N.Y. Times, Oct. 26, 2013

By Robert J. Sampson

We don’t talk much about “the wrong side of the tracks” in public anymore, but the distinction between one place and another is implicitly understood and often explicitly specified. That location matters greatly for housing values, for example, is taken for granted. Less appreciated is the persistence of neighborhood inequality and its extensive reach into multiple aspects of everyday life. An increasing separation at the top has intensified the effect of spatial divisions on everyone else.

Our understanding of the neighborhood as a consolidating feature of American inequality has roots in a classic tradition of scholarly research. The eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson brought the geographic isolation of poor urban blacks to public attention in 1987 in a book he famously called “The Truly Disadvantaged.” A few years later, the sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton underscored the profound separation of blacks and whites by neighborhood.

Although much has improved in the inner city since then, it is still common in American cities to find neighborhoods struggling with poverty rates well above the national average, sometimes just streets away from neighborhoods brimming with affluence. While racial segregation has modestly declined in recent decades, the latest data reveal that approximately 60 percent of blacks or whites in metropolitan areas across the United States would have to relocate to achieve racial integration. In New York City, an eye-popping 81 percent of whites or blacks would have to move.

Fifty years after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed to African-Americans on a “lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity,” racial and economic disparities by place not only remain but are closely connected. Nationwide, close to a third of African-American children born between 1985 and 2000 were raised in high-poverty neighborhoods compared with just 1 percent of whites. Crucially, income does not erase place-based racial inequality — affluent blacks typically live in poorer neighborhoods than the average lower-income white resident.

The great neighborhood divide extends to many of the fundamentals of well-being. Violence, poor physical health, teenage pregnancy, obesity, fear and dropping out of school are all unequally distributed. Getting ahead economically is also shaped by where you live, even more than you might think. Despite the effects of globalization and the rise of technologies that allow us to work or interact virtually anywhere, the economist Raj Chetty and colleagues found that upward mobility — the odds of a child raised in the bottom fifth of income rising to the top fifth as an adult — is lower for those who grew up in cities characterized by racially and economic segregated neighborhoods.

What many have come to call “mass incarceration” has a local face as well — only a small proportion of communities have experienced America’s prisoner boom whereas others are relatively untouched. I was taken aback to learn that the highest incarceration rate among African-American communities in Chicago was over 40 times higher than the highest ranked white community. This is a staggering difference of kind, not degree. And it does not go unnoticed, even by children. In one neighborhood I came across a wall behind a school with sketches of the grim faces of black men behind prison bars. An open book and diploma were drawn underneath — hope to be sure, but against a backdrop of despair.

The stigmatization and widespread social exclusion of poor neighborhoods is corrosive. Cynicism toward institutions is high despite the commitment of residents to conventional values. In Chicago, for example, lower income and minority residents are more likely to condemn smoking, drinking and fighting among teenagers than upper class or white residents. Yet concentrated poverty lowered perceived trust and social cohesion among fellow residents, reinforcing a negative feedback loop.

Even the simple act of mailing a lost letter you find lying in the street varies greatly. As part of our larger project, a team at the Institute of Social Research conducted a field experiment to determine the rate at which strangers mailed back over 3,000 stamped letters randomly dropped in the streets of Chicago. The rate of return by neighborhood ranged from zero to over 75 percent. After adjusting for things like weather conditions, land use and housing patterns, concentrated poverty predicted lower rates of return.

Less visible are the long-term consequences of growing up in concentrated poverty for human capital development. In Chicago we found that early exposure to severely disadvantaged communities was associated with diminished verbal skills later in childhood. We estimated that living in concentrated disadvantage depressed the rate of future verbal learning by about four I.Q. points, akin to missing a year of school.

An experiment begun in the mid-1990s by the Department of Housing and Urban Development looked at a similar issue in a different way. Housing vouchers were randomly assigned to poor families that could be redeemed only by moving to a lower poverty neighborhood. Even though final destinations were just marginally better, poor children whose families moved out of the most severely disadvantaged neighborhoods in Baltimore and Chicago showed the largest improvements in cognitive skills. These cities have concentrated poverty, racial segregation and violent crime rates higher than those of Boston, New York or Los Angeles, the other project sites. In other words, in cities with more desperate pockets of isolation, the move was more advantageous.

Neighborhood disadvantage can extend across surprisingly long periods of time in the lives of children and families. My colleagues and I just completed a long-term follow-up of over 1,000 children from the study in Chicago that we began in 1995. We tracked a birth cohort, 9-, 12-, and 15-year-olds, no matter where they moved in the United States. Among the near-majority of black infants born in high poverty neighborhoods in 1995, more than half remained there in 2012; 13 percent had “moved up” to low poverty.

What about downward mobility? Over a third of black infants born in low poverty ended up in high poverty neighborhoods, compared with 2 percent of white children.

The results for adolescents show even greater inequality by race: almost 70 percent of black adolescents raised in concentrated poverty areas remain there as young adults; 55 percent of the small group raised in low poverty nonetheless ended up in high poverty. Again the contrasts are striking: almost no adolescent whites experience concentrated poverty in the first place, and for the majority who were raised in low poverty, only 9 percent were downwardly mobile 17 years later.

The extent of intergenerational transmission of neighborhood disadvantage is also notable. A study by Patrick Sharkey of N.Y.U. found that approximately half of black families in the United States had lived in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods in consecutive generations since the 1970s, compared with only 7 percent of white families.

Inequality may persist in the lives of individuals, but what about neighborhoods themselves? Do the same neighborhoods remain poor decade after decade, or is poverty “reshuffled”? And what about gentrification?

Although there is always population turnover of individual residents and fluctuations in the poverty rate over time, it turns out that if we know where a neighborhood starts out statistically, we can do rather well predicting where it will end up relative to other neighborhoods. Many poor neighborhoods get stuck for decades.

The “stickiness” of inequality by place is also notable at the high end. The Gold Coast of Chicago is as golden as ever, and elite neighborhoods from the Upper East Side of New York to Bel-Air in Los Angeles are in no danger of even relative decline.

These durable inequalities seem paradoxical when we consider the changing American landscape. Poverty is increasing most rapidly in the suburbs, crime has decreased just about everywhere, and gentrification is reshaping many working-class and poor areas of central cities. New York is the poster child these days for crime reduction and a new type of urban renewal. The media has focused attention on Brooklyn, for example, highlighting neighborhoods undergoing gentrification that were in despair not long ago.

The phenomenon is real but the fact that it makes the news is precisely the point — “rags to riches” is no more common among neighborhoods than it is among people. For every poor neighborhood on the move, more struggle out of the media glare. And while large cities like Detroit have been much in the news for spectacular failure, smaller cities and towns like Flint, Mich., and Port Clinton, Ohio, contain some of America’s poorest and hardest-hit neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, many social policies tend to accentuate these trends rather than mitigate them. The persistent geography of inequality is reinforced by exclusionary zoning, persistent red lining, selective withdrawal of public services, the segregation of low-income public housing, “stop and frisk” policing concentrated in minority areas, school funding tied to property values and the political fragmentation of metropolitan areas. The city line is more than just geography, it typically means a sharp social boundary.

The good news is that we are experimenting with a number of policies, some place-based and others person-based. Both are needed, but in either case the durability of poverty calls for profound long-term investments. Although funding levels are still too low relative to the magnitude of the challenge, sustained investment in disadvantaged communities is at the core of the Obama administration’s “Promise Zones” initiative, modeled in part after Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. There are also some encouraging results from a long-term effort to develop mixed-income housing in suburban Mount Laurel, N.J. In addition to promoting quality early childhood education and affordable housing, reducing violence must be central to any community intervention.

There is no magic bullet, however, and historical trends caution against quick solutions. In a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, neighborhoods have an effect on people’s lives in part because people and institutions act as if neighborhoods matter, further reinforcing the reproduction of inequality by place. Crime, perceived safety and the quality of local schools lead to reputations that have real consequences. Neighborhood reputations may well be sturdier than those of individuals, a point not lost on real estate agents.

The tendency of humans to segregate by place has also persisted across long time spans and eras despite the transformation of specific boundaries, political regimes and the layout of cities. Research by archaeologists indicates that spatial divisions like ours were found in ancient cities, too.

The greatest divisions of place today are at the very top, creating what we might call the new 1 percent neighborhoods. In recent decades, cities have been pulling apart; income inequality by neighborhood has increased. As a consequence, the kinds of mixed-income neighborhoods many of us remember from growing up have grown rarer, while exclusively affluent and exclusively poor neighborhoods have grown much more common.

The Great Recession has exacerbated this divergence. Just as they have been among individuals, economic hardships have been unequally shared by neighborhoods: poverty, vacancy rates and particularly unemployment rates increased at a greater clip in disadvantaged and minority neighborhoods from 2005 to 2011 than elsewhere.

We live in a free society, of course, but the high-end spatial concentration of income and its associated resources, like well-endowed schools, security, abundant services and political connections, in effect pulls up the drawbridge from our neighbors. The hypersegregation of “the truly advantaged” speaks volumes about the continuing significance of place and raises important questions about what kind of society we want to be.

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Robert J. Sampson is a professor of the social sciences at Harvard and the author of “Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect.”

© 2013 New York Times

N.Y. Times, Oct. 21, 2013

By Stephen Castle, Reuters

London — In a 2008 biography he wrote of an antislavery campaigner, Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, described the trade in human beings as an indefensible barbarity, “brutal, mercenary and inhumane from its beginning to its end.”

Fourteen Caribbean countries that once sustained that slave economy now want Mr. Hague to put his money where his mouth is.

Spurred by a sense of injustice that has lingered for two centuries, the countries plan to compile an inventory of the lasting damage they believe they suffered and then demand an apology and reparations from the former colonial powers of Britain, France and the Netherlands.

To present their case, they have hired a firm of London lawyers that this year won compensation from Britain for Kenyans who were tortured under British colonial rule in the 1950s.

Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, but its legacy remains. In 2006, Tony Blair, then prime minister, expressed his “deep sorrow” over the slave trade; the Dutch social affairs minister, Lodewijk Asscher, made a similar statement in July.

Britain has already paid compensation over the abolition of the slave trade once — but to slave owners, not their victims. Britain transported more than three million Africans across the Atlantic, and the impact of the trade was vast. Historians estimate that, in the Victorian era, between one-fifth and one-sixth of all wealthy Britons derived at least some of their fortunes from the slave economy.

Yet the issue of apologies — let alone reparations — for the actions of long-dead leaders and generals remains a touchy one all over the globe. Turkey refuses to take particular responsibility for the mass deaths of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, let alone call the event a genocide, as the French Parliament has done. It was not until 1995 that France’s president at the time, Jacques Chirac, apologized for the crimes against the Jews of the Vichy government. The current French president, François Hollande, conceded last year that France’s treatment of Algeria, its former colony, was “brutal and unfair.” But he did not go so far as to apologize.

His predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, offered an aid and debt-cancellation package to Haiti in 2010 while acknowledging the “wounds of colonization.”

In Britain, in 1997, Mr. Blair described the potato famine in Ireland in the late 1840s as “something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today,” but suffering pain is not the same thing as making a formal apology.

For some, such comments do not go far enough, particularly when some European nations, like postwar Germany, have apologized — the former chancellor Willy Brandt went to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 — and paid reparations for Nazi crimes.

Caribbean nations argue that their brutal past continues, to some extent, to enslave them today.

“Our constant search and struggle for development resources is linked directly to the historical inability of our nations to accumulate wealth from the efforts of our peoples during slavery and colonialism,” said Baldwin Spencer, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, in July this year. Reparations, he said, must be directed toward repairing the damage inflicted by slavery and racism.

Martyn Day, the senior partner at Leigh Day, the London law firm acting for the Caribbean countries, said a case could start next year at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, a tribunal that adjudicates legal disputes among states.

“What happened in the Caribbean and West Africa was so egregious we feel that bringing a case in the I.C.J. would have a decent chance of success,” Mr. Day said. “The fact that you were subjugating a whole class of people in a massively discriminatory way has no parallel,” he added.

Some Caribbean nations have already begun assessing the lasting damage they suffered, ranging from stunted educational and economic opportunities to dietary and health problems, Mr. Day said.

Critics contend that it makes no sense to try to redress wrongs that reach back through the centuries, and that Caribbean countries already receive compensation through development aid.

The legal terrain is not encouraging. Though several American and British companies have apologized for links to slavery, efforts by descendants of 19th-century African-American slaves to seek reparations from corporations in American courts have so far come to little. And, unlike the successful case made in Britain by Kenyans tortured during the Mau Mau uprising, there are no victims of slavery to present in court.

Even that case was disputed initially by a British government worried that it would expose itself to claims from numerous former colonies. And when he agreed to pay compensation, Mr. Hague insisted this was not a precedent.

Though Parliament abolished the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, the law took years to put into effect. In 1833, Parliament spent £20 million compensating former slave owners — 40 percent of government expenditure that year, according to estimates by Nick Draper of University College, London, who estimates the present-day value at about $21 billion.

Mr. Draper’s work traced recipients of compensation and showed they included ancestors of the authors Graham Greene and George Orwell, as well as a very distant relative of Prime Minister David Cameron.

But the prospects for a modern-day legal case for reparations by victims are far from clear. Roger O’Keefe, deputy director of the Lauterpacht Center for International Law at Cambridge University, said that “there is not the slightest chance that this case will get anywhere,” describing it as “an international legal fantasy.”

He argues that while the Netherlands and Britain have accepted the court’s jurisdiction in advance, Britain excluded disputes relating to events arising before 1974.

“Reparation may be awarded only for what was internationally unlawful when it was done,” Dr. O’Keefe said, “and slavery and the slave trade were not internationally unlawful at the time the colonial powers engaged in them.”

Even lawyers for the Caribbean countries hint that a negotiated settlement, achieved through public and diplomatic pressure, may be their best hope. “We are saying that, ultimately, historical claims have been resolved politically — although I think we will have a good claim in the I.C.J.,” Mr. Day said.

Mr. Hague’s own views add an intriguing dimension. In his biography of Britain’s most famous abolitionist, William Wilberforce, Mr. Hague highlighted many atrocities of slavery, including a case in 1783 involving a slave ship that ran out of drinking water, prompting its captain to throw 133 slaves overboard so he could claim insurance for lost cargo.

In 2007, on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the trade, Mr. Hague spoke of his deep regret over “an era in which the sale of men, women and children was carried out lawfully on behalf of this country, and on such a vast scale that it became a large and lucrative commercial enterprise.”

But as foreign secretary, Mr. Hague is opposed to compensation. In a statement, his office said that while Britain “condemns slavery” and is committed to eliminating it where it still exists, “we do not see reparations as the answer.”

© 2013 New York Times

N.Y. Times, Oct. 19, 2013

By David L. Kirp

Suburbia beckons many poor and working-class families with the promise of better schools, access to non-dead-end jobs and sanctuary from the looming threat of urban violence. But many suburbanites balk at the prospect of affordable housing in their midst.

They fear that when poor people move next door crime, drugs, blight, bad public schools and higher taxes inevitably follow. They worry that the value of their homes will fall and the image of their town will suffer. It does not help that the poor are disproportionately black and Latino. The added racial element adds to the opposition that often emerges in response to initiatives designed to help poor families move to suburbs from inner cities.

Are the fears supported by facts? A comprehensive new analysis of what has transpired in Mount Laurel, N.J., since 140 units of affordable housing were built in that verdant suburb in 2000, answers with a resounding “no.”

Families with incomes as low as $8,150 — one-third of the poverty level — have been living in a town where the median income is 10 times higher for a family of four. “Climbing Mount Laurel,” co-written by the Princeton sociologist Douglas S. Massey and several colleagues, concludes that this affordable housing has had zero impact on the affluent residents of that community — crime rates, property values and taxes have moved in step with nearby suburbs — while the lives of the poor and working-class families who moved there have been transformed.

In suburbs across America, the houses, schools, swimming pools and golf courses look just like those in Mount Laurel. The socioeconomic backgrounds of their residents are similar as well. Even the names of the subdivisions in Mount Laurel — the Lakes, Laurel Knoll, Tricia Meadows — are familiar in suburbia. So there is reason to believe that what’s happening in Mount Laurel can be readily repeated.

The Mount Laurel story begins on a Sunday morning in October 1970, when 60 black residents gathered in Jacob’s Chapel, a Methodist church. The parishioners were deeply troubled by the fact that their sleepy farm town was being quickly transformed into a wealthy suburb in which many parishioners could no longer afford to live. They gathered in the chapel to await word on a proposal from a community group to build 36 affordable garden apartments in the center of town.

According to those present, the news was not good. “If you people can’t afford to live in our town,” a township official told the congregation, “then you’ll just have to leave.” The blunt announcement turned a modest request into a movement that spanned several decades.

For 30 years, local officials waged a battle against affordable housing, as “Mount Laurel” came to symbolize the struggle over the socioeconomic integration of suburbia. In “Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia,” which my Berkeley colleagues John P. Dwyer and Larry A. Rosenthal and I published in 1995, we chronicled the controversy. It wasn’t pretty.

Jose A. Alvarez, who was mayor in 1975 when the New Jersey Supreme Court sided with the parishioners in one of the most important civil rights decisions since Brown v. Board of Education, regarded the proposed housing units as a deathly threat. “It’s like grafting a good healthy skin so you can graft in cancer skin and blend it in,” he told me. As Judge Edward V. Martino, who presided over the first trial in the case in 1971, said to me, township officials “were treating these people like cattle, even calling them the scum of the earth.”

With the town finding one excuse after another to keep out affordable housing, the New Jersey Supreme Court issued a second landmark ruling in 1983. In the decision, known as Mount Laurel II, the justices ordered all New Jersey suburbs to rewrite their zoning laws and allow a “fair share” of affordable housing. But that was hardly the end of it. Not until 1997, after endless planning board hearings, council meetings, and multiple attempts to reach a legislative solution, was the housing development finally approved.

In 1999, construction started on the affordable housing complex. A year later, the first tenants moved into the Ethel R. Lawrence Homes, town houses whose clean, contemporary exteriors and manicured lawns blended in with nearby market-rate developments. Many came from disadvantaged communities like Camden, just 15 miles away, which has the nation’s highest crime rate.

“A ghetto in the field” was how some townspeople envisioned the new housing. “Everyone was scared, apprehensive of the unknown,” recalls Mount Laurel’s former mayor, Peter McCaffrey, who had been booed by his constituents for supporting the venture. No one could predict whether life in and around the Mount Laurel complex would affirm or mock the ideals of faith, hope, tolerance and equality, names given to streets in the complex.

Thirteen years later the answer is at hand, and it is unambiguously positive. “Climbing Mount Laurel” shows that the well-off residents of the town have been unaffected by the new housing. There have been changes in life in Mount Laurel. But the changes are entirely consistent with those in demographically similar suburbs that surround the township. In all these communities, crime rates fell. Property values rose during the housing boom and dipped during the recession. Tax rates declined. Even in the Mount Laurel neighborhoods closest to the affordable housing, property values were unaffected. To most residents, the fact that poor families now live in Mount Laurel has proved entirely irrelevant. Today, many well-to-do Mount Laurel residents don’t even know that affordable housing exists there.

Where you live profoundly shapes who you are. “I would go as far as to argue that what is truly American is not so much the individual but neighborhood inequality,” concludes the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson in his landmark 2012 book, “Great American City.” The families that migrated to Mount Laurel — earning from 10 to 60 percent of median income — obtained more than a nicer house. They secured a new lease on life, a pathway out of poverty for the adults and a solid education for the children.

“Climbing Mount Laurel” makes good use of what social scientists call a natural experiment — since there weren’t enough units to accommodate everyone who wanted to live there, the researchers could compare the experiences of the successful and unsuccessful applicants. At the outset the two groups led similar lives, but much has changed since then.

Those who didn’t secure housing report that their neighborhoods remain pockmarked by violence. But the families who came to Mount Laurel have settled into a tranquil world — so quiet, one resident tells me, that for the first year she had to keep the TV on to fall asleep. Deer are a familiar sight, and frogs sometimes land on their doorstep. “I used to be afraid of gunshots,” another tenant says. “Now I’m afraid of skunks.”

With less stress and better job opportunities, these families have done much better economically than the nonresidents. Two-thirds are working, compared with just over half of the nonresidents, and a third as many, 4 percent, are on welfare. The sizable earnings gap, $19,687 versus $12,912 from wages, helps push the tenants living in the new housing out of poverty. The longer they stay in Mount Laurel, the better jobs they get and the more economically independent they become.

Their youngsters have also fared better. They study twice as many hours and spend more time reading. That extra effort is paying off — even though their schools are more academically rigorous, they earn slightly better grades.

On a sweltering day in August 2002, a thousand people came to the formal dedication ceremony in Mount Laurel. The civil rights icon Julian Bond described the moment as “bittersweet.” To those who fought so long to open up this suburb, he said, the new homes were a proud achievement. But what about the poor people “locked into inner-city blight”?

The woes of the inner cities cannot be solved by opening up the suburbs. Many urban dwellers, embedded in networks of kith and kin, wouldn’t dream of swapping the spiciness of the city for the white-bread pleasures of suburbia. And as “Climbing Mount Laurel” points out, “those mired in substance abuse, criminality, family violence and household instability” need more support than simply “a decent home in a peaceful neighborhood with good schools.” Still, millions of families, trapped in terrible neighborhoods, would jump at the chance to move to a place like Mount Laurel.

“I wish other places could learn from our example,” says Mr. McCaffrey, the former mayor, but that hasn’t happened. Affordable housing is still too rare in suburbia, as zoning laws continue to segregate poor and working-class families. Despite the track record in Mount Laurel and the promise it holds for neighborhoods around the country, it’s hard to imagine that the suburban drawbridge will be lowered anytime soon. It is a truism that fear and prejudice are not readily ousted by facts.

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David L. Kirp is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools.”

NRDC Switchboard, Oct. 17, 2013

By John Walke

A new report from the World Health Organization’s (WHO) cancer research agency announced the classification of outdoor air pollution and particulate matter as known human carcinogens. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) independently reviewed over 1,000 of the latest scientific studies on air pollution across five continents to conclude there is sufficient evidence to show that with increased levels of air pollution and particulate matter (commonly known as soot pollution), cancer risks increase too. As my colleague Dr. Jennifer Sass noted, “[t]he link is strongest for lung cancer, but bladder cancer was also flagged as a risk.”

This places particulate matter and outdoor air pollution in the company of asbestos, plutonium, silica dust, ultraviolet radiation and tobacco smoke. The IARC lists all of these as “Group 1” carcinogens (the highest classification) that are known to be carcinogenic to humans.

Beyond causing cancer, the report confirms that “[a]ir pollution is already known to increase risks for a wide range of diseases, such as respiratory and heart diseases.” These findings have been confirmed by numerous peer-reviewed studies and the 2010 Global Burden of Disease report, which estimated that particulate matter worldwide caused “over 2.1 million premature deaths and 52 million years of healthy life lost in 2010 due to ambient fine particle air pollution.”

Despite this overwhelming scientific consensus that “[t]he air we breathe has become polluted with a mixture of cancer-causing substances”, Republicans in Congress have repeatedly attacked the extensive science on this pollution in an effort to undermine health-protective EPA standards that limit soot pollution.

In 2011, Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) asserted at a congressional hearing on EPA clean air standards that even though he is not a “medical doctor” there is no “medical negative” to particulate pollution. In response to this astonishing statement, the American Lung Association, American Public Health Association and American Academy of Pediatrics wrote the Congressman expressing “shock… at such statements.” These doctors stated that they “see in the patients we treat what… the scientific literature lets us know to expect: that air pollution makes people sick and cuts lives short.”

But the political attacks did not stop there. For a June 2012 hearing attacking clean air safeguards and particulate matter science, House Republicans on the Energy and Environment Subcommittee declined to invite respected scientists from the National Academy of Sciences, Health Effects Institute, American Heart Association or U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, all of which have found a causal relationship between particulate matter and mortality. Instead, House Republicans chose to invite a Texas state official who presented outlier testimony that “[s]ome studies even suggest PM [particulate matter] makes you live longer.”

Most recently, Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) of the House Science Committee subpoenaed EPA to seize confidential patient data underlying one study showing the linkage between particle pollution and premature death. I’ve outlined the problems with this outrageous witch hunt here.

While House Republicans waste time attacking well-established science that clearly shows the devastating health impacts from air pollution, the IARC’s report tells us that “[t]here are effective ways to reduce air pollution and, given the scale of the exposure affecting people worldwide, this report should send a strong signal to the international community to take action.” Denial by politicians won’t reduce this deadly pollution. Only health-protective standards will.

The IARC report underscores the urgency of cleaning up the sources of dangerous particulate matter―such as dirty diesel fuels and dirty coal plants, both in the U.S. and globally―to limit the outdoor air pollution that we know leads to heart attacks, asthma attacks, premature death and now, cancer.

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John Walke is Clean Air Director/ Senior Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Washington, D.C.

Associated Press, Oct.17, 2013

PITTSBURGH — Thousands of young environmentalists from around the country are heading to Pittsburgh, planning to strengthen the green movement by involving more people of different races and backgrounds.

The four-day Power Shift conference beginning Friday takes on some traditional issues in a new way. Organizers are fighting coal mining, fracking for oil and gas, and climate change, but doing it through sessions such as "Racism and the Climate Movement," ”Sex and Sustainability," ”Young Leaders from Puerto Rico’s Frontlines," and "Lessons from Transgender Activism."

Power Shift, the Sierra Club and other groups are making a concentrated effort to reach working-class black, Latino, and Asian communities, seeking to change the typically mostly white and upper-class membership of national environmental groups. The meeting in Pittsburgh is the first Power Shift conference outside of Washington, D.C., where conference organizer Energy Action Coalition is based.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, chief executive of Green For All, said the lack of diversity within the environmental movement is "shocking." She said it’s important to note that "communities of color really have a strong environmental record, they just don’t have a strong connection" to national groups.

"We just didn’t call it environmentalism. We just did it to survive," she said of such practices as recycling.

Ellis-Lamkins said the challenge for the environmental movement is to get minority and working class people to expect and demand both good jobs and clean air and water.

About 8,000 people are expected to attend the meeting, which includes training sessions and evening music concerts.

Conference spokesman Whit Jones said the group doesn’t ask attendees to list their race so a breakdown on those attending isn’t available. But he estimated hundreds of students are coming from historically black colleges and universities.

There’s little debate that minority communities suffer from excessive pollution. A 2012 report from the NAACP found that in areas around the 12 most-polluting coal-fired power plants in the U.S., people of color were about 76 percent of the population.

Allison Chin, a past president of the Sierra Club, said environmentalists won’t become a more diverse group "without us rolling up our sleeves." She said the Sierra Club has launched programs to provide environmental training, scholarships and even jobs to people from minority communities, as well as a Spanish language website, Ecocentro.

That kind of outreach helped attract Erica Thames, a 23-year-old woman with a multi-racial background who lives in Inland Empire east of Los Angeles and now works for the Sierra Club.

"In the past, the environmental movement has been upper-middle class, white male. I’m really excited that it’s getting more inclusive," said Thames, who’s working on a project to bring rooftop solar panels to her heavily polluted, working-class community, which also suffers from high unemployment.

Thames said many of her friends and neighbors were skeptical when she began the project, partly because some recalled that in 2004 an anti-immigration faction ran for seats on the national Sierra Club board. The battle spawned allegations of racism, lawsuits and ugly headlines before the anti-immigration candidates were defeated.

Thames said that at first community groups "didn’t want anything to do with us" because they suspected an elitist underside to the environmental agenda. Then, she had to deal with practical questions.

"People were like, how does that apply to me really? I don’t have $20,000 to put rooftop solar on my house," said Thames, who would then explain that solar panels would mean jobs for local construction workers, savings for the property owners in lower electric bills and cleaner air for everyone.

"When you start talking about health benefits and jobs, people become really intrigued," she said.

Bill McKibben, a leader in the national climate change group 350.org, said in an email to The Associated Press that diversity among environmentalists is critical to the fight to limit damage from climate change.

"It’s people on front-line communities who are crucial to leading this fight — and the hardest hit front-line communities, not surprisingly, are full of poor people and people of color," said McKibben, who plans to speak at the conference.

Information Clearing House, Oct. 10, 2013

Racism: A History

A three-part British documentary series originally broadcast on BBC Four in March 2007.
Documentary explores the impact of racism on a global scale. How racist ideas and practices developed in key religious and secular institutions, and how they showed up in writings by European philosophers Aristotle and Immanuel Kant.
The series explores the impact of racism on a global scale and chronicles the shifts in the perception of race and the history of racism in Europe, the Americas, Australia and Asia.
Part 1
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=efI6T8lovqY]

Part 2
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IdBDRbjx9jo]

Part 3
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oCJHJWaNL-g]

Truthout, Oct. 10, 2013

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

American pundits are missing the bigger point about the Republican shutdown of the U.S. government and the GOP’s threatened default on America’s credit. The real question is not what policy concessions the Tea Partiers may extract, but rather can a determined right-wing white minority ensure continuation of white supremacy in the United States?

For years, political scientists have been talking about how the demographic changes in the United States are inexorably leading to a Democratic majority, with Hispanics and Asian-Americans joining African-Americans and liberal urban whites to erode the political domains of white conservatives and white racists.

But those predictions have always assumed a consistent commitment to the democratic principle of one person, one vote – and a readiness of Republicans to operate within the traditional standards of democratic governance. But what should now be crystal clear is that those assumptions are faulty.

Instead of accepting the emergence of this more diverse and multi-cultural America, the Right – through the Tea Party-controlled Republicans – has decided to alter the constitutional framework of the United States to guarantee the perpetuation of white supremacy and the acceptance of right-wing policies.

In effect, we are seeing the implementation of a principle enunciated by conservative thinker William F. Buckley in 1957: “The white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.” Except now the Buckley rule is being applied nationally.

A Nationwide Strategy

This reality is hard to deny even though much of the U.S. political elite remains in denial. But the truth is apparent in a host of anti-democratic moves that have emanated from the lily-white Tea Party and that have been implemented by the predominantly white Republican Party at both the state and federal levels.

It’s there in the nationwide campaign to impose “ballot security” by requiring photo IDs for voting to cure the virtually non-existent problem of in-person voting fraud. The well-documented result of requiring photo IDs will be to reduce the number of urban minority voters who are less likely to have driver’s licenses and other approved identification.

It’s there in the reduction of voting hours, which — when combined with disproportionately fewer (and less efficient) voting booths in poor and minority areas — guarantees long lines and further skews the political power to wealthier white areas. In the pivotal election of 2000, we saw how this combination of factors in Florida suppressed the vote for Al Gore and handed the White House to the national vote loser George W. Bush.

It’s there in the sophisticated gerrymandering that Republican statehouses have applied to congressional districts around the country by lumping minorities and other Democratic voters together in one deformed district so other districts have comfortable Republican majorities.

This gerrymandering – now aided by computer models to remove any guesswork – played an important role in maintaining the current Republican “majority” in the House of Representatives even though congressional Republicans lost the national popular vote in 2012 by about 1½ million votes.

Congressional Tactics

The Right’s anti-democratic strategy is there, too, in the endless use of Republican filibusters in the U.S. Senate. Because of compromises made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, some of this anti-democratic bias was built into the system (from a deal to assure the small states that they would not be overwhelmed by the large states under the Constitution, which concentrated power in the federal government).

Except for that long-ago compromise, there is no logical reason why the 240,000 registered voters in Wyoming should have the same number of senators as the 18 million registered voters in California. (Or why the 400,000 registered voters in the District of Columbia should have none.)
However, this violation of democracy’s one-person, one-vote principle is exacerbated in the U.S. Senate when Republicans filibuster even minor bills and demand that Democrats muster 60 votes in the 100-seat Senate to proceed. That means that a handful of lightly populated states can block legislative action favored by large majorities of the American people, such as requiring background checks on gun-show purchasers.

Republicans also have found endless excuses to deny congressional voting rights to Washington DC residents. You can probably guess what color skin many DC citizens have and what political party they favor.

The New Jim Crow

If you step back and take a look at this ugly landscape, what you will see is something akin to a new Jim Crow system, a sickening reprise of what happened the last time white supremacists saw their political and cultural dominance threatened in the years after the Civil War.

In the late 1860s and 1870s, the two parties were on the opposite sides of the racial-equality issue. Then, the Republicans pressed for a reconstruction of the South to assure civil rights for blacks. However, the Democrats, the old party of slavery, acted to frustrate, sabotage and ultimately defeat those efforts.

What the United States then got was nearly a century of racial segregation across large swaths of the country although most egregious in the South. It was not until the 1960s when the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson broke with the old traditions of collaborating with the Old Confederacy. These new Democrats instead supported civil rights legislation pushed by Martin Luther King Jr. and other advocates for racial equality.
However, opportunistic Republicans, such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, saw an opening to flip the electoral map by snaking away the South’s resentful white racists from the Democrats and locking them into the Republican Party. The maneuver – cloaked in coded messages about states’ rights and hostility toward the federal government – proved astoundingly successful.

Still, the white supremacists faced a politically existential problem. They were demographically fading from their historic dominance, steadily replaced in numbers by Hispanics, Asian-Americans and blacks as well as by younger whites who viewed racial bigotry as a disgusting residue from the age-old crimes of slavery and segregation.

Countering Demographics

So what to do? Right-wing billionaires helped by pouring in vast sums to create a powerful right-wing propaganda machine, an ideological media unparalleled in American history. The loud voices and angry words from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Rupert Murdoch whipped up white grievances, but – as the election and reelection of African-American Barack Obama showed – more was needed.

The votes of non-whites and the young needed to be suppressed via manipulated election rules; the use of scientific gerrymandering had to be expanded to further devalue Democratic votes; obstructionism in Congress had to become the rule, not the exception.

Finally, it became clear that a de facto transformation of the constitutional system was needed to prevent the rule of this emerging – and “undeserving” – majority. Thus, government by extortion became the ultimate solution.

By using the Republican House and its gerrymandered “majority” to prevent votes on straightforward bills to pay for the government and raise the debt ceiling, the Tea Party is now testing whether the majority of the nation can be coerced into accepting the demands of a right-wing minority through threats of economic calamity.

Even some Republicans seem confused about their short-term goals. Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Indiana, declared, “we’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

But the message that the Tea Party Republicans are delivering to the nation is that if the American people insist on electing Democratic presidents or enacting federal legislation to “promote the general Welfare,” the Tea Party will respond by making the economy scream. The economic dislocations from a credit default alone could be so severe that millions of people will be thrown out of work and out of their homes.

The implicit warning is that you will suffer that fate — you may be driven into poverty — if you don’t let whites continue to rule. Or as the urbane William Buckley put it, you must let whites “prevail, politically and culturally.”

An Unthinkable Idea?

For those Americans who recoil at this scenario – and think it must be unthinkable in the Twenty-First Century – they should remember their history. In the 1870s, racist whites – especially in the South but also in many parts of the North – refused to accept post-Civil War amendments that guaranteed equal rights and voting rights for blacks.

Through connivance and violence, the racist whites prevailed and it took nearly a century – and much more bloodshed – to reverse their victories. What America is witnessing today is the next phase of that war for white supremacy. Well-meaning people should not be too cavalier about the outcome.

The Tea Party-induced government shutdown and the upcoming extortion demands over the debt ceiling may indeed turn out to be the white man’s last tantrum – but this extremist strategy of mayhem and extortion could also be the inauguration of a grim new era of Jim Crow.

© 2013 Truthout

N.Y. Times, Oct. 6, 2013
By the Editorial Board
The basic outlines of poverty in America are sadly familiar. At last count, 46.5 million people were poor — 15 percent of the population. Women and children, especially in single-mother families, were, as always, hit hardest.
Another group, people 65 and older, now seems vulnerable as well. In analyzing the recent Census Bureau report on poverty, researchers at the National Women’s Law Center foundthat from 2011 to 2012, the rate of extreme poverty rose by a statistically significant amount among those 65 and older, meaning that a growing number of them were living at or below 50 percent of the poverty line. In 2012, this was $11,011 a year for an older person living alone.
An additional 135,000 older women became extremely poor in 2012, raising the extreme-poverty rate in that group to 3.1 percent, And 100,000 older men were extremely poor in 2012, raising the extreme-poverty rate in that group to 2.3 percent In all, nearly 1.2 million people age 65 and up were classified as extremely poor in 2012.
The increase in extreme poverty requires utmost attention. For the most part, Social Security has protected older Americans from poverty. In cases where older people are poor, the afflicted often have been very old women, who have long outlived their spouses and any nest egg.
In the law center’s research, however, the increase in extreme poverty was concentrated in the 65-to-75 age group. Some of them could be among the long-term unemployed, whose jobless benefits have been cut or run out. Or they might be people who would generally qualify for public assistance in addition to Social Security but are having trouble getting those benefits in the face of administrative cutbacks at the state and federal levels.
The numbers alone don’t say why extreme poverty has risen or whether the rise will be lasting or fleeting. But other data echo the law center’s findings. The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which tracks a larger sample than in its poverty report, shows an increase in poverty among those 65 and older, from 9.0 percent in 2010 to 9.3 percent in 2011 and 9.5 percent in 2012. That is not a record; poverty rates for that group have reached 9.9 percent
But it would be devastating if recent increases became a growing trend. For now, the best policy response is to do no harm. For example, budget proposals to cut Social Security’s cost-of-living benefit, ill advised in any case, would be especially unwise and untimely.