that could have helped us anticipate all this. That book was “Benito Cereno,” a largely forgotten masterpiece by Herman Melville. In today’s charged political environment, the message of Melville’s story bears rehearing.

“Benito Cereno” tells the story of Amasa Delano, a New England sea captain who, in the South Pacific, spends all day on a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans who he thinks are slaves. They aren’t. Unbeknown to Delano, they had earlier risen up, slaughtered most of the crew and demanded that the captain, Benito Cereno, return them home to Senegal. After Delano boards the ship (to offer his assistance), the West Africans keep their rebellion a secret by acting as if they are still slaves. Their leader, a man named Babo, pretends to be Cereno’s loyal servant, while actually keeping a close eye on him.

Melville narrates the events from the perspective of the clueless Delano, who for most of the novella thinks Cereno is in charge. As the day progresses, Delano grows increasingly obsessed with Babo and the seeming affection with which the West African cares for the Spanish captain. The New Englander, liberal in his sentiments and opposed to slavery as a matter of course, fantasizes about being waited on by such a devoted and cheerful body servant.

Delano believes himself a free man, and he defines his freedom in opposition to the smiling, open-faced Babo, who he presumes has no interior life, no ideas or interests of his own. Delano sees what he wants to see. But when Delano ultimately discovers the truth — that Babo, in fact, is the one exercising masterly discipline over his inner thoughts, and that it is Delano who is enslaved to his illusions — he responds with savage violence.

Barack Obama may have avoided the fate of the protagonist of “Invisible Man,” but he hasn’t been able to escape the shadow of Babo. He is Babo, or at least he is to a significant part of the American population — including many of the white rank and file of the Republican Party and the Tea Party politicians they help elect.

“Benito Cereno” is based on a true historical incident, which I started researching around the time Mr. Obama announced his first bid for the presidency. Since then, I’ve been struck by the persistence of fears, which began even before his election, that Mr. Obama isn’t what he seems: that instead of being a faithful public servant he is carrying out a leftist plot hatched decades ago to destroy America; or if not that, then he is a secret Muslim intent on supplanting the Constitution with Islamic law; or a Kenyan-born anti-colonialist out to avenge his native Africa.

No other American president has had to face, before even taking office, an opposition convinced of not just his political but his existential illegitimacy. In order to succeed as a politician, Mr. Obama had to cultivate what many have described as an almost preternatural dominion over his inner self. He had to become a “blank screen,” as Mr. Obama himself has put it, on which others could project their ideals — just as Babo is for Delano. Yet this intense self-control seems to be what drives the president’s more feverish detractors into a frenzy; they fill that screen with hatreds drawn deep from America’s historical subconscious.

Published in late 1855, as the United States moved toward the Civil War, “Benito Cereno” is one of the most despairing stories in American literature. Amasa Delano represents a new kind of racism, based not on theological or philosophical doctrine but rather on the emotional need to measure one’s absolute freedom in inverse relation to another’s absolute slavishness. This was a racism that was born in chattel slavery but didn’t die with chattel slavery, instead evolving into today’s cult of individual supremacy, which, try as it might, can’t seem to shake off its white supremacist roots.

THIS helps explain those Confederate flags that appear at conservative rallies, as well as why Tea Party-backed politicians like Sarah Palin and Rand Paul insist on equating federal policies they don’t like with chattel bondage. Believing in the “right to health care,” Mr. Paul once said, is “basically saying you believe in slavery.”

As for Mr. Obama, he continues to invoke fantasies that seem drawn straight from Melville’s imagination. One Republican councilman, in Michigan, attended a protest carrying an image of Mr. Obama’s decapitated head on a pike, which happens to be the very fate that befalls Babo once his ruse unravels. Another Republican ran for Congress in Florida with a commercial featuring Mr. Obama as the captain of a slave ship.

Over 60 years ago, Ralph Ellison began “Invisible Man” with an epigraph drawn from “Benito Cereno.” It’s a pleading question that Delano asks Cereno after the revolt is put down and Babo is executed: “You are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?” Though Ellison purposefully omitted it from his epigraph, in today’s America it is still worth recalling Cereno’s answer: “The Negro.”

Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University and the author of “The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World.”

NY Times, Jan. 18, 2014

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff

Growing up poor has long been associated with reduced educational attainment and lower lifetime earnings. Some evidence also suggests a higher risk of depression, substance abuse and other diseases in adulthood. Even for those who manage to overcome humble beginnings, early-life poverty may leave a lasting mark, accelerating aging and increasing the risk of degenerative disease in adulthood.

Today, more than one in five American children live in poverty. How, if at all, to intervene is almost invariably a politically fraught question. Scientists interested in the link between poverty and mental health, however, often face a more fundamental problem: a relative dearth of experiments that test and compare potential interventions.

So when, in 1996, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains opened a casino, Jane Costello, an epidemiologist at Duke University Medical School, saw an opportunity. The tribe elected to distribute a proportion of the profits equally among its 8,000 members. Professor Costello wondered whether the extra money would change psychiatric outcomes among poor Cherokee families.

When the casino opened, Professor Costello had already been following 1,420 rural children in the area, a quarter of whom were Cherokee, for four years. That gave her a solid baseline measure. Roughly one-fifth of the rural non-Indians in her study lived in poverty, compared with more than half of the Cherokee. By 2001, when casino profits amounted to $6,000 per person yearly, the number of Cherokee living below the poverty line had declined by half.

The poorest children tended to have the greatest risk of psychiatric disorders, including emotional and behavioral problems. But just four years after the supplements began, Professor Costello observed marked improvements among those who moved out of poverty. The frequency of behavioral problems declined by 40 percent, nearly reaching the risk of children who had never been poor. Already well-off Cherokee children, on the other hand, showed no improvement. The supplements seemed to benefit the poorest children most dramatically.

When Professor Costello published herfirst study, in 2003, the field of mental health remained on the fence over whether poverty caused psychiatric problems, or psychiatric problems led to poverty. So she was surprised by the results. Even she hadn’t expected the cash to make much difference. “The expectation is that social interventions have relatively small effects,” she told me. “This one had quite large effects.”

She and her colleagues kept following the children. Minor crimes committed by Cherokee youth declined. On-time high school graduation rates improved. And by 2006, when the supplements had grown to about $9,000 yearly per member, Professor Costello could make another observation: The earlier the supplements arrived in a child’s life, the better that child’s mental health in early adulthood.

She’d started her study with three cohorts, ages 9, 11 and 13. When she caught up with them as 19- and 21-year-olds living on their own, she found that those who were youngest when the supplements began had benefited most. They were roughly one-third less likely to develop substance abuse and psychiatric problems in adulthood, compared with the oldest group of Cherokee children and with neighboring rural whites of the same age.

Cherokee children in the older cohorts, who were already 14 or 16 when the supplements began, on the other hand, didn’t show any improvements relative to rural whites. The extra cash evidently came too late to alter these older teenagers’ already-established trajectories.

What precisely did the income change? Ongoing interviews with both parents and children suggested one variable in particular. The money, which amounted to between one-third and one-quarter of poor families’ income at one point, seemed to improve parenting quality.

Vickie L. Bradley, a tribe member and tribal health official, recalls the transition. Before the casino opened and supplements began, employment was often sporadic. Many Cherokee worked “hard and long” during the summer, she told me, and then hunkered down when jobs disappeared in the winter. The supplements eased the strain of that feast-or-famine existence, she said. Some used the money to pay a few months’ worth of bills in advance. Others bought their children clothes for school, or even Christmas presents. Mostly, though, the energy once spent fretting over such things was freed up. That “helps parents be better parents,” she said.

A parallel study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also highlights the insidious effect of poverty on parenting.The Family Life Project, now in its 11th year, has followed nearly 1,300 mostly poor rural children in North Carolina and Pennsylvania from birth. Scientists quantify maternal education, income and neighborhood safety, among other factors. The stressors work cumulatively, they’ve found. The more they bear down as a whole, the more parental nurturing and support, as measured by observers, declines.

By age 3, measures of vocabulary, working memory and executive function show an inverse relationship with the stressors experienced by parents.

These skills are thought important for success and well-being in life. Maternal warmth can seemingly protect children from environmental stresses, however; at least in these communities, parenting quality seems to matter more to a child than material circumstances. On the other hand, few parents managed high levels of nurturing while also experiencing great strain. All of which highlights an emerging theme in this science: Early-life poverty may harm, in part, by warping and eroding the bonds between children and caregivers that are important for healthy development.

Evidence is accumulating that these stressful early-life experiences affect brain development. In one recent study, scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis followed 145 preschoolers between 3 and 6 years of age for up to 10 years, documenting stressful events — including deaths in the family, fighting and frequent moves — as they occurred. When they took magnetic resonance imaging scans of subjects’ brains in adolescence, they observed differences that correlated with the sum of stressful events.

Early-life stress and poverty correlated with a shrunken hippocampus and amygdala, brain regions important for memory and emotional well-being, respectively. Again, parental nurturing seemed to protect children somewhat. When it came to hippocampal volume in particular, parental warmth mattered more than material poverty.

The prospective nature of both studies makes them particularly compelling. But as always with observational studies, we can’t assume causality. Maybe the children’s pre-existing problems are stressing the parents. Or perhaps less nurturing parents are first depressed, and that depression stems from their genes. That same genetic inheritance then manifests as altered neural architecture in their children.

Numerous animal studies, of course, show that early life stress can have lifelong consequences, and that maternal nurturing can prevent them. Studies on rats, for example, demonstrate that even when pups are periodically stressed, ample maternal grooming prevents unhealthy rewiring of their nervous systems, favorably sculpting the developing brain and making the pups resilient to stress even in adulthood.

Yet in observational human studies, it’s difficult to rule out the possibility that the unwell become poor, or that some primary deficiency stresses, impoverishes and sickens. This very uncertainty is one reason, in fact, that Professor Costello’s findings are so intriguing, however modest her study size. A naturally occurring intervention ameliorated psychiatric outcomes. A cash infusion in childhood seemed to lower the risk of problems in adulthood. That suggests that poverty makes people unwell, and that meaningful intervention is relatively simple.

Bearing that in mind, Randall Akee, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a collaborator of Professor Costello’s, argues that the supplements actually save money in the long run. He calculates that 5 to 10 years after age 19, the savings incurred by the Cherokee income supplements surpass the initial costs — the payments to parents while the children were minors. That’s a conservative estimate, he says, based on reduced criminality, a reduced need for psychiatric care and savings gained from not repeating grades. (The full analysis is not yet published.)

But contrary to the prevailing emphasis on interventions in infancy, Professor Akee’s analysis suggests that even help that comes later — at age 12, in this case — can pay for itself by early adulthood. “The benefits more than outweigh the costs,” Emilia Simeonova, a Johns Hopkins Carey Business School economist and one of Professor Akee’s co-authors, told me.

Not all changes in the Cherokee’s “natural experiment” were benign, however. For reasons neither Professor Costello nor Professor Akee can explain, children who were the poorest when the supplements began also gained the most weight.

Another analysis, meanwhile, found that more accidental deaths occurred during those months, once or twice a year, when the tribe disbursed supplements. The authors attributed that, in part, to increased drinking, as well as to buying cars and traveling more.

Then there’s the broader context of gaming, an often contentious issue around the country. Opponents often cite the potential for increases in crime, problem gambling and bankruptcies. And some early studies suggest these concerns may have merit.

But Douglas Walker, an economist at the College of Charleston who has done some consulting for pro-gaming organizations, says many of the studies on gaming have methodological problems. Increased criminal behavior may simply be a function of more visitors to the casino area, he says. If the population increases periodically, it’s natural to expect crime to rise proportionally. “The economic and social impacts of casinos are not as clear, not as obvious as they seem,” he said.

So Professor Costello’s findings are not necessarily a sweeping endorsement of Native American gaming, and casinos generally. Rather, they suggest that a little extra money may confer long-lasting benefits on poor children. And in that respect, the Cherokee experience is unique in several important ways.

First, this was not a top-down intervention. The income supplements came from a business owned by the beneficiaries. The tribe decided how to help itself. Moreover, the supplements weren’t enough for members to stop working entirely, but they were unconditional. Both attributes may avoid perverse incentives not to work.

Also, fluctuations in the casino business aside, the supplements would continue indefinitely. That “ad infinitum” quality may both change how the money is spent and also protect against the corrosive psychological effects of chronic uncertainty.

And maybe most important, about half the casino profits went to infrastructure and social services, including free addiction counseling and improved health care. Ann Bullock, a doctor and medical consultant to the Cherokee tribal government, argues that these factors together — which she calls the exercising of “collective efficacy” — also may have contributed to the improved outcomes. She describes a “sea change” in the collective mood when the tribe began to fund its own projects. A group that was historically disenfranchised began making decisions about its own fate.

“You feel controlled by the world when you’re poor,” she said. “That was simply no longer the case.”

Professor Costello and Professor Akee don’t entirely agree. They think cold hard cash made the real difference. For one thing, Professor Akee says, outcomes started improving as soon as the supplements began, before many of the communitywide services went into effect.

If that’s the primary takeaway, then we have some thinking to do. Some people feel that “if you’re poor, it’s because you deserve it,” Professor Costello said. “If you’re sick, it’s because you deserve it,” she said.

But if giving poor families with children a little extra cash not only helps them, but also saves society money in the long run, then, says Professor Costello, withholding the help is something other than rational.

“You’re not doing it because it pains you to do it,” she said. “That’s a very valuable lesson for society to learn.”

Moises Velasquez-Manoff is a science writer and the author of “An Epidemic of Absence.”

NY Times, Jan. 18, 2014

By Michael Barbaro and Kate Zernike

ORLANDO, Fla. — A swing through Florida proved no sunny retreat for Gov. Chris Christie on Saturday, as well-organized protesters hounded him outside a Republican fund-raiser here, a powerful ally in the New Jersey State House rebuked the governor’s office and new allegations emerged that his administration tried to intimidate a New Jersey elected official.

Mr. Christie’s trip, which was supposed to showcase his political resilience after the rockiest period of his governorship, was overshadowed by claims from the mayor of Hoboken, N.J., Dawn Zimmer, a Democrat.

In a television interview on Saturday, she said that two high-ranking aides to Mr. Christie had threatened to withhold money for Hurricane Sandy recovery to her hard-hit city if she did not support a real estate development that the governor wanted built in her jurisdiction.

Speaking on MSNBC, she produced journal entries that she said documented conversations in which Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno and Richard E. Constable, the commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs, told her that if she wanted the money, she had to approve the project. The financial assistance, Ms. Zimmer said, was held “hostage.”

She recalled documenting her disappointment in Mr. Christie the day of her meeting with Mr. Constable. “I thought he was something very different,” she wrote at the time. “This week I found out he’s cut from the same corrupt cloth that I have been fighting for the last four years.”

Despite being almost entirely submerged during the hurricane, Hoboken has received a small fraction of the recovery money it requested from the state, Ms. Zimmer said.

In a statement, Mr. Christie’s spokesman, Colin Reed, did not directly address the mayor’s claims of a threat, but said that she and the governor “had a productive relationship” that was delivering the relief money Hoboken needed.

Mr. Reed took the unusual step of denouncing MSNBC, on which Mr. Christie is a frequent guest, as “a partisan network that has been openly hostile to Governor Christie and almost gleeful in their efforts attacking him.”

Attempting to cast doubt on the new allegations of political payback, which have always been a part of American politics, Mr. Christie’s aides pointed to Ms. Zimmer’s history of praising Mr. Christie, such as a Tweet last summer in which she wrote, “I am very glad that Gov. Christie has been our governor.”

On MSNBC, Ms. Zimmer hinted at the pressure many mayors felt not to speak out against the governor, saying, “This is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Soon after Ms. Zimmer’s interview aired, Stephen M. Sweeney, a Democrat, the president of the New Jersey Senate and a key ally of Mr. Christie’s, issued an unexpected rebuke to the governor’s office.

Calling the latest allegations “extremely disturbing” and promising an investigation, Mr. Sweeney said that Ms. Zimmer’s experience, combined with the lane closings on the George Washington Bridge, “suggest a pattern of behavior by the highest ranking members of this administration that is deeply offensive to the people of New Jersey.”

In Florida on Saturday, Democratic activists unleashed a partisan assault on Mr. Christie. Protesters waved placards calling him a “bully,” telling him to “go home” and, in a reference to the gridlock at the George Washington Bridge, declaring that their own “traffic is bad enough.”

Mr. Christie shunned public appearances in Florida, where he is raising money for Gov. Rick Scott, a fellow Republican.

Instead, the New Jersey governor was whisked into an event at the Country Club of Orlando, and, later, a fund-raiser at a Palm Beach home owned by the heir to a sugar fortune.

Inside, Mr. Christie found what must pass, at this difficult moment, as an oasis for him: a group of Ferrari and Jaguar-driving Florida Republicans for whom traffic in New Jersey is a distant thought.

Getting into his Bentley after the fund-raiser, one guest, Geoffrey Leigh, called the controversy over the lane closures “little flies on the wall, quite frankly.”

Michael Barbaro reported from Florida and Kate Zernike from New Jersey. Nick Madigan contributed reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

NJ Spotlight, Jan. 15, 2014

By Tom Johnson 

Healthfinder.gov, Jan. 15, 2014

(HealthDay News) — Medicine alone cannot improve the health of the nation — not when one in five Americans lives in unsafe neighborhoods where pollution, crime and joblessness are prevalent; nutritious food is scarce; and the well-being of young people is at risk, an expert panel reports.

What’s needed is a "seismic shift" in the way the nation approaches health care, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Commission to Build a Healthier America.

The panel’s exhaustive report urges leaders in public, private, nonprofit and academic settings to work together to address social and environmental factors that impact people’s health.

"We must put just as much energy into creating conditions that will keep people well in the first place as we do into providing treatment when it is needed," the commission wrote.

The 16-member panel, led by Dr. Mark McClellan, former administrator of the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and Alice Rivlin, former director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, identified three areas for improvement:

** Investment in early childhood education.

** Development of safe housing.

** Incentives for medical providers to address nonmedical factors that impact health.

The panel said these actions have the greatest potential to impact overall health.

"Consumers know full well that the realities of their everyday lives — where they live, the food they eat, whether they can pay their bills at the end of the month — impact their health," said commission member Rebecca Onie, co-founder and CEO of Boston-based Health Leads.

"Each of us has a responsibility to make healthy choices, but … for many folks that’s just harder to do because they don’t have access to the resources they need to be healthy," said Onie, whose organization connects low-income patients with food, heat and other basic needs.

The Commission to Build a Healthier America issued its first recommendations in 2009. The new analysis, released Monday, builds on that work by providing specific advice for advancing the nation’s health and highlighting community-based initiatives.

Carol Naughton, senior vice president of Purpose Built Communities, an Atlanta-based nonprofit consulting group that helps local leaders across the country rebuild struggling neighborhoods, praised the commission’s report.

"I think this is going to be a real call to action, and it provides good granular examples of what you can do to get better outcomes," Naughton said.

The revitalization of Atlanta’s East Lake neighborhood serves as a model for change. Community leaders replaced poverty-stricken housing with high-quality, mixed-income apartments. They also opened the city’s first charter school, which is now ranked first among Atlanta’s schools. And they partnered with the YMCA, which provides physical-education classes.

Thanks to safe sidewalks, about half of the school’s 1,300 children walk to school each day, Naughton said. A cycling club was launched, healthy breakfasts and lunches are served, and students are much trimmer than when the school first opened, she said.

Investing in America’s youth should be a national priority, the commission said. Yet the United States ranks 25th out of 29 industrialized counties in early childhood education.

According to the latest research, children exposed to the stress of poverty "grow up to be adults with very unhealthy outcomes," said Jessie Rasmussen, president of the Buffet Early Childhood Fund in Omaha, Neb.

Enter Educare, a network of full-day, year-round schools serving at-risk children from birth to age 5, one of several model programs mentioned in the report.

Kids at Educare schools get high-quality early learning opportunities and access to health, nutrition and mental-health consultants. That offsets the negative effects of stress, said Rasmussen, whose nonprofit organization partners with the Chicago-based Ounce of Prevention Fund, which created the Educare model.

One of the three main recommendations from the Commission to Build a Healthier America targets the medical community. The commission said health care providers should work more closely with community organizations to help link patients with nonmedical services.

It’s not just the poorest of the poor who need help, but people working two or three jobs to make ends meet, Onie said. Health Leads recently began working with a new clinic in Boston, at which 59 percent of patients reported having an unmet resource need.

"They were reporting, for example, that they couldn’t refrigerate their diabetes medications because the utilities company had cut off their electricity," Onie said. "Or they couldn’t afford heat at home even though the cold air was triggering their asthma."

The commission did not determine the cost of the proposed reforms, but it might require making tough decisions on how to redeploy existing resources to yield the greatest impact on health, Onie said.

This much is clear: The United States cannot afford to devote increasing levels of spending to medical care, especially for preventable health conditions, the panel said.

Avis Vidal, a professor of urban planning at Wayne State University in Detroit, said not all health interventions are costly. "Moms walking kids to school isn’t expensive if moms are not employed in full-time jobs," she said.

"But things like [making] sure all assisted low-income housing developments are near good public transportation — that’s big bucks," Vidal said.

SOURCES: Rebecca Onie, co-founder and CEO, Health Leads, Boston; Carol Naughton, senior vice president, Purpose Built Communities, Atlanta; Jessie Rasmussen, president, Buffet Early Childhood Fund, Omaha, Neb.; Avis Vidal, Ph.D., professor of urban planning, department of urban studies and planning, Wayne State University, Detroit; Time to Act: Investing in the Health of Our Children and Communities, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America, January 2014

Copyright © 2014 HealthDay . All rights reserved.

Save the date for the 34th Anniversary of the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series!

The 34th Anniversary of the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series
Tending the Light:
Community Organizing and the Modern Civil Rights Movement

Saturday, February 15, 2014
9:30 am – 3:00 pm
The Paul Robeson Campus Center
Rutgers University, Newark Campus
350 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Newark, NJ 07102
Get more info: http://goo.gl/rrlokC