Campaign News

Para la activista Ana María Archila, víctima también de violencia sexual, el caso de Kavanaugh despierta el de muchas mujeres que han sido objeto de abuso.

Read the full article here.

New York Daily News - June 27, 2013, by Tina Moore & Erin Durkin - The City Council overrode Mayor Bloomberg’s veto Thursday and made New York the largest city in the country to require paid sick leave for workers.

The council also approved the city's new $70 billion budget, held Madison Square Garden at a 10-year operating permit and abolished a ban on brunch before noon at outdoor cafes.

The veto override came after a protracted battle over the paid sick-leave legislation that was first proposed in 2009.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn brought the bill to the floor for a vote in May under intense pressure from political opponents and labor unions. Bloomberg then vetoed the measure, saying it would damage businesses.

The legislation forces tens of thousands of city businesses with at least 20 employees to offer five paid sick days a year beginning in April 2014.

The following year, the mandate would extend to businesses with at least 15 workers.

One million workers eventually will be covered by the bill, which also prevents companies from firing employees for taking unpaid sick days.

Before the vote, bill sponsor Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan) led a rally on City Hall’s steps in support of the override, boasting that “nobody will be fired if they are ill."

Union Local 32BJ President Hector Figueroa said New York started a movement that would sweep across the country.

“We are going to take this legislation now to other states and other cities,” he said. “People don’t need to be worried anymore about losing their job because they have to take care of a loved one.”

The $70 billion budget passed by the Council does not include tax increases and provides $58 million for the New York City Housing Authority to avoid most of 500 threatened layoffs.

The plan also saves 20 fire companies that Bloomberg’s budget had proposed shutting, keeps city pools open and restores $144 million for thousands of child care and after-school seats that were at risk.

The Council also voted to give Madison Square Garden a 10-year permit to continue operating at its current location over Pennsylvania Station.

The Garden had requested permission to operate at the site in perpetuity. Last month, the city planning commission approved a 15-year extension.

But Quinn said finding a new home for the arena was the only way to build a new Penn Station and called for a commission to find a new location in Manhattan. A representative for the Garden declined to comment.

The council also voted to abolish a law that prevented cafes from serving brunch outdoors before noon, changing the start time to the a.m.

The old restriction was “silly and it’s outdated and deserves to be changed,” Councilman Dan Garodnick (D-Manhattan) said. “We have found that that rule is not really serving anybody. It is a burden on small business and it is an obstacle to the many brunch loving New Yorkers out there.”

Source

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton joined the fray Thursday in the debate over how the nation’s central bank operates, saying banking industry insiders need to be removed from the Federal Reserve System.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign said, if elected, she would appoint officials who will carry out “unwavering oversight” of the financial sector and “defend” both sides of the central bank’s inflation and employment mandates. The campaign also said “commonsense reforms—like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks—are long overdue.”

Mrs. Clinton’s comments on central bank changes appeared to be her first on the topic in a campaign season where the Fed has intermittently been an issue, albeit mostly on the Republican side. Mrs. Clinton’s views emerged on a day in which dozens of Democratic congressional members, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, criticized the central bank for a leadership largely made up of white males with business and finance backgrounds.

While the Fed is led by its first-ever woman chief, all of its governors are white and three of the five are men. Of the 12 regional bank presidents, none are black and 10 are men. The last African-American to serve in a key leadership role left in 2006.

The letter to Ms. Yellen, referencing a recent study by the left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up Coalition, also flagged a lack of diversity among the boards of directors that oversee the regional Fed banks. The letter said a Fed that doesn’t look like the nation it works for will struggle to make policy that benefits an increasingly diverse nation. Regional Fed board members are drawn from the private sector to watch over institutions that are quasi-private. By law, the boards are supposed to represent their broader communities with three classes of directors reserved for differing interests, including the financial sector, in a process set out by a complicated set of rules. These boards oversee regional Fed bank operations, provide local economic insights and help select new bank presidents.

But the presence of bankers on the boards, representing firms regulated by the Fed, has been a sore spot for Fed critics. Over the years, the New York Fed faced notable controversies on this front.

Recent legal changes have removed financial-market participants from the process of selecting new bank presidents. Also, the Fed’s regulatory operations are managed in Washington even as they operate out of regional banks, and are insulated from the influence of the regional boards. Most regional Fed boards are spoken of in glowing terms by their respective bank presidents.

Financial-market professionals are well represented among Fed leaders. Most top central bankers are either economists by training or former bankers. The leaders of the New York, Minneapolis, Dallas and Philadelphia Fed banks all have worked in some capacity for investment bank Goldman Sachs. Current Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer was vice chairman of Citigroup from 2002 to 2005.

Mrs. Clinton’s desire to remove financial-sector leaders from the regional Fed boards would mark a historic change for a central bank that was founded on the mission of promoting financial stability, and whose monetary policy actions work through private financial-market channels to affect the performance of the broader economy.

In response to the congressional letter, the Fed said in a statement that when it comes to the members of the regional boards, “by law, we consider the interests of agriculture, commerce, industry, services, labor, and consumers. We also are aiming to increase ethnic and gender diversity.“ It also said there has been a rise in both racial and gender diversity on the regional Fed boards, with 46% of all directors now meeting the label of “diverse.”

A recent overhaul proposal by former top Fed staffer Andrew Levin, now a professor at Dartmouth College, called for the regional Fed banks to be made fully public, ending their private ownership structure operating within the Fed board, which is explicitly part of the government. Mr. Levin also called for directors representing firms regulated by the central bank to be removed.

By MICHAEL S. DERBY

Source

Language Access in New York State: A Snapshot from a Community Perspective

The state government provides New Yorkers with a multitude of services and benefits necessary for their survival and success: nutritional supports, health benefits, unemployment insurance and driver’s licenses, to name but a few. In order for these services to be equally accessible to all of the diverse residents of the state, it is essential that government agencies be linguistically accessible, providing interpretation and translation services for the over 2 million individuals in New York State who are limited English proficient (LEP). This report assesses the state of language access in New York, particularly access to state benefits that are critically important to low-income New Yorkers, such as public benefits, unemployment, police protection, etc. It examines the degree to which government agencies that administer state benefits programs and services are providing LEP New Yorkers with language assistance services required under a patchwork of federal, state and county-level policies. 

Read the full report here.

Executive Summary

The state government provides New Yorkers with a multitude of services and benefits necessary for their survival and success: nutritional supports, health benefits, unemployment insurance and driver’s licenses, to name but a few. In order for these services to be equally accessible to all of the diverse residents of the state, it is essential that government agencies be linguistically accessible, providing interpretation and translation services for the over 2 million individuals in New York State who are limited English proficient (LEP). This report assesses the state of language access in New York, particularly access to state benefits that are critically important to low-income New Yorkers, such as public benefits, unemployment, police protection, etc. It examines the degree to which government agencies that administer state benefits programs and services are providing LEP New Yorkers with language assistance services required under a patchwork of federal, state and county-level policies.

This report is the outgrowth of years of advocacy and months of research and analysis conducted by Make the Road NY (MRNY), the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and three additional partner organizations across the state: the Center for the Elimination of Health Disparities (CEMHD) at SUNY Albany, Multicultural Association of Medical Interpreters (MAMI) in Central New York and the International Institute of Buffalo.

This study also grows from the experiences of the thousands of LEP New Yorkers with whom CPD, MRNY and our partners have worked in recent years.  Their consistent reports concerning the barriers created by the lack of competent, consistent interpretation and translation have informed this research, and their continuing efforts to overcome and eliminate these obstacles have inspired this work.  In recent years, CPD, MRNY and other members of the broader New York State Language Access Coalition have advocated for policy changes that guarantee language assistance for LEP New Yorkers in private and public settings.  At the local level, the Language Access Coalition has successfully advocated for Executive Order 120 in New York City and Executive Order 10 in Suffolk County, which require local agencies to provide language assistance services to the LEP community members they serve.

In 2011, these efforts culminated with Governor Cuomo signing Executive Order 26, a statewide order which requires all state agencies with direct public contact to translate vital documents into the top six languages spoken by LEP individuals in New York State, provide interpretation services for all New Yorkers in their primary language, develop a language access plan and designate a language access coordinator.

With Executive Order 26, the Cuomo administration not only took a tremendously important step towards guaranteeing access to government services for LEP New Yorkers, it also demonstrated national leadership on this issue.  New York State’s language access policy is the first of its kind.  And at a time when other states across the nation were implementing regressive, anti-immigrant measures, New York demonstrated a better way forward.  The administration’s commitment to language access, demonstrated by its consistent engagement with advocates in the years preceding the issuance of the Executive Order and in the months since its enactment, stands as a compelling example of how public policy can support the immigrant communities that have been powerful drivers of local economies across the state and strengthen New York as a whole.

However, the ultimate measure of the success of government and advocacy efforts is whether all LEP New Yorkers who interact with government agencies are provided with the interpretation and translation services to which they are entitled.   Our findings, outlined below, suggest that this is not the case and that there is still much to be done to ensure that such New Yorkers receive competent, consistent language assistance services. In particular, during the course of our research, we have learned that many state benefits programs and services are administered by county- or locally-run entities that may not fall within the ambit of the Governor’s Executive Order 26, and may not be in jurisdictions with a county or local executive order. Access to language services and, thus, to the essential public services and benefits to which they are linked remains patchy and work must continue to be done with all levels of government—state and local—to ensure equity.