Frontline communities gathered for the People’s Climate Justice Summit following the historic Peoples Climate March on September 21, 2014 in New York City. We held a People’s Tribunal as global corporate and government leaders gathered across the street, allowing only a very small number of civil society representatives to join. One of those delegates, Kandi Mossett of Indigenous Environmental Network, describes the challenge that frontline communities encounter when trying to insert our perspectives into the climate debate.
Watch the video here.
 

Rolling Stone, Oct. 8, 2014
By Paul Krugman
When it comes to Barack Obama, I’ve always been out of sync. Back in 2008, when many liberals were wildly enthusiastic about his candidacy and his press was strongly favorable, I was skeptical. I worried that he was naive, that his talk about transcending the political divide was a dangerous illusion given the unyielding extremism of the modern American right. Furthermore, it seemed clear to me that, far from being the transformational figure his supporters imagined, he was rather conventional-minded: Even before taking office, he showed signs of paying far too much attention to what some of us would later take to calling Very Serious People, people who regarded cutting budget deficits and a willingness to slash Social Security as the very essence of political virtue.
And I wasn’t wrong. Obama was indeed naive: He faced scorched-earth Republican opposition from Day One, and it took him years to start dealing with that opposition realistically. Furthermore, he came perilously close to doing terrible things to the U.S. safety net in pursuit of a budget Grand Bargain; we were saved from significant cuts to Social Security and a rise in the Medicare age only by Republican greed, the GOP’s unwillingness to make even token concessions.
But now the shoe is on the other foot: Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn’t deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it’s working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it’s much more effective than you’d think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy.
I’ll go through those achievements shortly. First, however, let’s take a moment to talk about the current wave of Obama-bashing. All Obama-bashing can be divided into three types. One, a constant of his time in office, is the onslaught from the right, which has never stopped portraying him as an Islamic atheist Marxist Kenyan. Nothing has changed on that front, and nothing will.
There’s a different story on the left, where you now find a significant number of critics decrying Obama as, to quote Cornel West, someone who ”posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit.” They’re outraged that Wall Street hasn’t been punished, that income inequality remains so high, that ”neoliberal” economic policies are still in place. All of this seems to rest on the belief that if only Obama had put his eloquence behind a radical economic agenda, he could somehow have gotten that agenda past all the political barriers that have con- strained even his much more modest efforts. It’s hard to take such claims seriously.
Finally, there’s the constant belittling of Obama from mainstream pundits and talking heads. Turn on cable news (although I wouldn’t advise it) and you’ll hear endless talk about a rudderless, stalled administration, maybe even about a failed presidency. Such talk is often buttressed by polls showing that Obama does, indeed, have an approval rating that is very low by historical standards.
But this bashing is misguided even in its own terms – and in any case, it’s focused on the wrong thing.
Yes, Obama has a low approval rating compared with earlier presidents. But there are a number of reasons to believe that presidential approval doesn’t mean the same thing that it used to: There is much more party-sorting (in which Republicans never, ever have a good word for a Democratic president, and vice versa), the public is negative on politicians in general, and so on. Obviously the midterm election hasn’t happened yet, but in a year when Republicans have a huge structural advantage – Democrats are defending a disproportionate number of Senate seats in deep-red states – most analyses suggest that control of the Senate is in doubt, with Democrats doing considerably better than they were supposed to. This isn’t what you’d expect to see if a failing president were dragging his party down.
More important, however, polls – or even elections – are not the measure of a president. High office shouldn’t be about putting points on the electoral scoreboard, it should be about changing the country for the better. Has Obama done that? Do his achievements look likely to endure? The answer to both questions is yes.
HEALTH CARE
When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, an excited Joe Biden whispered audibly, ”This is a big fucking deal!” He was right.
The enactment and implementation of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, has been a perils-of-Pauline experience. When an upset in the special election to replace Ted Kennedy cost Democrats their 60-vote Senate majority, health reform had to be rescued with fancy legislative footwork. Then it survived a Supreme Court challenge only thanks to a surprise display of conscience by John Roberts, who nonetheless opened a loophole that has allowed Republican-controlled states to deny coverage to millions of Americans. Then technical difficulties with the HealthCare.gov website seemed to threaten disaster. But here we are, most of the way through the first full year of reform’s implementation, and it’s working better than even the optimists expected.
We won’t have the full data on 2014 until next year’s census report, but multiple independent surveys show a sharp drop in the number of Americans without health insurance, probably around 10 million, a number certain to grow greatly over the next two years as more people realize that the program is available and penalties for failure to sign up increase.
It’s true that the Affordable Care Act will still leave millions of people in America uninsured. For one thing, it was never intended to cover undocumented immigrants, who are counted in standard measures of the uninsured. Furthermore, millions of low-income Americans will slip into the loophole Roberts created: They were supposed to be covered by a federally funded expansion of Medicaid, but some states are blocking that expansion out of sheer spite. Finally, unlike Social Security and Medicare, for which almost everyone is automatically eligible, Obamacare requires beneficiaries to prove their eligibility for Medicaid or choose and then pay for a subsidized private plan. Inevitably, some people will fall through the cracks.
Still, Obamacare means a huge improvement in the quality of life for tens of millions of Americans – not just better care, but greater financial security. And even those who were already insured have gained both security and freedom, because they now have a guarantee of coverage if they lose or change jobs.
What about the costs? Here, too, the news is better than anyone expected. In 2014, premiums on the insurance policies offered through the Obamacare exchanges were well below those originally projected by the Congressional Budget Office, and the available data indicates a mix of modest increases and actual reductions for 2015 – which is very good in a sector where premiums normally increase five percent or more each year. More broadly, overall health spending has slowed substantially, with the cost-control features of the ACA probably deserving some of the credit.
In other words, health reform is looking like a major policy success story. It’s a program that is coming in ahead of schedule – and below budget – costing less, and doing more to reduce overall health costs than even its supporters predicted.
Of course, this success story makes nonsense of right-wing predictions of catastrophe. Beyond that, the good news on health costs refutes conservative orthodoxy. It’s a fixed idea on the right, sometimes echoed by ”centrist” commentators, that the only way to limit health costs is to dismantle guarantees of adequate care – for example, that the only way to control Medicare costs is to replace Medicare as we know it, a program that covers major medical expenditures, with vouchers that may or may not be enough to buy adequate insurance. But what we’re actually seeing is what looks like significant cost control via a laundry list of small changes to how we pay for care, with the basic guarantee of adequate coverage not only intact but widened to include Americans of all ages.
It’s worth pointing out that some criticisms of Obamacare from the left are also looking foolish. Obamacare is a system partly run through private insurance companies (although expansion of Medicaid is also a very important piece). And some on the left were outraged, arguing that the program would do more to raise profits in the medical-industrial complex than it would to protect American families.
You can still argue that single-payer would have covered more people at lower cost – in fact, I would. But that option wasn’t on the table; only a system that appeased insurers and reassured the public that not too much would change was politically feasible. And it’s working reasonably well: Competition among insurers who can no longer deny insurance to those who need it most is turning out to be pretty effective. This isn’t the health care system you would have designed from scratch, or if you could ignore special-interest politics, but it’s doing the job.
And this big improvement in American society is almost surely here to stay. The conservative health care nightmare – the one that led Republicans to go all-out against Bill Clinton’s health plans in 1993 and Obamacare more recently – is that once health care for everyone, or almost everyone, has been put in place, it will be very hard to undo, because too many voters would have a stake in the system. That’s exactly what is happening. Republicans are still going through the motions of attacking Obamacare, but the passion is gone. They’re even offering mealymouthed assurances that people won’t lose their new benefits. By the time Obama leaves office, there will be tens of millions of Americans who have benefited directly from health reform – and that will make it almost impossible to reverse. Health reform has made America a different, better place.
FINANCIAL REFORM
Let’s be clear: The financial crisis should have been followed by a drastic crackdown on Wall Street abuses, and it wasn’t. No important figures have gone to jail; bad banks and other financial institutions, from Citigroup to Goldman, were bailed out with few strings attached; and there has been nothing like the wholesale restructuring and reining in of finance that took place in the 1930s. Obama bears a considerable part of the blame for this disappointing response. It was his Treasury secretary and his attorney general who chose to treat finance with kid gloves.
It’s easy, however, to take this disappointment too far. You often hear Dodd- Frank, the financial-reform bill that Obama signed into law in 2010, dismissed as toothless and meaningless. It isn’t. It may not prevent the next financial crisis, but there’s a good chance that it will at least make future crises less severe and easier to deal with.
Dodd-Frank is a complicated piece of legislation, but let me single out three really important sections.
First, the law gives a special council the ability to designate ”systemically important financial institutions” (SIFIs) – that is, institutions that could create a crisis if they were to fail – and place such institutions under extra scrutiny and regulation of things like the amount of capital they are required to maintain to cover possible losses. This provision has been derided as ineffectual or worse – during the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney claimed that by announcing that some firms were SIFIs, the government was effectively guaranteeing that they would be bailed out, which he called ”the biggest kiss that’s been given to New York banks I’ve ever seen.”
But it’s easy to prove that this is nonsense: Just look at how institutions behave when they’re designated as SIFIs. Are they pleased, because they’re now guaranteed? Not a chance. Instead, they’re furious over the extra regulation, and in some cases fight bitterly to avoid being placed on the list. Right now, for example, MetLife is making an all-out effort to be kept off the SIFI list; this effort demonstrates that we’re talking about real regulation here, and that financial interests don’t like it.
Another key provision in Dodd-Frank is ”orderly liquidation authority,” which gives the government the legal right to seize complex financial institutions in a crisis. This is a bigger deal than you might think. We have a well-established procedure for seizing ordinary banks that get in trouble and putting them into receivership; in fact, it happens all the time. But what do you do when something like Citigroup is on the edge, and its failure might have devastating consequences? Back in 2009, Joseph Stiglitz and yours truly, among others, wanted to temporarily nationalize one or two major financial players, for the same reasons the FDIC takes over failing banks, to keep the institutions running but avoid bailing out stockholders and management. We got a chance to make that case directly to the president. But we lost the argument, and one key reason was Treasury’s claim that it lacked the necessary legal authority. I still think it could have found a way, but in any case that won’t be an issue next time.
A third piece of Dodd-Frank is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That’s Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild, an agency dedicated to protecting Americans against the predatory lending that has pushed so many into financial distress, and played an important role in the crisis. Warren’s idea was that such a stand-alone agency would more effectively protect the public than agencies that were supposed to protect consumers, but saw their main job as propping up banks. And by all accounts the new agency is in fact doing much more to crack down on predatory practices than anything we used to see.
There’s much more in the financial reform, including a number of pieces we don’t have enough information to evaluate yet. But there’s enough evidence even now to say that there’s a reason Wall Street – which used to give an approximately equal share of money to both parties but now overwhelmingly supports Republicans – tried so hard to kill financial reform, and is still trying to emasculate Dodd-Frank. This may not be the full overhaul of finance we should have had, and it’s not as major as health reform. But it’s a lot better than nothing.
THE ECONOMY
Barack Obama might not have been elected president without the 2008 financial crisis; he certainly wouldn’t have had the House majority and the brief filibuster-proof Senate majority that made health reform possible. So it’s very disappointing that six years into his presidency, the U.S. economy is still a long way from being fully recovered.
Before we ask why, however, we should note that things could have been worse. In fact, in other times and places they have been worse. Make no mistake about it – the devastation wrought by the financial crisis was terrible, with real income falling 5.5 percent. But that’s actually not as bad as the ”typical” experience after financial crises: Even in advanced countries, the median post-crisis decline in per- capita real GDP is seven percent. Recovery has been slow: It took almost six years for the United States to regain pre-crisis average income. But that was actually a bit faster than the historical average.
Or compare our performance with that of the European Union. Unemployment in America rose to a horrifying 10 percent in 2009, but it has come down sharply in the past few years. It’s true that some of the apparent improvement probably reflects discouraged workers dropping out, but there has been substantial real progress. Meanwhile, Europe has had barely any job recovery at all, and unemployment is still in double digits. Compared with our counterparts across the Atlantic, we haven’t done too badly.
Did Obama’s policies contribute to this less-awful performance? Yes, without question. You’d never know it listening to the talking heads, but there’s overwhelming consensus among economists that the Obama stimulus plan helped mitigate the worst of the slump. For example, when a panel of economic experts was asked whether the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus, 82 percent said yes, only two percent said no.
Still, couldn’t the U.S. economy have done a lot better? Of course. The original stimulus should have been both bigger and longer. And after Republicans won the House in 2010, U.S. policy took a sharp turn in the wrong direction. Not only did the stimulus fade out, but sequestration led to further steep cuts in federal spending, exactly the wrong thing to do in a still-depressed economy.
We can argue about how much Obama could have altered this literally depressing turn of events. He could have pushed for a larger, more extended stimulus, perhaps with provisions for extra aid that would have kicked in if unemployment stayed high. (This isn’t 20-20 hindsight, because a number of economists, myself included, pleaded for more aggressive measures from the beginning.) He arguably let Republicans blackmail him over the debt ceiling in 2011, leading to the sequester. But this is all kind of iffy.
The bottom line on Obama’s economic policy should be that what he did helped the economy, and that while enormous economic and human damage has taken place on his watch, the United States coped with the financial crisis better than most countries facing comparable crises have managed. He should have done more and better, but the narrative that portrays his policies as a simple failure is all wrong.
While America remains an incredibly unequal society, and we haven’t seen anything like the New Deal’s efforts to narrow income gaps, Obama has done more to limit inequality than he gets credit for. The rich are paying higher taxes, thanks to the partial expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the special taxes on high incomes that help pay for Obamacare; the Congressional Budget Office estimates the average tax rate of the top one percent at 33.6 percent in 2013, up from 28.1 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, the financial aid in Obamacare – expanded Medicaid, subsidies to help lower-income households pay insurance premiums – goes disproportionately to less-well-off Americans. When conservatives accuse Obama of redistributing income, they’re not completely wrong – and liberals should give him credit.
THE ENVIRONMENT
In 2009, it looked, briefly, as if we might be about to get real on the issue of climate change. A fairly comprehensive bill establishing a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse-gas emissions actually passed the House, and visions of global action danced like sugarplums in environmentalists’ heads. But the legislation stalled in the Senate, and Republican victory in the 2010 midterms put an end to that fantasy. Ever since, the only way forward has been through executive action based on existing legislation, which is a poor substitute for the new laws we need.
But as with financial reform, acknowledging the inadequacy of what has been done doesn’t mean that nothing has been achieved. Saying that Obama has been the best environmental president in a long time is actually faint praise, since George W. Bush was terrible and Bill Clinton didn’t get much done. Still, it’s true, and there’s reason to hope for a lot more over the next two years.
First of all, there has been much more progress on the use of renewable energy than most people realize. The share of U.S. energy provided by wind and solar has grown dramatically since Obama took office. True, it’s still only a small fraction of the total, and some of the growth in renewables reflects technological progress, especially in solar panels, that would have happened whoever was in office. But federal policies, including loan guarantees and tax credits, have played an important role.
Nor is it just about renewables; Obama has also taken big steps on energy conservation, especially via fuel-efficiency standards, that have flown, somewhat mysteriously, under the radar. And it’s not just cars. In 2011, the administration announced the first-ever fuel-efficiency standards for medium and heavy vehicles, and in February it announced that these standards would get even tougher for models sold after 2018. As a way to curb green house-gas emissions, these actions, taken together, are comparable in importance to proposed action on power plants.
Which brings us to the latest initiative. Because there’s no chance of getting climate-change legislation through Congress for the foreseeable future, Obama has turned to the EPA’s existing power to regulate pollution – power that the Supreme Court has affirmed extends to emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. And this past summer, the EPA announced proposed rules that would require a large reduction over time in such emissions from power plants. You might say that such plants are only a piece of the problem, but they’re a large piece – CO2 from coal-burning power plants is in fact a big part of the problem, so if the EPA goes through with anything like the proposed rule, it will be a major step. Again, not nearly enough, and we’ll have to do a lot more soon, or face civilization-threatening disaster. But what Obama has done is far from trivial.
NATIONAL SECURITY
So far, i’ve been talking about Obama’s positive achievements, which have been much bigger than his critics understand. I do, however, need to address one area that has left some early Obama supporters bitterly disappointed: his record on national security policy. Let’s face it – many of his original enthusiasts favored him so strongly over Hillary Clinton because she supported the Iraq War and he didn’t. They hoped he would hold the people who took us to war on false pretenses accountable, that he would transform American foreign policy, and that he would drastically curb the reach of the national security state.
None of that happened. Obama’s team, as far as we can tell, never even considered going after the deceptions that took us to Baghdad, perhaps because they believed that this would play very badly at a time of financial crisis. On overall foreign policy, Obama has been essentially a normal post-Vietnam president, reluctant to commit U.S. ground troops and eager to extract them from ongoing commitments, but quite willing to bomb people considered threatening to U.S. interests. And he has defended the prerogatives of the NSA and the surveillance state in general.
Could and should he have been different? The truth is that I have no special expertise here; as an ordinary concerned citizen, I worry about the precedent of allowing what amount to war crimes to go not just unpunished but uninvestigated, even while appreciating that a modern version of the 1970s Church committee hearings on CIA abuses might well have been a political disaster, and undermined the policy achievements I’ve tried to highlight. What I would say is that even if Obama is just an ordinary president on national security issues, that’s a huge improvement over what came before and what we would have had if John McCain or Mitt Romney had won. It’s hard to get excited about a policy of not going to war gratuitously, but it’s a big deal compared with the alternative.
SOCIAL CHANGE
In 2004, social issues, along with national security, were cudgels the right used to bludgeon liberals – I like to say that Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists. Ten years later, and the scene is transformed: Democrats have turned these social issues – especially women’s rights – against Republicans; gay marriage has been widely legalized with approval or at least indifference from the wider public. We have, in a remarkably short stretch of time, become a notably more tolerant, open-minded nation.
Barack Obama has been more a follower than a leader on these issues. But at least he has been willing to follow the country’s new open-mindedness. We shouldn’t take this for granted. Before the Obama presidency, Democrats were in a kind of reflexive cringe on social issues, acting as if the religious right had far more power than it really does and ignoring the growing constituency on the other side. It’s easy to imagine that if someone else had been president these past six years, Democrats would still be cringing as if it were 2004. Thankfully, they aren’t. And the end of the cringe also, I’d argue, helped empower them to seek real change on substantive issues from health reform to the environment. Which brings me back to domestic issues.
As you can see, there’s a theme running through each of the areas of domestic policy I’ve covered. In each case, Obama delivered less than his supporters wanted, less than the country arguably deserved, but more than his current detractors acknowledge. The extent of his partial success ranges from the pretty good to the not-so-bad to the ugly. Health reform looks pretty good, especially in historical perspective – remember, even Social Security, in its original FDR version, only covered around half the workforce. Financial reform is, I’d argue, not so bad – it’s not the second coming of Glass-Steagall, but there’s a lot more protection against runaway finance than anyone except angry Wall Streeters seems to realize. Economic policy wasn’t enough to avoid a very ugly period of high unemployment, but Obama did at least mitigate the worst.
And as far as climate policy goes, there’s reason for hope, but we’ll have to see.
Am I damning with faint praise? Not at all. This is what a successful presidency looks like. No president gets to do everything his supporters expected him to. FDR left behind a reformed nation, but one in which the wealthy retained a lot of power and privilege. On the other side, for all his anti-government rhetoric, Reagan left the core institutions of the New Deal and the Great Society in place. I don’t care about the fact that Obama hasn’t lived up to the golden dreams of 2008, and I care even less about his approval rating. I do care that he has, when all is said and done, achieved a lot. That is, as Joe Biden didn’t quite say, a big deal.
© 2014 ROLLING STONE

The Atlantic, Nov. 3, 2014
By CONOR FRIEDERSDORF
Immediately after President Obama was elected in 2009, promising to fundamentally change the way business is done in Washington, D.C., to harken in an era of unprecedented transparency, to protect whistleblowers, and to fight the War on Terror without compromising core U.S. values, 67 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing. Today his job approval rating is just 42 percent. His unpopularity is expected to cost Democrats in the midterm elections.
Ross Douthat spends his Sunday column trying to understand this unpopularity. Is Obama blamed for Republican intransigence? Are voters finally losing patience with a weak economy that can no longer be blamed on George W. Bush? Is it the fact that Obamacare has created many losers along with its winners? Is it “a results-based verdict on what seems like poor execution” in foreign policy?
All of these are plausible factors. And there is, of course, no single answer. Different people disapprove of Obama’s performance for different reasons. Here are mine:
1) After denouncing his predecessor’s warrantless wiretapping, Obama presided over the construction of a surveillance state more expansive than any democracy has ever known. What he hid includes documented violations of the Fourth Amendment. And the so-called reforms he urged to satiate the public are a cynical farce.
2) The Obama Administration hasn’t merely violated the law in its failure to prosecute what the president and attorney general acknowledge to be illegal torture. It has also suppressed a still-unreleased Senate report about that torture and done nothing to prevent the next president from restarting “enhanced interrogation.”
3) The Obama Administration continues to wage the most costly, ruinous war in the modern era: the War on Drugs. Obama did not try and fail to end the drug war.
He did not even try.
4) When the Obama Administration kills innocent people in a drone strike, it does not acknowledge its mistake, apologize, compensate the family, nor does it articulate how it will prevent such tragedies in the future. Instead, Obama just keeps quiet. He suppresses the number of innocents killed, preventing anyone outside the executive branch from judging the effectiveness or morality of drone policy. He invokes the state secret’s doctrine to keep the courts from judging whether he is violating the Constitution. And he hides even his own team’s legal reasoning.
5) Obama took two actions that set extremely dangerous precedents: he established a secret kill list, put the name of an American citizen on that list, and ordered his execution by drone strike without charges or trial or any due process. And he waged a war of choice in Libya without permission from Congress.
6) Under Obama, the national security state is out of control. Set aside his policies, whatever you think about them. This is a president who let his Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie in sworn testimony to Congress without consequences. His CIA director, John Brennan, presided over CIA surveillance of Senate intelligence committee operations, also without consequence.
7) Compared to his predecessors, Obama has been extremely aggressive in his persecution of whistleblowers and journalists who’ve worked with whistleblowers.
Notice two attributes that these indictments share. They’re not campaign promises Obama made and upheld–on the contrary, all are in tension with his self-presentation. Nor are these policy areas where Congress thwarted the White House. In every case, Obama could’ve pursued a much-improved course on his own.
Blaming the transgressions on his opposition won’t work here.
Among Democrats, who vary in their assessments of Obama, there is still broad agreement that he’s better, warts and all, than Bush was, and better than John McCain or Mitt Romney would’ve been. Fair enough. This isn’t an indictment of Obama voters.
Nor is Obama without accomplishments.
But here’s what I find alarming: Confronted with a president who 1) spied on every American, 2) covered up torture, 3) continued a War on Drugs ruinous to minorities and whole foreign nations, 4) killed hundreds of innocents in drone strikes, 5) waged war illegally and killed an American citizen without due process (while suppressing the legal reasoning used to do so) 6) let high-ranking national security officials break the law with impunity, and 7) persecuted whistleblowers – confronted with all of those transgressions, more than four in ten Americans still approve of the job Obama is doing. And most of them are loyal Democrats. Partisanship and tribalism are overriding the moral compass of too many liberals, who ought to be furious with Obama. National security policies he unilaterally pursued will be harming the U.S., its moral standing, and its most vulnerable citizens for years if not decades to come, especially since Democrats are poised to make civil illibertarian Hillary Clinton their party’s next leader.
To see it all with open eyes is to disapprove.
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CONOR FRIEDERSDORF is a staff writer atThe Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

NJ Spotlight, Oct. 31, 2014
By SCOTT GURIAN, EVE TROEH, AND JANET BABIN
Experts list key lessons learned for handling disasters yet-to-come
This is the second story in a two-part series. Read the first part.
Two years ago, Hurricane Sandy caused enormous destruction in New Jersey, damaging or destroying some 365,000 homes up and down the coast and leading to an estimated $37 billion in losses.
That was bad enough.
But then came a manmade disaster of sorts.
Storm victims were forced to spend month after month standing in lines, waiting on hold, and taking days off from work to fill out reams of paperwork, only to later be told their files had been lost. Some residents were denied for funding but later found out they should have been accepted. And people struggling to make ends meet — displaced and having to pay for rental housing while simultaneously paying a mortgage and taxes on their old, unlivable homes — have endured lengthy delays to get money to rebuild without ever being given a clear indication of what’s holding up the process or where exactly their application stands.
The sad fact of the matter is that this is hardly a new or unique story. Even worse delays have plagued New York City’s Sandy recovery; there were numerous stumbles in Texas after Hurricane Ike; and a myriad of problems continue to hold back Louisiana from fully recovering, even now, nearly a decade after Katrina.
So why can’t we ever get disaster recovery right? Is there any solution, or are we simply doomed to repeat the mistakes?
In partnership with WNYC/NJ Public Radio and public radio station WWNO in New Orleans, NJ Spotlight has been investigating the roots of the problems and figuring out how to avoid them in the aftermath of the next big storm.
It appears there’s no one, single solution, but rather a variety of steps that must be undertaken on both the state and federal levels to ensure things go more smoothly the next time. Some of the recommendations involve changes to how we lay the groundwork, preparing for disasters before they occur. And experts say we need to thoroughly rethink every stage of the recovery process, from planning to hiring decisions to management oversight if we hope to be more successful the next time a major storms hits the coast.
The New Jersey Department of Community Affairs — which is overseeing much of the state’s recovery – declined several interview requests for this story, and the governor’s press office has also turned down or ignored multiple requests in the past to interview anyone in the Governor’s Office of Recovery and Rebuilding. New York City’s current and former Sandy Czars did speak to us, however, as did several other experts and advocates in New Jersey and Louisiana. What follows is a summary of the key recommendations they made to ensure that future disaster recovery is handled in a more timely and efficient manner.
FIVE LESSONS FOR IMPROVING DISASTER RECOVERY
** Reduce the amount of federal bureaucracy
** Use homegrown help
** Provide more oversight for private contractors
** Develop a skilled, post-disaster workforce
** Create a “cookbook” to help states and cities better and more quickly recover
The first big issue that nearly everyone agrees needs to be fixed is reducing the amount of paperwork and bureaucracy.
For example, attorney Jeffrey Thomas unrolled a long chart he received from a private contractor when he worked for the City of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The document shows all the public hearings, environmental checks, reports, and other steps required for spending aid money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Thomas said his office got to work immediately, streamlining and applying for waivers.
“We spent months taking the seven-foot flow chart and trying to make it five feet,” he said, “but to the public this is all lost on them. This is just delay.”
Thomas explained that as officials, consultants, and contractors touted their Katrina experience for the Sandy recovery, they weren’t saying everything was rosy.
“It’s based on the premise that there is inherent inefficiency to the resources you’re going to be given, and we know how to help you get through it more effectively,” he said.
The federal government says this mountain of rules is intended to prevent fraud and ensure compliance with historic and environmental regulations, but New York City’s former Sandy Czar Brad Gair thinks some of them are just ridiculous. For example, before he was able to secure a waiver from the federal government, he had to send notices to Native American tribes in case there were human remains or other artifacts at the rebuild sites, even when people were just repairing their ceilings and walls.
As for concern about potential abuses by homeowners, Gair thinks it’s easy to go overboard.
“There’s always going to be fraud in every program,” he said. “We spend way more money trying to prevent fraud than we would lose if there was some fraud that just couldn’t be avoided.”
To Attorney Adam Gordon with Fair Share Housing — a group that’s advocated on behalf of storm victims throughout New Jersey — some of the problems with the recovery could have potentially been avoided and repairs could have been done for less money if we had worked more with homegrown organizations that already knew the geography and the culture of the region.
“I think undoubtedly the state needed to hire some outside contractors,” he said, “but there needed to be more of a balance with people who had actual experience on the ground in these communities.” Gordon acknowledged that nonprofits like Catholic Charities probably couldn’t carry the entire load, but he said they at least need a seat at the table.
Brad Gair agrees. “The nonprofit sector, the religious-based sector needs to be brought into the fold and not just be out there on the fringes trying to pick up the pieces around what the governments are trying to do” he said. Such organizations, he added, have a good understanding of what people need following a disaster and how to work effectively on a community level.
Gair said that after Sandy, the city partnered with several local groups to help with mold remediation. The project went well, but it was a pretty straightforward program funded by a private charity rather than governmental money. For larger-scale projects, he worries there might be a steeper learning curve.
“By being nongovernmental organizations, they sort of inherently don’t know how government works all the time,” he said. “So when you then try to throw them into this arena, they could do it. They could catch up eventually. But I think we’d be much better off if we started off with getting those groups involved before a disaster happens and figuring out what role they can play. Habitat for Humanity is building homes all the time all over the country. There are groups like this that could play a big role — both homegrown and national — if we had a coalition that was ready to stand up and do this. It’s like anything else. If you come to them on the fly and ask them to do it, you can get mixed results.”
Amy Peterson — who took over for Gair as the director of New York City’s housing recovery when Bill de Blasio became mayor — agrees that there may have been too much reliance on outside contractors. But the bigger concern, she said, was that the city didn’t watch over them closely enough. Both the blessing and the curse of consultants, she added, is that they’ll do exactly what you tell them to do.
“There’s no kind of nuanced understanding of how to move people forward, how to have a bit of flexibility across this very complex program with lots of regulations,” she explained. But if you add more oversight, when the outside contractors hit roadblocks, government supervisors can step in and use their discretion to change rules as needed and get money out the door more quickly.
Another example of a lack of oversight, said Fair Share’s Adam Gordon, is that some of the state’s requests for proposals from these contractors were poorly written and nonspecific to begin with, so the companies were unclear on exactly what they were supposed to do. He said the state’s expectations were constantly shifting, leading to confusion and frustration for all parties involved.
An additional recommendation experts say would help with more-efficient recovery from future storms is having a better-trained workforce that specializes in post-disaster skills. Local governments hire outside consulting companies because they don’t have enough staff to process paperwork on their own. But the private companies often end up hiring their front-line staff through temp agencies anyway, and spend little time training them. With storms like Sandy and Katrina becoming increasingly common, it’s important to make sure there are enough adequately qualified workers in the pipeline. Certificates and college programs are emerging to fill precisely this need. The irony is that part of the solution to the problems of the disaster industry may be to make the disaster industry bigger and more permanent in the long run.
One final lesson from Katrina and Sandy is that states and cities need a better cookbook instructing them in exactly what to do after following a major storm.
“When you start a big, new program or you’re not set up to review people’s insurance and personal records and come out and inspect their homes for totally different sorts of things than you normally do, and make up the rules as you go, mistakes happen. It’s inevitable,” said New York City’s Gair, who worries that we keep reinventing the wheel. The federal government gives states like New York, New Jersey, and Louisiana the freedom to design their own housing recovery programs, and Gair appreciated that flexibility when he was the city’s Sandy Czar, but he thinks in retrospect that it actually made things way more complicated than they needed to be.
“We’ve got to figure out how to build these programs at the federal level, have them off the shelf, ready to be implemented, turned on right after the disaster and not try to build a program from scratch on each, single disaster. It just doesn’t work,” he said. After Sandy, the federal government did release some model recovery programs that it said could be used as templates adaptable to local needs. While he’s not one to advocate for increased red tape, Gair thinks that in this case, more rules and less flexibility might actually be beneficial.
The way things currently operate, in order for officials in each state to design their own housing recovery, they need to come up with a plan, hold hearings, get approval from the government, and navigate a myriad of federal regulations to make sure state laws are in compliance. And all that consumes valuable time for storm victims desperately in need of funding to rebuild their homes.
Scott Gurian is the Sandy Recovery Reporter for NJ Spotlight and NJ Public Radio; Eve Troeh is the News Director of public radio station WWNO in New Orleans; Janet Babin covers economic development issues for NJ Spotlight partner WNYC.
Copyright 2014 NJ Spotlight

NJ Spotlight, Oct. 30, 2014
By SCOTT GURIAN, EVE TROEH, AND JANET BABIN
Two years after Sandy and nearly a decade after Katrina, a look at how we screwed up and what we have learned
This is the first story in a two-part series
U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan gave Gov. Chris Christie a firm handshake and smiled for the cameras. It was April 29, 2013, six months to the day since Sandy had devastated New Jersey’s coast, and Donovan had come up from Washington to make the official announcement that the feds had approved the state’s plan for spending its first batch of $1.83 billion in recovery funding, and to start the flow of money.
The two men stood in the center of the dining room at a seafood restaurant in Highlands, one of several bay shore communities that had been devastated by the flooding. There was no oversized, Publishers Clearinghouse-style check, though the governor quipped that Donovan would later hand off the money in suitcases in the back room.
Joking aside, the HUD secretary assumed a cautious tone.
“We’ve got to be responsible with this money. And we’ve got to make sure that it’s spent right,” he said.
From the get go, a smooth recovery was doomed. The state did not have the personnel or experience to handle a disaster of this magnitude, and the federal government gave it the freedom to deal with problems as it saw fit. So New Jersey ended up hiring the very same contractors that failed with Katrina, and then it failed to oversee them closely. It took seven months to identify these problems, and once they were, the chief contractor was fired. But by then, tens of millions of dollars had already been spent.
That would all come later, though. Back in the restaurant, Donovan was optimistic New Jersey would get things right. He spoke of the need to balance safeguards against waste, fraud and abuse with getting the money out the door expeditiously, drawing upon the federal government’s experience handling past disasters. And he added that he had worked with Christie’s team to develop a program that was sure to be successful. New Jersey’s Sandy recovery, he seemed to say, wouldn’t repeat the mistakes that had plagued the Gulf Coast.
“It’s never fast enough, but it will be a lot more effective and faster than what we had in Katrina, and we’ll get better results because we’ve set it up right in the first place,” he said.
Now, a year and a half later, much of the visible damage along the coast is gone, and state officials are proudly proclaiming that they’ve committed more than $1 billion in housing assistance for storm victims. The feds have delivered to New Jersey a second tranche of $1.46 billion in aid, and a third batch is expected to arrive next spring.
Yet despite the promises of Donovan and Christie, thousands of homeowners are still waiting for long-term rebuilding aid, and popular dissatisfaction with the recovery is rampant. Along with the successes it’s had, it’s been plagued with horror stories of delays, lost paperwork, and bureaucratic red tape. A Monmouth University poll released earlier this week found widespread dissatisfaction among storm victims, who cited poor communication and responsiveness when they tried to apply for aid. And one-quarter of applicants who were denied funding from the state’s largest grant program said they don’t even fully understand why.
The problems are frustrating, but they’re not unique to New Jersey or even superstorm Sandy. New York City had many of the same issues, as did Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 and Texas after Hurricane Ike in 2008.
The failures stem from numerous reasons, beginning with paperwork requirements by the federal government and extending to the lack of accountability on the part of the state in overseeing the contractors.
In partnership with WNYC/NJ Public Radio and public radio station WWNO in New Orleans, NJ Spotlight has been investigating why disaster recovery always seems to be fraught with error and what best practices should be adopted for dealing with the aftermath of future storms. The answers to these questions, it turns out, are far from simple.
For many people, the starting point for discussions about what went wrong after Sandy revolves around the private contractors the State of New Jersey hired help manage the recovery.
It’s hard to get a complete sense of exactly how much the State has spent on outside firms. But according to the latest, publicly available Sandy Integrity Monitor report — which tracks all Sandy projects whose prices exceed $5 million — more than $90 million has been paid so far to seven firms managing large parts of the recovery (as of the quarter ending June 30).
Several of the companies the state hired have come under criticism at one point or another for their mishandling of the recovery. For example, housing advocates said CDM Smith ignored federal rules and used erroneous data in its initial action plan that later had to be revised by the state. And the Christie administration abruptly terminated URS Corp.’s contract last Februrary after it was discovered that a high percentage of grant applicants had been wrongly rejected (though officials denied the move was related to poor performance).
Perhaps the most notorious contractor-related issues to arise from New Jersey’s Sandy recovery, however, revolve around New Orleans-based Hammerman and Gainer International.
HGI wasn’t hired to conduct brick-and-mortar repairs. Instead, its tasks included processing paperwork to determine who is eligible for what sort of federal aid. The company was brought on board in May of 2013, shortly after its New Jersey law firm, Capehart Scatchard, made a $25,000 donation to the Republican Governors Association, which. Christie now heads. The RGA contributed $1.7 million to Christie’s 2013 reelection campaign.
HGI was also hired to operate nine intake centers where storm victims could apply for long term rebuilding aid. If you were one of the thousands of homeowners who needed help, you might have gone to one of these centers.
“The housing recovery centers were set up to help process applicants that didn’t feel comfortable applying either online or over the phone … primarily elderly applicants that were not particularly computer-literate,” explained “David,” a former employee who worked in a management position in one of the centers. He’s afraid that going public could hurt his chances for future employment, so we’ve agreed not to disclose his real name or other identifying details.
Like most of the other employees, David was hired through a temp agency — actually a subcontractor of a subcontractor of HGI.
“The senior people, in my opinion, were adequately qualified,” he said. “Most of the lower-level people were a mix of typical temporary workers and college students.” Few if any had any sort of experience doing this kind of work.
David said that higher-level managers received a week of training, while the rest of the employees including customer service reps were basically trained on the job. The workers shared a genuine commitment and desire to help everyone who came through their doors, he said, but they faced a series of obstacles.
“We were coached to give rote answers to questions,” he recalled. “Many of the applicants wanted more information, and we were urged not to provide further information.”
Although HGI’s initial contract was worth $68 million, he said the subcontractor that ran the centers on behalf of HGI appeared to be cutting corners to save money. The computers ran cloud-based software that had all sorts of glitches. There weren’t enough chairs for applicants to sit while they waited in long lines. And several of the centers were located in buildings that seemed to have cheaper rent but were miles from where most storm victims lived, in inconvenient areas inaccessible to public transportation.
On top of all that, there were communication difficulties, so homeowners would sometimes make appointments through the call center, but when they showed up, the staff did not know to expect them.
“The sense I got was that the management of the program was more interested in perpetuating their contract than they were in helping the victims of the storm,” David said. “I’m from New Jersey, and I live in the coastal area, and I had any number of friends that were in severe distress,” he added, “and to see a program extending their distress rather than trying to help them in the most efficient manner possible angered me.”
The problems David saw on the inside provide a window into what was going on behind the scenes of a severely broken recovery process. Meanwhile, back on the outside, the state’s recovery was met by repeated criticism from homeowners and advocacy groups over lost paperwork, repeated delays, and claims it had wrongly blocked many storm victims from getting aid.
The state had hired HGI based on its experience managing past disasters, including Hurricane Katrina. The point of hiring outside firms like this is supposed to be to provide extra manpower and make the recovery more efficient. But in this case, it wasn’t working.
Richard Constable, the New Jersey Commissioner of Community Affairs, acknowledged as much at a hearing before state lawmakers last January.
“We know there were some issues and concerns,” he said. “Once we were made aware, we wanted to make sure from a training standpoint that the housing advisors that would be hired by our consultants were well informed and could do the best job possible.”
David said he tried making suggestions for improvement at the recovery center, but his bosses were not receptive. Eventually, he was fired. State officials declined to respond to David’s specific complaints, but said they’ve taken several steps to refine the program.
“We work every day to improve customer service and employee training, and these efforts are paying off,” Lisa Ryan, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Consumer Affairs, said in an email. “The State’s recovery programs, including RREM, are running more efficiently and achieving their goals.”
For its part, HGI complained in legal filings that the state kept piling on extra work with unrealistic deadlines that went beyond what the company had originally agreed to perform.
Eventually, the Christie administration cut its ties with the firm due to “performance-related concerns,” though administration officials have never provided a public accounting of just what those concerns were. The Department of Community Affairs declined multiple requests for interviews, including even a general discussion about the use of outside contractors. According to the latest figures, HGI has received $36 million for its New Jersey work.
State officials have been less than forthcoming, so most of what’s known about the termination of HGI’s contract comes from public records uncovered by the group Fair Share Housing. The Christie administration has refused to release internal records on the firing on the grounds that they are “deliberative” and “advisory” draft documents. The company has billed the state an additional $22 million, but it’s unclear if the dispute is currently in litigation or mediation.
After HGI was fired, its duties were handed off to another contractor called ICF. At the same time, state officials assumed more of a hands-on management role than they did in the past. Housing advocates say things do appear to have improved somewhat in recent months, though it’s unclear how much of that is due to the change in contractors and how much is the result of greater oversight or the fact that the state is simply farther along in its recovery process.
VISIT THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY
LandofOpportunity, an experimental web platform that explores post-crisis community rebuilding in America, has teamed up with Sandy Storyline to produce Katrina/Sandy, an interactive timeline comparing the two disasters through personal narratives, analysis, and commentary from leading mediamakers, journalists, advocates and scholars.
View it here.
ICF is a familiar name in Louisiana, where New Jersey’s post-Sandy stumbles sound all too familiar.
After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed 200,000 homes in 2005, that state established the Road Home program to funnel billions of federal dollars to homeowners in the form of rebuilding grants. And it hired Virginia-based ICF for $900 million to administer the program. The company went public shortly after it won the Road Home contract.
But the program found critics early on.
“The company, in hindsight, we can all say should have done a better job,” said Davida Finger, a professor at the Loyola Law Clinic in New Orleans. “That program was plagued from the beginning: very serious issues with how the program was assessing damage, with how the program was estimating costs, with serious race discrimination issues that eventually went to federal court.”
Louisiana’s legislature tried to fire ICF and have the feds investigate its business practices. Finally in 2009, the state let the company’s contract expire. The company declined to comment on its Road Home work for this story. One of its partners in the program took over: HGI – the same firm that would be hired by New Jersey four years later, after Sandy, only to be let go within a year.
So in an ironic case of musical chairs, Louisiana and New Jersey made the exact opposite hiring decision, but both faced similar problems.
In Louisiana, the change in contractors did lead to some improvements, but the state still ended up fining HGI more than half a million dollars between 2009 and 2013, primarily for delays in handling applications. New Jersey officials, meanwhile, said they’d heard about HGI’s troubles in Louisiana, but hiring the firm was the best choice at the time. HGI’s proposal was $127 million less than the only other bid the state received. In addition, California-based Tetra Tech. — the other bidder — did have experience working on the Katrina and Rita recoveries along the Gulf Coast and had been contracted to rebuild levees and floodwalls, but it was very different sort of work than they were applying for here, to help manage the RREM program for Sandy-affected homeowners.
HGI, however, seemed to have exactly the sort of experience managing Louisiana’s Road Home program that Trenton was looking for.
In Louisiana, nearly a decade after Katrina, homeowners continue to battle both ICF and HGI over recovery money. Last year, the Road Home program sent letters to 50,000 residents saying they had to pay back some or all of their grants. Homeowners complain that they’ve tried to figure out which rules they’ve violated or what documentation they’ve failed to provide, and they’ve been met with unreturned phone calls or told their files are lost.
“I never could have imagined that ten years later, we’d still be hearing about Road Home and FEMA and other post-disaster programs, although people who were familiar with post-disaster work told us it would take at least ten years,” Finger said.
After Sandy, many Louisiana companies and officials helped write legislation to try to help New Jersey and New York avoid Katrina-style missteps, but it wasn’t enough.
Despite technocratic leadership under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and an expensive, top-down analysis of how to run a rebuilding program, New York City’s efforts ran up against many of the same obstacles.
The city started out vowing to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past by undertaking a comprehensive review of not just Katrina but also Hurricane Ike and the 2008 floods in Iowa.
“One of the very first things we did was we engaged the Boston Consulting Group to help us look at all the past disasters, all the problems that they had, all the lessons learned from those, and try to put together a program that would avoid those problems,” recalled Brad Gair, the city’s former Sandy Czar.
“It was easy to categorize them and classify them and identify solutions, but those solutions can’t be implemented independently at the local level, like the environmental issues that often delay these programs for months and months. We couldn’t change that unilaterally. The federal government can’t change that quickly.”
In addition, the contractors running the city’s recovery program ended up losing applicants’ paperwork as they tried to navigate the complexities of the federal Sandy legislation.
“Things go wrong in the best of circumstances, so when something’s put together quickly, implemented on the fly, more things go wrong, people start scrambling for solutions and trying to do quick fixes that may Band-aid one problem but then it just pushes the problem down the line,” Gair said. So what started out as small problems have only gotten worse over time.
“Meanwhile, the homeowners are sitting there,” he added.. “All they know is they’ve applied, they’ve done everything they’ve asked, and it’s really not very transparent to them what’s going on to cause the delays.”
Repairs on the first home in New York City using federal housing aid did not begin until March of this year, about 14 months after Congress approved the $50 billion Sandy aid package. And even though the pace has picked up considerably, a report earlier this month by the city’s Department of Investigations found that 90 percent of applicants have yet to receive any assistance from Build it Back, the city’s program.
New York City’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, has instituted numerous changes and committed to begin repairs on 1000 homes by the end of the year. But observers predict that if another disaster were to hit in the near future, many of the same problems and delays could happen all over again.
After hearing about all the problems New Jersey, New York City, and Louisiana faced, it’s easy to blame the contractors and assume that things might have turned out better if we simply hadn’t hired the same firms that had spotty track records to begin with.
But the field of disaster recovery is a relatively small world. There simply aren’t that many companies out there that do this kind of work. And many of the ones that do have encountered their share of difficulties. Furthermore, NJ Spotlight’s investigation identified a number of structural problems with how disaster recovery is handled that mean it’s likely many of these same problems would occur regardless of which firm is in charge. There will be more discussion of how to address those underlying problems in the second part of this report.
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Scott Gurian is the Sandy Recovery Reporter for NJ Spotlight and NJ Public Radio; Eve Troeh is the News Director of public radio station WWNO in New Orleans; Janet Babin covers economic development issues for NJ Spotlight partner WNYC.
Copyright 2014 NJ Spotlight