NJ Spotlight, July 1, 2013
By Colleen O’Dea
In 1975, Mount Laurel was the first ruling in the country to prohibit communities from enacting "exclusionary zoning" practices.
Named after a South Jersey township, the Mount Laurel decisions are New Jersey Supreme Court rulings that have defined the responsibility communities have to provide a certain amount, known as their “fair share,” of affordable housing to people with low or moderate incomes.
What it means
Every New Jersey municipality must provide its share of affordable housing. The first Mount Laurel decision, in 1975, was the first of its kind in the nation, prohibiting municipalities from “exclusionary zoning” practices, so towns cannot enact land-use rules that make it impossible for affordable housing to be built. The second decision, in 1983, went further and ordered communities to provide housing for those with low or moderate incomes. In response, the state Legislature passed theFair Housing Act that created the Council on Affordable Housing to determine municipal housing needs and approve plans to meet those needs.
History
In the 1960s, then-rural Mount Laurel began developing housing and commercial units designed to attract tax ratables and middle- and upper-middle-class families. At the same time, the township was condemning substandard homes – some wereconverted chicken coops — of mostly poor blacks, who worked on the farms. They could not afford the new single-family homes. A nonprofit group sought approval to build 36 garden apartments for displaced residents and the township turned them down, with the mayor saying that anyone who couldn’t afford to live there should leave town. So a group of citizens led by Ethel R. Lawrence, who has been called the Rosa Parks of affordable housing, and the NAACPs of Southern Burlington and Camden filed a class-action lawsuit against Mount Laurel.
The case ultimately made it to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which in March 1975 issued what would become an oft-cited decision barring the practice of exclusionary zoning. The court ruled that all municipalities, through zoning, had to allow enough housing for people of all classes, including the low- and moderate-income, to meet its share of the need in its region. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge.
Mount Laurel II
But many municipalities refused to follow the decision. Mount Laurel itself rezoned three tracts of land that were less than ideal – one site was in an industrial park and another was wetlands. The plaintiffs went back to court, saying the township had not met the Supreme Court mandate. They lost in Superior Court and appealed, prompting the state Supreme Court’s Mount Laurel II ruling.
In that decision, the court said that every municipality must provide its “fair share” of the regional need and set up some requirements for doing so. Towns have to provide realistic zoning opportunities for the housing and show how their zoning and other actions would lead to the actual construction of affordable housing. It also established the “builder’s remedy,” allowing a developer willing to make 20 percentof a development low- and moderate-income housing to sue for a zoning change.
Fair Housing Act of 1985
In response, the Legislature passed the Fair Housing Act of 1985, creating theCouncil on Affordable Housing, which oversaw municipal efforts at providing housing for the low- and moderate-income. COAH was charged with devising municipal housing quotas every six years. Voluntary participation in the council would protect a municipality from builder’s remedy lawsuits.
Some towns have complied and others have not, choosing to try their luck in the courts instead. The Mount Laurel decisions have led to the construction of about40,000 affordable units throughout the state. But some municipal officials continue to balk at providing any such housing.
Legal Challenges
The system is currently in a state of uncertainty. The third set of quotas issued by COAH cut housing obligations and exempted municipalities that choose not to grow from having to provide any additional affordable units. They also allow communities to transfer half of their obligation to another municipality and fulfill up to half their units with senior-citizen housing. The Appellate Division of Superior Court ruled in January 2007 that those rules violated the earlier Mount Laurel decisions and the FHA and ordered COAH to issue new regulations. It did so in October 2008 and those are the subject of a current legal challenge.
The COAH Conundrum
In the meantime, Gov. Chris Christie tried to abolish COAH twice and ultimately was told by the courts that he did not have the authority to do so. Legislators have sought to do the same, but have not been able to agree with Christie on a new mechanism to replace the COAH process. The council has met only once since the court ordered its reinstatement and that was primarily to start the process of taking money meant to help build affordable housing from municipalities and giving it to the state. That action, too, has been the subject of court action. And while COAH has not been functioning, little affordable housing has been built.

NRDC Switchboard, Aug, 1, 2013
By Melissa Lin Perrella
Yesterday afternoon [July 31, 2013], NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council] filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Coast Guard and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The lawsuit challenges the Coast Guard’s decision to authorize the raising of the Bayonne Bridge without sufficiently evaluating the very real public health and environmental risks the current project poses to neighboring communities. NRDC brings this lawsuit with the Coalition for Healthy Ports, North Shore Waterfront Conservancy of Staten Island, Elm Park Civic Association, and Eastern Environmental Law Center.
The current project will increase the risk of heart disease, lung cancer, asthma, other respiratory illness and premature death in Newark, Staten Island, Bayonne and other communities near the port. That’s because the project will increase cargo volumes handled at the port, which will mean more harmful, diesel-polluting trucks, trains and ship traffic through these neighborhoods.
Construction of the project also risks exposing residents in Staten Island and Bayonne to arsenic, lead, asbestos and PCBs. This is particularly troubling because Staten Island children have a long history of being exposed to lead. In fact, the EPA designated the North Shore of Staten Island an “Environmental Justice Showcase Community” because of the number of children in that community with elevated levels of lead in their blood due to former industrial uses in the area.
Our lawsuit alleges that the Coast Guard violated the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) by failing to thoroughly evaluate these public health and environmental risks before authorizing the Port Authority to raise the Bridge. Our lawsuit does not seek to kill the project. In fact, we are in favor of renovating the Bridge. Rather, our lawsuit calls on the authorities to disclose how the project may harm local communities and identify measures that can mitigate this harm. This is what NEPA requires. We are suing the Coast Guard and Port Authority to ensure they comply with the law.
The Bayonne Bridge crosses the Kill Van Kull, which is the primary shipping channel between the New York Harbor and several major cargo terminals. More than 2,000 vessels passed beneath the Bayonne Bridge en route to and from these cargo terminals in 2010. Shipping companies are increasingly using larger vessels (taller, wider, deeper draft) to transport cargo between foreign ports and the U.S. The existing height of the Bridge, however, restricts the port’s ability to service the influx of these larger vessels. As a result, the Port Authority sought authorization from the Coast Guard to raise the roadway of the Bridge so that larger ships can pass under it and access the port’s terminals. Before the Coast Guard could authorize the Port Authority to raise the Bridge, however, it was supposed to comply with NEPA.
But instead of taking a hard look at how the project could harm public health and the environment, the Coast Guard and Port Authority attempted to pull the wool over the public’s eyes, in an attempt to skirt the law and avoid addressing these harms.
For example, the Coast Guard denies that raising the Bridge will enable the port to handle increased cargo volumes even though the Port Authority has represented to the Department of Transportation in a funding application for millions of dollars that the purpose of the Bridge project is to enable the Port Authority to remain competitive and handle increased trade in the future. The Port Authority made similar statements to President Obama when it asked that the Bridge project be “fast tracked.” The Port Authority’s clients, the business community, and EPA, among others, have also linked the Bridge project to increased cargo volumes at the port.
As stated, greater cargo volumes at the port means more diesel trucks and other vehicles and equipment operating around the clock to move cargo in and out of the port and through neighborhoods in Newark and Staten Island. The Coast Guard concedes that Newark and Staten Island are environmental justice communities. Moreover, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and EPA have already found cancer risks from air pollution in both communities that far exceed what EPA deems acceptable. Despite this, the Coast Guard refuses to provide an honest assessment of how the project may exacerbate pollution levels in these communities.
To make matters worse, the Coast Guard’s environmental analysis for the project was based on an allegedly proprietary model that the agency refused to release to the public for comment and review. By refusing to release the basis for its conclusions, the Coast Guard insulated itself from public scrutiny, essentially thumbing its nose to NEPA’s purpose, which is to foster public input and informed government decision-making.
The Coast’s Guard’s NEPA violations do not end there. The soil, structures, and groundwater where construction will occur contain pollutants such as lead, PCBs, arsenic and asbestos. The Coast Guard and Port Authority admit this but refuse to disclose what the potential harm to local residents will be when construction activities in Staten Island and Bayonne disturb and release these contaminants. This is the case despite the North Shore of Staten Island’s past exposure to lead.
Instead, the Coast Guard takes an “act now study later approach” in violation of NEPA. The Coast Guard green-lit construction with a promise to study the extent of the harm later, and with a vague commitment to deal with any problems by abiding by existing law. The Coast Guard’s promises are hardly reassuring to local families, and don’t come close to complying with NEPA.
The “construction zone” includes dense residential areas, at least seven schools, multiple churches, at least five parks, and a number of businesses that may be affected by these activities. Approximately 10,000 Staten Island residents and approximately 7,000 Bayonne residents live within this area. These individuals have a right to know how the project will affect their health.
We want the port to thrive economically so that good jobs can be brought to the region. But we also want to make sure that the risks that accompany the benefits of the Bridge project are disclosed and dealt with. We can raise the Bayonne Bridge and protect the health of surrounding communities at the same time—but the Port Authority and Coast Guard must stop cutting corners. By taking the time to properly evaluate the risks and identifying how to protect against them, we can capture the economic promise of a renovated Bridge without sacrificing the health of its neighbors. That’s not asking for much and it’s what the law requires.

Alternet, July 25, 2013; Reprinted from Washington Monthly
By Richard D. Kahlenberg [2]
The following is a book review of David Kirp’s Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools. [3]
If you believe that education can only be reformed by center-right business notions — that privately run nonunion charters will outperform public schools; that teachers need to be goaded into doing a good job — David Kirp is here to tell you that absolutely the opposite is true. Generous funding, tied to a rigorous and rich curriculum, with testing as a diagnostic tool, can produce extraordinary results. Kirp, a professor at the University of California Berkeley who has written extensively about education for decades, is most recently the author of Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools, a beautifully rendered account of the schools of Union City, New Jersey. Kirp spent the entire 2010-2011 academic year visiting classrooms in Union City, a low-income, mostly Latino school district of 12,000 students, located five minutes from the gleaming towers of Manhattan. His story is written with the empathy that characterizes Jonathan Kozol’s books on urban education, but with a far more hopeful message.
Kirp quickly falls in love with the children he studies, a group that includes many undocumented students who face difficult home lives. “Be my father!” one boy, Joaquin, cries out one day, a reminder that Joaquin’s father has been gone for two years. Another boy, Andres, calls out, “Be my father.” Writes Kirp, “That’s harder for me to hear because Andres is in fact living with his father.” And when Kirp goes to Paris for Thanksgiving, a boy named TomÃis asks, “Can you return? Do you have papers?”—an indication of the fragile lives these children are living.
Nationally, high-poverty schools are twenty-two times less likely to be high achieving than middle-class schools. That was generally the case with the Union City school district, which ranked next to last in the state in 1989, Kirp notes, sparking the mordant response, “Thank God for Camden!”
But today the situation could hardly be more different. Union City students, overwhelmingly low income and Latino, score at roughly the New Jersey average in reading and math from third grade through high school—this in a state where scores are consistently among the very best in the nation. The graduation rate is 89.4 percent, compared with about 70 percent nationally. Union City High School, according to the American Institutes for Research, ranks among the top 12 percent nationally, and sends students to top colleges.
What happened to turn around an entire high-poverty district like Union City? Generous funding, for one thing. Union City is the beneficiary of a series of New Jersey Supreme Court rulings, including one in 2011 that decreed that the state would have to rescind budget cuts and spend an extra $500 million in impoverished school districts. Among the extras this money bought was a high-quality preschool program. Beginning at age three, students in New Jersey’s high-poverty school districts are entitled to receive free preschool, six hours a day and 245 days a year, taught by teachers with college degrees in small classes. Although the program is not compulsory, about 90 percent of Union City children participate.
Many high-poverty New Jersey districts got this extra funding but continue to fail, while Union City students have flourished. Trenton, for example, embraced what Kirp calls “the Great Leader Theory,” hoping that superstar principals would jump-start individual schools, but has had little success. Union City, instead, pursued system-wide reform, with a number of key elements. The district adopted a consistent curriculum across classrooms, with a relentless focus on early reading and expanding the vocabulary of students. Tests are used as diagnostic tools, rather than to punish, and every new teacher gets a mentor.
In a district where students come from a number of foreign countries, the Union City schools also do the important work of instilling a strong sense of American identity. At an end-of-year school ceremony, children hoist flags from more than fifty countries, says Kirp. A roar goes up for the Dominican Republic flag, but the “longest, loudest cheer is heard when the flag of the United States, their new homeland, is unfurled.”
Kirp is emphatic in noting that Union City achieved its success by hewing to fundamentals. There are no charter schools in Union City. And while teacher’s unions have come under fire for much of what ails public education, Kirp says, Union City’s teachers are part of a strong union, as are other teachers in New Jersey’s highly ranked schools.
Of course, Union City schools are not immune from national education policy. Kirp is concerned that the No Child Left Behind Act causes teachers to skip interesting lessons like plant experiments because science is not among the tested subjects in elementary school. He also worries when teachers provide extra learning sessions only for the “cusp” kids—those just within reach of passing the tests.
To his credit, Kirp does not join the militant anti-testing crowd. “High-stakes exams contributed to making Union City’s schools better,” he writes; if used properly, to identify areas for student improvement, “testing can be a force for good, especially for the have-less kids on whom schools have too often given up.” Unlike many state tests, New Jersey’s assessments measure students’ critical thinking skills rather than just their ability to memorize material. “Teaching to this kind of test means readying students to become problem-solvers,” notes Kirp.
Skeptics will likely ask whether Union City’s success can be replicated in high-poverty districts elsewhere, given the district’s relatively small size. Likewise, as Kirp points out, sociologist Anthony Bryk has found that Latino schools are often an exception to the “straight-line connection between poor neighborhoods and failing schools.” Trust levels are higher in Latino schools, Bryk found, and “Latino neighborhoods tend to have significantly more social capital and neighborhood organizations” than other poor neighborhoods. Would Union City’s programs work with African American students, who continue to bear the legacy of the nation’s most egregious forms of discrimination?
Yes, says Kirp, in places like Montgomery County, Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C., for example, which educates ten times as many students as Union City. Montgomery County, which includes wealthy white areas alongside more diverse and low-income communities, has devoted extra funds to lower-income “red zone” schools than to the wealthier “green zone” schools—for such interventions as reduced class size and extended learning time. The approach has worked. Kirp writes, “In 2003, only half the district’s black and Hispanic fifth graders passed the state’s reading test; by 2011, 90% did.”
Significant as Montgomery County’s “red zone” approach has been, Kirp fails to discuss a far more effective educational strategy employed by the county. Under an inclusionary zoning initiative, public housing units are made available to low-income families throughout Montgomery County, in the affluent green zone as well as the working-class red zone. An important 2010 Century Foundation report by RAND Corporation’s Heather Schwartz found that low-income elementary school students whose families were randomly assigned to housing units in the green zone and attended green zone schools had far more significant achievement gains than those assigned to red zone neighborhoods and schools—even though students in the latter group were showered with extra financial resources and did pretty well.
The omission of integration strategies is surprising, because in other contexts Kirp has written powerfully about the benefits of housing and school integration. In a 2012 New York Times article, for example, Kirp wrote, “The experience of an integrated education made all the difference in the lives of black children—and in the lives of their children as well.” Given legal constraints on using race in student assignment imposed by the Supreme Court, more than eighty school districts now pursue integration by socioeconomic status, an approach that not only raises student achievement but also allows low-income students access to the kind of middle-class social networks that are powerful determinants of employment.
Despite this lapse, Kirp is to be credited with providing critical balance to our education debates. While much ink has appropriately been spilled on the success of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, Union City has done something in many ways even more impressive: taking low-income children who happen to live in a jurisdiction and helping them make dramatic achievement gains. (The one time KIPP tried to take over a regular public school population, in Denver, Colorado, it failed.)
Like the KIPP approach, the Union City strategy involves large amounts of money, which makes it less attractive to policymakers than getting tough with teachers and their elected union representatives. But as Improbable Scholars makes clear, the success in Union City suggests that money spent on effective educational strategies is likely to pay substantial dividends for years to come.
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/education/how-union-city-njs-school-district-achieved-huge-gains
Links:
[1] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/richard-d-kahlenberg
[3] http://global.oup.com/academic/product/improbable-scholars-9780199987498;jsessionid=80FB9E4B6028F4956E54F082699396C1?cc=us&lang=en&
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/union-city
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/new-jersey
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/david-kirp
[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/improbable-scholars
[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/corporate-school-reform
[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/teachers-unions
[10] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Truthout, July 25, 2013

By Ira Chernus
All right, I confess: I have a dream. I bet you do, too. I bet yours, like mine, is of a far, far better world not only for yourself and your loved ones, but for everyone on this beleaguered planet of ours.

And I bet you, like me, rarely talk to anyone about your dreams, even if you spend nearly all your time among politically active people working to improve the planet. Perhaps these days it feels somehow just too naïve, too unrealistic, too embarrassing. So instead, you focus your energy on the nuts and bolts of what’s wrong with the world, what has to be fixed immediately.
I’m thinking that it’s time to try a different approach — to keep feeling and voicing what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the fierce urgency of now,” but balance it with a dose of another political lesson he taught us: the irresistible power of dreaming.

I started reflecting on this when I returned from a long trip and found my email inbox crammed with hundreds of urgent messages from progressive groups and news sources, all sounding the alarm about the latest outrages, horrors, and disgraces, punctuated by an occasional call for a new policy to right at least one of the horrendous wrongs described and denounced.
Suddenly, I found myself thinking: Same old same old. The particular words keep changing, but the basic message and the music of our song of frustrated lament remain the same. We give the people the shocking facts and call them to action. And we wonder: Why don’t they listen?

Then I looked at the calendar and noticed that the end of the summer would bring the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s greatest speech — and I realized what was missing from virtually all those email messages: Where was the dream? Where was the debate about what the world we seek would look like?

In most of them I could dimly sense that the writer might indeed have a vision of a better world. But it was always hidden somewhere between the lines, as if in the century when capitalism had “triumphed” and nowhere on Earth did there seem to be an alternative, the writer was ashamed to speak such things aloud.

Occupied Dreams

It wasn’t always so. I remember how incensed I used to get in the 1960s when hearing the charge from the right: “Those hippie radicals. They don’t know what they’re for, only what they’re against.” “Those hippie radicals” knew what they were for: concrete changes in political policies that would turn their dreams into reality. And they talked constantly about the dreams as well as the policies.

It was Dr. King, above all, who inspired them. If, on that hot summer day in 1963, he had only denounced the evils of racism and proposed policy remedies, we would scarcely recall his speech half a century later. It holds a special place in our public memory only because he concluded by confessing his dream. Daring to be a public dreamer propelled him to greatness.

Now, I fear, we mostly talk only about what we’re against. The just-give-‘em-the-facts approach, so tilted toward denunciation (however well deserved), scarcely leaves room for any other impression.

There are still a few dreamers. You can find them among environmental activists, who give us science fiction-like descriptions of technology that can create a clean, sustainable environment for the whole biosphere. Except that isn’t simply a fantasy: much of the technology already exists.

You can also find dreamers in religious communities, sharing the words of holy scriptures informed by eschatological visions of a better future. Occasionally, even a hard-boiled devotee of the facts like Noam Chomsky gives us a peek into his dream: a world without borders.

Not long ago, you could find dreamers occupying parks and public spaces across the country, short-lived as their moment was mainly because of an onslaught of police violence. For that brief season, they showed us that our dreams had been occupied and needed to be freed. In the past, though, movements have persisted much longer, even in the face of massive state violence.

The Occupy movement, however, emerged in a distinctly twenty-first-century world in which activists have long become accustomed to hiding their dreams. Without such shared dreams, political activism can easily feel like nothing more than an endless struggle against insurmountable odds — like being part of a small band of good guys besieged on every side. Who can blame them for feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and hopeless?

Once most Occupiers were forced to retreat from public spaces, I suspect they, too, felt tired, cramped, hemmed in. Occupy could flourish only in the open, where people could share their dreams and imagine that all the boundaries that limit us might, in that open-air spirit, dissolve.

Realism and Dreams

Boundaries and limitations dissolving: that’s not merely Chomsky’s dream, it’s the essence of all dreaming — to transcend the barriers that separate one person from another, one group or nation from another, and all humanity from its natural environment.

Dreaming is the realm of pure freedom. In dreams, we can see, do, or be anything. When our dreams are political, they help us sense what it might be like to escape the limits imposed by corporations, the state, the media, the advertisers, powerful forces of every kind. They help us imagine in new ways what is possible. In our dreams, none of the powers that be can touch us.

Freud said that every dream is the fulfillment of a wish, but political dreams aren’t about our private desires. They are visions of the public realm being freed from the artificial divisions and constraints of the present. There, as in our nighttime dreaming, we experience whole new worlds, constantly changing, often in remarkable detail. Dreaming is the realm of permanent revolution that the great political visionaries from Thomas Jefferson to Che Guevara spoke of.
Constant change, pure freedom, the sense that anything is possible: combined, they can give us the daytime energy we need to work for change despite the obstacles and failures we inevitably face. When political life is infused with a dream, traveling without a map can feel exhilarating. In politics as in physiology, we must dream on a regular basis to restore our energy.
But a political dream is quite different from the dreaming of sleep because it happens while we are wide-awake. It may even make us feel more awake, allowing us to pierce the pre-packaged version of reality handed to us by the rich and powerful, who demand that we take their distorted version of how this place, this country, this planet works as “realism” itself.

When we see by the light of imagined futures, the present and its real possibilities come into clearer view, offering us a broader framework into which we can fit the chaotic pieces of current reality and the specific changes we are working for.

We don’t have to wait for some distant future to see our dreams realized. The essence of the nonviolent action that Dr. King preached is to pierce the lies and distortions in the here and now by acting out, with our bodies, the authentic reality we have seen — to persist in what is really real (which is the best translation I know of Gandhi’s term satyagraha).

So we should never let anyone dismiss our political dreams as “unrealistic.” The world as we wish it to be is no mere fantasy. It is often our most reliable guide to knowing the truth.

Never Stop Dreaming

Whether they know it or not, everyone has their own dream of the world as it should be, and every dream is open to endless interpretation. Dr. King had his. I’ve got my interpretation of his. I’ve got my own, too. And you’ve got yours. The point is not to argue about who has the one “correct” dream, but to bring all of our dreams out of the closet and voice them openly, share our interpretations of each other’s dreams, and start a conversation about the politics of dreaming.

When that kind of dream-sharing becomes part of political life, it begins to create myths. By “myth” I don’t mean a lie. I mean a story that a community tells itself to interpret its life, to express the fundamentals of its worldview and values, to give meaning and hope to events great and small.

A myth, it is often said, is a collective dream. In myths, as in dreams, anything can happen. And once new myths start circulating, anything can indeed happen. There is a real chance that one myth (or several with much in common) will — by some mysterious, unpredictable process — grab hold of a big enough part of the body politic to stir it to action. The U.S saw that process at work in the 1770s (the dream of a republic), the 1860s (the dream of abolishing slavery), and the mid-1930s (the dream of basic economic security for all).

In the late 1960s, the dream of radical democracy and equality for all took hold in millions of American minds. It happened surprisingly fast. In 1963, when Dr. King gave the nation permission to share our dreams, few could have imagined how radically the political and cultural landscape would be reshaped by new myths within just a few years.

Of course, we should never confuse our dreams and myths with specific policy proposals. That would endanger the chances of achieving policies that could bring us a few steps closer to realizing those dreams. Policies, after all, are always political artifacts, produced by compromises between our dreams and the hard facts of the present.

The coming commemoration of the “dream” speech should remind us of Dr. King’s recipe for meaningful political change: take one part facts to reveal the world’s evils, one part policy proposals to remove those evils, one part shrewd political strategy, and one part dreams — shared aloud — and stir artfully into a political movement.
So don’t stop shouting from the rooftops about everything that’s outrageously wrong. Don’t stop the grinding political work of changing specific policies. But take the time to show how your outrage, policies, and politics are propelled by your dreams. Share those dreams: talk or write or draw or sing or dance them. Describe the kind of world you are working for and show how it could be linked to policies and politics. And don’t let anyone dismiss you as an “unrealistic dreamer.”

Yes, it’s true, the world will never look exactly like our mythic dreams. But we can’t get to any better future unless we first imagine that future, together. A political dream is a magnet that pulls us toward our goals. It may also be an asymptote — a promised land that we can never reach. Yet even if we never get there, every dream takes us closer to a transformed reality.

Copyright 2013 Ira Chernus

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Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado and author of MythicAmerica: Essays. He blogs at mythicamerica.us, hosted by History News Network.

© 2013 Truthout

New York Times, July 28, 2013*

By Anthony R. Ingraffea

Ithaca, N.Y. — Many concerned about climate change, including President Obama, have embraced hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. In his recent climate speech, the president went so far as to lump gas with renewables as “clean energy.”

As a longtime oil and gas engineer who helped develop shale fracking techniques for the Energy Department, I can assure you that this gas is not “clean.” Because of leaks of methane, the main component of natural gas, the gas extracted from shale deposits is not a “bridge” to a renewable energy future — it’s a gangplank to more warming and away from clean energy investments.

Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, though it doesn’t last nearly as long in the atmosphere. Still, over a 20-year period, one pound of it traps as much heat as at least 72 pounds of carbon dioxide. Its potency declines, but even after a century, it is at least 25 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. When burned, natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, but methane leakage eviscerates this advantage because of its heat-trapping power.

And methane is leaking, though there is significant uncertainty over the rate. But recent measurements by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at gas and oil fields in California, Colorado and Utah found leakage rates of 2.3 percent to 17 percent of annual production, in the range my colleagues at Cornell and I predicted some years ago. This is the gas that is released into the atmosphere unburned as part of the hydraulic fracturing process, and also from pipelines, compressors and processing units. Those findings raise questions about what is happening elsewhere. The Environmental Protection Agency has issued new rules to reduce these emissions, but the rules don’t take effect until 2015, and apply only to new wells.

A 2011 study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research concluded that unless leaks can be kept below 2 percent, gas lacks any climate advantage over coal. And a study released this May by Climate Central, a group of scientists and journalists studying climate change, concluded that the 50 percent climate advantage of natural gas over coal is unlikely to be achieved over the next three to four decades. Unfortunately, we don’t have that long to address climate change — the next two decades are crucial.

To its credit, the president’s plan recognizes that “curbing emissions of methane is critical.” However, the release of unburned gas in the production process is not the only problem. Gas and oil wells that lose their structural integrity also leak methane and other contaminants outside their casings and into the atmosphere and water wells. Multiple industry studies show that about 5 percent of all oil and gas wells leak immediately because of integrity issues, with increasing rates of leakage over time. With hundreds of thousands of new wells expected, this problem is neither negligible nor preventable with current technology.

Why do so many wells leak this way? Pressures under the earth, temperature changes, ground movement from the drilling of nearby wells and shrinkage crack and damage the thin layer of brittle cement that is supposed to seal the wells. And getting the cement perfect as the drilling goes horizontally into shale is extremely challenging. Once the cement is damaged, repairing it thousands of feet underground is expensive and often unsuccessful. The gas and oil industries have been trying to solve this problem for decades.

The scientific community has been waiting for better data from the E.P.A. to assess the extent of the water contamination problem. That is why it is so discouraging that, in the face of industry complaints, the E.P.A. reportedly has closed or backed away from several investigations into the problem. Perhaps a full E.P.A. study of hydraulic fracturing and drinking water, due in 2014, will be more forthcoming. In addition, drafts of an Energy Department study suggest that there are huge problems finding enough water for fracturing future wells. The president should not include this technology in his energy policy until these studies are complete.

We have renewable wind, water, solar and energy-efficiency technology options now. We can scale these quickly and affordably, creating economic growth, jobs and a truly clean energy future to address climate change. Political will is the missing ingredient. Meaningful carbon reduction is impossible so long as the fossil fuel industry is allowed so much influence over our energy policies and regulatory agencies. Policy makers need to listen to the voices of independent scientists while there is still time.

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Anthony R. Ingraffea is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University and the president of Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy, a nonprofit group.

© 2013 The New York Times

*Note: The word "Hess’s" has been added to the original N.Y. Times headline to indicate the relevance of this story to Newark, where Hess is proposing to build a natural-gas power plant, claiming that it represents a climate-friendly development, which, as this opinion piece makes clear, it does not. –P.M.

New York Times, July 27, 2013

By Steven Greenhouse

Often relegated to the background, America’s low-wage workers have been making considerable noise lately by deploying an unusual weapon — one-day strikes — to make their message heard: they’re sick and tired of earning just $8, $9, $10 an hour.

Their anger has been stoked by what they see as a glaring disconnect: their wages have flatlined, while median pay for chief executives at the nation’s top corporations jumped 16 percent last year, averaging a princely $15.1 million, according to Equilar, an executive compensation analysis firm.

In recent weeks, workers from McDonald’s, Taco Bell and other fast-food restaurants — many of them part-time employees — have staged one-day walkouts in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Seattle to protest their earnings, typically just $150 to $350 a week, often too little to support themselves and their families. More walkouts are expected at fast-food restaurants in seven cities on Monday. Earlier this month hundreds of low-wage employees working for federal contractors in Washington walked out and picketed along Pennsylvania Avenue to urge President Obama to press their employers to raise wages.

Ana Salvador, who earns $10 an hour after 10 years working at the McDonald’s inside the National Air and Space Museum, wrote Mr. Obama to say that she did not earn enough to support her four children, adding that her family relied on food stamps and Medicaid. Another striker, Karla Quezada, who has worked at the Subway inside the Ronald Reagan Building for 11 years, said that while her employer made “lots of money off of my work, I still only make $9.50 an hour.” This is higher than the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage as well as the District of Columbia’s $8.25 minimum — many states have minimums above the federal level — but it isn’t much after more than a decade on the job. In a speech in Galesburg, Ill., last Wednesday aimed at bolstering the middle class, Mr. Obama called for raising the minimum wage.

Many low-paid workers feel their employers have put an invisible ceiling on their wages, with little prospect of ever making more than $10 or $11 an hour, as corporations have focused on keeping wages competitive and maximizing profits to benefit shareholders. The richest Americans have benefited mightily from corporate America’s record profits and the stock market’s repeated highs.

“Long-term trends have not been kind to low-wage workers,” said Lawrence F. Katz, an economics professor at Harvard University. “They’ve been hurt by technological change” — scanners, for instance, have reduced the demand for supermarket cashiers — “and by the decline in institutions like labor unions and the minimum wage,” which has not kept up with inflation in recent decades. “Then on top of that is an extremely weak labor market.”

The bottom 20 percent of American workers by income — 28 million workers — earn less than $9.89 an hour, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. That translates to $20,570 a year for a full-time employee. Their income fell 5 percent between 2006 and 2012. Wages for workers at the 50th percentile — their median pay is $16.30 an hour — have also dipped, falling 3.4 percent, while pay for the top 10 percent rose 3 percent.

Lorraine Riley James makes $9.35 an hour at the Macy’s on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago and has received just $1.35 in raises since starting there six years ago. “I have so much experience that I don’t feel what they’re paying me is fair,” she said. “I generated a quarter of a million in sales for them last year.”

Jim Sluzewski, Macy’s senior vice president for corporate communications, said, “We seek to pay competitive wages and benefits based on performance and experience,” adding that the company has increased wages every year. “Remaining a stable employer requires that we remain a financially strong company,” he said.

Corporate America has embraced many strategies to slice labor costs. Many Walmart stores — as part of a new strategy to save on wages and benefits — are hiring only temps to fill job openings. Scores of companies are relying increasingly on part-timers, who typically get paid several dollars less per hour than full-timers.

Caterpillar has pioneered two-tier wage systems, in which workers hired after a certain date are consigned to a significantly lower wage scale than others, and it recently pressed its longer-term employees into accepting a six-year wage freeze. Many Caterpillar workers ask why the company insisted on a pay freeze when it reported repeated record profits — $5.7 billion last year, amounting to $45,000 per Caterpillar employee.

Caterpillar’s chief executive, Douglas Oberhelman (whose compensation has increased more than 80 percent over the last two years), says the freeze was vital to keep wages competitive with rival companies. “I always try to communicate to our people that we can never make enough money,” he recently told Bloomberg Businessweek. “We can never make enough profit.”

Nick Hanauer, a Seattle-based entrepreneur whose company produces comforters and pillows, said: “Employers pay their work force as much as they are forced to and no more. There’s no compelling reason to give raises” with the unemployment rate as high as it is. He said he supported a higher minimum wage so workers earn enough to live on. Mr. Katz sees only limited ways to end wage stagnation for low-paid workers. More education and training can lift pay for individual workers, but considering that 20 of America’s 25 fastest-growing jobs — like nursing home aide and retail clerk — do not require a college education, low-wage jobs won’t disappear anytime soon.

Mr. Katz said a good way to push up wages would be to reduce the jobless rate to 5 percent or less. That happened in the late 1990s — the only time since the 1970s when wages for the bottom half of workers rose strongly. Employers had to bid up wages to attract workers or keep employees from jumping ship.

It remains unclear what the wave of one-day strikes is seeking to achieve. One objective is to push the issue of low-wage work onto the nation’s political agenda. Some one-day strikers are calling for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, but Scott DeFife, executive vice president of the National Restaurant Association, scoffed at the idea, saying a $15 minimum would cause restaurants to hire fewer people. He said restaurants provide valuable experience for many entry-level workers, noting that “80 percent of restaurant owners and operators say they started out as hourly workers in the industry.”

Some strategists behind the one-day strikes hope to create a political environment in which some cities might embrace measures similar to ones in Washington and Long Beach, Calif. Washington’s City Council has approved a $12.50 minimum wage at big-box stores — a move that has Walmart threatening to cancel plans to open three more stores in the city. And in Long Beach, labor unions persuaded residents to approve a $13-an-hour minimum wage for the city’s hotel workers in a referendum last November.

Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, argues that wage increases would give a boost to the economy.

“The real reason businesses aren’t hiring is they’re not seeing consumer demand for their goods and services increase,” she said. “We need greater demand for goods and services. It is clearly true that if people receive higher incomes, that will help the economy.”

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Steven Greenhouse is a reporter on labor and workplace issues for The New York Times, and the author of “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.”

© 2013 New York Times

New York Times, July 27, 2013

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff

Although professionals may bemoan their long work hours and high-pressure careers, really, there’s stress, and then there’s Stress with a capital “S.” The former can be considered a manageable if unpleasant part of life; in the right amount, it may even strengthen one’s mettle. The latter kills.

What’s the difference? Scientists have settled on an oddly subjective explanation: the more helpless one feels when facing a given stressor, they argue, the more toxic that stressor’s effects.

That sense of control tends to decline as one descends the socioeconomic ladder, with potentially grave consequences. Those on the bottom are more than three times as likely to die prematurely as those at the top. They’re also more likely to suffer from depression, heart disease and diabetes. Perhaps most devastating, the stress of poverty early in life can have consequences that last into adulthood.

Even those who later ascend economically may show persistent effects of early-life hardship. Scientists find them more prone to illness than those who were never poor. Becoming more affluent may lower the risk of disease by lessening the sense of helplessness and allowing greater access to healthful resources like exercise, more nutritious foods and greater social support; people are not absolutely condemned by their upbringing. But the effects of early-life stress also seem to linger, unfavorably molding our nervous systems and possibly even accelerating the rate at which we age.

The British epidemiologist Michael Marmot calls the phenomenon “status syndrome.” He’s studied British civil servants who work in a rigid hierarchy for decades, and found that accounting for the usual suspects — smoking, diet and access to health care — won’t completely abolish the effect. There’s a direct relationship among health, well-being and one’s place in the greater scheme. “The higher you are in the social hierarchy,” he says, “the better your health.”

Dr. Marmot blames a particular type of stress. It’s not necessarily the strain of a chief executive facing a lengthy to-do list, or a well-to-do parent’s agonizing over a child’s prospects of acceptance to an elite school. Unlike those of lower rank, both the C.E.O. and the anxious parent have resources with which to address the problem. By definition, the poor have far fewer.

So the stress that kills, Dr. Marmot and others argue, is characterized by a lack of a sense of control over one’s fate. Psychologists who study animals call one result of this type of strain “learned helplessness.”

How they induce it is instructive. Indiscriminate electric shocks will send an animal into a kind of depression, blunting its ability to learn and remember. But if the animal has some control over how long the shocks last, it remains resilient. Pain and unpleasantness matter less than having some control over their duration.

Biologists explain the particulars as a fight-or-flight response — adrenaline pumping, heart rate elevated, blood pressure increased — that continues indefinitely. This reaction is necessary for escaping from lions, bears and muggers, but when activated chronically it wears the body ragged. And it’s especially unhealthy for children, whose nervous systems are, by evolutionary design, malleable.

Scientists can, in fact, see the imprint of early-life stress decades later: there are more markers of inflammation in those who have experienced such hardship. Chronic inflammation increases the risk of degenerative diseases like heart disease and diabetes. Indeed, telomeres — the tips of our chromosomes — appear to be shorter among those who have experienced early-life adversity, which might be an indicator of accelerated aging. And scientists have found links, independent of current income, between early-life poverty and a higher risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and arthritis in adulthood.

“Early-life stress and the scar tissue that it leaves, with every passing bit of aging, gets harder and harder to reverse,” says Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford. “You’re never out of luck in terms of interventions, but the longer you wait, the more work you’ve got on your hands.”

This research has cast new light on racial differences in longevity. In the United States, whites live longer on average by about five years than African-Americans. But a 2012 study by a Princeton researcher calculated that socioeconomic and demographic factors, not genetics, accounted for 70 to 80 percent of that difference. The single greatest contributor was income, which explained more than half the disparity. Other studies, meanwhile, suggest that the subjective experience of racism by African-Americans — a major stressor — appears to have effects on health. Reports of discrimination correlate with visceral fat accumulation in women, which increases the risk of metabolic syndrome (and thus the risk of heart disease and diabetes). In men, they correlate with high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.

Race aside, Bruce McEwen, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York, describes these relationships as one way that “poverty gets under the skin.” He and others talk about the “biological embedding” of social status. Your parents’ social standing and your stress level during early life change how your brain and body work, affecting your vulnerability to degenerative disease decades later. They may even alter your vulnerability to infection. In one study, scientists at Carnegie Mellon exposed volunteers to a common cold virus. Those who’d grown up poorer (measured by parental homeownership) not only resisted the virus less effectively, but also suffered more severe cold symptoms.

Peter Gianaros, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, is interested in heart disease. He found that college students who viewed their parents as having low social status reacted more strongly to images of angry faces, as measured by the reactivity of the amygdala — an almond-shaped area of the brain that coordinates the fear response. Over a lifetime, he suspects, a harder, faster response to threats may contribute to the formation of arterial plaques. Dr. Gianaros also found that, among a group of 48 women followed for about 20 years, higher reports of stress correlated with a reduction in the volume of the hippocampus, a brain region important for learning and memory. In animals, chronic stress shrinks this area, and also hinders the ability to learn.

These associations raise profound questions about stress’s role in hindering life achievement. Educational attainment and school performance have long been linked to socioeconomic class, and a divergence in skills is evident quite early in life. One oft-cited study suggests that 3-year-olds from professional families have more than twice the vocabulary of children from families on welfare. The disparity may stem in part from different intensities of parental stimulation; poorer parents may simply speak less with their children.

But Martha Farah, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has also noted differences not just in the words absorbed but in the abilities that may help youngsters learn. Among children, she’s found, socioeconomic status correlates with the ability to pay attention and ignore distractions. Others have observed differences in the function of the prefrontal cortex, a region associated with planning and self-control, in poorer children.

“You don’t need a neuroscientist to tell you that less stress, more education, more support of all types for young families are needed,” Dr. Farah told me in an e-mail. “But seeing an image of the brain with specific regions highlighted where financial disadvantage results in less growth reframes the problems of childhood poverty as a public health issue, not just an equal opportunity issue.”

Animal studies help dispel doubts that we’re really seeing sickly and anxiety-prone individuals filter to the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. In primate experiments females of low standing are more likely to develop heart disease compared with their counterparts of higher standing. When eating junk food, they more rapidly progress toward heart disease. The lower a macaque is in her troop, the higher her genes involved in inflammation are cranked. High-ranking males even heal faster than their lower-ranking counterparts. Behavioral tendencies change as well. Low-ranking males are more likely to choose cocaine over food than higher-ranking individuals.

All hope is not lost, however. Gene expression profiles can normalize when low-ranking adult individuals ascend in the troop. “There are likely contextual influences that are not necessarily immutable,” says Daniel Hackman, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. And yet, as with humans, the mark of early-life hardship persists in nervous systems wired slightly differently. A nurturing bond with a caregiver in a stimulating environment appears essential for proper brain development and healthy maturation of the stress response. That sounds easy enough, except that such bonds, and the broader social networks that support them, are precisely what poverty disrupts. If you’re an underpaid, overworked parent — worried, behind on rent, living in a crime-ridden neighborhood — your parental skills are more likely to be compromised. That’s worrisome given the trends in the United States. About one in five children now lives below the poverty line, a 35 percent increase in a decade. Unicef recently ranked the United States No. 26 in childhood well-being, out of 29 developed countries. When considering just childhood poverty, only Romania fares worse.

“We’re going in the wrong direction in terms of greater inequality creating more of these pressures,” says Nancy Adler, the director of the Center for Health and Community at the University of California, San Francisco. As income disparities have increased, class mobility has declined. By some measures, you now have a better chance of living the American dream in Canada or Western Europe than in the United States. And while Americans generally gained longevity during the late 20th century, those gains have gone disproportionately to the better-off. Those without a high school education haven’t experienced much improvement in life span since the middle of the 20th century. Poorly educated whites have lost a few years of longevity in recent decades.

A National Research Council report, meanwhile, found that Americans were generally sicker and had shorter life spans than people in 16 other wealthy nations. We rank No. 1 for diabetes in adults over age 20, and No. 2 for deaths from coronary artery disease and lung disease. The Japanese smoke more than Americans, but outlive us — as do the French and Germans, who drink more. The dismal ranking is surprising given that America spends nearly twice as much per capita on health care as the next biggest spender.

But an analysis by Elizabeth H. Bradley, an economist at the Yale School of Public Health, suggests that how you spend money matters. The higher the spending on social services relative to health care, she’s found, the greater the longevity dividends.

Some now argue that addressing health disparities and their causes is not just a moral imperative, but an economic one. It will save money in the long run. The University of Chicago economist James Heckman estimates that investing in poor children yields a yearly return of 7 to 10 percent thereafter to society.

Early-life stress and poverty aren’t a problem of only the poor. They cost everyone.

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Moises Velasquez-Manoff is a science writer and the author of “An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases.”

© 2013 The New York Times

New York Times, July 26 2013

By Charles M. Blow

Our 50 states seem to be united in name only.

In fact, we seem to be increasingly becoming two countries under one flag: Liberal Land — coastal, urban and multicultural — separated by Conservative Country — Southern and Western, rural and racially homogeneous. (Other parts of the country are a bit of a mixed bag.)

This has led to incredible and disturbing concentrations of power.

As The New York Times reported after the election in November, more than two-thirds of the states are now under single-party control, meaning that one party has control of the governor’s office and has majorities in both legislative chambers.

This is the highest level of such control since 1952. And Republicans have single-party control in nearly twice as many states as Democrats.

This is having very real consequences on the ground, nowhere more clearly than on the subjects of voting rights and women’s reproductive rights.

Almost all jurisdictions covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the section that requires federal approval for any change in voting procedures and that the Supreme Court effectively voided last month — are in Republican-controlled states.

So, many of those states have wasted no time following the court ruling to institute efforts to suppress the vote in the next election and beyond.

Within two hours of the Supreme Court ruling, Texas announced that a voter identification law that the Department of Justice had blocked for two years because “Hispanic registered voters are more than twice as likely as non-Hispanic registered voters to lack such identification” would go into effect, along with a redistricting map passed in 2011 but blocked by a federal court.

The department is trying to prevent those actions in Texas, but it’s unclear whether the state or the feds will prevail.

Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina have also moved forward with voter ID bills that had already passed but were being held up by the Justice Department. (Virginia has passed a bill that’s scheduled to go into effect next year.)

And on Wednesday, a federal court gave Florida the go-ahead to resume its controversial voter purge by dismissing a case filed against the state that had been rendered moot by the Supreme Court decision.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not surprised by this flurry. She voted with the minority on the Voting Rights Act case, and she wrote in a strongly worded dissent: “The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proved effective. The Court appears to believe that the VRA’s success in eliminating the specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclearance is no longer needed.”

She continued, “With that belief, and the argument derived from it, history repeats itself.”

History does appear to be doing just that. In an interview this week with The Associated Press, Ginsburg reiterated her displeasure with the court’s decision and her lack of surprise at what it has wrought, saying, “And one really could have predicted what was going to happen.” She added, “I didn’t want to be right, but sadly I am.”

While Republicans may claim that voter ID laws are about the sanctity of the vote, Republican power brokers know they’re about much more: suppressing the votes of people likely to vote Democratic.

Last week Rob Gleason, the Pennsylvania Republican Party chairman, discussed the effects of his state’s voter ID laws on last year’s presidential election, acknowledging to the Pennsylvania Cable Network: “We probably had a better election. Think about this: we cut Obama by 5 percent, which was big. A lot of people lost sight of that. He won — he beat McCain by 10 percent; he only beat Romney by 5 percent. I think that probably voter ID helped a bit in that.”

And on women’s reproductive rights, as the Guttmacher Institute reported earlier this month, “In the first six months of 2013, states enacted 106 provisions related to reproductive health and rights.” The report continued, “Although initial momentum behind banning abortion early in pregnancy appears to have waned, states nonetheless adopted 43 restrictions on access to abortion, the second-highest number ever at the midyear mark and is as many as were enacted in all of 2012.”

A substantial majority of the new restrictive measures — which include bans on abortion outside incredibly restrictive time frames (at six weeks after the woman’s last period in North Dakota), burdensome regulations on abortion clinics and providers, and forced ultrasounds — were enacted in states with Republican-controlled legislatures.

These are just two issues among many in which the cleaving of this country is becoming an incontrovertible fact, as we drift back toward bifurcation.

© 2013 The New York Times

Dissent Magazine, Summer 2013
By Mark Engler and Paul Engler
For those who believe that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice, it is comforting to see that bend reflected in the polls. Over time, as public awareness of an outrage increases, tolerance for the status quo should diminish while the percentage of the population demanding change creeps up. With steady persistence, popular support for detrimental views will recede, ignorance will be undermined, and consensus around truth will solidify.
Unfortunately, with one of today’s most pressing public issues—climate change—things have not worked out so neatly. From the early 2000s through 2007, the year after Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released, public concern about global warming grew. The percentage of people who indicated in Gallup polls that they believed climate change would pose a “serious threat” to them within their lifetimes rose from 25 percent in 1998 to a high of 40 percent by the start of 2008.
Then came a bad turn. By 2010, the “serious threat” number had fallen back to 32 percent, erasing almost a decade of progress. A summary of polling data by two University of Connecticut professors notes that the percentage of Americans who agreed that “most scientists believe that the planet is warming” also took a nosedive, falling “by 13 points between March 2008 and March 2010—reaching the lowest level of support since the question was first asked in 1997.” In the aftermath of a sharp economic downturn—amid a furious counterattack by Fox News pundits, think tanks funded by the fossil fuel industry, and Tea Party activists—a widespread wariness about the issue took hold in Washington, D.C. The mood persists to the present day.
Environmental advocates now face a question that has widespread implications for how we think about legislation, lobbying, mass movements, and social change: what do you do when an issue emerges as one of the most urgent matters of our time and, at the same instant, becomes firmly regarded as a political loser?
The inhospitable climate in Washington has touched off a debate among environmentalists about what sort of inside politicking and outside pressure will be required to secure limits on greenhouse gases—and whether regulation of these emissions should be pursued at all. Early in the first Obama administration, the White House responded to the political dilemma of global warming with a curious two-step. First, it indicated that it would use the Environmental Protection Agency to promote green regulation and that it would support cap-and-trade legislation to address climate change as it worked its way through Congress. Second, it told people not to talk about the issue.
Or rather, the president’s team preferred that people not call the problem by its name. In November 2012, the British Guardian broke the story of an off-the-record meeting that the Obama administration held with green leaders in the spring of 2009. The paper reported that the meeting “marked a strategic decision by the White House to downplay climate change—avoiding the very word.” After examining focus groups and polling, the White House decided that “climate change was not a winning message” and that “[r]aising the topic would also leave Obama open to attack from industry and conservative groups opposed to intervention in the economy.”
The administration opted to use different language to promote environmental measures, and it pushed the environmentalists present to do the same. One participant, environmental campaign consultant Betsy Taylor, described the message conveyed by the White House’s presentation: “I took away an absolutely clear understanding that we should focus on clean energy jobs and the potential of a clean energy economy,” she said, “rather than the threat of climate change.”
The Guardian presented its story as a groundbreaking exposé. However, the shift in messaging it reported had been apparent for several years. In 2009, the drive for a landmark national climate change law took the form of a push to put carbon emissions under a market-based, cap-and-trade system. In typically euphemistic fashion, the legislation, which passed the House of Representatives in July 2009 and was killed in the Senate the following year, was dubbed the “American Clean Energy and Security Act.” Leading advocates rallied support for it using the slogan, “Better Jobs, Less Pollution, and More Security.” It was also obvious that President Obama scrupulously avoided mention of climate change in his 2011 and 2012 State of the Union addresses and in his reelection campaign—at least until Hurricane Sandy struck the Eastern seaboard.
Moreover, this approach to climate change was consistent with what outfits such as the Breakthrough Institute have long endorsed. The institute was founded by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, authors of the much-discussed 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism.” With regard to the climate, Breakthrough has focused primarily on promoting public investment in clean energy technology. By itself, this is not very controversial, but Shellenberger and Nordhaus strive to cultivate post-partisan bona fides and an image as the “bad boys of environmentalism” by attacking progressive environmentalists. They blame figures such as Al Gore for alienating the public with unduly “partisan” stances and deride activist “climate warriors” for opposing natural-gas fracking and projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline. Advocating “climate pragmatism” that will “swim with, rather than against, the process of human development and modernization,” they aim to appeal to the center by tacking to the right and bashing the bogeyman of traditional liberalism. In other words, they propose to do for environmentalism what Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy did for the Democratic Party.
While Breakthrough leaders opposed cap-and-trade altogether—seeing it as too punitive and objecting that it would raise energy prices—they praised Obama’s instinct that, in their words, “the best way to move forward on climate policy is to not focus on climate at all.” Moreover, they argued, “Obama’s explicit embrace of nuclear and natural gas broadens the political appeal of his energy policies.”
Breakthrough proponents share much in common with conservatives who acknowledge the reality of warming but reject any critique of the high-consumption lifestyles of people in advanced industrial countries and believe that solutions to future climate problems should be left to market-based innovation. While Shellenberger and Nordhaus promote a more active government role in funding research and development, they, too, believe that technology will save us.
The Breakthough position, and to a lesser extent the strategy of the Obama administration, represents a most profound capitulation to existing political conditions. It is based on a simple logic: since we cannot pass ambitious climate legislation, we should focus on the measures that can pass. Breakthrough puts forth the premise that “deadlocked international negotiations and failed domestic policy proposals bring no climate benefit at all.” Instead, it embraces “politically feasible forms of action.”
Most of the “big green” groups pursued a different approach after the 2008 election of Barack Obama—one also rooted in insider pragmatism, but less politically fatalistic than Breakthrough’s. The center of the environmental movement in Washington, D.C., deployed considerable lobbying resources, attempted to build a coalition with business, and brokered a series of policy compromises in an effort to cobble together a cap-and-trade deal that could make it through Congress. Led by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), these groups also accepted the decision to avoid talking about climate change as an impending ecological catastrophe, but they did so for more narrowly strategic reasons.
Under the leadership of Fred Krupp, the EDF has rebuilt itself over the past two decades as a home for business-friendly environmentalism. In 2007, in preparation for a major legislative effort, the organization helped create the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP). This coalition brought together several dozen CEOs (including executives from BP and Jim Rogers, CEO of utility giant Duke Energy) and major environmental groups such as the EDF, the Nature Conservancy, and the National Resources Defense Council. Since cap-and-trade policy was a “market-based” alternative to straightforward regulation of carbon emissions and had drawn some support from Republicans in the past, Krupp and his allies reasoned that adequate lobbying and sufficient pre-compromise with corporate interests could propel it through Congress. The USCAP campaign culminated in the climate bill that died in the Senate in 2010.
In January 2013, Harvard professor of sociology and government Theda Skocpol released a 142-page report detailing the history of this failed drive. The report elicited a strong response from the environmentalist community and has fueled ongoing debate about future strategy. Its assessment of cap-and-trade leaders is often damning. Skocpol concludes that the “USCAP campaign was designed and conducted in an insider-grand-bargaining political style that, unbeknownst to its sponsors, was unlikely to succeed given fast-changing realities in U.S. partisan politics and governing institutions.”
In 2009 and 2010, conservative funders such as David and Charles Koch and activists in the Tea Party outmaneuvered the business-friendly insiders, not merely by changing general public attitudes but by polarizing right-wing opinion. Making opposition to cap-and-trade an important litmus test for Republican officials, they eliminated any possible support for the deal from moderate crossovers.
In light of this emerging opposition, Skocpol slams USCAP and its allies for embracing “nonpartisan messaging strategies that, in general and gauzy terms, mentioned unspecified ‘green jobs’ and ‘American energy independence’ as the reasons for ordinary citizens to acquiesce to sweeping climate change legislation, whose specifics those citizens were supposedly not to worry about too much.” Skocpol takes a firm stand against the stealth approach of pushing climate change legislation without discussing the crisis of global warming.
She also points out that although “big green” groups purported to invest tens of millions of dollars to organize the public around climate legislation, the money was in fact mostly spent on television advertising that “maintained a lofty nonpartisan stance well above the level of any policy specifics.” In contrast, the Tea Party-fueled Right garnered far more success with a vivid scare campaign emphasizing the direct economic costs of cap and trade.
Responding to the Skocpol report, many environmentalists questioned whether the professor lets Obama off too easily for what they believe was his failure to lead aggressively on climate change. (Skocpol defends the White House’s penchant for staying above the congressional fray and only intervening at moments when the vote is very close. In the case of cap and trade, she argues, “Presidential arm-twisting and sweet-talking were not the issue.”) Despite these disagreements, Skocpol’s concluding recommendation—that environmental donors must make a more significant investment in movement-building outside of the beltway—should be a welcome one on the environmental Left, which has long pointed out that resources within the movement are overwhelmingly directed toward inside efforts.
“To counter fierce political opposition, reformers will have to build organizational networks across the country,” Skocpol writes, “and they will need to orchestrate sustained political efforts that stretch far beyond friendly Congressional offices, comfy board rooms, and posh retreats.”
More broadly, she contends “Big, society-shifting reforms are not achieved in the United States principally through insider bargains. They depend on the inspiration and extra oomph that comes from widely ramified organization and broad democratic mobilization.”
This sentiment is sound. At the same time, the idea of “oomph” is vague enough to allow a variety of competing, and even contradictory, interpretations. In discussions about strategy, this causes problems.
Skocpol and her many interlocutors broadly agree that environmentalists need to pursue an inside-outside approach to addressing climate change. The question is, what does this really mean? As it turns out, understandings of this strategic notion can vary widely, and even some of those who claim to accept the need for more “outside” pressure take stances that are distrustful or even contemptuous of actual social movements. Indeed, Skocpol’s report, shrewd and useful in many respects, breaks down on this point.
In a particularly insightful passage, Skocpol notes that inside reformers, despite giving lip service to the need for outside pressure, see citizen activists as playing a secondary and ultimately inferior role:
"[The] division of labor in the cap and trade effort—insiders work out legislation, pollsters and ad-writers try to encourage generalized public support—reflects the way most advocates and legislators in the DC world proceed nowadays. “The public” is seen as a kind of background chorus that, hopefully, will sing on key. Insiders bring in million-dollar pollsters and focus-group operators to tell them what “the public” thinks and to try to divine which words and phrases they should use in television ads, radio messages, and internet ads to move the percentages in answers to very general questions in national polls. It all has a very distanced, antiseptic quality to it…"
Eric Pooley, an EDF senior vice president, took issue with Skocpol’s characterization of its effort as merely an insider drive. He acknowledged that “successful legislative effort must be built upon a combination of inside strategy and outside push (see Lincoln),” and he insisted that USCAP was intended as just one part of a wider effort. The business-environmentalist alliance “wasn’t designed to be the only horse pulling the climate cart.” Pooley contends that a grassroots, outsider coalition simply did not come together quickly enough in 2008 and 2009 to back the cap-and-trade drive: “Yes, we needed more horses. But Skocpol’s response is, in effect, to shoot the horse that pulled hardest.”
Yet, in maintaining that “the real problem was execution, not strategy,” Pooley essentially makes the argument for his more progressive-minded critics: he views outsider organizing as an appendage to the central work of cultivating a legislative compromise. Grassroots pressure is not the foundation of a campaign, something that must be built over the long term, but rather something extra, a force to be brought in when the reformers need backup. Pooley implicitly conveys the notion that many who should-have-been supporters at the grassroots did not appreciate the difficult, expert work being done on their behalf, and that social movement reticence to embrace cap-and-trade deal making can be chalked up to ingratitude and political naïveté.
Skocpol effectively indicts this position, but she too evinces mistrust of the instincts of grassroots environmentalists. This suspicion takes several forms.
First, she barely mentions the fact that, by the time the Senate version of the cap-and-trade legislation materialized, a very sizeable portion of the environmental movement opposed the deal. Groups such as Greenpeace, Public Citizen, Friends of the Earth, and
350.org pointed out that USCAP, in trying to make the cap-and-trade bill more palatable to reluctant senators, had granted some startling concessions. The insiders agreed to the expansion of offshore drilling, promotion of nuclear power, and the elimination of EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act. “It’s not accurate to call this a climate bill,” Public Citizen’s Tyson Slocum told reporter Joshua Frank. “This is nuclear energy-promoting, oil drilling-championing, coal mining-boosting legislation with a weak carbon pricing mechanism thrown in.”
Skocpol does not explore the substance of these arguments. She only mentions disaffected progressives in order to portray them as averse to working with business, insufficiently self-critical, and immature in their fear of the “messy compromises” that passing major legislation necessarily entails. “The left critics,” she writes, “never asked themselves whether they might have done more in an overall push to get basic emissions controls through the Senate—and then come back in later months and years to strengthen the legislation. Left-environmentalists focused instead on what more they should have done to demonize business interests.”
Nor does Skocpol give attention to the organizing that environmentalists have already been doing. Given some impressive grassroots efforts at the time, this is a significant oversight. As Nation environment correspondent Mark Hertsgaard points out, during Obama’s first term a vibrant organizing effort successfully blocked construction of more than one hundred new coal-fired power plants, “thereby imposing a de facto moratorium on new coal in the United States.” Their actions, he argues, “limited future U.S. greenhouse gas emissions almost as much as the cap-and-trade bill would have done.” In the process of scoring key victories in Southern and Midwestern states, the “CoalSwarm” and “Beyond Coal” efforts built coalitions that reached far beyond the “usual suspects” of liberal environmentalism, embodying precisely the type of far-reaching organizing that those interested in building greater outsider pressure should laud.
Skocpol does not elevate such efforts for a clear reason: she fears a turn toward the local. Given the hardening of resistance among congressional Republicans that her report details, one might think that it would be prudent for environmentalists to shift to campaigns that do not require national legislation. But Skocpol rejects this impulse. She warns against any focus on states, cities, towns, and universities “that gives up on legislative remedies” in Washington, D.C. Getting a carbon-capping measure through Congress remains her priority; she merely thinks that the next policy proposal environmentalists push should be better explained to the public and that negotiations around it should be more “transparent.” Writing in Foreign Policy, she argues, “The congressional equation can only change if proponents of carbon limits stop trying to arrange secretive insider bargains and, instead, put forward a transparent proposal such as a carbon tax with revenues returned directly to citizens in annual dividend checks.”
A variety of experts have questioned whether Skocpol’s solution, a “cap-and-dividend” policy, is politically viable, and there is active debate about whether movement groups could more easily organize around it than cap and trade. Putting aside those concerns, her proposal has a more basic problem: once again, it asks the grassroots to take its cue from technocratic national policymakers. Even as Skocpol calls for “several years of popular organizing . . . to build alliances stretching into most states and congressional districts,” she shows little interest in the popular organizing that is already going on or in the demands that have emerged from below.
In a condescending passage in her report, Skocpol lampoons those who believe that “purely grassroots activity [can] carry the day, working its magic entirely outside of Washington, D.C., headquarters to so many confusing maneuvers and imperfect bargains.” But the process of creating social movement pressure is not magic. If it is sometimes treated as such, it is because its dynamics are much less studied and much less understood than the arts of electioneering, lobbying, and legislative deal-making. The latter dominate public understanding of U.S. politics, and they are consistent with elite values and practices. In contrast, the “outside” portion of an inside-outside strategy deserves more sustained attention, precisely because its contours are too often regarded as mystical.
A more robust understanding of the process of building outside pressure would paint a different picture of the options and opportunities available for future climate advocacy. And it would draw on key concepts and overlapping vocabularies from the worlds of community organizing, anti-corporate “comprehensive campaigning,” social movement theory, and strategic nonviolence.
A first useful idea highlights a distinction between “transactional” campaign approaches and “transformational” ones. In a well-regarded op-ed published after the 2010 midterm elections, Harvard lecturer and former United Farm Workers organizer Marshall Ganz referenced the leadership theories developed several decades ago by political scientist James MacGregor Burns to explain the difference between Obama’s method for getting elected in 2008 and his philosophy of wielding power once in the White House. Ganz wrote,
"’Transformational’ leadership engages followers in the risky and often exhilarating work of changing the world, work that often changes the activists themselves. Its sources are shared values that become wellsprings of the courage, creativity and hope needed to open new pathways to success. “Transactional” leadership, on the other hand, is about horse-trading, operating within the routine, and it is practiced to maintain, rather than change, the status quo."
Transformational action favors “moral argument and public education” over cutting narrow deals or “[trying] to mediate in a fractious, divided Washington.” Applying the concept to social movements, rather than individual leaders, transformational campaigns are those designed to dramatize a moral crisis and broadly shift public opinion, rather than to score narrow wins. Put another way: with its focus on changing political realities, the transformational approach is the exact opposite of the Breakthrough Institute’s strategy of accepting the impositions of those political conditions currently in place.
When many Washington-based groups call for the support of outsiders, they are still thinking in a highly transactional mode. This vantage limits their understanding of the scope of organizing required to force change, the forms such activity might take, and the potential impact it might have.
Certainly, it is sometimes warranted to approach a social movement campaign with transactional precision, to exploit points of leverage that grassroots advocates have over a corporation or politician in order to extract an incremental gain. And it is not entirely wrong to argue that 2009 was the right time to rally around a cap-and-trade grand compromise, given that the Senate had a filibuster-proof Democratic majority, unlikely to be seen again soon. But conditions in the Senate were never as hospitable as insiders had hoped—something made clear by the huge concessions they had to make to push their bill forward, as well as the fact that they faced resistance not only from Republicans but also from Democrats hailing from coal- and oil-rich states.
A model such as the Movement Action Plan (MAP), developed by the late organizer and theorist Bill Moyer and advocated by others, including sociologist Mary Lou Finley, would have predicted this failure. MAP recognizes different roles necessary in social movement campaigns, including the “rebel,” who “advocat[es] protest against existing conditions,” and the “reformer,” who works with “official institutions and power holders to formalize the alternatives.” Yet, according to MAP, the reformer becomes important in the endgame of movements, while the rebel is of utmost importance in the rising action—exactly the inverse of the cap-and-trade division of labor, which sought to employ grassroots muscle mostly to make a final push.
Among prominent voices in the climate debate, Bill McKibben, the author and founder of 350.org, most often articulates the transformational perspective. Reflecting on how, in the face of rising public support for gay marriage, droves of once-timid politicians are claiming to have “evolved” in their thinking and are changing their previously entrenched positions, McKibben recently came to the following conclusion:
"[W]e probably need to think, most of the time, about how to change the country, not the Democrats. If we build a movement strong enough to transform the national mood, then perhaps the trembling leaders of the Democrats will eventually follow. I mean, “evolve.” At which point we’ll get an end to things like the Keystone pipeline, and maybe even a price on carbon. That seems to be the lesson of Stonewall and of Selma. The movement is what matters; the Democrats are, at best, the eventual vehicle for closing the deal."
Moving beyond a purely transactional framework affects the way in which movement organizations choose their targets and demands, as well as how they relate local wins to larger, national goals. Skocpol suggests that left environmental groups are increasingly mobilizing around state and municipal issues out of distaste for Washington compromise. She is critical of the idea that social justice groups would receive funding for campaigns “regardless of their relevance to any realistic policy agenda”—preferably, a national policy agenda—“about climate change or the limitation of dangerous emissions.”
But in most cases, left environmentalists are not crafting locally targeted campaigns out of desire to address parochial issues or to maintain ideological purity. In order to build mass movements, organizers must choose fights that allow them to generate momentum among participants and draw in ever-wider support. They are not local for local’s sake. The campaigns are strategically and symbolically chosen. Martin Luther King captured this dynamic in 1967 when he wrote, “Sound effort in a single city such as Birmingham or Selma produced situations that symbolized the evil everywhere and inflamed public opinion against it. Where the spotlight illuminated the evil, a legislative remedy was soon obtained that applied everywhere.”
Within social movements, organizers and theorists employ diverse terminology to capture different facets of how this works. In various ways, they affirm the principle that, if they are to spark mass movement, campaigns must be built with symbolic as well as instrumental considerations in mind; they must achieve outcomes that perpetuate further movement-building, even if they do not immediately advance a given policy goal.
Ruckus Society organizer Joshua Kahn Russell writes about how actions combine communicative elements “designed to sway opinion, express an idea, or contribute to public discourse” and concrete objectives “designed to have a tangible impact on a target.” Gene Sharp, the author and theorist known as the “Machiavelli of nonviolence,” counsels dissidents to design actions partly as “symbolic challenges,” which set out “to test and influence the mood of the population, and to prepare [the public] for continuing struggle through noncooperation and political defiance.” Likewise, the trainers at the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) instruct grassroots activists to judge actions according to criteria such as whether they “build the number of movement supporters and increase their participation” and “build the capacity of civilians to resist.” All of these considerations function outside of a strictly transactional calculus. In fact, in the short term they may make the work of reformers more difficult by polarizing opposition.
Grist magazine commentator David Roberts has done an excellent job of examining some of these dynamics in the climate battle. Defending the often-maligned campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline, Roberts writes,
"[C]limate analysis and climate activism involve different logics. The biggest sources of carbon are not necessarily the best targets for activism, because the goal of activism is not merely carbon reduction, it is organization and empowerment. The goal of activism is to create a vibrant, impassioned constituency that can throw enough weight around to shift the balance of power in politics.
"To create such a movement you need symbolism. You need dramatic confrontations that help define a moral contrast. It’s not like integrating Montgomery’s bus system was going to eliminate structural racism, but the Montgomery bus boycott was a defining moment in demonstrating what was at stake and the possibility of change. . . .
"There aren’t many easy or obvious ways to make viscerally affecting stories out of the models and statistics of climate science….In Keystone XL, they found one….It’s an entrée to the climate fight that is immediate enough, vivid enough, to spark the popular imagination."
These days, it is common to see environmental “moderates” ridicule protests against the Keystone XL pipeline as misguided and ineffectual—just as civil rights “moderates” lambasted the campaign in Birmingham as being of “doubtful utility” (Washington Post), possessing “a poorly chosen target” (Justice Department official Burke Marshall), and being “poorly timed” (Time). Such critics may say they want broad citizen engagement to supplement legislative haggling. But when presented with actual social movement activity, they undermine it.
Roberts responds with a simple maxim: “If you want to move the center, you have to pull from one end.”
Ultimately, climate change may not be as hopeless a cause as conventional Washington opinion deemed it during Obama’s first term. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the president and other elected officials have begun to talk about global warming again. The portion of Americans who agree in polls that there is solid evidence of warming has climbed back up to 69 percent, a rise of 12 points since October 2009. What is more, environmentalism—which has traditionally enjoyed broad but shallow support—can take heart from other movements that have recently demonstrated how a mobilized core constituency can sometimes provoke surprisingly swift transformation.
Former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote in the Washington Post in 2011 that “the role of carbon dioxide in climate patterns has joined abortion and gay marriage as a culture war controversy.” Thinkers at places like the Breakthrough Institute take such comparisons as a sign that drives for greenhouse gas regulation are unwinnable, and that we must therefore acquiesce to post-partisan realism.
Yet, just in the past year, two “culture war” causes that were treated until recently as untouchable have flipped. Immigration reform—thanks to a movement led by outspoken DREAM Act youths—and gay marriage—propelled by persistent advocates who refused to settle for either discrimination or mere civil unions—are now seen as political inevitabilities. In each case, activists did not hang their hopes on euphemisms. They took a polarizing issue, translated vague discontent in their communities into organized political action, and ultimately changed the climate of national debate.
Do the economic costs of addressing global warming make it more difficult to win than gains around cultural issues? Perhaps. But disasters such as Hurricane Sandy are increasingly making clear the price of inaction. And the fact that damage from climate change is concentrated in Republican states may help create new paths for clearing ideological blockades in Congress, particularly if emboldened popular movements can use “trigger events” such as devastating storms to propel new waves of action.
In the end, the idea that global warming is considered a political loser does not make it unique among progressive causes. After all, issues that are already embraced as winners by elected officials hardly need outside campaigns to push them forward. If there ever was such a time, the moment in which one could plausibly believe that we could solve the climate crisis without uttering its name has passed. We have entered a time that demands a different type of mobilization: the type that will cause discomfort among believers in pre-compromise and will inspire all those who have not yet found an outlet for their concern about the changing climate; the type that is equally plainspoken and rebellious.
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Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus. Paul Engler is founding director of the Center for the Working Poor, in Los Angeles. They are writing a book about the evolution of political nonviolence. They can be reached via the website www.DemocracyUprising.com.

Alternet, July 24, 2013

By Alyssa Figueroa and Alana de Hinojosa

The ongoing public outcry over Zimmerman’s acquittal may actually spark some change.

George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin left many Americans shaken. Perhaps it was the sheer clarity of the verdict, which sent the message that in this country, a person can racially profile, stalk and kill a kid — and walk away free. The verdict inspired tens of thousands of people to get on the streets nationwide. Government officials, civil rights leaders, athletes, celebrities and even President Obama have spoken out.

A Washington Post-ABC News Poll revealed that Americans were split on the verdict. However, 86 percent of African Americans disapproved of the verdict, while 51 percent of whites were in favor of it. While the numbers reveal a racial divide, multi-racial groups are still forming to seek justice. Indeed, the ongoing outcry over Zimmerman’s acquittal is so strong, persistent and diverse that it may actually spark some change.

Here are eight signs that Zimmerman’s acquittal may have big ramifications.

1. Rallies and vigils for Trayvon Martin continue.“Justice for Trayvon” rallies have been happening nationwide, nearly non-stop. These rallies, sometimes including vigils, conjured anger around the unjust killing.

Over the weekend, rallies took place in more than 100 cities around the country including New York City, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, Denver and Austin. In Los Angeles, people shut down a highway for 20 minutes. In New York, it’s estimated that 10,000 marched, with Jay-Z and Beyonce among them. Al Sharpton, whose National Action Network helped organize many of the protests, was also in attendance as well as Martin’s mother Sybrina Fulton. Fulton spoke out at the rally, saying: “We have moved on from the verdict. Of course we’re hurting. Of course we’re shocked and disappointed. But that just means that we have to roll up our sleeves and continue to fight.”

Trayvon Martin’s father, Tracy Martin, led a rally in Miami, where protesters gathered and sang, “We Shall Overcome.” He said: “I vowed to Trayvon, when he was lying in his casket, that I would use every ounce of energy in my body to seek justice for him … Senseless violence is a disease and we as a people have the cure, we just need to come together.”

2. NAACP puts pressure on the DOJ. The NAACP is leading the way in pressuring the Department of Justice to file civil rights charges against Zimmerman. On Saturday, the organization launched a petition stating that, "The most fundamental of civil rights — the right to life — was violated the night George Zimmerman stalked and then took the life of Trayvon Martin.” The petition garnered 1.5 million signatures in three days.

The NAACP’s president, Ben Jealous, spoke to senior DOJ officials to pressure them to continue their investigation of the case. Attorney General Eric Holder has said a thorough investigation will be conducted as to whether Zimmerman violated civil rights law. Sanford Police Department said it turned over all the evidence, as well as Zimmerman’s gun, to the DOJ. Holder has called Martin’s death “tragic” and “unnecessary.” He also said the DOJ “will continue to act in a manner that is consistent with the facts and the law. We will not be afraid.”

3. Activists organize a sit-in at Rick Scott’s office. A group of young activists have held a weeklong occupation of Florida governor Rick Scott’s office, demanding that he call a special session on the state’s "Stand Your Ground" law and racial profiling. The activists, called the Dream Defenders, have organized different working groups that will make sure the group sustains its ability to occupy. They also announced that they are planning on holding weekly demonstrations in the state’s capitol, similar to North Carolina’s "Moral Mondays" protests.

On Monday, Scott said he supports the Stand Your Ground law and will not hold a special session. The Dream Defenders say they are ready to occupy his office until he calls the special session. Several Democrats in the state’s House have come out in support of the activists and hope to hold a hearing on the law during the legislature’s next committee week. So far, protesters have had no trouble with the police.

4. “Stand Your Ground” laws face fierce criticism. While the Dream Defenders demand a special session on “Stand Your Ground,” protesters nationwide have made the law a focal point. At least 22 states have laws similar to Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws.

While activists protest the laws, prominent figures have also called for their reassessment. Eric Holder said the laws may encourage violence and “senselessly expand the concept of self-defense and sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods.” U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., also agrees these laws need to be reviewed. On Tuesday, Arizona state senator Steve Gallardo called on the state legislature to review Arizona’s version of Stand Your Ground. Alabama state senator Hank Sanders announced there will be an effort to repeal the law in his state.

Obama also spoke out directly against the law during his speech on Friday, saying: “And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these Stand Your Ground laws, I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? … And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.”

5. Everyone boycotts Florida. Within days of Zimmerman’s acquittal, calls to boycott Florida abounded. Stevie Wonder announced during a performance in Canada that he had canceled upcoming shows in the Sunshine State, and would not perform there until Stand Your Ground laws are repealed. "As a matter of fact, wherever I find that law exists, I will not perform in that state or in that part of the world," Wonder said.

There was some noise about travelers canceling trips to Florida, and heading to other warm places like California and Mexico. Huffington Post’s associate travel editor encouraged his readers to jump on board the travel boycott with his piece, “Travelers Can Save the Next Trayvon Martin By Avoiding Florida.”

Tweeters condemned those planning to visit Disney World, tweeting, “Shame on you! Go to Disneyland instead.”

On the official "Visit Florida" Facebook page, one commenter echoed what seemed to be a slew of angry comments calling for a Florida boycott: “I really LOVE vacationing in Florida, but I cannot, in good conscience, take my kids to Florida, or visit Florida again ever!!”

Martin Luther King III called for a national boycott of Florida oranges and orange juice last week. A Facebook page titled "Boycott Florida" (with more than 3,000 likes) outlined a list of “Top Florida companies that depend on your dollar,” which included Carnival Cruise Co., Tupperware Corporation, and restaurants like Olive Garden and Red Lobster.

One angry Twitter user summed up the sentiment when she tweeted: “Until we hit their pockets, nothing will change.”

Al Sharpton also announced that his National Action Network may propose boycotts on corporations that still support the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is a corporate-sponsored lobbying group that is a major supporter of Stand Your Ground laws.

6. There’s a renewed call for gun control. Though this surprisingly hasn’t been at the forefront of the responses to Zimmerman’s acquittal, there have been renewed calls for gun control that may grow in time. The Brady Campaign, the nation’s largest citizens’ lobby to prevent gun violence, issued a statement on the Zimmerman verdict, which read: “There is sharp disagreement over the verdict, but there can be no disagreement over the reason why Trayvon Martin is dead. George Zimmerman had a gun that night, and the state of Florida allowed him to carry it virtually anywhere despite a violent history.”

The statement also spoke out against Stand Your Ground as well as concealed weapons laws. The Brady Campaign, along with the parents of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis (another black 17-year-old Florida resident shot by a white man), filed an amicus brief “asking the entire United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to review and reverse a 2-1 decision that held Illinois law restricting the public carrying of firearms unconstitutional.”

Meanwhile, gun enthusiasts are pushing the narrative that Zimmerman’s case had nothing to do with gun laws. One gun group, called the Buckeye Firearms Association, is fundraising to buy Zimmerman a new gun, after the court confiscated his weapon and passed it on to the DOJ.

In a recent blog in the Huffington Post titled “Where is Gun Control?” Sanjay Sanghoee called on Democrats to fight harder to pass gun control legislation. He wrote:

"In the wake of the Trayvon Martin verdict, President Obama once again brought up the need for gun control, but sincere as he might be, words are not enough. The President, and the Democratic party, need to follow it up with action. Setbacks may be a part of our political process, but they are not an excuse to do nothing."

7. Plans Revamped for MLK’s 50th anniversary of the march on Washington. Plans to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech are being revamped as angry and frustrated reactions over the acquittal of Zimmerman and the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act quickly multiply. Such fast-escalating resentment has senior figures in the civil rights movement expecting a significantly larger turnout – so large, in fact, that it could nearly double the number of those who heard King speak in 1963, bringing the running total to close to half a million.

According to NAACP president Benjamin Jealous, expectations are high because the Zimmerman case and the Supreme Court ruling have accented how far America is from realizing King’s dream. Jealous told the Guardian: “The march has gone from being seen by many about primarily about the past, to being urgently about the present.”

8. Obama’s unprecedented statement. President Obama delivered an unexpected and surprisingly bold speech last week, articulating why the shooting and killing of Trayvon Martin may well be the moment to reflect on race and race relations in the United States. With no script in hand, Obama spoke to why the killing and verdict has been especially painful for the black community due to “a history that doesn’t go away.” He also spoke of his personal history growing up as a black man in America.

Obama also stated there is a sense "that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different." Obama concluded by calling on the nation to do a little soul searching. It seems Obama has finally done some himself.