Neal Peirce / Nov 25 2011
For Release Sunday, November 27, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — There’s no sane way to say that America’s criminal justice system is “OK.” It costs over $100 billion a year; it imprisons hundreds of thousands for minor drug possession or sale; overall it’s incarcerating 2.3 million men and woman — the most of any nation on earth.
But that didn’t stop 43 Senate Republicans from recently wielding the weapon of a filibuster to torpedo a proposal by Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) for a bipartisan national commission to undertake a stem-to-stern examination of how we apprehend, try and punish in America.
The ostensible reason the Republicans gave was states’ rights — that because the study would encompass state and local practices as well as federal, it would somehow violate our constitutional separation of federal and state powers.
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Neal Peirce / Nov 19 2011
For Release Sunday, November 20, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
DETROIT — “We stand with Occupy Wall Street. We’re inspired by the organizing we’ve seen… It catches the moment.”
But the group PolicyLink, meeting here last week with 2,300 community organizers, policy advocates and foundation observers in attendance, had a major agenda ready to roll well before the first tents went up in New York’s Zucotti Park.
Its thrust: “Equity is the superior growth mode for America’s future.”
America, the participants agreed, needs a massive shift from the last decade’s growth model, based as it was on a housing bubble, credit-fueled consumption and a deregulated financial industry.
But the equity answer they advocate doesn’t just mean social justice or simply serving PolicyLink’s mission of benefitting low-income groups and people of color. Rather, they assert, “it’s an economic necessity for the United States” — that building the capabilities of people now trailing in education and work-readiness “creates the conditions that allow us to flourish. The more we invest in each other, the better off we will be. Equity is the superior growth model.”
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Neal Peirce / Nov 12 2011
For Release Sunday, November 13, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Is it time to restore the old-fashioned rooming house — or something akin to it — in America’s cities?
OK, maybe not the century-old stereotype of a dowdy rooming house with doilies on the furniture, tiny rooms with cast iron beds, a shared bathroom down the hall, and meals ruled over by a stern older woman.
Shared meals? Maybe not anymore. But we do need much smaller, more affordable units than today’s market offers, especially for our millions of “millennials” — twenty-somethings who are now selecting cities to live in. Millennials find themselves stuck with meager pay (median income $31,000) in today’s limping economy.
Unquestionably, tens of millions of oncoming youth will disconnect from the American vision of home as a “homestead” — the self-contained units of our pioneer forbears, translated since World War II by a suburban home occupying its own staked out lot.
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Neal Peirce / Nov 05 2011
For Release Sunday, November 6, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Presidential debates are aflame with calls for border moats and electrified fences. Attacks are launched on any candidate’s past pro-immigrant positions. The Department of Homeland Security boasts of deporting 397,000 undocumented immigrants in a year — and promising more to come. Actual laws, Arizona- and Alabama-style, are clearly designed to instill fear in immigrant communities.
That’s one America, 2011.
But there’s another, with cooler heads. It’s a broad swath of local officials seeking to protect — and where there’s need, to legalize — their immigrant communities. And it’s an amazing array of American corporations insisting that fresh immigration into the United States, especially in times of nagging recession, is needed to invigorate our economy.
John Cook, mayor of El Paso, directly on the Mexican border, recently put the local officials’ position this way:
“Our immigration system is broken. When we have a demand for a half-million new workers each year, and no way to bring them in legally, it’s an invitation for illegal immigration.”
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Neal Peirce / Oct 28 2011
For Release Sunday, October 30, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Above: Aga Khan
Who is the Aga Khan? And why is he being honored?
It’s the question that 6,000 developers from around the United States (plus many from around the world) must have been asking last week as they assembled in Los Angeles for the Urban Land Institute’s 75th anniversary celebration. The organization’s highest honor, they heard, was not, as in previous years, going to a familiar U.S. property developer, planner or far-sighted political leader (last year Chicago’s retiring Mayor Richard M. Daley).
Rather, the prestigious J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development was being awarded to Shah Karim-al Hussayna — a man better known as the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims, a sect of 12-15 million believers worldwide who revere him as a direct descendant of and legitimate heir to the Prophet Muhammad.
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Neal Peirce / Oct 22 2011
For Release Sunday, October 23, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Why should we spring for the multi-billions of hard-to-find dollars that the experts say are necessary to patch up America’s essential — but often deteriorating — public transportation systems?
It’s straightforward, argues the New York-based Regional Plan Association (RPA). Transportation, it asserts, isn’t just a question of patching a few potholes or cleaning dirty subway cars. It’s a matter of the national future — whether our economy hums or shrinks, carrying our standard of living down with it.
Illustrating its point, RPA cites the case of America’s top 10 transit regions, among them New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Atlanta.*
Collectively, the 10 regions represent a third of America’s economic output and a quarter of our population. And they’re projected to grow 26 percent — 90 million people — in the next 30 years.
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Neal Peirce / Oct 14 2011
For Release Sunday, October 16, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
What if we got really serious about “greenscaping” our neighborhoods, towns and cities — bringing them closer, by plantings, building design, nurturing parks both great and small, to the natural world that preceded them?
It may be much more important than we think. Journalist-visionary Richard Louv argues that in an age of overwhelming technology, as we dive ever deeper “into a sea of circuitry,” we need more than ever to relate to the natural world. And that we embrace “The Nature Principle,” title of his latest book (subtitled “Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder,” published by Algonquin Books).
Louv’s earlier book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” sparked creation of an international movement to reconnect children with the natural world.
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Neal Peirce / Oct 01 2011
For Release Sunday, October 2, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Could Bill Clinton have it right — that we’re seeing the most “determined effort” in a half century to limit Americans’ right to vote? That the new wave of restrictions are the worst, as the former president puts it, “since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting?”
Alarmingly, the evidence supports Clinton’s position. Bills to require government-issued photo identification at the polls have passed this year in several states where Republicans control both the governorships and legislatures — Texas, Wisconsin, South Carolina, Alabama, Kansas and Tennessee. And they’re being advanced in several more GOP-held states.
The alleged reason: serious voter fraud. But the facts beg to differ. The Brennan Center for Justice reports actual prosecutions, arrests or findings of voter malfeasance are exceedingly rare. Kansas and Wisconsin, for example, report more sightings of U.F.O.s than voter fraud charges. Realistically, there’s no significant problem.
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Neal Peirce / Sep 24 2011
For Release Sunday, September 25, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Several Republican presidential candidates — Texas Gov. Rick Perry at the fore — are dismissing climate change as a concoction of misguided or self-serving scientists.
But a growing number of Main Street and regional business leaders, types often thought of as Republican leaning, are taking the issue ever-more seriously, if not to save the world, at least to serve their bottom lines.
Each year the American Chamber of Commerce Executives, Partners for Livable Communities and the Institute for Sustainable Development give out “Green Plus” awards to local chambers and communities that have launched exemplary, community-wide efforts to “go green” with varieties of carbon-saving initiatives. Winners for 2011 recently announced include Cleveland, Chattanooga (Tenn.) Savannah (Ga.), North Myrtle Beach (S.C.) and Gatlinburg (Tenn.).
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Neal Peirce / Sep 17 2011
For Release Sunday, September 18, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — Mention “green”
in connection with the Nation’s Capital and most people think of the Bureau of Engraving — or our multi-trillion dollar national budgets.
But the Washington region has another green goal and agenda. It wants to be the most environmentally advanced, climate-responsive, livable region of America.
A gathering of the local “greenies” at the Smithsonian Institution early this month did reveal some impressive forward steps.
Outsiders might be surprised by the first-named asset: the Washington Metro rail system. Opened in 1976, it now has five lines, 106 miles of track, 86 stations, and is America’s second busiest line after New York City.
Metro has had accidents and some serious maintenance — and funding — problems. But with the agency’s 200-million-plus trips a year — saving tens of millions of personal auto trips, many millions of gallons of gasoline — it has in fact succeeded in creating a more single and accessible urban region of Washington, D.C. and its Virginia and Maryland suburbs.
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