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Two Realities

In posting this essay, which may seem unrelated to environmental justice issues,  I’m hoping to provoke discussion about social justice work in a world that has changed drastically since environmental justice and environmental racism first came into public consciousness, in about 1980. –Peter Montague (pm8525@gmail.com)

 

Two Realities

 
by Richard Heinberg, originally published by Resilience.org  | JUL 22, 2014
 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
–Robert Frost
 
Our contemporary world is host to two coexisting but fundamentally different—and, in at least one crucial respect, contradictory—realities. One of these might be termed Political Reality, though it extends far beyond formal politics and pervades conventional economic thinking. It is the bounded universe of what is acceptable in public economic-social-political discourse. The other is Physical Reality: i.e., what exists in terms of energy and materials, and what is possible given the laws of thermodynamics.
 
For decades these two realities have developed along separate lines. They overlap from time to time: politicians and economists use data tied to measureable physical parameters, while physical scientists often frame their research and findings in socially meaningful ways. But in intent and effect, they diverge to an ever-greater extent.
 
The issue at which they differ to the point of outright contradiction is economic growth. And climate change forces the question.
 
*          *          *
 
The voice of political reality tells us that economic growth is necessary. We need it for job creation; we need it to enable poor people to become wealthier, to maintain technological progress, to provide returns on investments, and to increase tax revenues so as to make essential government services available. Growth is even required to address environmental problems: after all, we need ever more money to fund disaster relief and renewable energy transition efforts. Only by growing the economy now can we become wealthy enough to afford to fix the problems created by past growth. Meanwhile population growth must continue because it is an essential component of GDP growth.
 
Within the realm of political reality, anybody who questions the importance of growth is not to be taken seriously. Such a person is obviously not a humanitarian, nor a responsible participant in mainstream political and economic discussions.
 
It wasn’t always this way: as I’ve explained in my book The End of Growth, and in a brief essay on the history of consumerism, economies tended to grow slowly or not at all prior to the fossil-fueled industrial revolution. Cheap, concentrated energy enabled industrial expansion and overproduction, which in turn laid the groundwork for consumerism, globalization, and financialization. Economies and governments came to expect high rates of growth, and to rely on them to fulfill increasingly extravagant promises.
 
The result has been—I’m choosing my words carefully—the gradual accretion of a set of widely shared assumptions that constitute a bounded ideational realm with rigidly consistent internal rules. Deviate from these rules, and there are predictable consequences. When any public person (writer, economist, scientist, whatever) demonstrates a disconnection from political reality by questioning the desirability or possibility of continued growth, the minders of the mainstream media turn their attention elsewhere.
 
How different physical reality is. Simple arithmetic shows that growth in population and consumption cannot continue indefinitely. In his book The No-Growth Imperative, Gabor Zovanyi offers an illustration: “If our species had started with just two people at the time of the earliest agricultural practices some 10,000 years ago, and increased by 1 percent per year, today humanity would be a solid ball of flesh many thousand light years in diameter, and expanding with a radial velocity that, neglecting relativity, would be many times faster than the speed of light.” Today’s global population growth rate of 1.1 percent per year is obviously unsustainable over any significant time frame. Growth in consumption levels faces similar practical limits.
 
Of course, long before we become a solid ball of flesh expanding at light speed while consuming galaxies of raw materials at a gulp, we will arrive at a point where the costs of further growth outweigh any real benefits. Those costs are likely to make themselves known in the forms of rising commodities prices, pollution dilemmas, biodiversity loss, crashing economies, declining real standards of living, and rising levels of conflict as nations and social factions fight over scraps.
 
Plenty of intelligent people whose first allegiance is to physical reality believe we are near or at that point now.
 
*          *          *
 
Some on both sides of the reality divide offer to compromise. If you’re an environmentalist and want to be taken seriously by politicians and economists, you propose ways to expand the economy with more environmentally responsible practices under the banner of “green growth.” If you’re an economist, politician, government bureaucrat, or business executive and you want to be taken seriously by environmentalists, you propose ways to solve environmental problems without sacrificing growth, such as by creating limited pollution regulations, promoting “green” products, or subsidizing renewable energy. Such projects and proposals help address some of the metastasizing crises resulting from humanity’s still-expanding population and rates of consumption, but so far they haven’t succeeded in changing worrisome consequence trends (warming climate, declining ore grades, depleting fossil fuels, disappearing biodiversity) or resolving the fundamental contradiction between the two realities.
 
Meanwhile many intellectuals mired in political realism reinforce the divide by arguing that physical limits are unimportant or nonexistent due to the promise of future (theoretical) technologies, resource substitution, efficiency, “dematerialization,” or “ephemeralization.” The late economist Julian Simon made a career of this, and his most famous follower, Bjørn Lomborg, proudly maintains the tradition. Physical realists refute such arguments as quickly as they are made, but that news doesn’t travel far in the world of political realism.
 
And so the disconnect continues and worsens.
 
Climate change has the potential to force the issue. To be sure, political realists work overtime to assure one and all that the world can reduce carbon emissions at a minimal cost, or even at a profit. (A recent example: The IPCC has released a report saying that the world can manage the climate crisis at a cost of “an annualized reduction of consumption growth by 0.04 to 0.14 … percentage points over the century.”) But they do this by deliberately underestimating costs, ignoring differences in energy quality, and overestimating the potential of alternatives to replace oil in the crucial transport and agriculture sectors. (The IPCC report just referenced does all these things.)
 
Climatologist Kevin Anderson of University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre concludes that, if we are to reduce carbon emissions as significantly and as quickly as needed, the economy will have to contract. Anderson estimates that industrial nations must cut emissions by 10 percent per year to avert catastrophe, and figures that such rapid reduction would be, in his words, “incompatible with economic growth.” Significantly, George Monbiot—a prominent voice in the world of climate change journalism—has adopted essentially the same view.
 
Given the dire planetary outcomes now looming, policy makers are increasingly committing themselves to doing something serious about climate change. If they do, the irresistible force and the immovable object will meet head-on. If they don’t, it will be because world leaders value political realism more highly than physical survival.
 
*          *          *
 
How to reconcile these two realities? This is one of the central problems of our time—and one of the least discussed.
 
Clearly, we’ve got to get past predictable cynical responses, with physical realists shouting “You’re driving us toward planetary catastrophe!” while political realists respond with, “You want to take us back to the Dark Ages!” That standoff accomplishes little.
 
Does this mean we should split the difference? In a word, No. In the contest between physical and political realities, it is political reality that must yield. Attempts to meet somewhere in the middle amount simply to reducing delusional thinking from absurd, world-annihilating levels to pathetic, self-immobilizing levels.
 
Our only hope of minimizing human suffering and wholesale ecosystem mayhem this century lies in coming to grips with the very limits that political realists spend their time seeking to hide and ignore. Their successful efforts at managing the public’s perceptions and beliefs have imperiled everything worth caring about. Soon the misled mass of humanity will be grappling with consequences of attitudes and actions that were insane from the get-go, yet cheered, rationalized, and normalized by nearly every respected public figure. Delusional expectations are about to crash upon the shoals of hard truth.
 
As we know from history, whole societies can descend into systemically delusional thinking. In the United States, with belief in climate change having become a matter of political affiliation, and with business pages of newspapers hailing each shred of ersatz evidence of economic “recovery” (i.e., return to GDP growth), we appear already to be far along that path.
 
Essayist John Michael Greer argues that the lunacy of managerial elites is a symptom invariably seen when civilizations approach collapse; he believes oursociety is in the early stages of one of history’s periodic, predictable, and inevitable phases of decline, and there’s essentially nothing we can do to stop the process.
 
I think he’s right, in that economic contraction is now inevitable. This is true whether or not governments and central banks are able to blow yet another bubble (perhaps one even beyond the current stock market / real estate / fracking bubble that’s set to burst the moment interest rates increase). What really matters is how contraction proceeds.
 
There are good arguments to be made that it’s too late to change population-consumption-pollution trends now converging, and that the best course of action for those of us awake and aware of physical reality is to adapt intelligently to the phases of collapse as they occur, while building resilience in our lives and communities so as to weather coming storms (literal and metaphorical) as successfully as possible. An equally good case holds that we should continue to do everything we can to counter those trends, so that whatever future unfolds is more survivable, and so that less damage is done to the ecological web on whose integrity the lives of future generations will depend. In my opinion, both are correct.
 
What’s needed is a contraction pathway that minimizes human suffering, averts the worst environmental impacts, and yields the best ultimate outcome of sustainable and thriving human cultures situated in functioning, restabilizing ecosystems.
 
*          *          *
 
Put off, for the moment, objections that “it’s too late” or “we don’t have the capacity.” What would be a strategy for reorienting society toward physical reality without incurring a collective psychological breakdown, so that the optimal contraction pathway can be realized?
 
At this late date, the following recommendations may constitute merely a speculative wish list. But just in case there is someone awake to physical reality at the Gates Foundation (which owns the only private philanthropic pile of money big enough to accomplish much of this), here are some ideas that could help avert the worst of the worst.
 
Start by putting effort into building a stronger consensus for action among those in the “physical reality” camp. Then pursue strategic alliances. There is a spectrum among those wedded to political reality, with denial of climate change and biological evolution at one end. Open a wider dialogue with those at the more physically realistic end of that spectrum, calmly insisting on the primacy of limits to growth while seeking common ground. Then help these reasonable folks work from the inside to transform political reality until it more closely resembles physical reality.
 
Dedicate major funding to a public education program in critical thinking. An Inconvenient Truth and Cosmos were helpful first volleys, but what is needed is something on a far larger scale; maintained over several years; encompassing classroom materials as well as television, YouTube, and social media; and addressing the population-consumption growth dilemma as well as numeracy, ecological literacy, and climate change.
 
Fund major culturally informed and targeted family planning campaigns throughout the world, with a special emphasis on nations with high birth rates.
 
There are already several movements aiding individuals and communities to adapt to a post-growth, post-carbon economic regime: localism, Transition Towns, the organics movement, Slow Food and Money, the voluntary simplicity movement, and more. These need far greater support.
 
Such movements tend to soft-peddle critiques of our society’s overarching systemic problem—the growth imperative built into our financial system, our economic system, and (some would argue) even our monetary system—simply because the issue is too big for local organizations to effectively address. The emerging discourse on alternative economics, including the economics of happiness and alternative economic indicators as well as the degrowth and post-growth movements, begin to fill that gap. This discourse also needs major support and elaboration, with the goal of utterly transforming both the discipline of economics (e.g., economics textbooks and classes must begin teaching ecological, steady-state economics) and the economy itself.
 
At the same time, think tanks should be funded to craft and promote policies that help households and institutions adapt to a contracting economy. These might include, for example, quota rationing of energy and informal training in home-scale arts of production and repair as well as supporting local distributed renewable energy; investment in public transit, electrified transportation, and nonmotorized transportation; and import substitution; and relocalization of appropriate industries.
 
Within a contracting economy, income and wealth inequality becomes a critical political and social issue. Unless policies dictate otherwise, those with prior economic advantage tend to aggressively aggregate an ever-larger share of overall societal wealth and income, while those at the bottom of the heap descend into absolute misery. Solutions would begin with taxing financial transactions, inherited wealth, high incomes, and luxury goods, with the revenues spent on building renewable energy infrastructure, redesigning food and transport systems to dramatically reduce oil dependence, and helping poor folks adapt and get by. These policies must be promoted on a national and global scale with major funding and the enlisted expertise of messaging professionals.
 
Now for those objections—“It’s too late,” “We haven’t the capacity.” They are persuasive. The fulfillment of the above wish list (it could be lengthened considerably) is indeed a far longshot. But even minor progress along any of these lines could help change the trajectory of collapse and our chances for a desirable outcome.
 
If the problem of political realists is self-delusion, the predicament of many physical realists is a sense of defeat and dread. So for the sake of the latter I will conclude with a little pep talk (directed as much to myself as to readers). Too much is at stake to retire in cynical self-assurance that we are right, they are wrong; we are weak, they are strong. Yes, horrible consequences from past growth are inevitable; today’s physical reality is a given. However, tomorrow’s reality is still, at least to some degree, up to us.
 

N.J. officials seeking a solution to Port Newark pollution

Newark Star-Ledger, July 18, 2014

 
 
Truck are backed up along Port Jersey Boulevard outside Global Terminal & Container Services in Newark in this 2010 file photo. A task force is examining the impact of pollution generated by all the trucks entering and exiting Port Newark. (Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-Ledger)
 
By Steve Strunsky I The Star-Ledger
 
NEWARK — As an economic engine, the Port of New York and New Jersey is a turbocharged V-8, supporting 270,000 jobs and $36 billion in annual economic activity for the shipping, trucking, warehousing and other industries in the bi-state region.


But like any big engine — especially one that predates the latest emissions standards — the port spews diesel fumes and other pollutants.
In response, officials at a town hall meeting in Newark earlier this week on the port’s future called for an approach that takes into account the health of people in surrounding neighborhoods. “We don’t want the port to grow at our expense,” Kim Gaddy, a member of the Newark Environmental Commission, told a crowd of about 400 members of the local port community.
Gaddy said one in four children in Newark suffered from respiratory problems including asthma, which she blamed in part on the 7,000 trips per day that port trucks take through Newark’s Ironbound section and South Ward.
Gaddy sits on the task force’s government outreach committee.
Port Authority Port Commerce Director Richard Larabee assured local officials and environmentalists that the port community shared their concerns, noting that the Port Authority had set up “a very aggressive” truck replacement program to curb diesel emissions, and that low-sulfur fuels were making ships’ engines run cleaner.
“Clearly, we are all focused on the environment, we live here, work here,” Larabee said. But just as clearly, he added, “We recognize that more needs to be done.”
The meeting at the Newark Airport Marriot Hotel was the first of three scheduled town hall meetings on recommendations by a port task force addressing congestion problems that threaten to send cargo to competing East Coast ports. Committees of the task force, convened by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the New York Shipping Association, have met since January to solve problems brought to light over the past year by labor shortages and severe weather.
An additional town hall meetings will be held July 26 in Elizabeth.
But Newark City Council President Mildred Crump and state Sen. Ronald Rice (DEssex) said the Port Authority had failed to reach out sufficiently to local officials.
“Certainly, the largest city in the state of New Jersey cannot be left out of the equation,” Crump told the task force cochairmen , Larabee and the shipping association’s president, John Nardi.
Newark City Councilwoman Mildred Crump told port officials at a meeting on Wednesday that the state’s largest city must be included in discussions on the Port of New York and New Jersey.Steve Strunsky/The Star-Ledger 
Larabee said one challenge to the truck pollution was that 4,900 trucks powered by pre-2007 engines were still being used to carry containers to and from the port, contrary to the goal of the truck replacement program.
Independent truckers and environmentalists countered that the replacement program, which offers loans and partial grants, places too heavy a burden on truck owner-operators who have small margins and are already hurt by the persistent congestion that limits how many pickups they can make and how much they can earn.
But while some Newark officials’ main concern was the port’s environmental impact, others went to the meeting seeking jobs for their constituents. Alturrick Kenney, a port operations official in Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s office, said he would be handing out and collecting business cards.
“We need business owners to look to us first if they’re looking for good employees,” Kenney said.
Jeff Bader, president of the Bi-State Motor Carriers Association, a port trucking group, said he could not embrace one of the committee’s recommendations for an appointment system until the “turn-time” — or time it takes to pick up or drop off a container — was consistently under one hour, because he could foresee appointments being unavailable.
“We have to take care of turn times, because right now cargo is leaving the Port of New York and New Jersey,” Bader said.
Nardi, the shipping association president, said comments gathered during the three town hall meetings would be sent to relevant committees of the task force for consideration, before a final set of recommendations was formalized.
Assemblywoman Linda Stender (D-Union), a member of the Assembly Transportation, Infrastructure and Independent Authorities Committee, whose district includes port facilities in Elizabeth, urged Nardi and Larabee to share cost information with her committee involving projects recommended by the task force.
“The issue of transparency is something that is not known as part of the existing culture of the Port Authority,” Stender said. “Going forward, I think it’s important that you share with us on the transportation committee the costs.”
Nardi, not wanting the port task force to be associated in any way with the transparency issues that plague the Port Authority, said, “Whatever is going on on the big stage has nothing to do with what we’re doing here.”

Storm surge threatens nearly 450K N.J. homes with $134B in reconstruction costs, new study finds

Star-Ledger July 10, 2014

ortley-beach-toms-river-sandy.JPG
A new study released today found that nearly 450,000 properties in New Jersey are at risk of being damaged by hurricane-driven storm surge. Here, an aerial view of the Ortley Beach section of Toms River is pictured after Hurricane Sandy battered the community. (Andrew Mills/The Star-Ledger)
Nearly 450,000 homes in New Jersey stand at risk of damage from hurricane-fueled storm surge, a new report released today found, representing more than $134 billion in potential reconstruction costs.
Only Florida, Louisiana and New York have more exposed homes than New Jersey, according to the analysis from CoreLogic, a California-based analytic and research firm.
Despite damages caused by massive storms like Hurricane Sandy, Thomas Jeffery, senior hazard scientist for CoreLogic Spatial Solutions, said he expects people to continue to build in the nation’s coastal communities, putting more properties at risk.
“People build there because they really want to have that aesthetic quality,” he said. “People are willing to pay more for that. I don’t think you are going to see a big deterrent from Sandy.”
Though New Jersey has a less-expansive coastline than states such as Florida and Texas, it still ranks among the top five for its number of exposed homes. The report said that’s because New Jersey’s low elevation allows storm surge to push water further inland and impact more properties. The density of development along the coast is another contributing factor.
Sandy set record storm surges, causing tens of billions of dollars worth of damage. At Sandy Hook, the storm surge pushed the water level to more than 13 feet before the gauge stopped reporting. That broke a previous record of 10.1 feet.
Along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, more than 6.5 million homes are vulnerable to storm surge, the report found. That represents $1.5 trillion in total potential reconstruction costs, the majority of which is concentrated in 15 major metropolitan areas.
The New York metro area, which includes northern New Jersey and Long Island, is most at risk for both the number of vulnerable homes and the costs associated with rebuilding those homes, followed by Miami.
Nearly 690,000 homes are at risk in the New York area, the report found, representing reconstruction costs of $251 billion.
Though this year’s hurricane season is expected to be slightly below normal, Jeffrey said, “the early arrival of Hurricane Arthur on July 3 is an important reminder that even a low-category hurricane or strong tropical storm can create powerful riptides, modest flooding and cause significant destruction of property.”
Because of changes CoreLogic made to its methodology , such as including other categories of single-family homes, the company said the data from this year’s report should not be compared with data from previous years.

Chester (Penna.) planners give thumbs down to Covanta land development plan

Delaware County Daily Times, July 9, 2014

[This story does not ask the obvious question, is New York’s trash about to come to the Camden, N.J. incinerator? –P.M.]
 

Trash-to-steam plant in Chester. (Times Staff / ERIC HARTLINE) 

By Vince Sullivan

Note: This article was updated at 11:17 a.m. to reflect the correct amount of trash Covanta contracted with New Yorkc City to incinerate.

CHESTER — The city planning commission voted Wednesday night not to recommend for approval an application from a trash incinerating company to construct a new building on its property. The city’s planning department approved the application, but after hearing testimony from a number of residents, as well the facility’s operator, the commission declined to endorse the project by a 5-0 vote.
Covanta’s Delaware Valley Resource Recovery facility, the largest energy-from-waste incinerator in the country, is located in the unit block of Highland Avenue and burns municipal solid waste in order to generate electricity, handling about 1.2 million tons of garbage per year. It generates 80 megawatts of electricity at peak performance. The company recently entered into a 20-year contract to bring waste from New York City via train to Wilmington, Del., where it will then be placed on trucks and driven to the Chester facility.
Covanta proposed constructing a 1,000-square-foot office building and 15,000-square-foot rail box transfer building to handle the new mode of delivery. Currently, all of Covanta’s waste is brought in on transfer trailers, but the proposal would enable trucks carrying the rail boxes to deliver some of the waste. The contract with New York City is to incinerate 1 million tons of garbage per year, but would not increase the permitted capacity of the facility, and truck traffic would not increase, according to Covanta Vice President John Waffenschmidt. He said that about 400,000 tons from New York would be brought to the Chester facility, and the rest would go to other Covanta locations.
“We receive all of our waste by truck,” Waffenschmidt said in response to some of the 100 people in attendance at the meeting questioning the application. “The request we have is to have some of that by rail. There is no request at all to increase the amount of waste.”
At least a dozen residents voiced their opposition to the land development request, with most saying that they have suffered health problems due to the facility’s emissions since it began operation in the early 1990s. Claims of asthma and birth defects were made and complaints about foul smells emanating from the facility were voiced.
Waffenschmidt said the emissions from the plant are regulated by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and that Covanta complies with those regulations.
“There has been no request to change those limits,” he said.
Planning commission Chairman Anthony L. Moore said that since the proposal was first heard at a June meeting, he and other commission members have been inundated with correspondence from residents and environmental advocates.
“We’ve had public comment at our meeting last month,” Moore said. “We’ve gone to Covanta and asked some of the public’s questions. We’ve also met with an environmental group. We’ve heard your concerns. We’ve gotten 50 to 100 emails. Please know that all of the environmental concerns have been taken into account.”
Mike Ewall, of the Energy Justice Network, gave a condensed version of the hour-long presentation he made to the commission on Tuesday, saying that asthma rates in Chester were three times higher among children than in the rest of the state. He added that Covanta could be burning more trash than they are now.
“They are not burning at full capacity,” Ewall said, citing EPA reports. “They have extra space to burn more.”
He explained that the facility is only operating at 75 percent of its permitted capacity.
A chorus of residents in attendance said that they not only wanted the application denied, but that they wanted the commission to close the incinerator for good.
“The planning commission has no authority to make a company pick up and move out of the city,” Moore said.
“We only make recommendations based on land development and usage issues,” said Commissioner Annette Pyatt.
A motion, requested by Pyatt and made by Moore in her absence when she had to leave the meeting early, sought a permit application for increased capacity from Covanta, as well as the installation of additional pollution control devices. The motion died for lack of a second.
A motion to recommend not approving the application was successful, with many audience members shouting “aye” when it came time for the commissioners to vote.
Waffenschmidt was perplexed by the denial, saying that he thought the planning commission was supposed to examine the application’s conformity with existing land planning regulations.
“There was no factual explanation as to why it was denied,” he said. “We specifically asked for something that meets the code. We don’t know that the vote was based on its merits or whether it was swayed by the residents and their comments.”
Moore said the commission would prepare a resolution to be considered by city council, which would have the final say in approving or denying the application.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vince Sullivan is a general assignment reporter for the Daily Times. Reach the author at vsullivan@delcotimes.com .

Is This Who We Want Driving Our Democracy?


Huffington Post, July 9, 2014

By Minister Leslie Watson Malachi, Director of African American Religious Affairs, People For the American Way and People For the American Way Foundation
On Tuesday, the Center for Media and Democracy released documents showing that mega-donor Charles Koch was a member of the far-right John Birch Society from 1961 to 1968, when the organization’s work opposing the civil rights movement was reaching a fever pitch.

From publishing materials calling the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King the “biggest” “liar in the country” and the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery a “sham and farce” to promoting pieces railing against the racial integration of schools, the 1960s saw the John Birch Society leading abhorrent attacks on the civil rights movement. According to The Progressive, Charles Koch was not simply a member of the society in name. He funded the organization’s campaigns, helped it promote right-wing radio programs, and supported its bookstore in Wichita.
Sound familiar? Though Charles resigned from the John Birch Society in 1968, he and his brother David are still using their wealth to support right-wing efforts — now through a complicated and secretive web of conservative groups. Put together, the groups in the Koch-backed network raised over $400 million in 2012 and have dumped heaps of cash into campaigns and projects to promote an anti-government and anti-worker agenda.
Unfortunately, today’s campaign finance landscape makes it easy for billionaires, corporations, and special interests to try and bend our political system to their will. In 2010, the Supreme Court infamously ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations can give unlimited sums of money to independently influence elections. This year, the High Court made things even worse when they ruled in McCutcheon v. FEC that wealthy individuals can give significantly more money directly to candidates, parties, and committees than they could before, upwards of $3.5 million per election cycle.
It’s a sad state of affairs. But as the leader of a national network of progressive African American ministers, many of whom are working hard to raise awareness about the dangers of money in politics, I often remind people: Democracy is for all of us. Though it can feel like democracy in America today is only for the few — the elite donor class who can bankroll the candidates of their choice — I have faith that this is not how things will always be.
There’s an important proposal moving forward across the country and in Congress that would help shift the power in our political system away from people like the Koch brothers and towards everyday Americans. This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee is voting on a proposed constitutional amendment that would overturn decisions like Citizen United. Introduced by Sen. Tom Udall, the 28th Amendment would restore legislators’ ability to set commonsense limits on money in elections. While amending our nation’s guiding text is a weighty proposal, our country has a proud history of amending the Constitution, when necessary, to expand democracy and fix damaging Supreme Court decisions.
With the voices of everyday Americans increasingly being drowned out by the likes of the Koch brothers, fixing our democracy can’t wait.

Rinku Sen On the Civil Rights Act’s 50th, Workplaces Remain Segregated

Color Lines, July 2, 2014 

Photo: Jonathan Alcorn/Getty Images

Today is the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act, one of the most important markers of racial progress—and its lack—in the United States. President Lyndon Johnson signed it to end Jim Crow segregation. Even conservatives like William F. Buckley have agreed, in recent years, that it greatly improved the status and life chances of African-Americans in particular, and that federal intervention had been necessary to do so.

Yet, segregation continues in nearly every arena of life and becomes increasingly more difficult to address through the Civil Rights Act as it currently stands and is applied. Although the Act has evolved over time through case law and amendments to cover disparate impact as well as discriminatory intent, a plaintiff’s ability to get a remedy under the impact clauses can easily be derailed. What better time than the half century mark to call for stronger remedies to modern-day discrimination, whose mechanisms are often hidden? 
We think of segregation most commonly with regard to housing and schools, and the country remains deeply segregated in those arenas. But we don’t often talk about segregation in employment, what researchers call “occupational segregation,” describing the phenomenon in which certain people are steered toward certain jobs, or toward deep long term unemployment. In last week’s Colorlines installment of the Life Cycles of Inequity series on the experiences of black men, Kai Wright cites a study that reveals segregation in high-wage construction and other industrial jobs: 45 percent of white men, compared to 15 percent black men and very few women at all, and with white men earning approximately double what the black men do.
Women, and many men of color, are steered into lower paying occupations as a matter of course, with deep consequences to their lives and families. Workers organizations such as the Restaurant Opportunities Centers and the Retail Action Project have begun to document this kind of segregation. According to the Roosevelt Institute’s research, for us to have desegregated workplaces fully as of 2005, nearly 70 percent of black women would have had to switch occupations with white men.
These are not the kind of phenomena that the Civil Rights Act addresses effectively. And where they might have done so, courts frequently find tangential elements of the cases that block accountability. In 2011, I wrote about the SCOTUS decision in Dukes v. Wal-Mart, in which the majority ruled that 1.5 million women employees could not file a class action suit over discrimination in promotions because male managers used too many different methods of discrimination for that to constitute a pattern. Without the ability to sue as a class, these 1.5 million women will all have to file smaller, or worse, individual lawsuits.
More recent cases further raised the bar for plaintiffs. Last year, SCOTUS ruled in University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar that retaliation for union organizing was only punishable if it was the decisive factor in a firing, not just a motivating factor. In Vance v. Ball State University, SCOTUS defined a supervisor differently from the way the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission does (companies are punished more if a supervisor creates a hostile work environment than if a co-worker does) by insisting that “supervisors” have the ability to hire, fire and promote, versus the power to assign and correct daily workloads.
What does this mean for those of concerned with the ongoing state of race, gender and economic opportunity? It doesn’t mean that we dismiss the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as useless or outdated. It does mean that remembering that there was deep resistance to this law, and it didn’t end in 1965. Conservatives have devoted a lot of energy in the past 50 years to limiting our understanding of what constitutes racial and gender discrimination, while employers have found multiple ways to segregate us with impunity. In the midst of all the important remembrances and celebrations that will take place this summer, and this year of our Civil Rights era accomplishments, we need to keep our eyes on a prize that hasn’t yet been won.

Climate Change May Hit Urban Poor the Hardest, According to New Report

NJ Spotlight, July 7, 2014
By Tom Johnson
People of color, low-income neighborhoods may be more vulnerable to exposure to toxins, other damaging effects of extreme storms like Sandy
Camden — Lower-income and minority communities are especially vulnerable to the detrimental effects of climate change, which should make protecting them a societal priority, according to a recent report.

The report, by the New Jersey Climate Change Alliance, focused on so-called environmental justice communities — areas especially burdened with pollution, particularly for people of color, and its impact during and after Hurricane Sandy.
Related link: New Jersey Climate Change Alliance Reports
Integrate Preparedness for Climate Change at Every Level of Government, Report Recommends
The extreme weather left residents of these communities, as elsewhere, without power and with disrupted communications. But it also drove up rents due to limited housing, among other problems. The storm surge also raised concerns about increased exposure to toxins, according to the report.
The overriding recommendation of the report, one of a series done by the alliance focusing on how the state should adapt to changes caused by climate change, includes specific emergency and preparedness plans for environmental justice communities.
What’s more, once the plans are adopted, they need to be practiced to ensure the community is prepared when a violent storm does occur, the report said.
While a direct link between Sandy and climate change has not been established, most scientists predict global warming is likely to increase the frequency of extreme storms and their intensity.
A major problem with the response to Sandy was a lack of communication and information about possible toxic contamination. The storm knocked out the state’s largest wastewater treatment plant and many others, sending hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into New Jersey’s waterways, according to environmental officials.
In addition, obtaining government assistance after the storm also proved to be difficult due in significant part to documentation requirements that seemed excessive and inflexible.
For example, prior to receiving government assistance, applicants had to provide receipts for groceries that were lost during the storm, according to the report.
To help environmental justice communities deal with future storms, the report recommended increasing energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy. It also suggested creating community-controlled energy systems.
Also, the report called for using green infrastructure — employing soil and vegetation to manage runoff from storms and ease the impact of storm surges — to address what is called the heat-island effect.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the heat-island effect describes how built-up areas, such as cities, are hotter than nearby rural areas. This can boost summertime peak energy demand, driving up air conditioning costs, increase air pollution and heat-related illnesses and mortality.
To address the air pollution issue, the report said the state may need to adopt tighter public policies and enforcement, particularly in environmental justice communities, to deal with climate change and address toxic air pollution.
Late last month the alliance released an overarching report that recommended a series of wide-ranging proposals to integrate the response to the possible impact of climate change — including rising sea levels — into state regulations, local land-use decisions, and allocation of government funding.
The alliance is a network of policymakers, individuals in the public and private sectors, academics, and business leaders trying to influence how New Jersey adapts to climate change.

Most Americans Think Racial Discrimination Doesn’t Matter Much Anymore

Mother Jones, June 27, 2014

On Thursday Pew released its latest “typology report,” which breaks down Americans into seven different groups. I’m a little skeptical of these kinds of clustering exercises, but I suppose they have their place. And one result in particular has gotten a lot of play: the finding that more than 80 percent of conservatives believe that blacks who can’t get ahead are responsible for their own condition.

But I think that misstates the real finding of Pew’s survey: everyone thinks blacks who can’t get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition. With the single exception of solid liberals, majorities in every other group believe this by a 2:1 margin or more. That’s the takeaway here.The other takeaway is that the news was a little different on the other questions Pew asked about race. The country is split about evenly on whether further racial progress is necessary, and large majorities in nearly every group continue to support affirmative action on college campuses. A sizable majority of Americans may not believe that discrimination is the main reason blacks can’t get ahead, but apparently they still believe it’s enough of a problem to justify continuing efforts to help out.
Overall, though, this is not good news. It’s obvious that most Americans don’t really think discrimination is a continuing problem, and even their support for affirmative action is only on college campuses, where it doesn’t really affect them. If that question were about affirmative action in their own workplaces, I suspect support would plummet.
I don’t have any keen insights to offer about this. But like it or not, it’s the base on which we all have to work. Further racial progress is going to be very slow and very hard unless and until these attitudes soften up.

Justice for Blacks and Whites

NY Times, July 1, 2014

As the Civil Rights Act Turns 50, Creating Cross-Racial Alliances

By Sheryll Cashin

WASHINGTON — THE Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment and federally funded activities like education, would not have passed without the support of House and Senate Republicans who were competing for black votes. And Presidents Kennedy and Johnson would not have advocated for the bill without being pressured to do so by a multiracial grass-roots movement.

The act became law on July 2, 1964. As we celebrate its 50th anniversary, we should pay close attention to the strange bedfellows behind its passage. Progressives today need to be just as overt at creating bipartisan, cross-racial coalitions that can win policy battles.

President Kennedy had been reluctant to press for a comprehensive civil rights bill. But when Bull Connor turned fire hoses and attack dogs on the children of Birmingham in the spring of 1963 and nearly a thousand nonviolent protests erupted in over a hundred Southern cities, suddenly doing nothing seemed more disastrous than alienating Southern Democrats. Kennedy began to work with moderate Republicans who wanted to give their party a pro-civil-rights slant.

Although the protests may have seemed spontaneous, they were a result of years of organizing by some 85 local affiliates of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This grass-roots mobilization was multiracial, from the integrated legion of Freedom Riders, to the young activists in the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, to the more than 250,000 demonstrators in the March on Washington, a quarter of whom were white.

There are important lessons here for progressives. Today most civil rights advocates focus on racial disparities, comparing the struggles of blacks and Latinos to those of whites without acknowledging that plenty of whites are harmed by the same structural barriers. Many whites shut down in the face of these arguments, rationalizing that minorities themselves are to blame and resenting the fact that their own economic pain is not being acknowledged.

Only 42 percent of Americans live in a middle-class neighborhood, down from 65 percent in 1970, a trend that limits access to quality schools and jobs for struggling people of all races. As awful and racially disparate as mass incarceration is, incarceration rates for black men have decreased since 2000 while they have risen for white men. A focus solely on black-white disparities masks the over-representation of high school dropouts of all colors in our prisons.

Instead, a civil-rights discourse that focuses on common challenges and values is needed to bridge the gaps between whites and non-whites that contribute to toxic, partisan gridlock.

One example of the kind of policy that can be championed by cross-racial coalitions is the Texas 10 percent plan. It guarantees admission to a public college to graduates in the top 10 percent of every high school in the state. It was enacted in 1997, after a ruling against race-based affirmative action, with the support of blacks, Latinos and a Republican senator from rural West Texas, where some counties had never sent a student to the prestigious University of Texas at Austin.

Since then the coalition that supports the plan has grown stronger and now includes a number of rural white lawmakers. It has successfully repelled attempts by representatives of affluent districts, whose wealthy schools traditionally dominated college admissions, to repeal the law. It agreed to one amendment in 2009 whereby U.T.-Austin alone was allowed to limit “Ten Percenters” to 75 percent of its entering class, although it had sought a cap of 50 percent.

In New Jersey, a similar coalition made up of local officials, faith leaders and engaged citizens, known as Building One New Jersey, has successfully backed state laws that stopped wealthy suburbs from buying their way out of affordable housing obligations and that mandated a more equitable allocation of school funding. (Disclosure: the group is affiliated with Building One America, on whose board I serve.) Republican mayors from working-class towns allied with urban legislators from Camden, Trenton and Newark by having a forthright dialogue about how growing concentrations of minority poverty were destabilizing their neighborhoods and schools.

Another example is the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance — a coalition of African-Americans, Latinos, unions and religious groups. In 2012, it helped create a swell of opposition to anti-immigrant legislation that made it easier for the conservative lieutenant governor, Tate Reeves, to buck Tea Party orthodoxy and assign the bill to a State Senate committee led by a Democrat he had appointed. As a result the bill was never brought up for a vote. Last week in Mississippi, Senator Thad Cochran defeated the Tea Party-backed candidate, Chris McDaniel, in a Republican primary runoff by openly courting black Democrats — another rewrite of tired scripts on race and politics.

The only way for advocates of racial and economic equality to overcome partisan gridlock is through alliances with reachable whites, who often hew Republican. Such reconciliation could create a true politics of fairness, one that is worthy of the Civil Rights Act and the movement that made it possible.

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Sheryll Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown, is the author of “Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America.”

Strong Healthy Community Initiative, Partners Release Report to Help Map Newark’s Future

June 30, 2014 — Last week, a coalition of Newark stakeholders released a comprehensive report on the conditions, trends, and disparities in Newark neighborhoods since the foreclosure crisis. Having received support from Newark’s leadership, the study promises to be a key guide for revitalization efforts in the city for years to come.
The report, entitled Measuring the State of Newark’s Neighborhoods, was commissioned by Living Cities’ Strong Healthy Communities Initiative (SHCI). The study was conducted by a team that included New Jersey Community Capital (NJCC), the Center for Community Progress (CCP), and the Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies at Rutgers University.
“We commissioned this market condition assessment to give the City and our partners a tool to measure our progress and plan for our neighborhoods’ futures as thriving residential communities”, said Monique Baptiste-Good, Director of SHCI.
The study team looked at seven factors affecting Newark’s 18 primarily-residential neighborhoods and 85 census tracts, including foreclosures, median sales price, median rent, vacancy, mortgage/sales ratio, violent crime, and poverty. The study looked at key trends, ranging from annual changes in crime and foreclosures to medium term changes in economic and racial characteristics.
The study reveals great discrepancies in conditions between the various parts of the city. According to Alan Mallach, principal author of the report, “Newark has been on a roller coaster for a decade, and while things seem to be settling down, we’re far from being out of the woods.”
The report is intended to inform planning decisions and strategies by the public entities, community institutions, and funders that serve Newark, helping them to design effective strategies to revitalize Newark’s distressed neighborhoods. “This information can be applied in many ways,” said Diane Sterner, Community Strategies Advisor for NJCC. “It can help decide how to reuse Newark’s thousands of vacant properties, which types of housing activities to promote, and where to prioritize such activities as home ownership strategies, infill development, foreclosure prevention and greening.”
The study was guided by an advisory committee of potential users of the report data, including city staff and representatives of Newark community development corporations and other community institutions. “I look forward to working with the new administration to see how the information from this report can support our neighborhood strategies moving forward”, said Alle Ries, Director of Community & Economic Development for La Casa de Don Pedro, a member of the advisory committee.
To access the full report, click here or visit www.shci.org.
About the Partners
New Jersey Community Capital (NJCC):  NJCC is a twenty-six year old nonprofit community development lender that transforms at-risk communities through strategic investments of capital and knowledge. NJCC invests in affordable housing, community facilities, and economic development ventures that strengthen neighborhoods, improve education, and increase jobs, ultimately providing greater opportunities for low-income residents in these communities. For more information, visit www.newjerseycommunitycapital.org. 
Center for Community Progress:  Founded in 2010, the Center for Community Progress is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring that communities have the vision, knowledge, and systems to transform blighted, vacant, and other problem properties into assets supporting neighborhood vitality. The Center serves as the leading national resource for local, state and federal policies and best practices that address the full cycle of property revitalization, including blight prevention through the acquisition and maintenance of problem properties and their productive reuse. 
Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies:   The Cornwall Center encourages and conducts relevant research and hosts learning opportunities all aimed at improving the cultural, social and economic development of the community, city and region in which the Center resides. The Center’s mission is to research and analyze complex issues facing urban areas, primarily metropolitan Newark and northern New Jersey, and to ultimately generate solutions to those challenges.
Strong Healthy Communities Initiative (SHCI): Launched in 2011 in Newark, NJ, SHCI is a cross-sector institutional partnership working collectively to improve the health and wellness of Newark’s low-income children in order to enhance their academic outcomes and their abilities to learn. As part of The Living Cities Integration Initiative, and through the generous support of the Prudential Foundation, SHCI uses a cohesive “one- table” approach to tackle complex social problems that challenge the success of Newark’s public school system. The partners of SHCI aim to rebuild and stabilize Newark’s neighborhoods, align public policy and private investments to sustain innovations, and create lasting systemic change to improve student success in all of Newark’s schools.