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.

========

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.

========

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.

[Posted by Ana Baptista]

Newark Star-Ledger, Oct. 8, 2013

By Erin O’Neill

A Latino advocacy organization filed a complaint against the Christie administration today charging the state with failing to provide accurate information to Spanish-speaking residents about major Hurricane Sandy grant initiatives.

The Latino Action Network said the website where residents may apply for storm recovery funding outlines the appeals process for individuals whose grant applications were denied in English, but not in Spanish. The group also said in the complaint filed with the state Department of Community Affairs that the Spanish-language version of the "reNew Jersey Stronger" website listed incorrect application deadlines and hours of operation for local recovery offices .

“It’s vital information that could make all the difference in the world,” for a resident trying to recover from the Oct. 29 storm, said Christian Estevez, vice president of the Latino Action Network.

The state Department of Community Affairs is responsible for distributing the majority of federal funds allocated to New Jersey by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for Sandy recovery. Among the grant initiatives is the Rehabilitation, Reconstruction, Elevation and Mitigation, or RREM, program. Eligible homeowners may receive up to $150,000 to help them rebuild or repair their homes through that initiative.

Another grant called the Resettlement program offers homeowners $10,000 to remain in the county where they lived before Sandy for three years.

Frank Argote-Freyre, the president of the Latino Action Network, wrote in a letter to Richard Constable, III, commissioner of the state Department of Community Affairs, that those programs “fail to provide critical and legally mandated documents, forms and other information to Spanish speakers in the language in which they are proficient.”

Lisa Ryan, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Community Affairs, said in an e-mail, "We are working hard to accommodate our Spanish-speaking residents who have been trying to access the many programs available for those impacted by Sandy. We are looking into the issues raised by this group, and if there are areas that need to be addressed, we will take action immediately."

Argote-Freyre called on the state Department of Community Affairs to take a number of steps, including: correcting all issues within seven days, agreeing to extend all deadlines for individuals who say they were impacted by incorrect Spanish-language information and appointing a monitor to ensure information is provided correctly to Spanish-language speaking residents.

The Latino Action Network has publicly endorsed state Sen. Barbara Buono, a Democrat from Middlesex County, in the gubernatorial race, against her opponent Gov. Chris Christie.

© 2013 New Jersey On-Line LLC.

N.Y. Times, Oct. 7, 2013

By Nancy Folbre

Shortly after House Republicans shut down the federal government in an effort to halt implementation of the Affordable Care Act, Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff of The New York Times reported that many Republican-controlled states have already strangled an important feature of the legislation by denying extension of Medicaid eligibility to the working poor.

Since the federal government committed to shouldering most of the cost of such extensions, the officials running these states seem to be cutting off their own noses to spite their faces. Then again, perhaps the noses they are cutting off are not their own.

Neither Republican officials nor their most valuable constituencies need help paying for health insurance. When they say they oppose government spending what they really mean is that they oppose spending on programs like Medicaid that – unlike universal programs such as Social Security – target low-income families.

The disparate racial impact is striking: 68 percent of poor and uninsured blacks live in states that are not extending eligibility, compared with 58 percent of poor and uninsured persons in other racial categories.

The concentration of negative effects in Southern states that also represent the stronghold of Congressional opposition to the law itself is not surprising. This episode of political history fits neatly into an established line of research that shows how federal efforts to extend protections to the disadvantaged have repeatedly fallen prey to a toxic blend of racial and regional politics. From civil rights to health insurance, white political leaders from states with large numbers of African-Americans — especially but not exclusively in the South — have cast new federal protections in apocalyptic terms and mounted a powerful opposition.

In her pioneering book “The Color of Welfare,” published in 1994, the sociologist Jill Quadagno persuasively documented the race-based politics that sent the United States down a policy path very different from that of other affluent countries, blocking the federal extension of most universal social programs other than Social Security and Medicare and giving states significant control over means-tested programs targeted at the poor. This control allowed politicians in Southern states to restrict benefits for low-income families, whatever their color.

A host of academic studies have explored the impact of intersections between race and class, noting, for instance, that in states with larger black populations race becomes more salient to the politics of social provision, altering the dynamics of social and political trust. Poor whites are promised protection against labor market competition or higher taxes in return for acquiescence with policies that restrict the social safety net.

As the Stanford economist Gavin Wright shows in his new history of the Civil Rights Movement, “Sharing the Prize,” Southern whites often overestimated the costs – and underestimated the benefits – that integration would bring them.

In “Disciplining the Poor,” an analysis of welfare reforms introduced in the mid-1990s, Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording and Sanford F. Schram demonstrate that states with a large number of African-Americans (especially but not exclusively in the South) imposed particularly stringent rules on access to public cash assistance, as well as keeping benefit levels extremely low.

In “Taxing the Poor,” Katherine Newman and Rourke O’Brien show that state income and sales taxes in the South are far more regressive than those in other regions of the country, penalizing all low-income families.

Overt racism and outright discrimination now elicit strong social disapproval, but racial bias takes a more subtle, coded form. In “Why Americans Hate Welfare,” Martin Gilens documents a tendency for Americans to systematically overestimate the percentage of public welfare spending going to blacks. His content analysis of pictures accompanying stories about poverty in three major newsmagazines between 1967 and 1992 showed that the frequency with which African-Americans were depicted far exceeded their actual representation in the population.

An Associated Press survey of racial attitudes conducted immediately before the presidential election last year clearly suggests that most Americans try not to discriminate, but that racial loyalties shape their perceptions of economic benefits.

When asked if President Obama’s race affected the likelihood they would vote for him, 80 percent of respondents said no. Yet 28 percent of respondents believed that his policies had made black Americans better off, compared with only 15 percent who believed they had made white Americans better off.

I don’t know of any analysis of the president’s economic stimulus program – or any other policy – purporting to show that blacks benefited more than whites. Indeed, the comparison itself is oddly optimistic, because neither black nor white Americans outside the top 1 percent of the population have enjoyed significant increases in family income since 2009.

Respondents predisposed to believe that a black president will try to benefit blacks more than whites are likely to view the Affordable Care Act through a racial lens, which helps explain the results of a recent Pew survey showing that almost 91 percent of blacks currently approve of the law, compared with 29 percent of whites.

This approval gap overshadows the effect of factors directly relevant to eligibility for assistance. Among those with annual family incomes of less than $50,000, 50 percent currently approve of the law, compared with 38 percent of those with higher incomes (who are less likely to benefit from it).

It’s important to note that many people who don’t approve (about 17 percent, according to a recent Kaiser Foundation poll) feel the Affordable Care Act doesn’t go far enough in reforming the way we pay for health care. Further, the complexity of the legislation makes it difficult for individuals to predict its economic consequences (the Pew survey reported that only 25 percent of poll respondents said they had a very good understanding of how the law would affect them).

Controversy and confusion make it easier for politicians to prey on pre-existing prejudices that serve their own interests better than those of their least influential constituents, as became apparent in the first stage of the civil rights movement.

This movement has yet to reach its final stage. Access to affordable health insurance should be considered a civil right for everyone.

© 2013 New York Times