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.

The Guardian (U.K.), July 23, 2013
By Alex Karakatsanis
The differential treatment of crack cocaine and powder cocaine by America’s criminal "justice" system has been exposed as discriminatory and admitted to be unfair. Yet, the secret nightmare continues for thousands of African Americans still in prison for crack cocaine offenses, while people convicted of powder cocaine offenses – the majority of whom are white or Hispanic – have served far shorter sentences. Even as the US government has reformed the injustice of punitive sentencing for crack, it has doubled down on the injustice for those imprisoned before the reforms.
I’ll never forget the first time I had to explain federal crack cocaine laws to a client. I was 25 years old, fresh out of law school, and working as a public defender in Alabama. I had come to the local jail, where my client was being held in a 6ft x 8ft cell with three other men and no access to fresh air or to a single window.
My client thought he would be released from jail and home with his family after our first appearance in court. Instead, I told him, the tiny bag of crack cocaine that police had found in his car – less than half the size of a ping-pong ball – meant that he would likely spend the next five to 40 years in prison.
Last month, President Obama quietly did something that should shake every American to the core. Seeking to enforce federal crack cocaine laws that have since been repealed, the Obama administration asked a federal appeals court to ensure that thousands of human beings, mostly poor and mostly black, remain locked in prison – even though everyone agrees that there is no justification for them to be there.
To understand Obama’s decision and to understand why you have probably not heard about this, it is important to realize just how normalized rampant incarceration has become in our society. America now puts people in prisons at rates unparalleled in the modern world and unprecedented in American history. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners.
Half of all human beings in federal prison are there because of a nonviolent drug offense. The number of nonviolent drug offenders in prisons and jails around America has increased 1100% since 1980. The vast majority of those in prison are very poor. African Americans constitute only 14-15% of the nation’s drug users (about the same as their percentage of the general population); yet, they constitute 37% of those arrested for drug offenses, 59% of those convicted for drug offenses, and 74% of those sentenced to prison for a drug offense.
The result: twenty years or so into the "war on drugs", America incarcerated blacks at a rate six times higher than South Africa did during apartheid.
Until President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, on 3 August 2010, there had been, for over two decades, a 100:1 disparity in the quantities of drugs seized that would trigger the mandatory minimum penalties faced by tens of thousands of people like my client. In other words, while my client’s five to 40 years was triggered by only 5g of crack cocaine, it would take 500g (half a kilo) of powder cocaine to trigger the same penalty.
A further disparity: 82% of federal crack cocaine defendants are African-American; only 27% of powder cocaine defendants are African-American. In the early years of the 100:1 ratio, from 1988 to 1995, no whites at allwere brought to trial by federal prosecutors under the crack provisions in 17 states, which included major cities such as Boston, Denver, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, and Los Angeles.
The president, Congress, and every serious expert agreed that this disparity was unjustifiable. Indeed, the two substances are pharmacologically identical. Curiously, though, without giving any reasons, Congress did not reduce the disparity to 1:1, as even federal law enforcement officials had conceded was appropriate. Instead, it picked the nice round number of 18:1. Even in making that arbitrarily decision, however, Congress did not indicate what was to happen to all those already sitting in prison under a law that Congress and the White House had now found to be unjust.
This was a moment almost unique in history: when a supposedly free society admitted that many of its citizens remain in prison for no good reason.
Strangely, the Obama administration initially urged in federal courts across the country that the old discriminatory penalties should still be applied to those arrested but not yet sentenced at the time the law was passed. However, the administration reversed course after significant criticism, and the US supreme court held last year that the new, more "fair" sentences must be applied to those not yet sentenced.
But that case did not decide the fate of any of the thousands of people already sitting in prison because of what all agree is an unfair law. For those people – sentenced, in some cases, just days or weeks before the Fair Sentencing Act was signed – our society’s acknowledgment that they remain in prison for no good reason may not help them at all – because the government did not care to reduce their penalties retroactively when it declared them unjust.
For several years, federal judges have done nothing to remedy this injustice; one famously concluded that the prisoners sentenced under the old law had simply "lost on a temporal roll of the cosmic dice". So, there are American citizens serving tens of thousands of years in prison because, according to all three branches of government, it’s just their tough luck?
Apparently so, until two months ago. On 17 May 2013, the US court of appeals for the sixth circuit held that the new, "fair" sentences must be applied to all those previously sentenced under laws that everyone acknowledges were discriminatory. The two-judge majority opinion wrote forcefully (pdf) and with unusual candor about the history of unequal treatment under the old laws. The judges ordered that those sentenced under those laws were entitled to ask federal judges to reduce their sentences.
The Justice Department is now seeking to overturn that decision – which will be devastating news to many thousands like my original crack cocaine client. The Obama administration would surely condemn an oppressive foreign dictator’s regime for the singular cruelty of declaring to its population that thousands of its citizens must continue to sit in prison for no good reason. The fact that few have even heard of the stunning position taken by President Obama is a sad reflection on how incurious mainstream US public opinion is about what underpins our mass incarceration society.
• Editor’s note: though not technically incorrect, this article was amended to include the phrase "or Hispanic" in the first paragraph, at 1.30pm ET on 23 July

New York Times, July 23, 2013

By Tara Parker-Pope

Breast cancer survival is, over all, three years shorter for black women compared with white women, mostly because their cancer is often more advanced when they first seek medical care, new research shows.

While cancer researchers have known for two decades that black women with breast cancer tend to fare worse than white women, questions remain about the reasons behind the black-white divide. The new report, from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, begins to untangle some of the issues by using an analytic method to filter the influence of demographics, treatment differences and variations in tumor characteristics, among other things.

The findings, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggest that while a significant number of black women still get inferior cancer care, the larger problem appears to be that black women get less health care over all, and that screening and early detection campaigns may have failed to reach black communities.

Using data from Medicare patients tracked in the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results database, the researchers analyzed 107,273 breast cancer cases, which included 7,375 black women. The larger number of cases involving white women allowed researchers to find nearly perfectly matched controls against which to compare the outcomes of black women with breast cancer.

The findings were striking. Over all, white women with breast cancer lived three years longer than black women. Of the women studied, nearly 70 percent of white women lived at least five years after diagnosis, while 56 percent of black women were still alive five years later.

The difference is not explained by more aggressive cancers among black women. Instead, the researchers found a troubling pattern in which black women were less likely to receive a diagnosis when their cancer was at an early stage and most curable. In addition, a significant number of black women also receive lower-quality cancer care after diagnosis, although those differences do not explain the survival gap.

“Something is going wrong,” said Dr. Jeffrey H. Silber, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Center for Outcomes Research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which studies disparities in health care. “These are huge differences. We are getting there too late. That’s why we are seeing these differences in survival.”

The data show that black patients are twice as likely to never receive treatment. The records of 12.6 percent of black patients did not show evidence of treatment, compared with 5.9 percent of whites.

Black patients were also more likely to have at least a three-month delay in receiving treatment. Among black and white women with similar tumors, 5.8 percent of black women had not started treatment after three months, compared with just 2.5 percent of whites.

One notable finding of the report is that while the introduction of new treatments has improved the outcome for both white and black breast cancer patients since 1991, those improvements have not narrowed the survival gap between the two groups.

But solving disparities in cancer care would not immediately have a major effect on overall survival for black women, the study showed. If black women began receiving exactly the same quality and level of breast cancer treatment as white women, that would lengthen their lives by two to three months, the study showed.

However, two additional years of life could be gained among black women if their breast cancers were detected earlier and if their health were better over all, as is the case with white women with breast cancer. Among the black women studied, 20 percent received a diagnosis of Stage III or IV disease, when the cancer is far less likely to be cured. Among the white women, only 11.4 percent had late-stage disease.

One reason may be that the black women studied were less likely to seek medical care for any reason.

Although all the patients in the analysis had Medicare coverage, blacks were significantly less likely than white women to have seen a primary care doctor in the 6 to 18 months before diagnosis, and they had far lower rates of cholesterol and colon cancer screening. Black women also had far lower rates of breast cancer screening — 23.5 percent had been screened 6 to 18 months before diagnosis, compared with 35.7 percent of white women. Black women with breast cancer were, over all, in poorer health than white women. Of the black women studied, 26 percent had diabetes, compared with 12.6 percent of white women.

“These patients have insurance,” Dr. Silber said. “We need to improve screening for these women and improve their relationships with a primary care provider.”

In an accompanying editorial, the authors, who included Dr. Jeanne S. Mandelblatt of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Cancer Center, said the rigorous study offered “additional clues to the black-white differences in breast cancer outcomes.”

However, the authors wrote that the report may still understate the effect of lower-quality cancer care for black women, in part because some treatment data are missing from the database it used.

“Ratings of patient-physician communication and trust have been related to black women’s, but not white women’s, patterns of chemotherapy use,” the authors wrote. These findings further reinforce “the idea that black women may have different cancer care experiences than white women.”

© 2013 New York Times

New York Times, July 19, 2013

By Charles M. Blow

On Friday President Obama picked at America’s racial wound, and it bled a bit.

Despite persistent attempts by some to divest the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman tragedy of its racial resonance, the president refused to allow it.

During a press briefing, Mr. Obama spoke of the case, soberly and deliberately, in an achingly personal tone, saying: “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

With that statement, an exalted black man found kinship with a buried black boy, the two inextricably linked by inescapable biases, one expressing the pains and peril of living behind the veil of his brown skin while the other no longer could.

With his statements, the president dispensed with the pedantic and made the tragedy personal.

He spoke of his own experiences with subtle biases, hinting at the psychological violence it does to the spirit — being followed around in stores when shopping, hearing the locking of car doors when you approach, noticing the clutching of purses as you enter an elevator.

It is in these subtleties that black folks are forever forced to box with shadows, forever forced to recognize their otherness and their inability to simply blend.

In “The Souls of Black Folk,” W. E. B. Du Bois described this phenomenon thusly:

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

Surely, much has changed in America since Du Bois wrote those lines more than a century ago — namely, bias tends to be expressed structurally rather than on an individual level — but the “two-ness” remains. The reality of being marked, denied and diminished for being America’s darker sons persists, even for a man who rose to become one of America’s brightest lights.

And while words are not actions or solutions, giving voice to a people’s pain from The People’s house has power.

On Friday the president reached past one man and one boy and one case in one small Florida town, across centuries of slavery and oppression and discrimination and self-destructive behavior, and sought to place this charged case in a cultural context.

It can be too easy when speaking of race, bias, stereotypes and inequality to arrive at simplistic explanations. There is often a tendency to separate legacy traumas and cultural conditioning from personal responsibility, but it cannot be done. The truth is that racial realities are complicated, weaving all these factors into a single fabric.

There is no denying that an enormous amount of violence — both physical and psychological — is aimed at black men. That violence is both interracial and intraracial. Too many black men inflict that violence on one another, feeding a self-destructive cycle of victimization until hope is crushed to the ground and opportunity seems beyond the sky.

All of this must be considered when we speak of race, and those conversations cannot be a communion of the aggrieved. All parties must acknowledge and accept their role in the problems for us to solve them. Only when the burden of bias is shared — only when we can empathize with the feelings of “the other” — can we move beyond injury to healing.

Yes, we should encourage young black men to value themselves and make better choices that reflect that value.

But we must also acknowledge that poverty is sticky and despair, dogged. The legacy effects of American oppression — which destroyed families, ingrained cultural violence, and denied generations of African-Americans the luxury of accruing and transferring intergenerational wealth — cannot simply be written off.

Most blacks don’t believe that racial prejudice is the whole of black people’s problems today, or is even chief among them. According to a Gallup poll released Friday, only 37 percent of blacks believe that the fact that they, on average, have worse jobs, income and housing is “mostly” because of discrimination.

But it would be hard to argue that bias plays no role, even if it’s immeasurable.

That’s why there was value in the president of the United States acknowledging his “two-ness” on Friday and connecting with Trayvon Martin — because we can never lose sight of the fact that biases and stereotypes and violence are part of a black man’s burden in America, no matter that man’s station.

We could all have been Trayvon.

• I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow.

© 2013 New York Times

NJ Spotlight July 22, 2013

By Andrew Kitchenman

The health of New Jersey’s urban residents is worse than the health of state residents as a whole – and detailed new report focused on the state’s capital city draws a vivid portrait of the problem and its scope. http://www.trentonhealthteam.org/tht/TrentonCommunityHealthNeedsAssesssmentJuly2013.pdf

A new community health-needs assessment found that if healthcare providers in Trenton are going to successfully treat city residents, they must address daunting social problems including crime and low health literacy.

The assessment was conducted by the Trenton Health Team (THT)], an organization dedicated to coordinating the efforts of the city’s healthcare providers

The study ranked reducing crime and increasing health literacy as two of the top five healthcare priorities for the city, along with reducing obesity, substance abuse and chronic diseases.

THT Executive Director Dr. Ruth Perry noted that both urban crime (both directly through gunshot victims and indirectly through the pervasive fear it causes in a community) and health literacy (the ability to understand medical information and use it to make decisions) are related to the other health priorities.

The team heard from residents who said “We know we need to exercise, but we don’t feel safe walking in our communities,” Perry said.

Her conclusion: “You see how all of these five priorities are interrelated.”

The 2010 Affordable Care Act mandates that nonprofit hospitals conduct these assessments every three years. The assessments generally include analysis of hospital patient data and participation by local public health experts. This information must then be used to adopt plans to meet the needs of the community.

The amount of time and effort that hospitals commit to the assessments can vary, but officials with Capital Health, which operates Capital Health Regional Medical Center, and St. Francis Medical Center decided to work together in an intensive effort as part of the THT, which also includes Henry J. Austin Health Center and city officials. They were able to take a more comprehensive approach involving dozens of local community organizations, thanks to a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Perry said the assessment was unique because it looked at the root causes of local health problems, rather than just tallying medical cases.

“If residents are afraid their kids going to get shot, then they’re not going to exercise,” Perry said.

St. Francis executive vice president Christy Stephenson, who codirected the assessment with Perry, said the new study was different from one her hospital conducted in 2010 because there was much more community involvement, including a series of public forums.

“It became clear after the second forum that the issues in Trenton were not confined to diabetes, hypertension, heart disease — it was like peeling an onion and people were talking about the environmental things as well as the social barriers” to achieving improved health, she said.

This led the group to directly ask residents what environmental and social factors affect healthcare.

“Crime and violence came up right away,” Stephenson said. “Many of the parents and grandparents felt that was one of the reasons that obesity was so high.”

The social factors came to the forefront in part because the assessment focused on city residents, rather than looking at the needs of the hospitals’ suburban patients.

“In some ways Mercer County is like the land of the haves and the have-nots,” Stephenson said. “That is very much the case where it comes to crime, violence and health literacy.”

Among non-English-speaking residents, language barriers affected residents’ health literacy, she noted. The assessment noted that 35.4 percent of Trenton residents speak a language other than English at home, higher than the 29.2-percent statewide average.

Perry added that if the THT can address health literacy, it would help residents to take care of themselves.

Dr. Robert Remstein, Capital Health’s vice president for accountable care, said the concerns about health literacy matched his own experience in the city. “If patients don’t have the basic fund of knowledge of what diabetes is,” as well as its complications and symptoms, Remstein said, “we’re not going to get off the dime with those patients and we’re really going to have bad outcomes.”

Remstein said the assessment was eye-opening for him. While he has worked as a doctor in Trenton since completing his residency in 1985, he had always thought of crime as a distinct problem, rather than as a cause of other health problems.

“The impact of where you live and the trauma of poverty around that area directly impacts your health,” he said. “I don’t think I ever realized that as an independent variable that can impact your health.”

He noted that as the THT conducted the assessment, scientific studies were published that linked stress to genetic changes.

Remstein said hospitals have traditionally based community health needs assessments on “the colored glasses of the organization.” Having an assessment that involved multiple hospitals led to a broader perspective.

Perry acknowledged that the THT took on an extremely difficult task by producing an assessment that focuses on major social problems.

“It can make it more difficult to address them, but I think here in Trenton we’re in a unique position” because every health provider, community organization and the city government are united in the effort, she said.

Perry gave another reason – based on economics — for investing in addressing these issues.

“I personally think that this is really key for Trenton because if we cannot get our population healthier and safer, then I think it limits Trenton’s ability to have a renaissance,” Perry said, noting that the chronic diseases that result from these factors affect the city’s workforce. “Businesses will not come if they think the community is not safe.”

The THT has assembled five working groups to look at each of the five priorities listed in the assessment. They will meet over the next two months with a goal of developing a plan to address the needs as soon as late September. Each of the group must develop concrete goals and objectives that can be measured, Perry said.

Stephenson sees the hospitals taking a new approach to addressing community needs as a result of the assessment. Rather than tailoring programs to meet individual diseases as concern about them arises, the hospitals will be able to prioritize their programs to address the larger priorities laid out in the assessment.

“They’re big (and)…audacious goals, but I think we’ll be much more effective not overlapping but working in concert,” she said.

New York Times, July 21, 2013

By Michael Kimmelman

NEWARK — Perhaps few places in America represent the urban trauma of the 1960s more than this city. Deindustrialization, corruption, suburban flight and calamitous planning gutted its core, tore up neighborhoods and helped fuel rebellion in the streets. The whole toxic environment was encapsulated in the desecration of the Passaic River, which borders Newark. It became a dumping ground for dioxin from the defunct Diamond Shamrock Chemicals Company, which manufactured Agent Orange.

But a quiet upheaval is turning that river, polluted as it may be, into a front line of reclamation. It’s a common approach these days, from Seoul to Madrid to San Francisco: upgrading cities by revamping ravaged waterfronts. Urban renewal strategies from decades past, which did so much to destroy places like Newark, are being turned on their heads. The idea here is to make the Passaic a point of pride. You can see the sign of change in a new stretch of fluorescent orange boardwalk along the riverfront, an eye catcher for passengers on trains rumbling over the bridge into Newark Penn Station.

Phase 1 of Riverfront Park, as it is called, was completed last summer: a $15 million complex of playing fields on formerly derelict land, a couple of miles north of a giant sewage treatment plant, in the Ironbound district. This traditionally Portuguese working-class neighborhood avoided urban renewal 50 years ago and has thrived, partly as a consequence.

The Ironbound also sidestepped the redevelopment movement of the 1980s, which produced alien, corporate sites like Battery Park City. Residents and vigorous neighborhood groups like the Ironbound Community Corporation welcomed the new fields, which, since opening, have become a citywide attraction.

Phase 2 is set to open on Aug. 3, just upriver from the fields: the 800-foot-long, $9.3 million orange boardwalk, designed by the veteran landscape architect Lee Weintraub, in collaboration with the city’s planning office.

In this cash-starved city, nearly half the money has come from the state, the rest from federal and county sources, along with private contributions solicited by the mayor, Cory A. Booker, and the nonprofit Trust for Public Land.

The ultimate goal, said Damon Rich, Newark’s planning director, is to create more than three miles of greenway, a riverfront ribbon with bike and walking paths stretching all the way through downtown to residential neighborhoods in the north.

Accomplishing that will require decades of political perseverance. “It doesn’t get more challenging than a waterfront park on a brownfield next to a Superfund site,” as Adrian Benepe, the director of City Park Development at the Trust for Public Land, and a former commissioner for New York City parks, put it. This is an especially tall order in a poor city notorious for unreliable governance. A timely coalition of environmental groups, Essex County leaders and Mr. Booker came together to complete the first phases. The mayor is now running for United States Senate. Whether early successes with the park will propel the project onward, whoever ends up in charge, is an obvious question.

Another is whether big change can happen here without gentrification driving out the very people the plan tries to help. The city administration says it wants to avoid exactly that. Many residents, accustomed to broken promises and fearful of investments that only produce quarantined office parks, are already wary.

“When the city center was destroyed by urban renewal, it became a place to avoid, a place to pass through,” said Mindy Fullilove, a professor at Columbia University and a New Jersey native who writes on urban affairs. “Now the riverfront can become an urban edge shared by everyone — a point from which to build the city back. The problem of urban renewal has been that when we’ve had an idea, it usually isn’t a good one, and when we have a good one, we don’t put money into it. The hope this time is that things will be different.”

These are changing times. Cities, which banked so much on fancy buildings, are increasingly finding new life and a fresh identity in public spaces that connect neighborhoods and communities. Planning gurus for years preached that waterfronts were no more than working ports and dumping grounds for industrial waste and the poor. Canals were paved with concrete and riverbanks lined with highways, factories, housing projects and railroads. According to this gospel, cars and freeways were good for failing cities, and urban density was bad.

The notion that industry might someday dry up, that economic development and public health would depend on clean, leisure-oriented waterfronts seemed almost inconceivable not even half a century ago. But environmental concerns and digital revolutions have reversed thinking. The proof is on the streets. Downtowns are coming back where residents and cities are stressing public transit over cars, density over sprawl, diversity over suburban flight.

In Newark’s case, repairing the damage will not be easy. Mr. Rich, the planning director, led the way on foot the other morning from the train station to the new boardwalk. The trip required crisscrossing streets with meager accommodation for pedestrians, clambering up the exit ramp of an old bridge and hugging the gutter of a four-lane boulevard that lacks traffic lights allowing people to cross into the park. Along the way, he pointed out a riverside brownfield, the former Market Street Gas Works, now a cleanup project for PSE&G, the utility company. Next door, a grim mirrored-glass office building, headquarters for New Jersey Transit and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, squatted atop a multistory garage.

It’s hard to envision how Riverfront Park will get around those obstacles.

And then there is the river. A state court ruled two years ago that Occidental Chemical Corporation, the successor to Diamond Shamrock, was principally liable for the costs (from $1 billion to $4 billion) of cleaning up the Passaic, but the company has contested the ruling. The next phase of Riverfront Park, to be completed in the spring, envisions the boardwalk stretching toward Penn Station. Restoring parts of the riverfront in the ethnic and racial mix of northern neighborhoods, for equity’s sake, will present a whole fresh set of hurdles.

Still, what has been built so far goes a long way. If a single downtown building like the Blue Cross Blue Shield headquarters separates the city from its river, a modest stretch of boardwalk knits them back together. At a ball field across the boulevard from the new park, Marcelino Arce, a youth baseball coach, described how some children in the Ironbound neighborhood had no idea the river was even there. Now, they must dodge traffic on the boulevard; but once across, he told me, it’s “a whole new world.”

That world includes a few zigzagging walking paths, with signs, by MTWTF, a graphic design firm, recounting the history of the river and its industries. There is an osprey rookery built into a copse of trees at an overlook onto the river. The city still needs to install those traffic lights and the park needs more seating.

As for the boardwalk, made of recycled plastic, its bright orange can summon up what Christo and Jeanne-Claude called “saffron” to describe the color of their “Gates” in Central Park. But police cones may leap to mind. Or Agent Orange. For his part, Mr. Weintraub said the orange was picked after eliminating various gang-related colors. Whatever. It is not ideal.

Newark deserves an elegant waterfront. That said, the orange boardwalk also acts like a giant highlighter, drawing attention to the park — as the project hopes to draw people from all over the city back to the Passaic, one patch of recuperated riverfront at a time.

© 2013 The New York Times

The Atlantic, July 19, 2013
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

My earlier criticisms notwithstanding, I think these comments (brought to you by my label-mate Garance Franke-Ruta) by Barack Obama, given his role as president of the United States of America, strike precisely the right note.
I could nitpick about a few things, but I think it’s more important that people take this in. As far as I know, these are Barack Obama’s most extensive comments regarding the impact of racism since he became president.
I would like to highlight this:

“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.
“There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.”
“And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.
“The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws — everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.”

I think this this is a very good primer on how it feels to be black and consider your relationship to law enforcement. Or people who think they are law enforcement.
I have had my criticisms of this president and how he talks about race. But given the mass freak-out that met him last year after making a modest point about Trayvon Martin, it must be said that it took political courage for him to double down on the point and then advance it.
No president has ever done this before. It does not matter that the competition is limited. The impact of the highest official in the country directly feeling your pain, because it is his pain, is real. And it is happening now. And it is significant.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.
 

By Peter Montague
Last evening at the statewide meeting of the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance (NJEJA), we had a brief discussion of the NJ Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP’s) “Licensed Site Remediation Professional” or LSRP program.  This program allows private contractors to oversee cleanup of the state’s 16,000 contaminated sites — which tend to cluster in communities of low-income and communities of color.  (See this large PDF report.)  Site remediation used to be overseen by public employees within NJ DEP.  Now those government jobs have been privatized.
Why would Governor Christie want to privatize government?
Here (below) is a short piece by New York Times columnist (and Nobel-prize-winning economist) Paul Krugman explaining what people like Mr. Christie gain by privatizing government.  But even Krugman’s essay misses some key points.
Krugman fails to mention that privatizing government programs also serves a second important function for the “powers that be” — eliminating an important source of good jobs for people of color.   Private industry has little trouble discriminating against Blacks and Hispanics.  Government has much less leeway to exclude people of color.   So privatization is a good way to throw Blacks and Hispanics out of good jobs with full benefits, reducing the economic (thus, political)  power of the Black middle class — who tend to vote, and who tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
Anyone examining the LSRP program should be asking, (a) Has it actually saved taxpayer’s any money, as it was supposed to do?  (b) Has is made information about toxic chemicals more difficult for the public to get its hands on?  (c) Has it cleaned up — REALLY cleaned up — more toxic waste sites than government employees were able to do?  (d) Are the pay, benefits and anti-discrimination hiring policies of LSRP contractors being carefully scrutinized — with what results? (e) Have any of the LSRP contractors made political contributions to help re-elect the privatizers?

Now, here is Krugman:
New York Times June 12, 2012
Prisons, Privatization, Patronage
By Paul Krugman
Over the past few days, The New York Times has published several terrifying reports about New Jersey’s system of halfway houses — privately run adjuncts to the regular system of prisons. The series is a model of investigative reporting, which everyone should read. But it should also be seen in context. The horrors described are part of a broader pattern in which essential functions of government are being both privatized and degraded.
First of all, about those halfway houses: In 2010, Chris Christie, the state’s governor — who has close personal ties to Community Education Centers, the largest operator of these facilities, and who once worked as a lobbyist for the firm — described the company’s operations as “representing the very best of the human spirit.” But The Times’s reports instead portray something closer to hell on earth — an understaffed, poorly run system, with a demoralized work force, from which the most dangerous individuals often escape to wreak havoc, while relatively mild offenders face terror and abuse at the hands of other inmates.
It’s a terrible story. But, as I said, you really need to see it in the broader context of a nationwide drive on the part of America’s right to privatize government functions, very much including the operation of prisons. What’s behind this drive?
You might be tempted to say that it reflects conservative belief in the magic of the marketplace, in the superiority of free-market competition over government planning. And that’s certainly the way right-wing politicians like to frame the issue.
But if you think about it even for a minute, you realize that the one thing the companies that make up the prison-industrial complex — companies like Community Education or the private-prison giant Corrections Corporation of America — are definitely not doing is competing in a free market. They are, instead, living off government contracts. There isn’t any market here, and there is, therefore, no reason to expect any magical gains in efficiency.
And, sure enough, despite many promises that prison privatization will lead to big cost savings, such savings — as a comprehensive study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded — “have simply not materialized.” To the extent that private prison operators do manage to save money, they do so through “reductions in staffing patterns, fringe benefits, and other labor-related costs.”
So let’s see: Privatized prisons save money by employing fewer guards and other workers, and by paying them badly. And then we get horror stories about how these prisons are run. What a surprise!
So what’s really behind the drive to privatize prisons, and just about everything else?
One answer is that privatization can serve as a stealth form of government borrowing, in which governments avoid recording upfront expenses (or even raise money by selling existing facilities) while raising their long-run costs in ways taxpayers can’t see. We hear a lot about the hidden debts that states have incurred in the form of pension liabilities; we don’t hear much about the hidden debts now being accumulated in the form of long-term contracts with private companies hired to operate prisons, schools and more.
Another answer is that privatization is a way of getting rid of public employees, who do have a habit of unionizing and tend to lean Democratic in any case.
But the main answer, surely, is to follow the money. Never mind what privatization does or doesn’t do to state budgets; think instead of what it does for both the campaign coffers and the personal finances of politicians and their friends. As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations capturing the politicians, or the politicians capturing the corporations? Does it matter?
Now, someone will surely point out that non-privatized government has its own problems of undue influence, that prison guards and teachers’ unions also have political clout, and this clout sometimes distorts public policy. Fair enough. But such influence tends to be relatively transparent. Everyone knows about those arguably excessive public pensions; it took an investigation by The Times over several months to bring the account of New Jersey’s halfway-house-hell to light.
The point, then, is that you shouldn’t imagine that what The Times discovered about prison privatization in New Jersey is an isolated instance of bad behavior. It is, instead, almost surely a glimpse of a pervasive and growing reality, of a corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage that is undermining government across much of our nation.
 

New York Times, July 18, 2013

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

In 2003, State Senator Barack Obama spearheaded a bill through the Illinois legislature that sought to put the clamps on racial profiling. Obama called racial profiling “morally objectionable,” “bad police practice” and a method that mainly served to “humiliate individuals and foster contempt in communities of color.”

Obama was not simply speaking abstractly. In his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope,” the future president wrote that he could “recite the usual litany of petty slights” directed at him because of his skin color, including being profiled by the police. “I know what it’s like to have people tell me I can’t do something because of my color,” he wrote. “And I know the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger.” That same bitterness probably compelled Obama, as president, to speak out after Prof. Henry Louis Gates of Harvard was arrested, and to famously note last year, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

That is why it is hard to comprehend the thinking that compelled the president, in a week like this, to flirt with the possibility of inviting the New York City Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly, the proprietor of the largest local racial profiling operation in the country, into his cabinet.

Kelly’s name has been floated by New York politicians of both parties as the ideal replacement for Janet Napolitano, who resigned last week. The president responded by calling Kelly “well-qualified” and an “outstanding leader in New York.” He sounded a pitch for bringing the commissioner into the White House’s fold.

“Mr. Kelly might be very happy where he is,” said the president. “But if he’s not, I’d want to know about it.”

There are some other things that the president should want to know about. Chief among them would be how his laudatory words for Kelly square with the commissioner’s practices and with the president’s deepest commitments.

The N.Y.P.D.’s stop-and-frisk program has been well-covered in this newspaper and elsewhere. It is now public knowledge that the police department, each year, stops hundreds of thousands of citizens, largely black and Latino men, for reasons as thin and subjective as “furtive movements.” Very few of those stops lead to actual charges, much less arrests, and according to the commissioner that’s fine.

“If you don’t run the risk of being stopped, you start carrying your gun, and you do things that people do with guns,” Kelly recently told The Wall Street Journal.

It’s certainly true that some number of people who are looking to carry guns will be less likely to if they know they are going to be searched. But Kelly’s formulation leaves out the hundreds of thousands of people who have no such intent and are simply unlucky enough to be caught in the wrong skin. Those unfortunates must simply pay the tax of societal skepticism.

The dragnet tactics don’t taper at the borders of black and brown communities. If anything, they expand. Last year, The Associated Press reported that the N.Y.P.D. has organized a network of agents and informants strictly for the purpose of spying on Muslim communities. The appropriately dubbed “Demographics Unit” has extended its reach along the Northeastern seaboard, sending informants to spy on Muslim rafting trips, mosques in Newark and Muslim organizations at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. The Demographics Unit did not discriminate, at least among Muslims: second- and third-generation American citizens were subject to profiling. Despite this sprawling fishing expedition extending up the Atlantic coast, N.Y.P.D. officials admitted in a subsequent court case that the unit’s work had not yielded a single lead, much less the opening of an actual case.

It is often said that Obama’s left-wing critics fail to judge him by his actual words from his candidacy. But, in this case, the challenge before Obama is not in adhering to the principles of a radical Left, but of adhering to his own. It is President Obama’s attorney general who just this week painfully described the stain of being profiled. It was President Obama who so poignantly drew the direct line between himself and Trayvon Martin.

It was candidate Obama who in 2008 pledged to “ban racial profiling” on a federal level and work to have it prohibited on the state level. It was candidate Obama who told black people that if they voted they would get a new kind of politics. And it was State Senator Obama who understood that profiling was the antithesis of such politics. Those of us raising our boys in the wake of Trayvon, or beneath the eye of the Demographics Unit, cannot fathom how the president could forget this.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, is a guest columnist. David Brooks is off today.

© 2013 The New York Times