Clinton Joins Crowd Calling for an Overhaul of Fed Governance
Clinton Joins Crowd Calling for an Overhaul of Fed Governance
Hillary Clinton is the latest voice calling for changes at the Federal Reserve.
A spokesman for the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination released...
Hillary Clinton is the latest voice calling for changes at the Federal Reserve.
A spokesman for the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination released a statement Thursday saying that the Fed “needs to be more representative of America as a whole” and arguing that “commonsense reforms -- like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks -- are long overdue.”
The statement, sent by Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson and first reported by the Washington Post, comes as Democrats unleash a volley of criticism against the central bank. Earlier on Thursday, lawmakers called for more consideration of African American, Latino and female candidates for top Fed posts in a letter to Chair Janet Yellen. The missive was signed by a majority of the Democratic members of Congress.
Clinton’s position garnered praise from the union-backed Fed Up coalition, which coordinated the congressional letter.
The campaign’s comment also partly echoed a proposal that Fed Up put out last week, in which former Fed economist Andrew Levin suggested structural reforms for the central bank. Levin argued that the Fed should be made a more public institution.
Currently, regional reserve bank boards have nine directors: six are elected by member banks, with three representing commercial banks and three representing the public. The final three directors are appointed by the Board of Governors in Washington, and are also meant to represent the public.
Bank Control
That means two-thirds of the board seats at the 12 regional Fed banks are controlled by commercial banks, Levin wrote, saying that the directors should instead be affiliated with small businesses and non-profit organizations and selected through a “process overseen by the Federal Reserve Board and involving the elected officials in each Fed district.”
“The process should ensure that directors are representative of the public in terms of racial/ethnic and gender diversity and educational background and professional experience,” Levin wrote.
Esther George, president of the Kansas City Fed, said Thursday that “diversity for the Federal Reserve is critical,” and that progress has been made both at the board of directors and at the staff level in making sure the Fed reflects the communities that it serves.
Preserving Independence
Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker pushed back against proposals to make the Fed more public in an article posted Thursday. He said the regional branches’ hybrid governance structure “has come to play an important role in the independence of monetary policy” and “independence allows monetary policy to place greater weight on the long-term benefits of low and stable inflation.”
“The current Fed governance structure may not be ideal,” Lacker wrote. “But until there is a proposal that preserves the monetary policy independence that is so vital to the Fed’s mandate, we should stick to what we have.”
While there have been various Congressional attempts at shaking up Fed structure in recent years, those have made little headway. For instance, Republican Senator Richard Shelby proposed a bill last year that would have tweaked the New York Fed, making its leader a presidential appointee, among other changes, but it never passed.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has also weighed in on the Fed in recent days. On CNBC last week, Trump said that he’s a “low-interest” person and that he would replace Yellen when her term ends.
By Jeanna Smialek
Source
Demonstrators Take Over Manhattan Amazon Store in Protest of Queens HQ
Demonstrators Take Over Manhattan Amazon Store in Protest of Queens HQ
"I think Amazon is only going to make it worse," said Charles Khan, of the Center for Popular Democracy. "There's no reason to give them $3 billion when we have so many problems, homelessness."...
"I think Amazon is only going to make it worse," said Charles Khan, of the Center for Popular Democracy. "There's no reason to give them $3 billion when we have so many problems, homelessness."
Read the full article here.
CFPB: Financial firms can no longer force consumers to use arbitration in group disputes
CFPB: Financial firms can no longer force consumers to use arbitration in group disputes
Consumers can now sue banks in class-action lawsuits.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Monday financial companies will no longer be allowed to force customers to use...
Consumers can now sue banks in class-action lawsuits.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Monday financial companies will no longer be allowed to force customers to use arbitration to settle group disputes, restricting the industry's favored legal tool after years of review.
Read the full article here.
America Needs a Network of Rebel Cities to Stand Up to Trump
America Needs a Network of Rebel Cities to Stand Up to Trump
“I want New Yorkers to know: we have a lot of tools at our disposal; we’re going to use them. And we’re not going to take anything lying down.” On the morning after Donald Trump was declared the...
“I want New Yorkers to know: we have a lot of tools at our disposal; we’re going to use them. And we’re not going to take anything lying down.” On the morning after Donald Trump was declared the victor in the U.S. presidential election, Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, wasted no time in signaling his intention to use the city government as a bulwark against the policy agenda of the President-Elect. The move made one thing very clear; with the Republican Party holding the House and Senate, and at least one Supreme Court nomination in the pipeline, it will fall to America’s cities and local leaders to act as the institutional frontline of resistance against the Trump administration.
However, cities can be more than just a last line of defense against the worst excesses of an authoritarian central government; they have huge, positive potential as spaces from which to radicalize democracy and build alternatives to the neoliberal economic model. The urgent questions that progressive activists in the States are now asking themselves are, not just how to fight back against Trump, but also how to harness the momentum of Bernie Sanders’ primary run to fight for the change he promised. As we consider potential strategies going forward, a look at the global context suggests that local politics may be the best place to start.
The election of Trump has not occurred in a vacuum. Across the West, we are witnessing a wholesale breakdown of the existing political order; the neoliberal project is broken, the center-left is vanishing, and the old left is at a loss for what to do. In many countries, it is the far right that is most successful in harnessing people’s desire to regain a sense of control over their lives. Where progressives have tried to beat the right at its own game by competing on the battleground of the nation state, they have fared extremely poorly, as recent elections and referenda across Europe have shown. Even where a progressive force has managed to win national office, as happened in Greece in 2015, the limits of this strategy have become abundantly clear, with global markets and transnational institutions quickly bullying the Syriza government into compliance.
In Spain, however, things are different. In 2014, activists in the country were wrestling with a similar conundrum to their counterparts in the U.S. today: how to harness the power of new social and political movements to transform institutional politics. For pragmatic rather than ideological reasons, they decided to start by standing in local elections; the so-called “municipalist wager.” The bet paid off; while citizen platforms led by activists from social movements won mayoralties in the largest cities across the country in May of 2015, their national allies, Unidos Podemos, stalled in third place at the general elections in December later that same year.
In Spain, this network of “rebel cities” has been putting up some of the most effective resistance to the conservative central government. While the state is bailing out the banks, refusing to take in refugees and implementing deep cuts in public services, cities like Barcelona and Madrid are investing in the cooperative economy, declaring themselves “refuge cities” and remunicipalizing public services. U.S. cities have a huge potential to play a similar role over the coming years.
Rebel cities in the USA
In fact, radical municipalism has a proud history in the U.S. One hundred years ago, the “sewer socialists” took over the city government of Milwaukee, Wis., and ran it for almost 50 years. They built parks, cleaned up waterways and, in contrast to the tolerated level of corruption in neighboring Chicago, the sewer socialists instilled into the civic culture an enduring sense that government is supposed to work for all the people, not just the wealthy and well-connected.
More recently, too, cities have been proving their ability to lead the national agenda. In the last few years alone, over 200 cities have introduced protections against employment discrimination based on gender-identity and 38 cities and counties have introduced local minimum wages after local “Fight for 15” campaigns.
Now we need a dual municipalist strategy that includes both supporting and putting pressure on existing progressive city governments from the streets, and standing new candidates with new policy platforms in upcoming local elections so that we can change institutional politics from within.
Why cities?
There are a number of reasons why city governments are particularly well-placed to lead resistance to Trumpism. Most obviously, much of the popular opposition to Trump is physically located in cities. With their younger, more ethnically diverse demographics, urban voters swung heavily against Trump and, in fact, played a large role in handing Hillary Clinton the majority of the national popular vote. Not only did Clinton win 31 of the nation’s 35 largest cities, but she beat Trump by 59% to 35% in all cities with populations of over 50,000. In most of urban America, then, there are progressive majorities that can be harnessed to challenge Trump’s toxic discourse and policy agenda.
But alternative policies will not be enough to create an effective challenge to Trump; different ways of doing politics will also be needed, and local politics has great potential in this regard. As the level of government closest to the people, municipalities are uniquely able to generate new, citizen-led and participatory models of politics that return a sense of agency and belonging to people’s lives. This new process must have feminism at its heart; it must recognize that the personal and the political are intimately connected, something that is clearer at the local level than at any other.
It’s for this reason that the municipalist movement need not be limited to the largest cities. Though large cities will inevitably be strategic targets in any “bottom-up” strategy, given their economic and cultural power, all local politics has radical democratic potential. Indeed, some of the most innovative—and successful—examples of municipalism around the world are found in small towns and villages.
Bringing the political conversation back to the local level also has a particular advantage in the current context; the city provides a frame with which to challenge the rise of xenophobic nationalism. Cities are spaces in which we can talk about reclaiming popular sovereignty for a demos other than the nation, where we can reimagine identity and belonging based on participation in civic life rather than the passport we hold.
Why a network of rebel cities?
By working as a network, cities can turn what would have been isolated acts of resistance into a national movement with a multiplier effect. Networks like Local Progress, a network of progressive local elected officials, allow local leaders to exchange policy ideas, develop joint strategies, and speak with a united voice on the national stage.
On the issue of racial equity, an essential question given the racist nature of Trump’s campaign and policy platform, cities across the U.S. have already started to mobilize to combat Islamophobia, as part of the American Leaders Against Hate and Anti-Muslim Bigotry Campaign, a joint project of Local Progress and the Young Elected Officials Action Network. The campaign pushes for local policies to tackle hate crimes against Muslims, including the monitoring of religious bullying in schools, intercultural education programmes, and council resolutions condemning Islamophobia and declaring support for Muslim communities.
Climate change will be another contentious issue over the coming years. While much has been made of the policy implications of Trump’s claim that global warming was invented by the Chinese, it has been local administrations, rather than the federal government, that have led on the environmental agenda over recent years. Sixty two cities are already committed to meet or exceed the emissions targets announced by the federal government and many of the largest cities in the country, including New York, Chicago and Atlanta have set emissions reductions goals of 80 percent or higher by 2050. U.S. mayors must continue on this path, working with international networks of cities like ICLEI and UCLG to exchange good practices and to lobby for direct access to global climate funds in the absence of support from the federal government.
Even on issues that are under the jurisdiction of the federal government, like immigration, cities have some room for maneuver. For example, although Trump has pledged to deport all undocumented immigrants from the U.S., 37 “sanctuary cities” across the U.S. are already limiting their cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer requests to reduce deportations. The mayors of New York and Los Angeles have already pledged to continue with this practice, and De Blasio has promised New Yorkers that the city will protect the confidentiality of users of the city ID-card scheme and continue to ensure that police officers and city employees won’t inquire about residents’ immigration status, predicting that Trump will face “a deep, deep rift with all of urban America” if he does not re-evaluate his stance on sanctuary cities.
What next?
First we must push our allies who are already in office at local level, including self-identified “Sanders Democrats,” to use all available means to act against any attempt by the federal government to roll back civil liberties, cut services or sow division among communities. Such cities must work, not only to counteract the worst excesses of the Trump administration, but also to continue to move forward on issues like gay rights and climate change, as well as forging new ground by standing up to corporate interests, increasing citizen participation in decision-making, and promoting the social and cooperative economies.
But we also need a new generation of local leaders, particularly women and people of color, who are prepared to take the leap from protest to electoral politics. The recent announcement by Black Lives Matter activist, Nekima Levy-Pounds, that she will be standing for election as mayor of Minneapolis is an inspiring example of the kind of candidate that is needed; someone with real-world experience and an insider’s understanding of social movement politics. But the search for new local leaders needs to be scaled up so that there is a pipeline of candidates to stand for school boards, zoning boards and local councils in 2017 and beyond. This is something that the Working Families Party is already doing successfully in many states, as well as supporting these candidates in primary campaigns against Establishment Democrats.
Finally, we must undertake new ways of doing politics at the local level to prove that there is an alternative to corporate lobbying, secret donors and career politics. There is no reason why candidates should wait until taking office to invite people to participate in decision-making. Local candidates should open up their policy platforms to public participation, integrating demands from social movements and local residents. There is also no reason why elected officials should use only the most generous interpretation of the law to guide their conduct; in Spain, the citizen platforms drew up their own codes of ethics for their elected representatives, including salary and term limits and strict transparency requirements. By leading by example, local movements can send a very powerful message: there is another way.
A resurgence of rebel cities in the U.S. would tap into a long-forgotten American tradition of radical municipalism and align with a new and growing international network of municipalist movements. Now is the time for us to seize this opportunity and to reclaim democracy from the bottom up.
BY KATE SHEA BAIRD AND STEVE HUGHES
Source
Starbucks employees still face ‘clopening,’ understaffing, and irregular workweeks
Starbucks employees still face ‘clopening,’ understaffing, and irregular workweeks
Starbucks employees say their schedules aren’t nearly as sweet as those pumpkin spice lattes they’re serving up this fall.
In a new report from the ...
Starbucks employees say their schedules aren’t nearly as sweet as those pumpkin spice lattes they’re serving up this fall.
In a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy, a nonprofit that works with community groups, Starbucks workers said the coffee company has failed over the past year to make good on a promise to improve employees’ schedules. Instead, employees said they still face unpredictable workweeks, obstacles to taking sick leave, insufficient rest and staffing, and a failure to honor their availability.
“Starbucks’ frontline employees bear the brunt of the management imperative to minimize store labor costs, which takes precedence over attempts to stabilize work hours, provide healthy schedules, and to ensure employees have real input into their working conditions,” the report states.
The issues detailed in the report are familiar to anyone to many who work on “non-standard” schedules common among low wage jobs.
Starbucks first came under fire after a New York Times article from August 2014 described the struggle of a Starbucks barista and single mother, whose irregular work schedule caused turbulence in her personal relationships, other jobs and parental routine. The source of such chaos was supposedly Starbucks’s sophisticated scheduling software that cuts labor costs by arranging workers’ weeks based on sales patterns.
While this technology can boost a business’s profits, it can also leave workers working back-to-back shifts (also known as ‘clopening’), or not receiving enough hours to make ends meet. Sometimes, as the Timesarticle pointed out, employees would commute to work just to find their schedule changed.
After the public backlash, Starbucks promised to revise its policies and end the irregular scheduling practices for its roughly 130,000 baristas in the U.S.
To achieve this, Starbucks said it would post all work hours 10 days in advance, and give any baristas with more than an hour long commute the option to transfer to a more convenient location. Starbucks also said it would revise the scheduling technology and kill the clopening shift.
But much has remained unchanged, according to the 200 workers across 37 states the Center for Popular Democracy interviewed.
Nearly half of the surveyed Starbucks employees said they received their schedule one week or less in advance, and one in four workers said they still had to work clopening shifts.
Employees also reported feeling as though managers disregarded their availability, and denied them more hours when they needed additional work. Finally, 40 percent of employees said they faced barriers to taking sick leave when they were ill.
None of this seems to fit with Starbucks’s reputation as a “fabulous company” to work for, as jobs and recruiting website Glassdoor described it in its annual ranking of the 50 best places to work in 2014. Starbucks came in at No. 39.
The Center for Popular Democracy’s report did have some suggestions for improvement, however, recommending that Starbucks guarantee minimum hours and full-time work for those who want it. It also said the company should mandate that managers provide predictable schedules so working families can have a more stable work-life balance, in addition to taking the pressure off sick employees to find a replacement for a shift.
Source: Boston.com
Elizabeth Warren, Workers Take Aim at ‘Walmart Economy’
RH Reality Check - November 19, 2014, by Emily Crockett - When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA) invited Walmart workers to brief Congress on Tuesday about the...
RH Reality Check - November 19, 2014, by Emily Crockett - When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA) invited Walmart workers to brief Congress on Tuesday about the retail giant’s abusive practices, the conversation was about more than just Walmart.
“No one in this country should work full-time and still live in poverty,” Warren said.
“This is about the simple dignity of the people you have hired to work,” Miller said. “When you have a higher minimum wage, fair scheduling, and equal work for equal pay, the perception of the business goes up in the people’s mind, the customers go up and the revenues go up.”
Cantare Duvant, a Walmart customer service manager, said at the briefing that since Walmart is the nation’s largest retailer, it sets the standard for others in the industry. “So not only do we as Walmart workers deserve better, our economy also deserves better,” she said.
Duvant is a member of OUR Walmart (Organization United for Respect at Walmart), a union-backed group of Walmart workers who are, in Duvant’s words, “struggling to support our families on low pay and erratic scheduling” in what is now “Walmart’s low-wage economy.”
“Walmart specifically is worth discussing not only because of the 1.3 million workers it directly employs, but also because of the impact its employment practices have on the rest of our economy,” said Amy Traub, senior policy analyst at Demos. She said Walmart does this by “pushing down wages, limited workers hours, and squeezing its suppliers and its competitors.”
A majority of Americans are paid by the hour, and about half of early-career adults have no say in their work schedules, said Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy. “This isn’t just a narrow section of people,” she said.
Sen. Warren, a progressive hero who was recently appointed to a position in the Senate Democratic leadership, said that the issue of low-wage work in America is “deeply personal” for her.
When her father lost his job after having a heart attack, Warren said, her working-class family couldn’t pay the bills, lost their car, and almost lost their home. Then one day, “My mother, who was 50 years old and had never worked outside the home, pulled on her best dress, put on her lipstick, put on her high heels, and walked to Sears to get a minimum-wage job.”
“But here’s the key: It was a minimum-wage job in an America where a minimum-wage job would support a family of three.”
That could never happen today, Warren said, when “a momma and a baby on a full-time minimum-wage job cannot keep themselves out of poverty.”
Warren used the briefing to promote three pieces of legislation aimed at helping low-wage workers, including but not limited to people working at Walmart.
Those bills would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, give workers more reliable and flexible schedules, and help women address unequal pay based on gender.
Equal pay came up because women make up about two-thirds of the low-wage work force, and many are family breadwinners. Warren said that women in about half of American jobs can be fired just for asking whether their pay is unequal to their male coworkers.
The Schedules That Work Act, Warren said, is about the “basic fairness” of workers being able to plan for a second job, child care, or schooling. It would require employers to give workers their schedules two weeks in advance, compensate them for showing up for work only to be sent home, and not retaliate against workers for requesting more flexible or predictable schedules.
All three bills have been blocked by Republicans, which Warren openly acknowledged.
“I know that change is not easy. We might not pass these bills right away,” she said. “But don’t kid yourself about the importance of these bills, and the assurance that we’re eventually going to get them through.”
The Schedules That Work Act in particular would help Fatmata Jabbie, a Walmart worker and refugee from Saudi Arabia whose story was read at the hearing.
“Although I am not full-time yet, I am virtually on call seven days a week to pick up extra hours,” she said in her written statement. Her reward for that trouble is usually only 30 to 36 hours of work and $150 to $200 in take-home pay.
“I am a mom with two beautiful children, so I am not the only one who relies on that salary to survive,” Jabbie said.
OUR Walmart is pushing for bigger reforms than the three bills Warren promoted though. Members of the group are calling for their aggressively non-unionized employer to pay a minimum living wage of $15 an hour, provide stable, full-time schedules, and stop retaliating against workers who speak out against the company’s practices.
Duvant, for instance, already makes the $10.10 per hour that the federal minimum wage bill would guarantee—but that doesn’t do her much good, she said, when Walmart will only schedule her for 16 hours of work per week.
And Evelin Cruz, who worked for Walmart for 11 years, said at the hearing that the company fired her a few weeks ago for her activism with OUR Walmart.
“We spoke out for change, and Walmart did what it does best, which is bully, retaliate, and fire me,” she said.
Cruz told RH Reality Check that even though she no longer works at Walmart and is looking for other work, she’ll keep up the fight with OUR Walmart.
“That’s what they count on, for people to be out of Walmart and no longer want to participate,” she said. “But this is an issue that is not only affecting people in Walmart. It’s a widespread problem of scheduling, lack of hours, and a minimum wage that you can’t survive on.”
Source
A year after the election: Fighting for the freedom to thrive
A year after the election: Fighting for the freedom to thrive
This day last year we woke up to a national nightmare –one that has now evolved into a full-blown social, not to mention constitutional, crisis.
Even as we remember November 8, 2016, we...
This day last year we woke up to a national nightmare –one that has now evolved into a full-blown social, not to mention constitutional, crisis.
Even as we remember November 8, 2016, we must acknowledge that today, many of us are waking up to the first clear sign that the wave of progressive activism that has successfully thwarted some the worst parts of this administration’s agenda, is also poised to have a real impact on electoral outcomes.
Fed Rate Hike Threatens Jobs and Wages
12/16/2015
Statement & Booking Opportunity : Connie Razza, Director of Strategic Research for the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) released...
12/16/2015
Statement & Booking Opportunity : Connie Razza, Director of Strategic Research for the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) released the following statement in advance of the likely interest rate hike this afternoon:
“The presumption underlying the Fed’s decision today is that the economic recovery is nearing completion, a determination wholly at odds with the data on which the Fed is committed to depending. Inflation is well below the Fed’s own target and wages remain stagnant, yet Fed officials voted today to intentionally slow down the economy. Today’s announcement lays the foundation for unnecessary economic obstacles in the way of the tens of millions of working people across the country who deserve higher wages and better jobs, and particularly the Black and Latino communities still mired in a Great Recession. We urge the Federal Reserve to deliberate carefully in considering future increases.” The Fed Up campaign is bringing the voices of working families and communities of color into the national debate about Federal Reserve policy. In the past year, our members have met with 9 of the 12 regional presidents and 4 of the 5 sitting Governors, sharing with them the human realities that underlie the economic numbers. We are urging the Fed to fulfill both sides of its dual mandate and build an economy with genuine full employment, where everybody who wants a good job can find one. In the event that the Federal Reserve does not raise interest rates, you will receive another statement following the Fed’s announcement on Wednesday afternoon.
To schedule interviews with Connie Razza, send an email to ajain@populardemocracy.org
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www.populardemocracy.org
The Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda.
Media Contact:
Anita Jain, press@populardemocracy.org, 347-636-9761
Sofie Tholl, stholl@populardemocracy.org, 646-509-5558
ABQ, SF receive grants to help immigrants become citizens
ABQ, SF receive grants to help immigrants become citizens
Cities for Citizenship is a national initiative supported by advocacy groups Center for Popular Democracy and the National Partnership for New Americans, with Citi Community Development as...
Cities for Citizenship is a national initiative supported by advocacy groups Center for Popular Democracy and the National Partnership for New Americans, with Citi Community Development as founding corporate sponsor. Fourteen cities were awarded challenge grants of either $25,000 or $40,000 a year over two years after 66 cities submitted proposals.
Read the full article here.
What does it mean to be an American?
What does it mean to be an American?
The climate in the U.S. hasn't changed much since that incident four years ago. Fulbright still fights for the same causes, helping people in marginalized communities, but she has taken a more...
The climate in the U.S. hasn't changed much since that incident four years ago. Fulbright still fights for the same causes, helping people in marginalized communities, but she has taken a more policy-based approach. Fulbright is the Texas state coordinator for Local Progress, a project under the New York-based nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy.
Read the full article here.
2 days ago
2 days ago