Hank Kalet

David Atkins makes some interesting points here, encouraging the left to look at the defeat of Eric Cantor in Virginia through a slightly different lens that we might otherwise use. Unlike other commentators, he is not focused on the specifics of the Cantor defeat, but the broader outlines — how a powerful, conservative Republican political actor (House majority leader in line to be the next House speaker) was taken out by a seemingly unknown and more conservative Republican in a primary, and what it means for the trajectory of the Democratic Party. Yes, the Democrats.

There are lessons, he says, that the left must take from Cantor’s defeat and from how conservative insurgencies have consistently pulled Republican politics — and national electoral politics — to the right.

The question, he says, is why the left has not sought to use the Democratic Party in a similar way, why it seems complacently willing to cede power within the party to the corporate Democrats and power brokers and rarely offers the slightest challenge — even in an environment where nearly every House seat is safe thanks to gerrymandering, it is rare to see sitting Democrats being challenged from their left.

This, he says rightly, means that corporate/centrist Democrats control the party and control the debate. The Democrats think they are chasing the center, but the center keeps moving right with the Republican Party — even as voters say they are not supportive of Republican policies. To prevent this rightward drift, he says, lefty Democrats need to be more aggressive, need to start their own Tea Party-like revolution within the Democratic Party.

I think his analysis is accurate, within the limits of electoral politics. There is a need for the left to be more engaged, though we should not fool ourselves into thinking that a more left-liberal Democratic Party will be effective in remaking America.

The Republicans’ aggressive use of the rule-making apparatus to shut down government — gerrymandering, the filibuster, the Senate hold, the power of House committee chairs — mean that that minority party is in a powerful position to keep even the most popular policies from coming to a vote. Pulling the Democrats to the left could alter the dynamic some, mostly by altering the tenor of the debate, but it will not lead to substantive policy changes. Those can only come from an engaged citizenry that is willing to do more than write blog posts (yes, I am guilty in this regard) and letters to their congressmen and local papers. The Occupy movement was too diffuse to have a real impact, though it did help push the issue of inequality onto the national agenda.

The model, I think, is the Civil Rights movement, which took to the streets and created a moral imperative for change that ultimately resulted in the Civil Rights Act and other legislation. The  immigrants rights movement today is having a similar effect (New Jersey’s tuition equality legislation happened because activism by immigrant students created the moral space within which elected officials could work to pass legislation).

So, yes, we need progressives and leftists to challenge Democrats in primaries and not just run for open seats. But we also need to work outside of the electoral process.

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Yesterday’s announcement that the state is providing “incentives” in the form of tax credits to the Philadelphia Sixers to build a practice facility in Camden, which I criticized in a post late in the day, has both sides of the political spectrum up in arms, as Mark J. Magyar notes in his piece today at NJ Spotlight. It is as good an overview of the issue as you will find, timed to both the Camden deal and a report from the liberal interest group New Jersey Policy Perspective. (Disclosure: I do a lot of reporting for NJ Spotlight and should have a piece on immigration up this week.)

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The state Economic Development Authority views construction of a new practice and office facility for the Philadelphia Sixers in Camden as a major boon to the struggling city. The EDA approved $82 million in grants to build the 110,000-square-foot facility, according to NJ.com — the exact amount it is estimated to cost the Sixers to build.

EDA President Timothy Lizura said the project would create 250 new non-construction jobs and net the state $76 million after the cost of the incentive. The project summary says the 250 jobs would have a median salary of $45,000.

So, to do the math — the state is offering the Sixers $328,000 over 10 years for each new $45,000 construction job created and $76 million in revenue — basically half of what will be generated by the facility.

There will be other jobs, of course, as John George explains in the Philadelphia Business Journal.

The team will bring 200 front-office employees from Philadelphia to Camden. (They are currently split between the Philadelphia Navy Yard and the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine).
Sixers CEO Scott O’Neil said the team anticipates adding 50 new jobs once the Camden facility is up-and-running.

That’s another 250 jobs, which means that we are looking at a total of about 500 jobs, some short-term, some longterm, with some residual effect on the neighborhood — though the impact of these kinds of developments is rarely as positive as people predict. Essentially, the state is giving the Sixers $82 million over 10 years to create 500 jobs and generate an $76 million over 35 years in anticipated “economic benefits” that could come “in the form of wage taxes, and direct and indirect spending.”

Camden Mayor Dana Redd said the project “sends a strong message” that Camden is moving forward

“To say it’s a big day for Camden is an understatement,” said Redd. “We welcome the 76ers to the Camden Waterfront.”

But not everyone agrees. The liberal think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective President Gordon MacInnes said in a press release that stadium subsidy deals “are notorious for short-changing the taxpayer and exaggerating the benefits.” In this case, the state is essentially paying the cost of construction for the facility for a “team (that) is worth $469 million and hardly needs a tax break to build a facility.”

This subsidy deal is among the worst we’ve seen under the Economic Opportunity Act. The net benefit to the state is incredibly low – $76.6 million over 35 years, according to the state’s own projections. That is, if the team even stays that long, since they will only be required to stay for 15 before they can seek tax breaks elsewhere. Each job promised in this deal is worth an astounding $328,000 in state tax dollars, despite having a median wage of just $45,000.

Conservative Republican state Sen. Michael Doherty was equally critical, calling the facility “a free gift from the hard-pressed taxpayers of New Jersey to Joshua Harris, the billionaire owner of the team.”

Governor Christie states that we have an $800 million budget shortfall. Then why is New Jersey providing an $82 million gift for a billionaire? Local governments are being forced to cut to the bone. Why are we opening up the money spigot to take care of a billionaire? How can New Jersey not make this year’s full pension payment, but the state government can find an extra $82 million for a basketball practice facility?

The governor has final say on the project and is likely to approve it. He has been an ally of Camden Mayor Redd — he held a press event in Camden on Monday — and signed the Economic Opportunity Act into law, with some modifications. He also had this to say yesterday in Camden:

“It’s not only good because of additional tax revenue and business but also for the image of the City of Camden to show the Philadelphia 76ers, one of the major sports teams in the region, has enough confidence in the strides we’re talking about making here, that they’re willing to invest significantly in the City of Camden,” Christie said.

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Apparently, despite several stories based on unnamed sources, the president and Capitol Hill Democrats are on the same page on the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap. This might be a surprise given that recent coverage said Democrats viewed the “Bergdahl swap (as the) latest last straw for top Democrats frustrated with president’s leadership.”

Let’s go back a bit, to my post from last week (triggered by Daniel Froomkin’s Facebook post). It was about a New York Times’ inside-baseball piece (i.e., a story about Washington for Washington) that purported to show that President Obama had list key Democrats in the House and Senate. My problem with the story was that it relied on unnamed elected officials and the Times’ cachet inside the Beltway to make its point.

The National Journal followed suit yesterday, offering a similar piece about the fraying relationship between Obama had Democrats on Capitol Hill, a piece that also relied exclusively on unnamed sources. (I tweeted out a question about that one from my KaletJournalism account I encourage my students to follow:

Off the record again? At what pt do reporters stop enabling the anonymous complaints? http://t.co/F1MTbwQCXo #journalism
— Hank Kalet (@KaletJournalism) June 9, 2014

Imagine my surprise today, however, when I came across this headline on Politico, “Senate Dems back Obama on Bergdahl,” which would seem to contradict the earlier reporting. It is based on comments made by leading Democrats after today’s intelligence briefing — so there is a timing issue that factors into the coverage — and it is fully sourced. This does not negate the earlier coverage, but it does cast its failings in much brighter light and makes me, at least, further question the motives of the unnamed elected officials on which the Times and National Journal stories relied. And, to be fair, Greg Sargent is reporting that there is Democratic criticism of the PR side of the Bergdahl affair, with Conn. Sen. Richard Blumenthal going on record as saying it could have been handled better.

I stick to my original contention — that anonymous sources must be used sparingly, if at all, and only in those cases when the importance of and need for the information gained is so great that it overrides the potential pitfalls created by relying on unnamed sources.

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The latest numbers on homelessness in New Jersey are far from encouraging. According to the report from Monarch Housing:

• On the night of January 28th, 2014 a total of 9,202 households, including 13,900 persons, were experiencing homelessness in New Jersey, according to the 2014 Point­‐ In‐Time Count.
• A total of 1,499 individuals, in 1,246 households, were identified as chronically homeless.
• 876 households, with 931 persons were unsheltered on the night of the count.

Overall, this is an increase of 15.8 percent — though the total still falls below the 2011 homelessness count. Part of the issue is the difficulty of counting such a transient population — the single-night count gets as close to an accurate census as it can, but it depends on a lot of factors, including the weather and how aggressive individual counties are at looking for homeless individuals and families.

This is the explanation offered to NJ.com by Monarch:

Jay Everett, an associate on the Ending Homelessness Team at Monarch, said the increase may be attributed to an increase in people staying in homeless shelters because of frigid temperatures. In previous years, those people may have been outside, and not easy to find.

“We had a very cold winter and a very cold night,” Everett said.

Everett said a handful of counties also counted people receiving temporary rental assistance from the Board of Social Services who meet the definition of homeless. Those individuals had not been counted in previous years.

The subtext here is  that annual count only tells part of the story. The numbers can fluctuate for a lot of reasons, so the increase this year is no more an indication of failure than the two-year drop-off from 2011 to 2013. This is a one-night snapshot and it is not a pretty picture. It is, however, our annual reminder that homelessness exists and is a problem.

Unless you live in places with large numbers of homeless (Newark, for instance) or in areas where a tent city has popped up (Lakewood, Toms River, Camden), you do not have to think much about the way we treat the people we’ve decided are of no value to our economy — the mentally ill, the substance abusers, unauthorized immigrants, the long-term unemployed. The American economy is consumption based and corporate run. Nearly everything is assigned a value and those things that are deemed valueless — like the homeless, like the greenhouse gases we spew — do carry costs, which are ignored by corporations that are perfectly happy to collect their profits. Those costs — in health problems caused by poor air quality, for instance, or the potential dangers of having people living on the streets — are passed along to the rest of us. They are socialized, when they are acknowledge at all.

I’ve written a lot about this issue over the last couple of years (see my profile of Jeffrey Wild, a founder of the New Jersey Coalition to End Homelessness and reports for The Progressive, The Progressive Populist and In These Times, along with a piece by NJ News Commons on the work I did with filmmaker Jack Ballo and photographer Sherry Rubel). I’ve talked with people who are homeless and those who now find themselves — because of a medical disaster, long-term unemployment or some other catastrophe that is fast-becoming normal in the 21st century — one step from the streets.

The immediate needs are obvious — cash to help with immediate bills and more temporary shelter space with services (assistance in finding work and treatment for mental health and substance-abuse issues). The longer term efforts — at least those that our capitalist economy will accept as legitimate — include expansion of low-cost rental housing, a livable minimum wage, income supports, real universal health care and a continuation of the services offered to those in immediate needs.

Ultimately, though, addressing the issue of homelessness is going to require us to re-evaluate how we treat people. Are we just human capital, useful only if we can provide a service to our economic masters or do we, as human beings, have some intrinsic value, whether we can perform a job?

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