College wish list, an investment in the future

It's not going to be an easy sell, but New Jersey voters need to endorse a plan to expand the state's public and private college systems.

NJ.com reported today that the schools submitted a $6 billion wish list to renovate existing facilities and add important new programs in health, technology and environmental sciences. The state's four-year schools need to expand their opportunities for in-state students. College presidents

cite a study that shows the state’s four-year colleges provide only 19 seats for every 100 high school graduates, forcing families to spend more on out-of-state schools or abandon the idea of higher college education for their children.

The list, which has yet to be discussed by the state Legislature as part of its discussion of a potential state bond referendum, could be the kind of jobs program with long-term benefits the state needs, creating construction jobs now and research and teaching slots later.

"There is no better investment the state can make than in higher education," said Richard McCormick, the departing president of Rutgers University, who is leading the lobbying effort for the financing. "In the short term, it will put a whole of lot of people to work, while increasing statewide capacity for higher education and meeting a strategic objective by investing in science, medicine and engineering."

Pipe dreams in the war on drugs

The American war on drugs -- both domestically and abroad -- has always been a sham, a pipe dram if you will fueled by the arrogant notion that we can control people's consumption behavior while also ignoring massive inequality and poverty under which our economy operates.

The equation seems fairly simple to me: criminalize drugs -- pot, liquor, even poppies -- and you drive the price up. That increases the potential profit, which in turn offsets the extreme risk involved. The upshot is the pseudo normalization of the drug trade even as we expand our crackdown and use increasingly brutal methods.

Consider this comment from today's New York Times by an otherwise mainstream Afghan farmer:

“Now I am desperate, what can I do?” said Mohammed Amin, a poppy farmer in Tirin Kot in Oruzgan Province, who harvested only one kilogram of opium poppy this year compared with 15 last year. “I don’t have any cash now to start another business, and if I grow any other crops, I cannot make a profit.”

The poppy crop offered a livelihood, which has been damaged by the crackdown, leaving him in deeper financial straits that make it impossible for him to get out of the poppy business.

Not that he would, as he told the Times. There are risks, but poppy farming offers a better and more stable return than other crops.

“The poppy is always good, you can sell it at any time. It is like gold, you can sell it whenever and get cash.”

In the United States, we've ignored our own history, using law enforcement -- federal, state and local -- to attack what should be treated as a public issue. The money spent on our ever-more militarized police forces could be better spent on treatment centers, with money raised through a tax on decriminalized substances.

There is movement on the margins on this -- the medical marijuana movement and pot decriminalization pushes, for instance -- but this nibbling does little to redirect the larger mindset. That means the failed model on which we have relied will remain in place and we will continue to waste billions on a drug war that cannot be won.

Approve the wage hike

Today's vote by the New Jersey General Assembly on a hike in the minimum wage shouldn't surprise anyone: It was approved on a party-line 46-33 vote with Republican opponents trotting out the standard arguments.

Assembly Minority Leader Jon Bramnick (R-Union) said the move would hurt the state's economic recovery at a time when Gov. Chris Christie and lawmakers are "starting to turn around that notion that New Jersey is not the right place for their business."

Business groups took the same tack, arguing that wage hikes would lead to lost jobs.

Stefanie Riehl, assistant vice president of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, urged lawmakers to vote down the bill today.

"Unfortunately, legislation raising the minimum wage does not increase the sales and revenues that businesses would need to pay higher wages," she said in a statement. "I sales are not rising fast enough to accommodate forced wage hikes, employers will be forced to make tough personnel and operating decisions, such as reducing workers' hours or cutting other costs."

New Jersey Policy Perspective said the increasing the state's minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50 "would boost the state’s ailing economy while improving the lives of many of the state’s working families."

NJPP says that the hike would increase the amount earned by low-wage workers by $489 million in the first year and generate $278 million in new economic activity, with more than a half-million workers feeling the direct impact. There are 307,255 workers making less than $8.50 an hour in the state.

“Raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do for New Jersey’s working families. It’s also the right thing to do for our ailing economy,” says NJPP president Gordon MacInnes. “Approving the proposed $1.25 per hour increase will ripple throughout New Jersey, producing an estimated $278 million in new economic activity. That’s what I call a smart investment.”

The Senate is expected to follow suit, but it is unlikely that the governor will approve the legislation. Expect a veto, which would be bad news for the state's low-wage workers.

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• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Campers are a canary in the coal mine

The population at Lakewood's tent city encampment is growing. When I talked with the Rev. Steve Brigham last month during my first visit, he told me he anticipated growth -- from about 70 then to about 100 by July -- but based on conversations today, he could be underestimating things.

Part of the issue is a lack of shelter space in Ocean County and the aggressive efforts of municipal and county officials to close down the smaller encampments that dot the area. That has resulted in a large number of people having little choice but to arrive in Lakewood hoping that Brigham can find them a tent.

William, who arrived early this morning with his girlfriend Lisa, is a house painter who works seasonably in Seaside Heights -- doing most of his work in the winter when the hotels are closed. Once they opened, he lost his job and the ability to pay his rent. They moved in with a friend in Freehold, but it turned out the friend was bipolar and off his medication and he began threatening them. So they left and moved into tent city.

Sheridan lost his job as a cook in Atlantic City, one he held for 22 years, when he found out he was bipolar. After trouble with the various social services -- he thought he would be able to enter a program in Asbury Park but that fell through -- he also found himself in Lakewood.


Today was my third visit down, part of a project I am working on with photographer Sherry Rubel and filmmaker Jack Ballo. I'm writing a long poem (and doing some magazine features) and we'll present the multimedia collaborative when it's done.

In the meantime, I'll do what I can to draw attention to the structural economic problems of which tent cities like the one in Lakewood are symptoms. Officially, there are 645,000 homeless people on any given day in the United States and about 3.5 million who are homeless at some point annually. That figure is the number of individuals who access resources or services through the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The number does not include a variety of others who lack housing, including about 660,000 children considered un-housed but not in the HUD system and about 55,000 veterans not covered by HUD. And for the most part, the numbers also do not include those living in tent city encampments.

The Lakewood encampment is one of hundreds that have cropped up across the country, most of which – like the one in Lakewood – predate the 2008 banking collapse. Their existence offers a stark reminder that the gross economic inequality that we have come to accept as a larger society has very real impacts and the housing industry, by chasing every dollar, has priced large numbers out of the market.

The response from Lakewood -- and from other towns, like Denver -- has been to criminalize the encampments and the homeless in general, rather than take steps to expand and improve the shelter and affordable housing systems.


Capitalism is the culprit here, or at least capitalism as practice in the United States. Our focus on winners and losers, on profits at all costs and our unwillingness to admit that our economic actions -- whether we are talking about buying an iPod, building a house or buying produce -- has its impacts. The corporate control we have come to accept has left us powerless to understand our own economy.


We are, as Don -- a man who helps out by bringing food and clothing by the camp periodically -- says, one catastrophe and a few weeks or a couple of months away from ending up in a tent in Lakewood ourselves.

• Send me an e-mail.
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• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Killing the messenger with ad hominem attacks

If I were teaching a course on logical arguments, I think it's safe to say the governor's latest rant against his critics would land him a fairly poor mark.

Here's the back story:

Gov. Chris Christie has developed a budget plan that more than one analyst says includes rosy revenue projections -- or an inflated sense of what can reasonably be expected to be collected via taxes and fees.

The budget plan drew criticism from the bond rating agencies a while back, and now the state Office of Legislative Services is saying that revenues are growing but falling well below anticipated levels -- to the tune of about $688 million for the current fiscal year and $635 million for the next one.

Christie, who is pushing an income tax cut, is furious and his response, in typical Christie fashion, was to tear down the messenger and not really address the messenger's analysis:

Gov. Chris Christie today attacked the legislature’s non-partisan budget expert, calling him “the Dr. Kevorkian of the numbers.”

“Why would anybody with a functioning brain believe this guy,” Christie said of David Rosen, the budget officer for the Office of Legislative Services. “How often do you have to be wrong to finally be dismissed?”

He then went on to decry the non-partisan office as the "handmaiden of the majority."

Look, there is an argument to be made here, but it should focus on the methodology that created the estimates. The question is how did each side come to its revenue figure and why does each side think it's right. Past experience is useful here -- so Christie is on solid ground when he questions last year's numbers. But he is cherry-picking, as NJ.com points out:

Though Christie’s revenue estimate last year was more accurate, the OLS has been closer to the mark over the decade. On average since 2000, governors have been off 1.99 percent, the OLS 1.36 percent.

Where the ground shifts and becomes rocky is in the name-calling, which is part of Christie's standard arsenal and has nothing to do with rational argument but makes for good copy.

Opportunity, but for who?

The New York Times today offers what should be a cautionary tale for supporters of the Opportunity Scholarship Act. The legislation, which has been assigned to the Senate Education Committee, would allow corporations to take a 100 percent credit against their corporate tax bill for donations they make to the state's scholarship fund for low-income students. The money could then be used by the students to attend a private school.

In Georgia, the Times reports, the money is being funneled to the families of the donors. The Georgia situation "is just one example of how scholarship programs have been twisted to benefit private schools at the expense of the neediest children."

Spreading at a time of deep cutbacks in public schools, the programs are operating in eight states and represent one of the fastest-growing components of the school choice movement. This school year alone, the programs redirected nearly $350 million that would have gone into public budgets to pay for private school scholarships for 129,000 students, according to the Alliance for School Choice, an advocacy organization. Legislators in at least nine other states are considering the programs.

While the scholarship programs have helped many children whose parents would have to scrimp or work several jobs to send them to private schools, the money has also been used to attract star football players, expand the payrolls of the nonprofit scholarship groups and spread the theology of creationism, interviews and documents show. Even some private school parents and administrators have questioned whether the programs are a charade.

The program is being sold as revenue neutral, but it is built on a fund that allows corporations to pay less in taxes, which in turn means that there will be less money flowing into the state's tax coffers.

The scholarship program, like most school choices plans, is a gimmick designed not to fix public education -- and urban schools, particularly -- but to create the illusion that we are doing something. If we were serious about fixing schools, we would ensure they were fully integrated by race and class and funded adequately.

Anti-camping law targets homeless

From The Tent City Project:

The Denver City Council voted 9-4 to impose an urban camping ban last week -- a move "that specifically targets homeless people sleeping on the streets and one that critics say simply criminalizes homelessness."

Critics point out that the city's shelters already are overburdened, that there is no way to house everyone living on the streets. Instead of finding ways to expand housing opportunities, the city is looking to chase the homeless from public view.

Grassroots: How to end a war without really ending it

My Progressive Populist column is live on the Progressive Populist site. It's on the president's snail's-pace withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Since certainty is impossible, death penalty should be banned

When capital punishment makes the news, it rarely is because something happens to prove its utility or necessity. In fact, the death penalty hits the headlines only when the argument for it is undercut -- a telling trend that should lead the United States to join the rest of the civilized world in banning executions.

Today's news that a Texas execution carried out in 1989 most likely sent an innocent man to death fits with this trend.

From The Huffington Post:

Carlos De Luna was executed in 1989 for stabbing to death a gas station clerk in Corpus Christi six years earlier. It was a ghastly crime. The trial attracted local attention, but not from concern that a guiltless man would be punished while the killer went free.

De Luna, an eighth grade dropout, maintained that he was innocent from the moment cops put him in the back seat of a patrol car until the day he died. Today, 29 years after De Luna was arrested, Liebman and his team published a mammoth report in the Human Rights Law Review that concludes De Luna paid with his life for a crime he likely did not commit. Shoddy police work, the prosecution's failure to pursue another suspect, and a weak defense combined to send De Luna to death row, they argued.

"I would say that across the board, there was nonchalance," Liebman told The Huffington Post. "It looked like a common case, but we found that there was a very serious claim of innocence."

Was De Luna innocent? I don't know. But given the questions tht should have been raised, it appears to me that his guilt was sufficient entry in doubt to have spared his life.

This is the point. The system does an awful job of protecting the accused and there is no way -- and can be no way -- to prove guilt beyond doubt. That makes capital punishment morally unsupportable.

It's time to stop tinkering with the machinery of death.

The emotional importance of Obama's marriage statement

There is plenty to criticize from the left about the limitations of President Obama's endowment of marriage equality.

Yes, he did the political calculus. Yes, his endorsement comes late in the game. Yes, it lacks any practical, legislative oomph.

But, and this is important, it carries massive symbolic weight. The first black president becomes the first sitting president to support gays' and lesbians' right to marry.

Frank Bruni, in a column on nytimes.com, describes the "emotional importance" of the president's statement to Robyn Roberts.

I find myself thinking about all the teenagers and young adults out there who cower in silence because they worry about being ostracized if they speak the truth about their sexual orientation. I think about the ones who are bullied, even the ones who contemplate taking their own lives.

And I think about what it will mean to them to hear the president say what he did today, not because they're focused on marriage but because they're buoyed by any and every reassurance that there's nothing wrong with them, nothing inferior about them. Today their president gave them that reassurance.

I think about how it would have felt to me when I was 16, and fearful, and often deeply, deeply depressed, to hear a president say what ours did today. I can't imagine it. In the three decades since, our country has traveled an enormous distance, and today is a poignant and compelling marker of that.

And this is what it is about.

Gay marriage endorsement: Obama places himself on the right side of history

Finally. After several years of trying to straddle the issue, endorsing equality but only within a separate status for gays and lesbians, President Obama has finally gotten on the right side of history.

In a sit-down interview with ABC's Robin Roberts, Obama completed what has been a markedly long and oft-mocked evolution on the matter.
"I've always been adamant that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally," Obama told Roberts, in an interview that will air in full on ABC's "Good Morning America" Thursday.
"I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don't Ask Don't Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married," he said.

Again, what took him so long? The answer, of course, is politics. Obama viewed his support for equality -- which he expressed as support for same-sex marriage way back in the 1990s when he represented an overwhelmingly liberal state district in Illinois -- as incompatible with his ability to win and maintain the highest office in the land. So his position evolved, much the same way we have watched the moderate Mitt Romney evolve.

Luckily, Obama's ultimate evolution led him in the right direction, ending with an endorsement of same-sex marriage, making him the only sitting president to come out in favor of marriage equality.

History will remember him for that.

***

On a side note, Dahlia Lithwick, Slate's legal correspondent,  offered what may be the best line on the announcement. Writing on her Facebook page, Lithwick said,

ok it's been 90 minutes and my marriage still feels pretty solid. anyone else????

Mine seems pretty solid, too.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Protesting the big banks (UPDATED)

The Occupy Wall Street movement and other progressives have Bank of America in its sights. Activists are protesting at the bank's shareholder meeting in North Carolina -- and at branches around the country.

Among the protest sites are the BofA branches in Princeton (at the corner of Nassau and Witherspoon streets at noon) and New Brunswick (45 Easton Ave.).

The Huffington Post describes a multifaceted protest that includes moves by "disgruntled shareholders -- including Trillium Asset Management, the City of New York and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees" to

force votes on proposals that would curb the bank's political spending and force it to review its foreclosure practices. Foreclosure victims are hoping to give testimony during the meeting.

And marches and demonstrations outside bank branches designed "to draw attention to Bank of America's relationship with the federal government, the coal industry and its long record of foreclosure abuse."

I should have more later as things develop.

***

Here is some Huffington Post video:



***
Word is that the protest in New Brunswick is lightly attended -- three protesters outside the Easton Avenue branch. I am waiting for an update and will pass it along, but it does look like a dud.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

To call it a difficult decision is an understatement

It is quiet this morning. The dogs are asleep -- Rosie in her crate with the door open, Sophie in the hallway by the kitchen. I have a gate blocking off the office where I'm working and where the crates are located.

It seems odd to me to keep the two of them separated. They are sisters, puppies from the same litter, and they've spent nearly their entire lives together. But, for now, we have little choice.

What we've learned in the three-plus years that we've had Rosie and Sophie is that owning two females, especially two from the same litter, is a bad idea. It presents a constant struggle as they both strive for dominance and attention. There have been fights -- some pretty nasty -- and while we have kept it under control as best we can, it appears that there is little we can do to ensure that they won't go at each other. We've done everything our trainer has said: removed toys from the equation; started using the crates again; exercised them as often as we can. We are vigilant (with some unfortunate goof ups on our part) and, yet, the possibility of a fight continues to hang over our heads.

Last night, we were watching television. We were giving the dogs access to their beds -- which we had taken away a while back -- and Rosie was in one of them. Sophie seemed afraid to pass her and tried to go around the couch, was in a tight spot under a table when Rosie pounced. She made it across the room in a second and we were lucky to pull them apart just as it began. But it was terrifying and we had to keep them separated the rest of the night and now feel like we have to keep them separated and only give them access to each other sporadically.

Pat, our trainer, told us to keep Rosie on lockdown and that is the plan. But it appears that we have a difficult and painful decision ahead. Have we reached a point where we need to break up the Rosie & Sophie Show permanently? How could we live with that decision and, yet, how can we go on living this way?

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Christie housing plan: We need to wait and see

Gov. Chris Christie has not been a champion of the state's existing affordable housing regime. The governor has moved to disband the state Council on Affordable Housing, planning to hand the council's responsibilities to the state Department of Community Affairs, allow towns more freedom to develop their own plans and, bizarrely, to take the nearly quarter of a billion dollars in housing trust fund money to balance his budget.

So housing advocates can be forgiven for being cautious in their response to his comments yesterday.

The proposal, outlined today by the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency, would change the way the state administers its annual $18 million federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit, a subsidy meant to encourage development of affordable rentals.

"My administration is committed to expanding housing options for our most vulnerable citizens as part of our long-term, comprehensive plan to combat homelessness," Christie said in a statement.

The agency did not release the language of the proposal, but said it would cap the cost of projects eligible for the credit, and limit construction of affordable housing in high poverty areas.

It would also award developers for building houses or apartments for families who are now homeless. Also under the plan, 40 percent of the tax credit awards would be granted in urban areas "to guarantee urban project development."

The big news, however, is the governor's stated intention to use the new rules to "give poor residents a better chance to live in towns with high performing schools."

According to a press release from the Department of Community Affairs,

The rule also proposes incentives to locate developments proximate to areas of high job growth and excellent schools.

“The changes will create opportunities for children to flourish in high achieving schools while greatly expanding parents’ ability to find employment proximate to their residence” explained Acting DCA Commissioner Richard E. Constable, III, who is Chair of the HMFA Board and Co-chair of the Interagency Council on Homelessness.

If the new rules produce housing -- which is desperately needed -- and ensures that the housing is spread fairly throughout the state, as the governor says, then kudos to him and his administration. But given the history of affordable housing in the state -- i.e., political unwillingness to allow construction of low-income and even moderate-income housing in many towns through the use of exclusionary zoning -- I'm not particularly optimistic.

Cross-published from The Tent City Project.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

No cushion

An IMF study reported on by The Huffington Post today should give all of us pause. Americans are buried in debt and, because of it, may be just one step away from financial catastrohe.

Today, Americans owe some $704 billion in credit card debt, and more than that in both auto loans and student borrowing.

Many Americans may not even realize the extent to which debt underpins their lifestyle. A number of analysts argue that many Americans who consider themselves middle class are in fact leading a precarious, over-leveraged existence, with few savings and little financial cushion in case of emergency.

Think about it. Most of us are just one health emergency -- cancer, a heart attack, some disabling injury, a lost job, a fire, etc. -- away from losing everything and ending up on a relative's couch, or in a tent in the woods.

Cross-published from The Tent City Project.

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.