Coming in 2014!

2014 Urban Engagement Book Club (Hosted by CitySquare)

Every FIRST Thursday at Noon

Highland Park United Methodist Church (at SMU), Room 120

3300 Mockingbird Lane Dallas, Texas 75205

www.UrbanEngagement.org          

www.CitySquare.org

                                                                                              

January 9

Outliers: The Story of Success , Malcolm Gladwell

February 6

Black Like Me (50th Anniversary Edition), John Howard Griffin

March 6

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy ,Bruce Katz & Jennifer Bradley

April 3

The Other America: Poverty in the United States ,Michael Harrington

May 1

The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools,

Christopher A. Lubienski & Sarah Theule Lubienski

June 5

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir

July 3

No Book Club: Summer Break

August 7

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives, Sasha Abramsky

September 4

Why Walls Won't Work: Repairing the US-Mexico Divide, Michael Dear

October 2

Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools, Diane Ravitch

November 6

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Malcolm Gladwell

December 4

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,  Susan Faludi

Every THIRD Thursday at Noon

First United Methodist Church, Crossroads Room

1928 Ross Ave Dallas, Texas 75201

www.UrbanEngagement.org

www.CitySquare.org

January 23

Outliers: The Story of Success,Malcolm Gladwell

February 20

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass,
Douglas Massey & Nancy Denton

March 20

The Other America: Poverty in the United States,Michael Harrington

April 16

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, T. R. Reid

May 15

The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools,

Christopher A. Lubienski & Sarah Theule Lubienski

June 19

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Malcolm Gladwell

July 10

The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation, Second Edition, Leo Chavez

August 21

NAFTA and the Politics of Labor Transnationalism , Tamara Kay

September 18

The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, Amanda Ripley

October 17

The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate

Walter Nicholls

November 21

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,Sheryl Sandberg

December 18

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir

Consider community

As I post the following commentary from Nicholas Kristof, I catch myself bracing for the reaction from some of my regulars here!  I think some of you follow me to refill your frustration tank!  But what Kristof writes raises tough and important issues that as a society we must address.  Hopefully, we can find a way to do so with respect, substance and integrity.  The debates over the role of public institutions in addressing real-life, contemporary issues affecting communities, neighborhoods, corporations and individuals must be taken seriously. 

This is certainly, possibly doubly, true in the neighbors where we live and work.  From education to health care, from infrastructure to public safety, from housing to living wage employment we face big issues that call for new, bold and comprehensive solutions and responses. 

At the end of the day we just need to face the fact that "standby generators" just won't get us what we all need. 

Read Kristof's essay.  Tell me what you think.

 

A Failed Experiment

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

In upper-middle-class suburbs on the East Coast, the newest must-have isn’t a $7,500 Sub-Zero refrigerator. It’s a standby generator that automatically flips on backup power to an entire house when the electrical grid goes out.

In part, that’s a legacy of Hurricane Sandy. Such a system can cost well over $10,000, but many families are fed up with losing power again and again.

(A month ago, I would have written more snarkily about residential generators. But then we lost power for 12 days after Sandy — and that was our third extended power outage in four years. Now I’m feeling less snarky than jealous!)

More broadly, the lust for generators is a reflection of our antiquated electrical grid and failure to address climate change. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave our grid, prone to bottlenecks and blackouts, a grade of D+ in 2009.

So Generac, a Wisconsin company that dominates the generator market, says it is running three shifts to meet surging demand. About 3 percent of stand-alone homes worth more than $100,000 in the country now have standby generators installed.

“Demand for generators has been overwhelming, and we are increasing our production levels,” Art Aiello, a spokesman for Generac, told me.

That’s how things often work in America. Half-a-century of tax cuts focused on the wealthiest Americans leave us with third-rate public services, leading the wealthy to develop inefficient private workarounds.

It’s manifestly silly (and highly polluting) for every fine home to have a generator. It would make more sense to invest those resources in the electrical grid so that it wouldn’t fail in the first place.

But our political system is dysfunctional: in addressing income inequality, in confronting climate change and in maintaining national infrastructure.

The National Climatic Data Center has just reported that October was the 332nd month in a row of above-average global temperatures. As the environmental Web siteGrist reported, that means that nobody younger than 27 has lived for a single month with colder-than-average global temperatures, yet climate change wasn’t even much of an issue in the 2012 campaign. Likewise, the World Economic Forum ranks American infrastructure 25th in the world, down from 8th in 2003-4, yet infrastructure is barely mentioned by politicians.

So time and again, we see the decline of public services accompanied by the rise of private workarounds for the wealthy.

Is crime a problem? Well, rather than pay for better policing, move to a gated community with private security guards!

Are public schools failing? Well, superb private schools have spaces for a mere $40,000 per child per year.

Public libraries closing branches and cutting hours? Well, buy your own books and magazines!

Are public parks — even our awesome national parks, dubbed “America’s best idea” and the quintessential “public good” — suffering from budget cuts? Don’t whine. Just buy a weekend home in the country!

Public playgrounds and tennis courts decrepit? Never mind — just join a private tennis club!

I’m used to seeing this mind-set in developing countries like Chad or Pakistan, where the feudal rich make do behind high walls topped with shards of glass; increasingly, I see it in our country. The disregard for public goods was epitomized by Mitt Romney’s call to end financing of public broadcasting.

A wealthy friend of mine notes that we all pay for poverty in the end. The upfront way is to finance early childhood education for at-risk kids. The back-end way is to pay for prisons and private security guards. In cities with high economic inequality, such as New York and Los Angeles, more than 1 percent of all employees work as private security guards, according to census data.

This question of public goods hovers in the backdrop as we confront the “fiscal cliff” and seek to reach a deal based on a mix of higher revenues and reduced benefits. It’s true that we have a problem with rising entitlement spending, especially in health care. But I also wonder if we’ve reached the end of a failed half-century experiment in ever-lower tax rates for the wealthy.

Since the 1950s, the top federal income tax rate has fallen from 90 percent or more to 35 percent. Capital gains tax rates have been cut by more than half since the late 1970s. Financial tycoons now often pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries.

All this has coincided with the decline of some public services and the emergence of staggering levels of inequality (granted, other factors are also at work) such that the top 1 percent of Americans now have greater collective net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.

Not even the hum of the most powerful private generator can disguise the failure of that long experiment.

Poverty--understanding scale

The following appeared in Blacklisted News.  Lots to think about here!

100 Million Poor People In America And 39 Other Facts About Poverty That Will Blow Your Mind
July 25, 2012

Source: Michael Snyder, BLN Contributing Writer

Every single day more Americans fall into poverty. This should deeply alarm you no matter what political party you belong to and no matter what your personal economic philosophy is. Right now, approximately 100 million Americans are either “poor” or “near poor.”  For a lot of people “poverty” can be a nebulous concept, so let’s define it. 

The poverty level as defined by the federal government in 2010 was $11,139 for an individual and $22,314 for a family of four. Could you take care of a family of four on less than $2000 a month? Millions upon millions of families are experiencing a tremendous amount of pain in this economy, and no matter what “solutions” we think are correct, the reality is that we all should have compassion on them. Sadly, things are about to get even worse. . . .

The following are 40 facts about poverty in America that will blow your mind….

#1 In the United States today, somewhere around 100 million Americans are considered to be either “poor” or “near poor”.

#2 It is being projected that when the final numbers come out later this year that the U.S. poverty rate will be the highest that it has been in almost 50 years.

#3 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.

#4 Today, one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the poverty level.

#5 According to the Wall Street Journal, 49.1 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives financial benefits from the government. Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.

#6 It is projected that about half of all American adults will spend at least some time living below the poverty line before they turn 65.

#7 Today, there are approximately 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.

#8 During 2010, 2.6 million more Americans fell into poverty. That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959.

#9 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of “very poor” rose in 300 out of the 360 largest metropolitan areas during 2010.

#10 Since Barack Obama became president, the number of Americans living in poverty has risen by 6 million and the number of Americans on food stamps has risen by 14 million.

#11 Right now, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

#12 It is projected that half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years of age.

#13 The poverty rate for children living in the United States is 22 percent, although when the new numbers are released in the fall that number is expected to go even higher.

#14 One university study estimates that child poverty costs the U.S. economy 500 billion dollars a year.

#15 Households that are led by a single mother have a 31.6% poverty rate.

Continue reading here.

Springsteen's Rock with a Message. . .

Rolling Stone published an interview with Bruce Springsteen conducted by Jon Stewart in its March 29, 2012 edition.  Springsteen spoke of his new album (Wrecking Ball) and of a number of his classic recordings that reflect his own social values and his vision for and concern about America.  His language is the language of community, fairness, compassion and collective will, as well as responsibility.  Here are some of his comments:

The first cut, "We Take Care of Our Own," is where I set out the questions that I'm going to try to answer.  The song's chorus is posed as a challenge and a question.  Do we take care of our own?  What happened to that social contract?  Where did that go over the past 30 years?  How has it been eroded so terribly?  And how is it that the outrage about that erosion is just beginning to be voiced right now?  I've written about this stuff for those 30 years, from Darkness on the Edge of Town to The Ghost of Tom Joad through to today. . . .

So these are issues and things that occur over and over again in history and land on the backs of the same people.  In my music--if it has a purpose beyond dancing and fun and vacuuming your floor to it--I always try to gauge the distance between American reality and the American dream.  The mantra that I go into in the last verse of "We Take Care of Our Own"--"Where are the eyes, where are the hearts?"--it's really:  Where are those things now, what happened to those things over the past 30 years?  What happened to the social fabric of the world that we're living in? What's the price that people pay for it on a daily basis?"  Which is something that I lived with intensely as a child, and is probably the prime motivation for the subjects I've written about since I was very, very young. . . .

You cannot have a social contract with the enormous income disparity--you're gong to slice the country down the middle.  Without jobs, without helping folks with foreclosures, without regulating the banks, without some sort of tax reform. . . .Without addressing those issues in some way, I don't think the country is going to hold together.  . . .at the end of the day, you can't have a society and you can't have a civilization without a reasonable amount of economic fairness, full employment, purpose and civic responsibility. (page 41)

"Bruce Springsteen's State of the Union"

Rolling Stone

Issue 1153, March 29, 2012

Public education's obvious, dark secret

"Root cause of achievement gap is poverty. Test scores on SAT, ACT, state tests, NAEP, show a tight correlation. No surprise."

Diane Ravitch

A flood of justice, not a show