N.Y. Times, Aug. 9, 2013

By Andrew Rosenthal

Despite all the politicians who call themselves straight talkers, there is little that makes official Washington queasier than straight talk. And so it was today when Senator Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, dared to suggest that there might just be a racial tinge to the Republicans’ wild-eyed outrage over just about everything President Obama says and their implacable opposition to just about everything he does or wants to do.

“It’s been obvious that they’re doing everything they can to make him fail,” Mr. Reid said in an interview on KNPR Radio. “And I hope, I hope — and I say this seriously — I hope that’s based on substance and not the fact that he’s African American.”

The Nevada senator recalled: “My counterpart, Mitch McConnell, said at the beginning of the presidency of Barack Obama that he had one goal — and that is to defeat Obama and make sure he wasn’t re-elected. And that’s how they legislate in the Senate. It was really bad. And we’re now seven months into this second term of the president’s and they haven’t changed much.”

The G.O.P.’s reaction was predictably furious. Brad Dayspring, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, said on Twitter that Mr. Reid’s comments were “offensive and insane.”

But Mr. Reid was just putting into words what many, many people have felt. Including me.

Note to Twitter: I am not saying every Republican is a racist. That would be flat wrong, just as it would be wrong to say that no Democrats are racists. Opposing Mr. Obama’s policies does not automatically make anyone racist.

What I am saying is that I suspect — apparently along with Mr. Reid — that a white president with the exact same plans and ideas would not have encountered the same kind of fierce opposition.

Certainly a white president wouldn’t have had to deal with the “birther” movement. And while that conspiracy theory didn’t originate in the House or the Senate, Republican lawmakers have fanned the flames. Many have refused to denounce it. Others have actually encouraged it. I wrote a few days ago about Rep. Ted Yoho, Republican of Florida, who said he’d consider supporting an investigation into the validity of the president’s birth certificate.

There is no way other than racism to explain “birtherism.” The whole point is to make Mr. Obama the menacing “other,” to remind everyone that he is African American.

Nor is it “insane” to detect a racial undercurrent to the incredible disrespect that’s been shown to this president over the years. Remember when the president addressed Congress in 2009, and Rep. Joe Wilson yelled “you lie!” Then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said “I have never in my 29 years heard an outburst of that nature with reference to a president of the United States, speaking as a guest of the House and Senate.” Would that have happened to a white president?

There is no doubt that Mr. Reid is going to get hammered for this remark. It did not fit into the usual definition of a “gaffe,” but it certainly fit the spirit of what the political journalist Michael Kinsley had in mind when he said “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.”

© 2013 New York Times

ClimateProgress, July 29, 2013
By Marina Fang
A growing number of polls and research suggests that minorities are ahead of the curve when it comes to supporting serious climate policy.
For Asian-Americans, the fastest-growing minority group in the U.S., climate change looms large among issues of concern. As Grist noted, “most Asian Americans hold particularly strong green values,” citing a 2012 survey of Asian-American political attitudes in the leadup to the presidential election, which found that 70 percent of Asian-Americans consider themselves environmentalist, compared to 41 percent of Americans overall, and 60 percent of Asian-American prioritize environmental protection over economic growth, compared to 41 percent overall.
African-Americans are similarly worried about climate change. A 2010 study from the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that “in many cases, minorities are equally as supportive, and often more supportive of national climate and energy policies, than white Americans.” In particular, 89 percent of blacks supported the regulation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant, compared to 78 percent of whites.
What accounts for strong minority support of climate change policy?
Political affiliation: Minorities overwhelmingly voted Democratic in the 2012 election, so it makes sense that they would express progressive views on environmental issues. A recent poll found strong bipartisan support for climate change policy. The fact that minorities are adding their voices provides a stark contrast to the climate change deniers continually obstructing efforts to combat climate change, most recently in their quest to challenge President Obama’s climate agenda.
Environmental justice: Growing evidence suggests that minorities are disproportionately affected by the negative consequences of climate change. For instance, the NAACP found that of the six million Americans who live in close proximity to a coal plant, 39 percent of them are people of color. Additionally, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that African-Americans visit the emergency room for asthma at nearly 350 percent the average rate of whites, and thus air quality regulations are particularly important to them.
Global effects: Finally, many minorities have immigrated from countries acutely affected by climate change. Last year, more than 32 million people were displaced by climate-related disasters, most of whom lived in Asia and Africa. The Japan earthquake and subsequent nuclear disaster rattled people all over East Asia, and extreme monsoons in India, caused by melting glaciers, have increased in recent years. Firsthand experience with the impact of climate change has made minorities firm believers in climate science.
Interestingly, Hispanics are less likely to express concern regarding climate change than blacks and Asians, but in many polls, they are still ahead of Caucasians. In a 2012 MPO Research Groups survey, 60.3 percent of Hispanics believed that humans contribute to climate change, compared to 67.3 percent of African Americans, 69.2 percent of Asian Americans, and only 56.7 percent of Caucasians. A 2012 survey conducted by the National Council of La Raza and the Sierra Club found that 77 percent of Latinos believe climate change is already happening, compared with only 52 percent of overall respondents. And in the Yale/George Mason study, 82 percent of Hispanics supported regulating carbon dioxide.
Marina Fang is an intern for ThinkProgress.

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