Bob Hennelly, Insider NJ

News blues on an apprehensive flight to Milwaukee

A version of this article originally appeared in Insider NJ.

As I write this column, I am in the air on the way to Milwaukee to cover the Republican National Convention. The plane is packed with GOP delegates from New Jersey and New York as well as journalists and civilians who have love or business somewhere in the Midwest.

There’s a palpable sense of apprehension on board. It’s the day after former President Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt in what can only be described as a spectacular failure of the multi-billion dollar national security apparatus.

As passengers who boarded at Newark Liberty International, we’ve all just submitted to being poked and prodded by the TSA after taking our shoes and belts off in a kind of homage to that same national security apparatus in place since after 9/11.

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Since the last in-person national political convention in 2016, there’s been a mass death event, a violent insurrection timed to happen as President Joe Biden’s 2020 Electoral College win was to be certified and the massive street protests that came after the police murder of George Floyd.

On the plane, reporters and Republican activists feel each other out in their across-the-aisle introductions.

"What outlet do you work for?" comes the inquiry and then the cautious response.

Even in a wounded state, Trump struck a pugilistic profile mouthing what appeared to be the word “fight.” That footage of his blood streaming down his face from his ear is like a Rorschach video. For tens of millions of Americans, Trump was a near martyr. For others, he’s a TV reality star and a convicted felon who should never again hold elected office.

The gunfire that exploded in Butler, Pa., left dead the alleged gunman and an innocent bystander, Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief, who shielded his family from the incoming sniper fire from the shooter’s AR-15. Once again, a nation that spends endless amounts of money on weapons and security is made to seem vulnerable to the actions of a lone actor.

While media commentators assert the broad daylight shooting of a former and would-be president shocks the conscience, it’s just another day in a nation where the smell of gun powder always hangs in the air.

There’s a gun violence epidemic in America with the Brady Center estimating that on an average day 327 Americans are shot and 117 die from their wounds.

Political violence is in our national DNA, and anyone who says otherwise hasn’t been paying attention. As I was packing up my reference materials for the convention, I came across a letter I wrote in August 1964 to Sen. Clifford Case, who was the last New Jersey Republican to be elected to the U.S. Senate. I wrote to suggest that the FBI should be in charge of the investigation into President John F. Kennedy’s murder.

In my third-grade voice, I expressed concern that the 1964 presidential campaign was well underway and there were still so many unanswered questions about the circumstances surrounding Kennedy’s murder. I had been in charge of my younger brothers and sisters when my parents went to mass at St. Catherine’s in Glen Rock in the days after JFK was killed.

I watched in real time horror on TV as Lee Harvey Oswald was shot in the gut during his transfer in Dallas. It was just a warmup for Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — it’s what we do.

In the decades since, the national security state’s need to control information, has come at a price of public confidence. Back in 2023, a Gallup poll indicated that 65 percent of Americans believe there was a conspiracy behind the JFK murder. Files from that era are still classified.

Scroll forward to the lead up to Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and the MAGA movement’s efforts in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 general election defeat to subvert the Electoral College. According to the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, which has responsibility for overseeing the U.S. Secret Service, “many U.S. Secret Service text messages from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021 were erased as part of a device-replacements program.”

We never got a full accounting about what the U.S. Secret Service knew and when they knew it about the first of its kind attack on the U.S. Capitol. It’s always "need to know." And the House of Representatives is now controlled by a majority of Republicans who voted NOT to certify Biden’s electoral college win AFTER the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol.

There’s precious little time for self-examination of any kind.

After a 20-plus-year military binge driven by our war on terror, the Brown University’s Watson Institute estimates the world lost 2.5 million lives indirectly due to the economic collapse, “the destruction of public and health infrastructure” and environmental contamination.

Watson estimates the United States spent $8 trillion in the 20 years since 9/11, setting off the worst refugee crisis since WWII, and collapsed a few nation states in the process. Did we have any reason to feel safer?

It’s a very open question as to whether we can gather as Americans in large crowds at a national political convention in a convivial way that harkens back to those halcyon days captured by Norman Rockwell. The decimation of local newspapers and community owned and operated TV and radio stations have left us as a nation that’s had authenticated news and information replaced by aggregation and social media.

This content is distributed by the corporate news media that are entirely fixated on driving online traffic and uses analytics that customizes our “news” feeds to match our existing prejudices and biases.

Is it any wonder we don’t have a consensus on who won the 2020 election?

This degraded information ecology has both profound public health and civil defense implications. No doubt, this fracturing of our national narrative along the faultiness of red and blue states helped drive our catastrophic COVID-19 death toll of close to 1.2 million Americans. Consider the challenge of finding the necessary public consensus required to confront the real challenges presented by the climate crisis.

By becoming reliant on a news media that relies on affirming our biases we’ve lost the intellectual capacity to challenge ourselves by asking how we know what we know. This becomes particularly problematic when as citizens in a democracy we have to try and hold the national security apparatus accountable, yet we don’t have a clue about what’s actually going on.

Accountability required for port workplace deaths — and not just in Baltimore

This article originally appeared in InsiderNJ.

Several weeks before the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse workplace mass casualty event, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) announced with great fanfare the state owned marine terminals in the Port of Baltimore had set a new record for handling incoming foreign cargo worth $80 billion in 2023.

“The Port of Baltimore is the best port in the nation and one of the largest economic generators in Maryland,” Moore proclaimed. “Together, we aren’t just breaking records — we are creating jobs, growing our economy, and building new pathways to opportunity.”

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The 45-year-old up-and-coming Democratic Party star’s press release touted the deep waters of Port of Baltimore’s ability to handle larger and larger container ships including the Evergreen Ever Max that can accommodate 15,000 20-foot containers.

“The arrival of ships of this size continues to demonstrate Baltimore’s capabilities of handling supersized vessels, including its ultra-large Neo-Panamax cranes and deep channel,” according to the promotional press release.

In the early morning hours of March 26, that changed in a flash.

The Dali, a Singaporean cargo ship with no propulsion except inertia, tried to pass under the Francis Scott Key Bridge on the cheap without a tug escort. It slammed into a bridge support and brought a huge chunk of the 1.6 mile span down on itself — along with a half-dozen immigrant workers who had been doing a non-union paving job on the bridge. The collision also caused the breach of dozens of shipping containers worth of hazardous materials that poured their contents into the Patapsco River.

The bodies of four of the construction workers have yet to be recovered from the water. The maritime and construction workforces by the nature of their sectors are largely invisible to the billions of consumers who rely on them. As we speed by on the highway, their work is often remote and isolated from the society that so relies on it.

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Such was the circumstance of the immigrants on a non-union paving job working overnight out on a bridge spanning the vast expanse of the Patapsco River that’s like a belt cinching the Port of Baltimore waist. In life you can’t get more nearly invisible than that. In death, well, it’s probably only your family that will know you are missing.

And for non-union contractors that very precarity of immigrant workers due to their ambiguous legal status makes them easy pickings and very profitable to employ. Should they die on the job, well, there’s always a GoFundMe page or leaving no trace at all — if the contractor properly manages the narrative.

Unions matter

Multiple studies have documented that union worksites are safer thanks to better training and accountability. As for the minimal crewing on the Dali, that’s an international maritime standard.

Roland “Rex” Rexha is the secretary-treasurer of the Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association. Established in 1875, it’s the oldest maritime trade union in the U.S., representing licensed deck and engine officers. Rexha says the Dali disaster highlights the downside of not having ships escorted by tug boats until they are out on the open sea away from critical infrastructure — as well as the risks created with building larger and larger vessels while using automation as justification for reducing crew size, and the wide variance between U.S. maritime safety standards and the rest of the world.

“As for having tug assistance when they are going under a bridge, these are changes of policy where we defer to what the mandatory policies are of the individual port; what they deem is the safest way to operate,” Rexha says. “I think in all ports there’s going to be a revisiting of how we operate and what’s the safest way to move vessels out into safe water. When you are talking about a large cruise ship or a cargo ship like this one, if they are out of the harbor and they lose power they are not going to hit anything, they are in the middle of the ocean. But as they are operating in local waters that’s where you have to be really diligent.”

That Moore’s pre-Dali disaster press release about the record port volumes reads very much like the self-congratulatory tone of the press releases regularly issued by Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) and Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

However, beyond all of that regional self-promotion, is the hard, cold, steel reality that when governments and their authorities own and operate ports, as well as the surrounding transportation infrastructure, they are the ultimate responsible party for maintaining occupational health and safety for the tens of thousands of workers in and around these complexes.

Floating flame nightmare

And when something goes tragically wrong, as it did on July 5 in Newark, N.J., when a fire broke out in Newark aboard the Grande Costa D’Avorio, claiming the lives of firefighters Augusto Acabou, 45, and Wayne Brooks Jr., 49, it’s not just the ship’s owner that needs to be held accountable. The operator of the marine facility, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is controlled by the Governors of both states, does, too.

While the fire alarm was sounded at 9:30 p.m., inexplicably the formal request for mutual aid from New York’s FDNY, which has the nation’s most robust marine firefighting capability, did not come until after midnight the next day.

During the joint board of inquiry convened by the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Board earlier this year, it became clear during the testimony of Newark Fire Department Deputy Chief Alfonse Carlucci, that the Newark Fire Department firefighters were poorly equipped and had not even the most rudimentary knowledge of how to fight a vessel fire.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s policy of leaving the responsibility for responding to maritime fires at its facilities to a financially stressed municipal fire department such as Newark was revealed as a complete unmitigated disaster that cost the lives of two of Newark’s bravest — and a traumatic moral injury to the scores of other first responders who were sent to do a job for which that they lacked the basic tools or training.

A clearly shaken Carlucci conceded that when he was handed the floor plan of the ill-fated ship, he was completely incapable of understanding it, much less in a position to use it to devise a strategy for fighting the fire that killed two of his men and injured several others. He said it was routine or a “little normal” to not have proper fire equipment — Newark’s two fireboats were non-operational.

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There’s been no explanation as to why there was such a lag time in engaging the FDNY although there are conflicting unconfirmed accounts that FDNY personnel were on the scene prior to the formal request for mutual aid. But Carlucci told the Coast Guard panel that once the FDNY marine unit arrived, hours into the deadly fire, he was “taught quite a lot” by the FDNY on how to fight a ship-based fire.

With a bit of amazement in his voice, he made the FDNY marine response sound like the calvary had arrived with the manpower, equipment and experience needed to fight a fire that killed two of his men. He described the vast volume of water that was projected from the large FDNY fireboat that was capable of cooling the deck of the ship that had been so hot it melted the boots of the Newark firefighters earlier in the response.

It’s just heartbreaking to have to listen to and transcribe such testimony. The official neglect that arguably extends to Trenton, Albany and Washington reflects a callous disregard for a fire service upon which an already vulnerable community relies on and as it turns out, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The National Transportation Safety Board and the U.S. Coast Guard probe into the Newark fire and the Dali disaster are ongoing. But holding entities like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Maryland Port Administration, and the Maryland Department of Transportation accountable can be a real political challenge.

Repeat offender?

Consider the mass casualty event in March 2023 on I-695 in Maryland when another six immigrant workers on a non-union work crew were killed after two racing vehicles obliterated their inadequately signed work zone. Lost in the horrific crash: Rolando Ruiz, 46; Carlos Orlando, 43; Jose Armando Escobar, 52; Mahlon Simmons III, 31; Mahlon Simmons II, 52; and Sybil Lee Dimaggio, 46.

The state’s own Maryland Occupational Safety and Health cited the Maryland DOT’s State Highway Administration for a “serious” violation — failing to post basic but essential traffic control signs approaching the construction zone that would alert passing motorists that highway work crews would be coming in and out of the zone. No monetary fine was imposed.

As for the private contractor, the federal OSHA levied a $3,000 fine which the notice of violation described as “contested.”

Patrick Moran is the president of AFSCME’s Council 3, which represents over 40,000 public sector workers in Maryland that include job titles that do highway and road repair. He says the lack of accountability for the I-695 failures by the state agency and contractor is “disheartening and disrespectful to the families of the people that lost their lives.”

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“It just tells you how upside down all of this stuff is in terms of contracting out work in terms of health and safety and how that’s valued and calculated,” Moran said. The union leader said the injury to workers and their families is compounded by the reality that the exploitative non-union business model that plays on the ambiguity of immigrant workers legal status is being funded by taxpayers.

Moran continued: “What we see is that there is little consideration given to health and safety and we have seen in construction, in all sorts of facets — roads or buildings in Maryland — it’s all left to the bottom line and the race to the bottom leaving it to whomever can build it cheapest and health and safety as well as worker safety be damned.”

What could go wrong?

In the Dali disaster, perhaps there could be a review of the absurdity of having the massive cargo ship operated by just some 20 crew members and of having the ill-fated vessel sail out to sea under such an essential and vulnerable asset without a tug escort. No doubt, the same industry lobbyists and multinationals that so effectively persuade regulators to water down labor standards in the first place, know the drill and will hunker down and spread around some campaign cash to try and blur any oversight.

In both Newark and Baltimore, it will take months if not a couple of years for official answers, the kind that holds responsible parties accountable and institutes reforms and new regulations that could save lives and protect the environment. Meanwhile, as we have seen with other workplace mass casualty events, the meat grinder of global commerce grinds on because here in America workers in general, and immigrants in particular, are all too often considered expendable.

In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic collapse of the Key Bridge in Baltimore, Murphy in New Jersey and Hochul in New York offered their support to the a ”people of Maryland in any way,” directing the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey “to further evaluate all available resources to minimize supply chain disruptions.”

“We have seen over the past several years that indefinite port closures can impact national and global supply chains, which hurt everyday consumers the hardest,” the two Democrats wrote.

You would think for all the campaign cash and union votes they have gotten in the past, they could have referenced workplace safety or even a phrase to uplift the immigrant workers and their families to make them less invisible.

After Dali, New York City Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi did a "it can’t happen here," telling reporters the Port of New York’s “own bridge infrastructure is some of the most highly monitored infrastructure in the nation. So, that and also the coordination with vessels and our bridge communication is highly sophisticated.”

Joshi continued: “We want New Yorkers to rest assured that the right precautions are in place to ensure that our infrastructure is safe and remains safe and how it interacts with both trucks and ships that both hit bridges occasionally. We have the right protections in place.”

As we all know even “the most highly monitored infrastructure” can fall prey to complacency as did the Port Authority’s George Washington Bridge on the Sept. 11th anniversary in 2013 when a rogue element of the bi-state agency’s police force and then-Gov. Chris Christie partisans deliberately snarled bridge traffic for a few days.

Legislative hearings and three failed federal criminal prosecutions later and the public was left with more questions than answers about the conduct of not just public employees but law enforcement officers as well who were not acting in the public interest.

A list of “un-indicted conspirators” that was assembled by the Department of Justice as part of the prosecution was never publicly released. Then U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman fought such a release in court and one of the conspirators that was not indicted sued to block a federal judge from releasing the list to the news media who had gone to court to make the names public.

Infrastructure and accountability?

It appears the bigger the asset in question the more likely there won’t be any and if there is, it will come so long after the actual sequence of events that prompted the inquiry no one is likely to notice.

Fatal eviction: A profile of one family’s despair

This article originally appeared in InsiderNJ.

NEPTUNE, N.J. — Last month, an American flag was still blowing in the January breeze on Lincrest Terrace as police gathered evidence.

The scene: a murder-suicide that took the lives of Reuben Alarcon, 51, and Andrea Alarcon, 41, and their two daughters, nine-year-old Scarlett and six-year-old Emma, who attended Hannah Caldwell Elementary School.

Their bodies were discovered by officers from the Union County Sheriff’s Department who had come to the house to serve an eviction notice on the family, whose home of 15 years had been sold out from underneath them in November at a Sheriff’s sale. Sale price: $322,000.

Investigators believe it was Andrea, described by neighbors as a “loving” mother, who shot her husband and daughters before turning the gun on herself.

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Emma’s pre-K teacher told the New York Post the Alarcon family were “very caring, loving, nurturing and generous, describing Andrea as “a dutiful class mom who ‘was on top of everything’ and made Valentine’s Day gifts for her daughter’s 14 classmates.”

New Jersey is the densest state in the nation, and yet, despite our close proximity to each other social conventions and the shame we dole out for financially falling behind can keep us trapped, isolated in our own living hell while we desperately try to keep up appearances.

Now, almost a year since President Joe Biden formally declared the COVID pandemic over, foreclosure and eviction moratoriums that were put in place during the mass death event are no longer in effect. We are now seeing surges in both.

Invisible funnel cloud

The Alarcon family was swept off this earth by what can only be described as an invisible tornado — a vortex of America’s gun violence, mental health and affordable housing death spirals. Polite society and our elected leaders are prone to say "nobody saw it coming" as kind of a post-traumatic salve we apply on our collective conscience. This bromide shields us from having to confront the brutality of an economic system that’s fueled by the dispossession and seizure of a family’s home but also funds the campaigns of the people that make the laws and appoint the judges.

While professional Democrats are touting Biden’s "miraculous" economic recovery, they neglect to describe the ongoing misery index that provides essential context to the robust Gross Domestic Product numbers they use to make their case. While we have seen wage growth, which has been stagnate for decades, grow late last year at a faster pace than inflation, the number of households who were paying more than 50 percent of their income for rent during the pandemic continued to surge.

“The U.S. has a shortage of 7.3 million rental homes affordable and available to renters with extremely low incomes,” reports the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “Only 33 affordable and available rental homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renter households. Extremely low-income renters face a shortage in every state and major metropolitan area. Among states, the supply of affordable and available rental homes ranges from only 17 affordable and available homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households in Nevada to 58 in South Dakota. In 12 of the 50 largest metro areas in the country, the absolute shortage of affordable and available homes for extremely low-income renters exceeds 100,000 units.”

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In New Jersey, there are 323,284 households that fall into that extremely low income cohort. Nearly 75 percent of them are “cost burdened,” which means paying for housing is forcing them to shortchange other essentials like food or healthcare, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. In our state, there are just 31 affordable housing units available for every hundred families in need of a place to live.

“Americans are losing their homes at a faster rate this year as banks make up for lost time after state and federal foreclosure bans expired,” reported CBS MoneyWatch. “Lenders repossessed nearly 96,000 properties during the first three months of 2023, up 22 percent from the same period last year, according to real estate data provider ATTOM.”

According to the most recent data, New Jersey ranks third in the nation for foreclosures, behind Maryland and Connecticut. According to SoFi Learn, a personal finance website, one in every 2,775 homes in our state was in foreclosure at the start of the year with 1,347 in foreclosure out of 3.7 million housing units. The hardest hit counties are Cumberland, Gloucester, Warren, Sussex and Atlantic.

Rent hikes higher than inflation

In August, the New Jersey Monitor reported that as the eviction moratorium ended on Jan. 1, 2022 the state’s official homeless numbers ticked past 10,000 for the first time since 2015.

“Rents are rising. New Jersey’s median rent in December 2022 was $2,723 — 8.38 percent higher than the same time the previous year and higher than the national median of $2,007, according to a Rent.com report,” according to the news source. “Rental vacancies fell. New Jersey had a 3.7 percent rental vacancy rate last year, down from an 11.2 percent a decade ago, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.”

While economists credited the Federal Reserve and the White House for a "soft landing" of the economy, it was actually a crash landing for many who had already been hanging on by a thread during the pandemic.

According to last year’s Point-in-Time Count, which is mandated by the federal government for all communities that have gotten federal homeless assistance, roughly 653,100 people were experiencing homelessness, the highest such count since reporting started in 2007. In that single night count, there were close to 35,000 people under the age of 25 without shelter that are categorized as unaccompanied youth.

In New Jersey, that Point-in-Time Count in January of 2023 identified 7,408 households, including 10,267 persons, that were experiencing homelessness with almost 2,000 people identified as chronically homeless and 1,416 people actually unsheltered the night of the count.

A vacant home in Neptune, N.J. Photo: Bob Hennelly

Walter Herres is the executive director of SHILO, (Supporting Homeless and Innovatively Loving Others), a grassroots non-profit working primarily in New Brunswick, who is now himself dealing with homelessness. He is also very active with the New Jersey Poor People’s Campaign and has been extensively trained in helping at-risk individuals regain their footing. During a phone interview with InsiderNJ, Herres said the Point-in-Time Count upon which so many policy decisions are based, vastly undercounts the number of people who are caught up in the worsening shelter crisis.

“These are fairy tale statistics. There’s no way that on one night in January that you are going to go out and find all of the homeless meaning you would walk right past me if I had on some new Jordan sneakers with a nice jacket on and I put on cologne — you would have walked right past me with your clipboard,” Herres explained.

“There’s a national shortage of affordable housing,” he said, and the reality is we see people of all races “forced into nomadic living in their cars.”

Herres contrasted how the nation gears up for lost dogs with how it handles the unsheltered.

“If you report your dog missing in America we will go outside with a van and will go around to try and pick your dog up and shelter it until you can pick it up,” Herres said. “That’s where we are in America.”

New Jersey’s shelter crisis is really acute in Trenton, the state capital.

“They have so many abandoned houses in Trenton — they just found the body of a homeless person that died in one. That’s where most of the homeless live — in those abandoned buildings,” Herres said.

A mayor's lament

Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora knows all too well the challenge of having a vast stock of vacant homes, a city with a significant homeless population, and a dearth of resources to address both.

“We just had a row house fire and five houses went up and the problem is we have squatters coming in and it’s cold and they start fires to get warm,” Gusciora told InsiderNJ during a phone interview.

Gusciora, who also served in the state legislature, estimates his city has “well over 1,000” of these residential properties in various stages of disrepair. “A lot of these houses have slipped into decay, so we have to fix roofs and porches. The pipes are gone and it’s almost cost prohibitive to save them.”

Across New Jersey, there are thousands upon thousands of vacant homes that are boarded up falling deeper and deeper into neglect posing public safety and fire risks to our most fragile neighborhoods. Meanwhile, we read isolated local newspaper accounts of homeless encampments in Neptune or in the woods behind Shop-Rite, in Atlantic City next to the Golden Nugget.

In our post-pandemic economic recovery, we just cranked back up the conveyor belt that carries families that had been sheltered, out on to the streets with the resumption of foreclosures and evictions. It’s like we just threw a switch and let the grinding begin without any regard for the potential human consequences like we saw with the Alarcon family’s tragedy.

It’s all right and just is what we tell ourselves. We can’t have people living someplace for free, why that’s not fair to everybody else that has to pay for shelter and here in New Jersey, when property rights bump up against human rights, you know what and who will prevail. It’s in the Garden State’s DNA. After all, we were a northern state that had no trouble turning over runaway slaves to the agents of their masters.

Property is property.

King's dream: rooted in labor’s rising

This article originally appeared in InsiderNJ.

This Martin Luther King Day comes just weeks after a year that’s been dubbed "the year of the strike" because in 2023 there were well over 300 such work stoppages involving 450,000 union workers willing to take the risk of walking out on their employer — a 900 percent increase from just a few years earlier.

Automakers, actors, writers, nurses and a long list of other occupations were fed up enough that they walked off their job by the tens of thousands. Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board reported in 2022 receiving over 2,500 applications for workplace union representation, a 53 percent increase over the previous year.

King’s last address in April 1968 was to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., who went out in part because two of their co-workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had been crushed to death by the errant trash compactor of their sanitation truck. Throughout King’s career, it was unions such as the United Autoworkers, the Transport Workers Union, SEIU 1199 and AFSCME that he saw as essential allies in his campaign for mass collective nonviolent action.

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For King, the civil rights and labor movements were intertwined because they both required disciplined non-violent collective action to succeed.

In his “The American Dream” speech, a version of which he gave at St. Peter’s College in September 1965, he spoke of the “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

King continued: “And whatever it affects one directly it affects all indirectly. And as long as there is extreme poverty in this world no one can be totally rich, even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than 28 or 30 years, no one can be totally healthy even if he just got a checkup in the finest clinic of the nation. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

In a 1962 speech in front of the National Maritime Union, MLK gave a speech that more than a half century speaks eerily to our national circumstance 24 years into the 21st century. In that address, he presciently frames out the contours of the opposition to the social justice agenda he shared with so much of the labor movement that appears even more lethal today.

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“Our nation is facing severe trials in these turbulent days because one region of our country still holds itself above law, as if it were cut adrift from constitutional obligations, and insurrection and mutiny against the government is still possible,” King said. “They not only abuse persons, but they debase the democratic traditions of the nation in their defiant resort to anarchy and stormtrooper rule.”

King continued: “Emulating the labor movement, we in the South have embraced mass actions — boycotts, sit-ins and, more recently, a widespread utilization of the ballot … The secret ballot is our secret weapon.”

John Samuelsen is the international president of the Transportation Workers Union, which represents 155,000 workers across the country and, here in New Jersey, in the airline, railroad, transit, university, utility and service sectors. It was one of the TWU’s founders, Michael J. Quill, who was one of the earliest and most ardent labor leaders to support King’s work.

“The very essence of Dr. King is fulfilled when workers organize together across lines ethnic and racial against their real common enemy, the bosses,” Samuelsen texted InsiderNJ. “Workers have far more in common with each other, regardless of skin color or religious / ethnic identity, than they have in common with the CEOs.”

Pedro Pascal walks the picket line at the SAG-AFTRA strike on Sept. 26, 2023 ,at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, Calif. (Photo by Hollywood To You/Star Max/GC Images)

In New York City alone, TWU lost over 100 members as a consequence of their occupational exposure running the city’s buses and subways.

It wasn’t just COVID that sparked this great reawakening. Ever since President Reagan, a former union leader, kneecapped the nation’s striking air traffic controllers by firing them, the union movement went into a tailspin with union density plummeting. And with the power of collective action by workers on the wane, corporations remade our society into a wealth pyramid with a tax and trade policy regime which accelerated wealth concentration to levels not seen since the Gilded Age.

According to a RAND Corporation analysis, during that decline the nation’s top one percent was able to extract $50 trillion in wealth from the bottom 90 percent of the nation’s households. Today, Fortune reports the average CEO for a publicly traded corporation makes 272 times the median salary of their employees, meaning it would take five lifetimes to make what the boss makes in a single year.

It’s no accident that this unprecedented 21st century surge in labor militancy came after the COVID pandemic that killed 1.1 million Americans and an untold number of transit workers, first responders and other essential workers, including 3,600 nurses in that first wave of the mass death event. Seven hundred of those nurses were from New Jersey and New York which, was Ground Zero for COVID. Two-thirds of them were people of color.

Across the country, healthcare worker unions were the only entities daring to hold the multi-billion dollar hospital industrial complex accountable for putting profits ahead of people by paying out Wall Street salaries for CEOs during a mass death event.

Tens of thousands of union healthcare workers who work for Kaiser Permanente in several states won a 21 percent pay increase over four years following a three-day strike in October, the largest such action in U.S. history. The tentative deal includes restrictions on outsourcing and measures to promote staff retention, a key concern of the coalition of unions led by SEIU.

“Millions of Americans are safer today because tens of thousands of dedicated healthcare workers fought for and won the critical resources they need and that patients need,” Caroline Lucas, executive director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, said in a statement. “This historic agreement will set a higher standard for the healthcare industry nationwide.”

The Oct. 4 to Oct. 7 strike by the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions was organized by eight unions including members of SEIU and OPIEU in California, Colorado, Maryland, Oregon, Virginia, Washington and Washington, D.C. Staffing, and higher wages were key demands.

Here in New Jersey, USW Nurses Local 4-200 won their strike at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital for better wages, improved working conditions and more robust staffing which has been documented to improve patient outcomes, promote infection control as well as encourage nurse retention, something that’s essential in a country where over one million nurses have opted to not be at the bedside.

Judy Danella, RN, is the president of USW Nurses Local 4-200.

“The five months’ strike was definitely an action aimed at the betterment of the patient, of the society, and of our nurses,” Danella told InsiderNJ. “It’s a hard road to walk but we were willing to put our employment at risk to improve the future of nursing.”

A broad coalition of nurses unions and the New Jersey State AFL-CIO continue to push for state legislation to codify safer staffing in New Jersey’s hospitals.

“Healthcare workers suffer moral injury every day working short staffed. They know they won’t be able do the job they were trained to do and therefore, patients will suffer,” wrote Debbie White, RN, and president of HPAE, New Jersey’s largest healthcare union. “This year, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we are fighting to get elected leaders to pass a safe staffing law that would enable healthcare workers to give patients the best possible care- the care they deserve.”

The long simmering rebirth of the American labor movement is producing results for workers and their families in a way that will have generational consequences.

The United Auto Workers’ strike resulted in a 25 percent wage hike and the end of an exploitative tiered workforce which depressed younger workers’ earnings for a generation.

The Teamsters, who drilled hard for a strike, emerged with a landmark deal giving all full- and part-time UPS Teamsters $2.75 more per hour in 2023, and over the length of the contract, a total $7.50 per hour increase. Wage gains for part-time workers were double the amount achieved in previous UPS deals with current part-time workers who will receive a 48 percent average total wage increase over the next five years.

Kevin Brown is the New Jersey state director of 32 BJ SEIU which is the nation’s largest building service worker union with 175,000 member in 12 states and Washington D.C. His union won a 4.5 percent annual wage increase and expanded pension benefits to an additional 5,000 union members in New Jersey.

“Collective action is the key to everything,” Brown told InsiderNJ. “If you have a voice on the job and you are able to sit down with your employer you improve tremendously your conditions at work and for your life as well as your family’s life. That’s how we make people’s lives better and that’s the same struggle Dr. King’s life was committed to.”

Brown continued: “The history of 2023 was that of the year of the strike. We had not only the UAW but we had Kaiser — we had SAG-AFTRA, the Writers Guild, and in New Jersey, we had USW Nurses Local 4-200. Basically, everybody won and so that certainly helped when we were bargaining for 70,000 workers up and down the East Coast. In 2023, workers have been making real gains at the bargaining table and that changes peoples’ lives and that can only be done through collective action and that’s what Dr. King’s mission was all about.”

King "recognized the common purpose of the civil rights movement and the labor movement to improving the lives of all working class people, including those of color,” texted Fran Ehret, New Jersey state director of the CWA, which represents 70,000 workers in the private and public sectors. “He understood that by joining these movements together it would build power and a greater voice for their common cause.”

Most of the labor activists that are reviving the American union movement were not on the planet when King walked the earth.

But the torch has been passed and the “dream” endures.

A golden dome above, 'street corners for bathrooms' below

This article originally appeared in Insider NJ.

The parking below the New Jersey State House that accommodates all of the legislature’s late model SUVs and cars was filled to capacity on Nov. 30 during a jam packed lame duck session day. Out in front of the Legislative Annex here in Trenton, N.J., a couple of hundred labor, social justice and environmental activists protested Gov. Phil Murphy’s plan to let the state’s 2.5 percent Corporate Business Tax Surcharge lapse on entities that post more than a million dollars in annual profits.

Activists from New Jersey Policy Perspectives, NJ’s Working Families Alliance, the CWA, HPAE, the state’s largest nurses’ union, Citizens Action, Make the Road New Jersey, the Domestic Workers Alliance, Immigrant Resource Center, and the League of Conservation Voters all stood behind a larger than life mock check made out to Walmart, Amazon, and ExxonMobil for $1 billion from the State of New Jersey.

“We cannot give the largest corporations in the world a $1 billion tax cut on the backs of working people across New Jersey,” Antoinette Miles, the interim director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, told reporters and supporters. “We need this revenue to fund our communities, our schools, our infrastructure, and our environment. The writing is on the wall with the fiscal cliffs on the horizon, and we have a solution right here. Lawmakers need to stop this tax cut and have these big corporations pay what they owe.”

As my InsiderNJ colleague Fred Snowflack observed, there were no legislators in attendance at the rally.

Gov. Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs man, is committed to letting the surcharge lapse at the end of the year as originally planned as if the economy has recovered sufficiently the state can forgo the revenue. He must be informed by the MSNBC commentators looking to boost President Joe Biden who cite the 5.2 percent growth in the Gross Domestic Product, the taming of inflation, and the upward pressure on wages as evidence of a robust economic recovery. These same pundits voice their annoyance that polls indicate voters are anxious about the economy.

But all of those data points that frame their worldview are in the national aggregate and nobody lives or votes there.

This view from 10,000 feet makes it easy to overlook the pockets of real despair all around us that are a manifestation of the real limits of democracy to counter the excesses of 21st century global capitalism. Have you ever noticed that both political parties direct their conversation to the middle class? It’s as if recognizing the 85 million low wealth and low wage Americans would expose the predatory aspects of a system that’s increasingly being fueled by wealth inequality.

Several of the attendees at the Trenton CBT rally were making the case that the $1 billion the surcharge generates would be better spent on stabilizing the shaky finances of NJ Transit that provides the bus and rail service upon which the state’s low wage essential workers and poor rely. In a state where politicians spend several millions of dollars on campaigns to win a state office that pays only $49,000 a year, there’s a real disconnect between the politicians and the people that worry about their bus fare.

These two cohorts are on different planets and there is nowhere in the nation where that is more evident than in the historic city of Trenton where well-heeled legislators can drive into their parking spaces in the bowels of the Capitol Complex avoiding entirely the dire economic circumstance of the people that actually inhabit the state’s capital, most of whom are people of color and often depend on mass transit.

Just a few blocks from the State House Capitol Complex, which cost close to $300 million to renovate, dozens and dozens of store fronts are boarded up and just a handful of businesses are open in the middle of a weekday. In between vacant buildings with fractured facades the alleys are packed with trash and debris along with evidence of past failed revivals.

Several people are waiting in the bus shelter in front of the imposing but now vacant First Trenton National Bank that bares an historical marker commemorating that in December of 1787 it was the site of New Jersey’s ratification of the Constitution of the United States. More than a decade earlier in December of 1776, New Jersey’s capitol was the scene of the Battle of Trenton where after a high stakes crossing of the Delaware River, General George Washington “defeated a garrison of Hessian mercenaries” setting “the stage for another success at Princeton a week later and boosted the morale of the American troops.”

A half block away from the empty bank, a man is sitting on the sidewalk up against a street sign and injects a needle in his arm in broad daylight as the traffic goes by and his consciousness drifts somewhere else, anywhere else.

A man shoots up on the streets of Trenton, N.J. Photo: Bob Hennelly

Trenton’s population peaked in 1950 at almost 130,000. Today, it’s around under 90,000. Coming out of the WWII production boom there were over 70,000 private sector jobs with companies like Lenox, Boehm, American Standard and Roebling.

“With its strategic location on the Delaware River, as well as its rail and canal access, Trenton developed into an industrial and manufacturing hub early in this country’s history,” according to Trenton.250, the city’s long term master plan. “Ironworks and potteries flourished first in Trenton, with steel and ceramics developing into iconic Trenton businesses, followed by rubber manufacturing….After the city’s chamber of commerce had held a contest for a civic slogan, ‘Trenton Makes The World Takes’ was selected to reflect the city’s manufacturing prowess.”

As both political parties embraced the notion of global free trade, for decades federal tax policy actually incentivized U.S. corporations to expand outside of the United States, setting into motion the deindustrialization of places like Trenton that were so prosperous First Trenton National Bank was built with cathedral scale doors. Today, money flows past the City of Trenton to tony suburbs, gated luxury communities, offshore tax jurisdictions and overseas to better investment opportunities.

Close to two thirds of Trenton’s households are living in poverty or struggling month to month to make ends meet, according to data from the latest United Ways ALICE (asset limited, income constrained, and employed) Report. The per capita income is $25,633, as compared to over $51,000 statewide. With a median household income of $52,508, Trenton’s is roughly half of the state’s over $96,000 median household income.

Dr. Stephanie Hoopes is the director of the United Ways ALICE project which grew, from a pilot study in Morris County, to a national effort tracking the local economic conditions in all 3,000 U.S. counties. Hoopes told InsiderNJ that Trenton’s poverty contrasts dramatically with the surrounding suburban Mercer County where two thirds of the population are not struggling month to month and doing slightly better than the state as a whole where 37 percent of households are either living below poverty or struggling month to month to get by.

“Those averages are concealing the hardship that had not only stayed but increased in some places and these are 2021 data points,” Hoopes said, adding that in some communities conditions have continued to deteriorate amidst an economic recovery . “All those supports that Biden was able to get passed during the pandemic are gone. One of the things we track is the unemployment rate for ALICE households, or households below the ALICE threshold state by state, community by community. And while the overall unemployment level is low, there are lots of locations where the ALICE unemployment rate is much higher.”

“We were brought up here and there was so much to do downtown back then — we had restaurants and clothing stores and now there’s nowhere to shop,” Shawn Johnson, 57, a longtime Trenton resident told InsiderNJ. “If you want to get a job you have to go to the temp agencies out in Cranberry or Yardville."

Tuyetmy Thatch, 30, is Johnson’s fiancée and walking arm in arm with Johnson. Thatch’s family came from Vietnam after the war and landed in Camden. “I speak Vietnamese and we had the right to come here after the war but I never met my grandfather who was American,” she said. “A lot of people down here have histories of substance abuse and felonies and they get turned down and turned away when they try to get help. I don’t think they should get turned down because of their clothing or because they are homeless. If they want help, they should get help.”

Thatch continued: “More people should be coming here, not running from here. I don’t think the governor has stepped foot down here. People don’t see all these abandoned buildings. People are using the street corners for bathrooms — there’s urine and feces everywhere.”

Johnson and Thatch were homeless for several months of the pandemic but now have housing for which they are grateful. The couple said the shelter was rife with bed bugs and they had to worry about having their few personal belongings being stolen. They stop to listen to Joseph Lockhart, who was improvising on his drum set that he’s staged in front of another shell of a bank across from the historic First Presbyterian Church, which has a cemetery where veterans of the American Revolution are buried.

Lockhart, 47, is the son of a preacher who started playing the drums in his father’s church when he was eight years old and hasn’t stopped. A local non-profit pays him $50 an hour to play for a couple of hours as a way of keeping drug dealers away while he practices his ‘percussive ministry.’

Shuttered storefronts in Trenton, N.J. Photo: Bob Hennelly

“This gives young people something to focus on and something for old people to live for,” Lockhart said. “I am just trying to bring more awareness to Trenton to make sure people understand you can still make music and entertainment here. I am an antidote to people that don’t want to try and help or do things to better the situation they are in.”

He confirms but shrugs off an anecdote that Thatch shared that a kid came up to Lockhart while he was playing and complimented the drummer for his playing and then ran off with his drum cover with loose change donated by people passing by. “He must have really needed it,” Lockhart said.

Pastor Rupert A. Hall Jr. is an attorney as well as the pastor at Turning Point United Methodist Church on Broad Street that celebrated its 250th anniversary in Trenton last year. Hall is working with the New Jersey Poor People’s Campaign, the state organization that’s affiliated with the Rev. Dr. William Barber’s national movement that’s following in the tradition of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign.

“The disconnect between the city and the state is represented and highlighted by the amount of money going to the [renovations] of the state house — you go one or two blocks away and you see the dire need of renovation and rehabilitation of the City of Trenton,” Hall told InsiderNJ during a phone interview, adding that there’s been a national failure to address the very real socio-economic fallout from the pandemic particularly in the hardest hit communities of color like his city.

“This needs to be addressed,” Hall said. “One of the statistics we found in the Poor People’s Campaign was how the rich got immensely richer during the pandemic which has even widened the wealth gap. What we see is the extent to which our folks in Washington are representing the people who give them the most money from areas that resemble Mar-a-Lago.”

Hall observed that within the last two to three months Bank of America and Wells Fargo shut down branches downtown. “It’s extremely telling – once financial institutions pull out it is a sign — it’s almost a white flag in my opinion.”

Hall remains optimistic that Mayor Reed Gusciora and a recently reconstituted City Council can start to turn things around.

“This is the first time in at least six years that from my perspective that the Mayor and the City Council are cordial to each other,” Hall said. “We have a City Council that was just elected last November and out of the seven seats, six are brand new to the Council. The previous Council and Mayor was a mix worse than ‘oil and water’.”

On March 2, Trenton will be one of 30 state capitals where state chapters like the New Jersey Poor People’s Campaign will rally to raise the profile of the nation’s 85 million low wage and low wealth individuals who collectively account for a third of the American electorate. “The wealth and income gap grows larger and larger every day,” Hall said. “America’s the richest country in the world and we should not have the abject poverty that we have. Once you start talking about income and wealth redistribution, that’s a ‘no-no’ in America.”

The national grassroots effort aims at increasing voter turnout in the country’s poorest communities like Trenton where voter turnout lags considerably behind more prosperous communities, a marginalization that only reinforces itself as politicians micro-target their message to the likely voters.

The reality is that most struggling households are not even participating in our democracy, according to research by Columbia University researcher Robert Paul Hartley. Hartley found that only 46 percent of voters with household income less than twice the federal poverty rate cast a ballot in 2016, as compared to a 68 percent turnout rate for voters who had a household income more than twice the poverty line.

“They’re saying that they’re not voting because people are not speaking to their issues and that they’re just not interested in those candidates,” Hartley, told the New York Times, “but it’s not that they couldn’t be.”

The act of voting is an act of faith but it’s also a way of affirming your own existence and that you and your family matter.

So, in 2024, the more economically struggling Americans that cast a ballot, the harder it will be for our politicians to continue to ignore them in the future.

Chris Christie's graceful pirouette on Jim Jordan

As a large guy myself, I really appreciate other guys who are on the larger size but are nimble on their feet. You haven’t known anxiety until you’ve been an obese father of the bride expected to dance like Fred Astaire with your daughter with all eyes on you.

It encourages sobriety.

So, yesterday, I really appreciated former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s graceful pirouette from the position he took early in the morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that he wasn’t going to weigh in on the Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) candidacy for House speaker to a position he took just hours later that Jordan should stand down.

Christie’s recalibration came on CNBC before today’s second vote where the insurrectionist and election denier from Ohio again came up short.

At breakfast, under close interrogation from Mika Brzezinski about his view on Jordan’s candidacy, Christie refused to take a position observing that as governor he had learned that “legislative folks want to make their own call on this, their own judgement” and that he reasoned the Republican House caucus didn’t “want somebody who is either president or wants to be president to be telling them what to do.”

Christie doubled down in response to a follow up by Morning Joe panelist John Heilemann.

“I am not getting involved and part of the background of me not getting involved, I don’t know Jordan. I have never met him…I am not getting involved in the race because I don’t have a vote and they don’t like it when you try and get involved in this and it’s not constructive,” Christie opined.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?

A few hours later on CNBC, Christie declared Jordan should throw in the towel if he lost the second roll call vote that was pending.

Christie told Squawk on the Street that the prolonged intramural GOP contest for House speaker made “my own party looks childish.”

The former New Jersey governor and presidential hopeful accurately predicted Jordan would fall short which he did, losing a vote from the 200 he had yesterday. (Jordan, who was one of the 147 members of Congress to vote against certifying the 2020 election after the violent insurrection, managed to hold on to the support of New Jersey’s three Republican House members Tom Kean, Chris Smith, and Jeff Van Drew.)

All 212 House Democrats continued to unanimously support their leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), for House speaker.

“I do think that after this second vote, if he doesn’t get it, I think it’s incumbent upon him to do what Steve Scalise did, which is say, ‘OK, it’s not me,’ step aside and let’s see who’s next,'” Christie told CNBC. “What I would say is, just get a speaker. You know, we have Israel aid, Ukraine aid, aid to Taiwan, border security and a budget all to get done. And none of that can get done without a speaker.”

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On Morning Joe, Christie did say the removal of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) “was a mistake” and that the deposed speaker hadn’t done anything “that should have necessitated his removal from office.”

Christie continued: “Those eight folks decided to remove him really for personal reasons to support Matt Gaetz who doesn’t like him because he wouldn’t rig the ethics investigation for Matt Gaetz. Let’s be honest. That’s what it was. It’s nothing more than that.”

Christie, who has yet to break through in New Hampshire's presidential primary contest, continues to try and distinguish himself as his party’s fiercest critic of former President Donald Trump who he supported very earnestly in 2016 and 2020.

While he did initially duck the question about Jordan’s candidacy for House speaker, he was refreshingly unequivocal in expressing his support for President Joe Biden’s response to the Israel-Gaza crisis.

“I think it was the right thing for the president to do to go over there and to show physical solidarity with the Israelis,” Christie said. “I think that’s an important message to send. I know he wanted the trip to be more than that but, in the end, the most important thing for him to do right now is to show the rest of the world that we stand solidly with Israel. I think his physical presence helps to convey that better than anything else would.”

Can an entire nation have attention deficit disorder?

This article originally appeared in Insider NJ.

In this summer of Trump indictments, there’s so much that’s being eclipsed by this essential multi-faceted effort to hold him accountable for trying to derail the peaceful democratic transfer of power. This internal myopic fixation on all things Trump is happening as the larger world around us continues to turn whether or not we are engaged in it.

This introspective national dynamic creates dangerous blind spots that can be exploited like they were on Sept. 11 when those hijacked passenger airliners were turned into weapons of mass destruction we did not see coming.

And then for 20 years all we saw was red.

For the 20 years that followed the World Trade Center attack, the United States prosecuted its global war on terrorism that cost trillions and, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs, helped contribute directly to the deaths of as many as 900,000 with another 3.6 million to 3.8 million perishing from the ecological and economic fallout from the open-ended warfare.

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Shaky nations were further destabilized and tens of millions of refugees left their homes to find sanctuary from a never ending cycle of violence that seemed to actually proliferate terrorism and terrorist groups like ISIS that didn’t exist when we started.

It’s a track record that’s so horrific you can understand why we opt to look away and why a corporate media that’s supported by the military industrial complex avoids it.

Are we up to the heavy lift of holding the Trump junta liable for their treason and calumny while also simultaneously learning the lessons from that global war on terrorism that commandeered the national agenda while Trump was still selling steaks?

Yes, there was beltway corruption before Trump and our national security apparatus had serious problems before Putin’s front man got into the White House.

Now, we have to do deal with both problems in real time. The world turns whether we are paying attention to it or not. That’s something that Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ), who was first elected to his seat in 2018, knows all too well as a former civilian official with the U.S State Department and Pentagon on the ground in Afghanistan.

“Long story short, I was a sophomore in college when Sept. 11 happened,” Kim told InsiderNJ during a wide-ranging interview. “Being from New Jersey it had a particular resonance and concern, so I decided to give my whole life to service, in particular foreign policy. So, I went and got a doctorate in international relations and joined up with the State Department, worked as a career public servant in foreign policy, and worked at the Pentagon.”

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Kim continued: “I was based out of Afghanistan in 2011 as a civilian advisor to the military and then worked at the White House National Security Council dealing with counterterrorism and in particular countering the terrorist group ISIS. So, this was something I lived and breathed. I was a career public servant. I worked both under Republicans and Democrats.”

The U.S. "stayed the course" in Afghanistan under four U.S. presidents, two Republican and two Democrats.

Ironically, part of Kim’s job description at the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon when he was stationed in Afghanistan was to brief visiting members of Congress about what was going on inside the beleaguered country. He recalls the failure of U.S. intelligence and the military to downplay the emergence of ISIS and its lethality which created a real disconnect between what was really going on in Afghanistan and what our leaders were being told.

“Well, I think the underestimation of ISIS happened across the board,” Kim told InsiderNJ. “It was a comprehensive failure for our country, not just the military but also in terms of intelligence—in terms of diplomacy. I have seen that with my own eyes and the challenges that come with these huge problems that we were facing especially in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Kim said it was “a huge challenge” for forward deployed Americans like himself to feel empowered to report back to Congress what they were actually seeing on the ground and not just parrot back what the power structure wanted to project back home.

“That was something we thought about when we were out in Afghanistan,” Kim said. “We are coming across and getting our own sense of what’s happening [on the ground], and we asked ourselves, are people back in D.C. understanding this? Do the people in the Situation Room and in power, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, understand?”

Kim continued: “And look, members of Congress would come out for a visit. I have done that myself traveling out to Afghanistan in 2019 to try and see with my own eyes. It was really interesting having been somebody who worked in Afghanistan and helped support these Congressional delegations before. Now, returning as a member of Congress I was briefed in the same room at the headquarters in Kabul that I worked in and briefed members of Congress when I was a staffer. So, having seen it from both sides, gives me a greater sense of my own personal belief about what information is needed and how do I try to get as full of a picture as possible because oftentimes, people are quite silent with what they hear.”

The lack of a "speak-up" culture, where flattering superiors by stroking their vanity and validating their false assumptions is the only way to advance up the ranks can have disastrous results.

This month marks the second anniversary of America’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan after 20 years of armed conflict making it this nation’s longest war. The departure was marred by a catastrophic suicide bombing that killed 13 American military personnel and more than 100 Afghans made all the more horrific because we were trying to leave.

In February 2020, the Trump administration signed the Doha Agreement with the Taliban committing to exiting Afghanistan in nine and half months in exchange for the Taliban not permitting anyone to use their country as a base to “threaten the security of the United States and its allies.”

Meanwhile, in the real work conditions on the ground continued to deteriorate as fighting between the Taliban and Afghanistan National Defense forces intensified with the Taliban gaining and holding much of the country.

By 2021, when the U.S. finalized its exit, despite hundreds of billions of dollars invested in Afghanistan’s national military, the national defense forces collapsed immediately. Testifying before Congress a month later U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testified “the fact that the Afghan army we and our partners trained simply melted away – in many cases without firing a shot – took us all by surprise.”

Surprised?!

Several years before the Afghan army collapsed so spectacularly, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) revealed that, while the US Forces-Afghanistan reported there were 319,000 Afghan soldiers, the actual number was closer to 120,000. “Persistent reports” of discrepancies in Afghan troop strength “raise questions” over whether or not US taxpayers are actually paying for “ghost soldiers,” SIGAR John Sopko said in a letter to the Pentagon in August of 2016.

Over the arc of its operation SIGAR, a watchdog agency set up by Congress in 2008, the agency helped to secure well over a hundred convictions of government contractors, active-duty and retired US military personnel, while recovering hundreds of millions in criminal fines, restitutions, forfeitures, civil-settlement recoveries, as well as flagging billions more in waste.

In 2016 SIGAR released a "lessons learned" report entitled “Corruption in Conflict: Lessons from the US Experience in Afghanistan.” It evaluated how the US government viewed the risks of corruption going in, how the United States responded to the corruption it encountered, and just how ineffective those responses were.

The SIGAR analysis describes how the pursuit of strategic and military goals all too often trumped concerns about fighting the corruption that U.S. personnel found rampant throughout Afghan society.

According to the report, the United States facilitated “the growth of corruption by injecting tens of billions of dollars into the Afghan economy, using flawed oversight and contracting practices,” while collaborating “with malign power brokers” all in hopes of realizing short-term military goals.

As a consequence, the United States “helped to lay a foundation for continued impunity” for bad actors that ultimately undermined the “rule of law” and actually promoted the kind of corruption that had historically driven the local population away from the central government and “to the Taliban as a way of expressing opposition” to a government they believed to be illegitimate.

The SIGAR report quotes former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker making the disconcerting observation that “the ultimate failure for our efforts wasn’t an insurgency. It was more the weight of endemic corruption.”

Kim attended a recent Congressional oversight hearings that was convened to examine the circumstances surrounding the U.S. exit from Afghanistan this inconvenient history was not discussed.

One of the subject matter witnesses, retired Col. Seth Krummrich, the former chief of staff for the Special Operations Command that oversaw U.S. operations in Afghanistan, testified described the corrosive impact of “selectively” using intelligence to re-enforce preconceived notions.

“The trap decision makers fall into is selectively choosing the intelligence that supports their favored course of action rather than letting the intelligence shape and inform their decision,” Krummrich told the panel.

After the testimony of subject matter experts, the hearing devolved into Republicans blaming President Joe Biden for the way the way his administration ended America’s 20-year misadventure.

“I agree there were many mistakes made in the 20 years, but the ultimate mistake ended 20 years of blood and treasure with now the Taliban in charge raising their flag over our embassy taking $7 billion of our weapons, leaving the women behind under Sharia law now where they can’t even go outside,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

The hearing had a surreal quality because so many of the Republican House members that were piling on the Biden White House, like Rep. Elise Stefanick (R-NY) voted AFTER the Jan. 6 violent insurrection in the U.S. Capitol not to certify Biden’s legitimate election.

Perhaps had Donald Trump not been so obsessed with staying in power beyond his term in office he could have been paying attention to the disaster brewing in Afghanistan.

Kim told InsiderNJ he was frustrated the U.S. exit had become a “political cudgel with people trying to weaponize the issue for the sake of the 2024 election…. I still truly believe that politics has no place in national security and in the Situation Room. We have to find ways, especially when we are talking about life and death, to have that kind of broader perspective and that humility that comes with it.

“Yes, we spend a lot of time at that hearing talking about the 13 service members who were tragically killed, and yes, I want to make sure that we are honoring their service — that we are learning lessons from that, but we also have to just keep in mind the bigger context," Kim continued. "Over 2,400 Americans died in Afghanistan and each one of their lives was tragically lost and was a sacrifice for this country. So, we need to learn about that.”

To that end, Kim worked with Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), an Iraqi war veteran who lost her legs in combat while piloting a Blackhawk helicopter, to draft the Afghanistan War Commission Act which was enacted as part of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.

The panel will look at U.S. actions just prior to the 9/11 attacks, through the twenty years of the U.S. engagement, right up through the military withdrawal. The Commission has four years from its first meeting to produce a final report with its findings, “conclusions, and recommendations to address any mistakes in the conduct of the war.”

“When we look at the circumstances that lead to the evacuation and all the chaos that was there, we also need to look out how after 20 years of war and trillions of dollars and over 2,400 lives lost, how did we get to the point where the Taliban was still so strong and capable across the entire country,” Kim said. “How was it that we got to a point we had to negotiate with them one on one, without the Afghan government in the room which was one of the questions I was pointing to during the hearing — just to point out that there were so many points along the way that lead to this lapse in August when the evacuation was happening that we need to look at because it created that snowball.”

InsiderNJ asked Kim how the U.S. foreign policy and military command structure could turn a blind eye to the dashboard with blinking hazard lights provided by SIGAR for well over a decade on the war in Afghanistan.

“Exactly, that really gets to the issues that underpins so much of what we have seen and what I saw in Iraq as well,” Kim said. “Did the Iraqi security forces have the will to fight? Did the Afghanistan National Security forces have the will to fight? Was that a credible operation? We spent so much time trying to build up these forces and we’ve learned the lessons of how much that has blown up in our faces. We have to reevaluate.”

Kim continued: “We have to really look at that carefully and draw upon those lessons for future potential challenges. And we see that right now with the fighting in Ukraine and how do we try to approach that learning lessons from the past.”

Even now, the three-term congressman is concerned that as the U.S. shifts its geo-political focus to China and “arming up” Taiwan it hasn’t fully grasped the lessons we need to learn from the last 20 years post 9/11.

“How are we going to learn our lessons from this all?” Kim asks with a sense of urgency. “It feels like in Congress we are not doing that. Instead, we are making things worse in my opinion by politicizing these issues and that’s something that I found deeply alarming coming to Congress from a place of having been a non-partisan national security official for the country.”

Kim says Congress has to think “more strategically and holistically about these massive problems and not to try to oversimplify them for partisan purposes.”

Of course, we have to finish litigating who won the 2020 election first.

U.S. slavery endures – close the 13th Amendment loophole

This article originally appeared in Insider NJ.

As we celebrate Juneteenth, we should reflect on the reality that the abomination of slavery is not entirely in our collective rear view mirror.

It endures.

The United States is still having real trouble giving up its addiction and reliance on involuntary servitude, a.k.a slavery. Like the free land we extracted from the Native Americans, it’s a footing of the foundation of our great pyramid that still stands in the 21st century.

Consider that in 1865, even as Congress was enacting the 13th Amendment to the Constitution to abolish slavery, it created a loophole that it would remain legal as a punishment “within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the former Confederate states used the pretext of minor crimes, like loitering or vagrancy, codified in law as the "Black Codes" to imprison thousands of Black residents who were in turn leased out to plantations. The use of the 13th Amendment loophole became so common that by 1898, close to three-quarters of Alabama’s state revenue was generated by renting out Black Americans.

Here in the U.S., which is 4 percent of the world’s population, we have 16 percent of the planet’s incarcerated persons, according to the Vera Institute, a social justice non-profit. The American justice system incarcerates close to two million people annually, overwhelmingly people of color that are mostly jailed for non-violent or drug-related crimes.

That’s just too large a captive labor pool to go unexploited in our punitive winner-take all system.

ALSO READ: Why do we use 'cult' to describe normal illiberal politics?

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union reported that prison workers had produced close to $11 billion in goods and services but received “just pennies an hour in wages for their prison jobs,” according to the Guardian newspaper.

“Since the end of the Civil War the United States has had a deep and troubling history of extreme exploitation of prison labor — primarily of black, brown and poor convicts who are abused by corporations and local businesses,” said Joe Wilson, a noted labor historian and author. “This is well documented in the South as well as the North in the production of everything from furniture to license plates and includes their exploitation for stoop labor in agriculture as well as call center work.”

Wilson adds, that because prison labor earns “just paltry or no wages” it has the secondary impact of undermining the value of labor outside the prison walls “in the fields, factories and offices where they undercut wage workers.”

Last year, in an insightful story by the New Jersey Monitor’s Dana Diflippo readers learned of the plight of New Jersey inmates were getting paid a dollar or two a day at their prison jobs even as the “Department of Corrections, consequently, hiked prices in prison commissaries, the only place incarcerated people can buy basic necessities and food.”

“Prison justice advocates say the widening gulf between inmate wages and commissary prices reflects a culture of disregard that pervades many prisons,” reported the news outlet.

“Having someone work for $2 a day is essentially slave labor,” Jennifer Lewinski, a co-founder of the Asbury Park Transformative Justice Project, told the New Jersey Monitor. “There’s no humanity to it.”

“It makes people feel like their labor is worthless, like nothing they do has any value,” Ron Pierce, a former inmate who is now with the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice,” told the online news source. “And when you come home, you’re going to end up with a lower paying job — and you’re almost happy to accept it because you’re so used to making nothing.”

Pierce told the New Jersey Monitor, that over 30 years he was only able to save $208 when he left the state’s custody in 2016.

Under legislation being sponsored by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Rep. Nikema Williams (D-GA) the so-called 13th Amendment’s exception clause permitting slavery as punishment for crime would be closed.

“In 2023, we still have legal slavery in the United States because Congress left this institution in place for ‘punishment for a crime’ when it passed the Thirteenth Amendment,” Booker said in a statement. “This has allowed our government to exploit individuals who are incarcerated and to profit from their forced labor – perpetuating the oppression of Black Americans, mass incarceration, and systemic racism.”

Booker continued: “This loophole is at odds with our nation’s foundational principles of liberty, justice, and equality for all our people. It is time we pass the Abolition Amendment and finally end the morally reprehensible practice of slavery in this country. We must ensure that all people are treated with fairness and dignity to truly live up to our nation’s promise.”

“This country was founded on the principles of equality and justice — principles that have never been compatible with the horrific realities of slavery and white supremacy,” said Merkley. “Nearly 160 years after the 13th Amendment was ratified, the evil remnants of slavery persist in the U.S., embedded in the heart of our Constitution. To live up to our nation’s promise of justice for all, we must take a long overdue step towards those principles by removing the loophole in our ban on slavery. No slavery, no exceptions.”

“Slavery was wrong from day one, and we should have abolished it when the 13th Amendment was ratified,” said Rep. Williams. “I will keep pushing — no matter how long it takes — for Congress to close the Slavery Loophole in the Constitution, finally ending slavery in America once and for all.”

“Slavery is hidden behind prison walls, in a system rife with racial prejudice, abuse, and inadequate oversight — out of sight and mind as long as we may pretend people inside prison are not people. They are,” said Celina Chapin, Associate Director of Advocacy at the Anti-Recidivism Coalition. “Where slavery exists, community health, rehabilitation, justice, and true public safety cannot.

Last June, the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic teamed up with the ACLU to conduct the first of its kind national survey of the status of prison labor in the United States.

Researchers found that two-thirds of U.S. prisoners were working behind bars with over three quarters of those surveyed reporting they faced punishment “such as solitary confinement, denial of sentence reductions, or loss of family visitation — if they declined to work.”

In addition to being excluded from federal and state wage guarantees, prison workers told researchers they did not receive adequate training and safety equipment. As a consequence, 64 percent of incarcerated workers worried about their safety on the job.

According to Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers “more than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, during which incarcerated workers faced especially brutal working conditions” they were “denied early access to vaccines in 16 states” even as they were “forced to launder bed sheets and gowns from hospitals treating COVID patients, transport bodies and dig graves.”

“More than a third of incarcerated people have contracted COVID-19 since the pandemic started and more than 3,000 have died,” according to the national report released last June.

Consider the plight of California inmates who volunteered with the state’s Conservation Camp Program which fights wildfires.

Time magazine reported that “more than 1,000 inmate firefighters required hospital care between June 2013 and August 2018” and that they were “more than four times as likely, per capita, to incur object-induced injuries, such as cuts, bruises, dislocations, and fractures, compared with professional firefighters working on the same fires.”

Time reported that “inmates were also more than eight times as likely to be injured after inhaling smoke and particulates compared with other firefighters.”

Between February 2017 and February 2018, three California inmates with its Conservation Camp Program were killed on the job

“While the rate at which inmate firefighters experience certain injuries is higher, their pay is lower, compared to the full-time firefighters they work alongside,” recounted Time magazine. “Inmates make only $2 per day taking part in the Conservation Camp Program. During an active fire, which has them working 24-hour shifts, they make an additional $1 an hour.”

The toxic cloud is upon us

This article originally appeared in Insider NJ.

Canada is on fire.

The smog fallout downwind has set off air quality alerts for 13 states south of the border with the worst air quality currently being reported in upstate New York from Syracuse to Binghamton. Toxic smog has extended down along the East Coast and into the Ohio Valley as millions of Americans are being advised to curtail outdoor activity if they have pre-existing health conditions.

On Wednesday, poor visibility at Newark Liberty International Airport and New York City’s LaGuardia Airport prompted the FAA to slow air traffic for lack of visibility. “Exposure to elevated levels of fine particles such as wood smoke can increase the likelihood of respiratory symptoms in sensitive individuals and aggravate heart or lung disease,” the National Weather Service warned.

Monday, Reuters reported “Canada is on track for its worst-ever year of wildfire destruction as warm and dry conditions are forecast to persist through to the end of the summer after an unprecedented start to the fire season” with blazes officials said on Monday “burning in nearly all Canadian provinces and territories.”

“The distribution of fires from coast to coast this year is unusual. At this time of the year, fires usually occur only on one side of the country at a time, most often that being in the west,” Michael Norton, an official with Canada’s Natural Resources ministry, told Reuters.

Yan Boulanger, with Natural Resources Canada told the wire service that “over the last 20 years, we have never seen such a large area burned so early in the season. Partially because of climate change, we’re seeing trends toward increasing burned areas throughout Canada.”

By last weekend officials were estimating that 3.3 million hectares (a hectare is equal to 2.47 acres) had already gone up in flames “about 13 times the 10-year average” forcing more than 120,000 people to leave their homes, according to Reuters.

Of the over 400 active wildfires, over half were deemed out of control.

After years of handwringing, Canada’s unprecedented wildfire season, aggravated by the weather distortions of climate change, is presenting us a teachable moment as we find ourselves checking the smog alert like we did the daily COVID numbers just a few months ago.

Mayor Ras J. Baraka had to urge his city residents to take precautions during the air quality alert issued by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP). One of the features of the climate crisis, like the pandemic, is it hits the communities hardest that have the highest concentration of the chronically ill, like the many thousands of New Jersey’s youths from communities of color who suffer from asthma at a much higher rate than their white peers.

“Due to heavy smoke from a convergence of wildfires as far away as Canada, the NJDEP has issued an air quality alert for the northern region of the state, including Newark,” Baraka said in a statement. “I ask everyone to protect their health by staying informed and carefully following NJDEP’s guidelines throughout the duration of the alert.”

Specifically, NJ DEP warned at-risk residents to stay indoors as much as possible, keep their windows closed, use an air purifier if possible, limit their outdoor physical activity and if they had to go out for an extended period to wear a mask. Officials flagged children, older adults, and people with heart disease, asthma, or other lung diseases as being particularly vulnerable to the degraded air quality.

“I think it would be common sense that when the National Weather Service and the NJDEP have both issued a code red air quality day with the weather service saying air quality is worse today, our state workforce should be kept insider as much as possible,” texted Fran Ehret, New Jersey state director of the CWA, which represents 40,000 state workers many of whom work outdoors.

Finally, after months of prodding from the environmentalists, Gov. Phil Murphy announced yesterday the adoption of the Inland Flood Protection Rule to better protect New Jersey’s communities from worsening flooding and stormwater runoff. The announcement was welcomed but the delay was inexcusable.

“The Inland Flood Protection Rule will serve as a critical component of my Administration’s comprehensive strategy to bolster our state’s resilience amid the worsening impacts of climate change,” Murphy said in his statement yesterday. “As a national model for climate adaptation and mitigation, we can no longer afford to depend on 20th-century data to meet 21st-century challenges. This rule’s formation and upcoming adoption testify to our commitment to rely on the most up-to-date science and robust stakeholder engagement to inform our most crucial policy decisions.”

The Governor got the rhetoric right way back in his January 2020 Executive Order 100 citing a 2019 report “New Jersey’s Rising Seas and Changing Coastal Storms” that showed “that sea-level rise projections in New Jersey are more than two times the global average and that the sea level in New Jersey could rise from 2000 levels by up to 1.1 feet by 2030, 2.1 feet by 2050, and 6.3 feet by 2100, underscoring the urgent need for action to protect the State from adverse climate change impacts.”

In the late summer of 2021, Hurricane Ida took 90 lives in total when it inundated a nine-state swath of the Northeast. Damage estimates for New Jersey ranged between $8 to $10 billion and in the $7.5 to $9 billion range in New York. In October 2012, Superstorm Sandy caused $70.2 billion worth of damage, left 8.5 million people without power, and destroyed 650,000 homes and was responsible for the deaths of at least 72 Americans.

“New Jersey is experiencing increased effects of climate change — this is a climate crisis and what we are seeing and will continue to see are periods of dryness that lead to drought and wildfires and then followed by periods of big rain events that lead to flooding — so we are going to have too much water excerpt when we don’t have enough of it,” said Jennifer Coffey, executive director of the Association of New Jersey’s Environmental Commissions. “These climate extremes are going to continue for New Jersey and the Northeast for many, many decades to come and we need to prepare ourselves for those impacts and become more resilient. So, we need to shore up our water supplies and also need to increase the intelligence that we use when we map storm water and that’s what these rules do.”

While we continue to debate climate change and the need to stop burning fossil fuels, the physical manifestation of the crisis is all around us whether we choose to make the connections or not. When wildfires on this hemispheric scale burn out of control it should prompt a sense of urgency for us to try and reduce our reliance on burning fossil fuels to power our society.

“This is the time to reject the seven fossil fuel projects here in New Jersey,” said Paula Rogovin, longtime Bergen County environmental activist. “What are they waiting for? It is going to get worse. This is the ultimate teachable moment. My grandson in New York City is in school and they can’t do anything outside. This is the time to recognize it is not getting better. We are not even in the summertime yet. The wildfires are just beginning.”

This morass had been building for days but we were too distracted to really notice how our atmosphere was being consumed by a jaundiced mega-cloud drifting south like a welcome mat from Hades.

And then the kids couldn’t go outside for recess.

Pray for rain to redeem us.

Chris Christie presidential rerun will pay residuals

On Tuesday in New Hampshire, former Gov. Chris Christie is expected to formally announce he’s entering the increasingly crowded 2024 Republican presidential primary field.

Why?

Could it be he feels remorse that on his recommendation, a sufficient number of Americans in 2016 voted for Donald Trump, so that he won the Electoral College vote and then four years later, after losing both the popular and Electoral College vote, incited a violent insurrection that continues to destabilize the United States to this very day?

Does he believe he can restore the good standing of his party that includes dozens of U.S. House members and U.S. senators who voted against certifying the legitimate results of the 2020 Presidential election AFTER the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol?

Not likely.

And there’s little in his past performance that should encourage another run for the White House. Christie’s 2016 bid crashed and burned in New Hampshire. Despite his close to 200 visits to the state, he won less than 10 percent of that state’s primary voters.

While the rear-view mirror snapshot is hardly encouraging, the look at the road ahead provided by the most recent Monmouth University poll would appear to be even more discouraging.

According to Monmouth, former Vice President Mike Pence got a 46 percent favorability rating versus 35 percent unfavorability rating with the 655 Republicans the poll surveyed last month. By contrast, Christie “receives a decidedly negative rating (21 percent favorable and 47 percent unfavorable) and is the only contender of the ten tested in this poll who gets a net negative score from the Republican electorate.

Back in April, in an interview with Politico’s Rachael Bade, the former governor positioned himself as the only candidate who would have the “balls” to take on former President Trump directly, a job Christie opined was best reserved for “somebody who knows him,” adding that “nobody” knew “Donald Trump better” than he does.

In his pre-announcement buzz, Christie insists he’s no mere 2024 spoiler but would be in the contest to win it.

“I’m not a paid assassin,” Christie told Politico. “When you’re waking up for your 45th morning at the Hilton Garden Inn in Manchester, you better think you can win, because that walk from the bed to the shower, if you don’t think you can win, it’s hard.”

At a relatively young looking 60, it’s his very busy brand that can’t afford to sit out 2024 on the sidelines. Win, lose or draw, by submitting himself to the 2024 red meat fray, he’ll get the windfall of what’s called earned free media. (In 2016, experts estimate Donald Trump raked in close to $5 billion worth of earned media.)

Christie has been working as a lobbyist and commentator for ABC News for the last several years. His Christie 55 Solutions firm, which offers an array of services, includes Mary Pat Christie, Rick Bagger, Bob Martin and Michele Brown, who is also the executive director of the Christie Institute for Public Policy, a 501(c)(3) non-profit partnership with Seton Hall University.

Christie’s firm offers guidance in business strategies, crisis management, disaster response and guidance for environmental regulation, as well as insights for the financial services, gaming, healthcare, life sciences and utilities, as well as transportation and infrastructure sectors.

And unlike so many of his Republican rivals, Christie can still get some Democrats to reach across the partisan divide to find some common ground in the spotlight like U.S. Sen. Cory Booker did back in April as a guest at Christie’s Institute.

Matt Arco with NJ.com, reported the pair “shared laughs, heaped praise on each other and talked about how to bring civility back to politics.” Previous Christie guests include Leon Panetta, a Democrat, and former secretary of Defense during the Obama presidency, as well as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).

This time out, Christie’s gotten some support from some very unlikely quarters.

As “the only potential contender with the guts to give Trump the thrashing he deserves, and the skill set to get it done. He’s made for this moment,” wrote Tom Moran, the Star Ledger’s Editorial Page editor recently. “To qualify for the debates, Christie needs one percent support in the polls, which he has, along with 40,000 individual donations, according to the draft rules. So, even if you can’t stand him, get ready to donate $1 as a patriotic duty when the clock starts ticking, after he announces.”

Moran reports that “Christie himself has vowed that he won’t vote for Trump, even if he is the GOP nominee.”

“I know, Christie helped create this monster in 2016 as the first major Republican to endorse Trump, and he stuck with Trump through his first term,” Moran recounts. “He prepped Trump for his debates with Joe Biden in 2020, long after it was clear that Trump was a racist, a liar, and an enemy of democracies worldwide. For that, Christie will have to answer to history.”

Christie may have lost the 2016 GOP primary, but in many ways, it was his role as chair of the Republican Governors’ Association back a decade ago, that laid the foundation for the Republican Party’s success at capturing dozens of state legislatures and Governorships in a rout of the Democratic Party that has had generational consequences that endure to this day.

When I was covering Christie at the 2012 Republican Convention in Tampa for WNYC it was the lobby of Christie’s hotel that felt like the heavy-gravity center of power for the Republican Party. In 2014, after his re-election, and beating of the Bridgegate rap, he was feted by the Republican Governor’s Association for netting in excess of $100 million for the party.

In 2023, as women see their reproductive freedoms radically curtailed across an increasing swath of America and voters of color see their access to the ballot increasingly restricted, they can thank Sen Booker’s friend Chris Christie who quarterbacked the GOP’s state level renaissance one race at a time.

It doesn’t matter if his brand is electable as long as it is bankable. Christie got great results for his party and the donors aren’t complaining either.

According to the Center For Responsive Politics, ExxonMobil in 2014 donated $750,000 to the Republican Governors Association. Other major energy sector donors included the Koch brothers Koch Industries which gave Christie’s RGA $4.25 million dollars.

That next year, Reuters reported “New Jersey’s long legal battle to recover $8.9 billion from Exxon Mobil Corp for environmental damage ended when Governor Chris Christie’s chief counsel, Christopher Porrino, cut a deal to settle for $250 million.”

Word of a deal came after the conclusion of an eight-month long trial after both sides wrote the presiding judge asking him to hold off on issuing a ruling because the two sides had reached an agreement.

Environmentalists and local elected officials, who had been tracking the litigation closely, expressed outrage over the deal which was widely expected to yield the state billions of dollars. “I grew up in the Bayway section of Elizabeth. The smell there was terrible but the stench this deal gives off is worse,” said State Senator Ray Lesniak during an interview. “$250 million dollars is just two weeks of profit for Exxon.”

For over a decade the state’s attorneys general under four governors, including Christie, aggressively pursued Exxon Mobil. Back in 2008 a state court judge ruled in the state’s favor holding Exxon-Mobil liable for the massive contamination of 1,500 acres in Hudson and Union counties. All that remained was to determine how much the state would be compensated.

The language of the 2008 ruling was powerful and set a strong legal foundation for what promised to be a substantial damages award. “It was estimated in 1977 that at least some seven million gallons of oil ranging in thickness from 7 to 17 feet, are contained in the soil and groundwater underlying a portion of the former Bayonne site alone,” wrote former Judge Ross R. Anzaldi. The level of hydrocarbon contamination was so high one creek was covered with “a gelatinous, oily emulsion overlying grey silt.”

The reported Exxon settlement came at a critical point in the history of the Newark Bay according to Dr. Angela Cristini, who taught biology at Ramapo College and studied the region for decades. Cristini credited billions of dollars invested in municipal sanitary sewers and declines in direct toxic discharges for bringing back oxygen and life back into these once dead waters. “There has been an amazing recovery in the Hackensack and even in Newark Bay,” Cristini said back in 2015.

How much more of an ecological recovery could Newark Bay have made if New Jersey had gotten those billions from Exxon in reclamation funds that just evaporated?

On the hunt for press row

This article originally appeared in Insider NJ.

Earlier this month, after the high energy NJ AFL-CIO nurses’ rally for safer staffing, I had time on my hands to explore the areas of the New Jersey State Capitol Building that have been off limits to inquiring reporters and the public due to the $300 million renovation that got rolling at the end of Gov. Chris Christie’s traumatic tenure.

Going back to the McGreevey days there was one stairway out of the subsurface floors and the parking garage that was to the left of the vending machines that I used to get quick access to the Governor’s Office and the historic Rotunda where all of New Jersey’s Great White Men hang in oil.

For a while now, like years, it’s been walled off but on this glorious day in May it was restored, and access was once again possible.

A uniformed guard sat some distance away behind a desk in the basement and I asked him if it was OK to use the handy staircase that would take me to the very heart of the Executive Branch. He seemed confused because it was apparently something he hadn’t been asked before. He asked a colleague, and the pair didn’t stop me.

The convenience of that stairs for reporters can’t be overstated. Not only did it provide you the most direct route to the governor’s ceremonial office on the first floor, but it also got you on the staircase up to State House press row where all of the newspapers had their offices directly across from the governor’s press offices on the upper floor.

Perhaps I could catch up with some newspaper colleagues I thought. I could bust their chops for not attending the nurses’ rally. I could discern which newspapers had made it into the 2020s with a presence in the State House keeping an eye on our “cold blooded capitalist” of a governor.

As I ascended the stairs to the first floor, my nostrils were overwhelmed with the smell of fresh paint and wood finishings. The erudite voice of a polished tour guide back at work filled the restored Rotunda with a velvet whisper.

I took time to appreciate each of the Rotunda’s portraits of past New Jersey governors for whom the state’s highest office had either been a sort of consolation prize or a stepping stone to higher office.

There was Gov. George B. McClellan, who was elected in 1878 but is perhaps better known as the General McClellan who in September of 1862 led the Union Army to victory at Antietam, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War.

According to battlefields.org, McClellan, was a West Point graduate and civil engineer who was a charismatic figure for the rank and file soldiers that made up the Union Army. Despite his success at repelling the Confederate Army’s northward advance, President Lincoln felt he had squandered the pivotal win and sent him packing to Trenton.

“Though he had managed to thwart Lee’s plan to invade the North, McClellan’s trademark caution once again denied the northern cause a decisive victory, and the once-cordial relationship between the army commander and his Commander-in-Chief had been badly damaged by the former’s lack of success and excessive trepidation,” the battlefields.org website recounts. “After the battle, a disappointed Lincoln visited McClellan in camp to express his frustration at the general’s inability to capitalize on this most recent success…. McClellan was relieved of command for the last time and ordered back to Trenton, New Jersey to await further orders, though none ever came.”

In 1864, McClellan ran as a Democrat challenging Lincoln’s re-election on an anti-war platform, pledging to pursue peace talks with the Confederacy but by Election Day the Union Army had victory in their sights and Lincoln was re-elected. However, McClellan did carry the State of New Jersey by five percentage points.

Less than a year later, Lincoln would be assassinated. As I have written before, New Jersey was at best ambivalent about the institution of slavery and had been very much reliant on it. Just before the end of the Civil War, New Jersey even voted down the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, only voting to ratify it in 1866, after the end of the Civil War and after Lincoln’s murder.

McClellan would be elected governor in 1878.

I circled back to the staircase after my quick promenade down history lane and jogged upstairs to where Press Row had been located and saw that the entire floor had been reconfigured with all of the space that had accommodated New Jersey news media outlets subsumed by what appeared to be more offices for the Executive Branch.

The only clue was a sign on the door “POLICY Scheduling Briefings.” What had happened to press row? Someone who appeared to be a staffer came out of what had been previously the Governor’s press office and was headed back down to the first floor. I asked her where all the reporters’ offices had moved to and she said she would find out.

When we both headed back down to the first floor I asked the New Jersey State Trooper on duty outside Governor Murphy’s office where I could find Press Row as the staffer made her own inquiry for me in the front office.

There was a nicely upholstered bench and I asked if I was allowed to sit on it, figuring it could be some antique meant just for viewing. The Trooper said I could. While I waited I thought about the portrait of Gov. Woodrow Wilson, another Democrat who had presidential ambitions that resulted in two terms in the White House from 1913 to 1921.

Wilson was considered a progressive reformer perhaps best known for his unsuccessful bid to establish the League of Nations, a forerunner of the United Nations. On his watch the U.S. enacted the Federal income tax, established the Federal Reserve as well as the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on widespread deceptive business practices.

On the labor front, he championed passage of anti-child labor laws and workplace safety protections for rail workers by limited their workday to eight hours.

But as it turns out, decades after the Civil War, it was our very own Woodrow Wilson, the president of Princeton University, governor of New Jersey, and the 28th president of the United States, who propagated the view that North’s Reconstruction was a great injustice that victimized whites, that Wilson believed were inherently superior.

Despite his Princeton pedigree, Wilson, a native of Virginia, was the first president who was a son of the South since the Civil War. His father was a chaplain for the Confederate Army. Long before he entered the fray of electoral politics, his academic writing was very influential in creating a racist revisionist history that became mainstream.

“The first practical result of reconstruction under the acts of 1867 was the disfranchisement, for several weary years, of the better whites, and the consent giving over of the southern governments into the hands of the negroes,” Woodrow Wilson wrote in the Atlantic.

The man, whose name is memorialized in stone at the Wilson Center, the prestigious international think tank located in Princeton, wrote former slaves were “a vast laboring, landless, homeless class ... unpracticed in liberty, unschooled in self-control; never sobered by the discipline of self-support, never established in any habit of prudence; excited by a freedom they did not understand, exalted by false hopes; bewildered and without leaders, and yet insolent and aggressive; sick of work, covetous of pleasure, — a host of dusky children untimely put out of school.”

One of Wilson’s earliest acts as president was to sign off on racially segregating the federal civil service.

“By the end of 1913, Black employees in several federal departments had been relegated to separate or screened-off work areas and segregated lavatories and lunchrooms,” according to the Equal Justice Initiative. “In addition to physical separation from white workers, Black employees were appointed to menial positions or reassigned to divisions slated for elimination. The government also began requiring photographs on civil service applications, to better enable racial screening.”

Wilson’s early 20th century racist beliefs would find 21st century arms and legs with Donald Trump’s race-based grievance of whites as victims which fueled the racist mob that stormed Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. On that day, the Confederate Stars and Bars Battle flag lead the charge into the federal Capitol Rotunda, something that McClellan had prevented from happening during the Civil War.

It was Wilson who actively suppressed word of the so-called Spanish Flu in 1918-20, because it would have hampered the U.S. World War I effort. At least 675,000 people died in the United States and 50 million around the worldwide. More American soldiers died from the Spanish Flu then were killed in combat.

The global scourge would be forever named for Spain, not because it was the point of origin of the killer virus, but because word of it surfaced in the press there — as Spain did not have the effective wartime press censorship we had here.

The Murphy staffer came back out and told me press row had been moved to a floor above where it had been. The trooper said I could take the elevator.

Up on that floor there was one room of cubicles for interns, and another similarly appointed space for reporters which on this day there was only one of on duty, Charlie Stile, the veteran political columnist for the Record, a.k.a. northjersey.com.

Stile has been covering New Jersey politics from the Statehouse in Trenton since 1993, starting with the Trenton Times. He worked as a general assignment reporter for the Record and Statehouse bureau chief before becoming its full-time columnist in 2007.

Having spent big chunks of my life in what had been press row offices for WNYC I was stunned by the downsizing. Where was everybody? I asked Stile what he thought.

“It’s unfortunately small,” Stile said. “It’s clean. It’s got a nice view, but it lacks privacy but sadly it does reflect the reality of current journalism. We are just not that big a presence. When I first came here there were 12 bureaus each having their own private office in a warren of offices on the second floor ranging from the New York Times which had two people to the Star Ledger which had about 12.”

Stile continued. “I came here with the Trenton Times and there were four of us and the Record had about six or seven. It was a time of high energy — a bustling nerve center, and it was right across the hall from the Governor and there was easy but tense access to the Governor’s office.

You could find them in the hallways by the vending machine, sometimes even in the bathrooms for interviews.”

“Proximity mattered — I think it broke down some of this veil of suspicion and skepticism. But without that kind of day-to-day interaction, it can boil into something more pernicious,” Stile said.

I asked him if he thought that the ability of the Governor to use social media to leapfrog the fourth estate, a practice perfected by Gov. Christie, had played a role in diminishing the state house press corps.

“Absolutely — they bypass the traditional gatekeepers and there’s the sad reality and acknowledgement that the gatekeepers are not this formidable force that they once were,” Stile said. “In their minds, their mission is to go where the voters are and I think they see that as the easiest way number one, and number two — its an unfiltered way. They don’t have to be pestered with impertinent questions or perspectives. They can speak to the public solely on their terms.”

But the lost clout of journalism is not all that Stile misses.

“What I do miss was the sharing of ideas—talking with each other. Picking up ledes and the ability to spitball ideas with colleagues from rival papers. It was an amazing and necessary dynamic and I think these bright, super talented kids coming up that I really admire — well I just lament they won’t have that same experience. Journalism was a social profession.”