In $15's Wake, Fair Scheduling Gains Momentum
Worker movements have had tremendous success in blue cities and states in securing higher minimum wages and access to paid sick leave. Now those wins are blazing a trail for another critical...
Worker movements have had tremendous success in blue cities and states in securing higher minimum wages and access to paid sick leave. Now those wins are blazing a trail for another critical policy for low-wage workers: the right to a fair workweek. After enacting a $15 minimum wage and paid sick leave in recent years, two cities are now leading the way on granting workers the right to a sane and predictable schedule.
Last week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his support for legislation currently pending in the city council that would give Gotham’s fast-food workers the right to more predictable work hours. On Monday, the Seattle City Council passed a comprehensive fair workweek law that advocates hope can serve as a model for other cities.
These policy developments come at a time when many workers say that service-sector employers’ scheduling practices make it impossible for them to live their lives. On-call scheduling—in which workers can be told to report to work with little advance notice—make it hard for employees to schedule parenting, school, doctor visits, and much else. Scheduling software aimed solely at efficiency can lengthen or eliminate their shifts at the last minute. On top of that, the prevalent practice of “clopening”—where a worker has a closing shift followed just a few hours later by an opening shift—often leaves workers with little time to rest. Meanwhile, workers are on the hook for the costs of uncertainty, like a last-minute taxi ride to work or unexpected child-care costs.
In one nationwide survey, four out of five early-career adult workers said that their weekly hours fluctuated by an average of 87 percent compared with their usual hours; 45 percent of hourly workers who are parents said they have no input on their schedules.
Fair-scheduling advocates say it's time for employees to have more say in scheduling practices—and for employers to finally pay their workers for the costs that their flexible schedule imposes on employees (like those taxi rides and child care). They are also demanding that companies stop hiring more and more workers to maximize flexibility while cutting hours for existing workers.
In 2014, San Francisco became the first jurisdiction in the country to mandate fair-scheduling practices with its unprecedented “Retail Workers Bill of Rights.”
In 2014, San Francisco became the first jurisdiction in the country to mandate fair-scheduling practices with its unprecedented “Retail Workers Bill of Rights.” The new Seattle law will build on that by requiring that employers give workers two weeks advance notice on shift schedules—any changes made to schedules after that requires additional compensation for the worker, including half-time pay for any hours an employer cuts or cancels. Workers will have the right to request flexible scheduling without fear of retaliation.
Workers will also have protections against “clopening.” The proposed law would be the first in the country to require an employee’s consent for shifts that allow less than ten hours of rest, and to mandate that “clopening” workers get paid time and a half. Additionally, employers would be required to offer available hours to part-time workers before hiring additional workers. Companies that have been found to consistently under-schedule workers and make last-minute shift changes would be subject to fines.
“These are critical steps forward. If you don’t get that many hours, earning $15 only goes so far.”
On the opposite coast, the New York City legislation focuses on the 65,000 workers in the city’s fast-food industry. As such, it follows the pattern set by Fight for 15 organizers, who first convinced Governor Andrew Cuomo to convene a wage board for fast food last year, later to be followed by a general increase in the state minimum wage. “We are in a battle to restore dignity and decent living to retail and service workers in industries where that really has been badly eroded in recent years,” New York City Councilmember Brad Lander told the Prospect in an interview. “These are critical steps forward. If you don’t get that many hours, earning $15 only goes so far.”
As in the Seattle legislation, New York fast-food employers would be required to give workers two weeks advance notice on expected shifts, mandate additional compensation for last-minute changes to a worker’s schedule, and provide protections for workers who are “clopening.” However, as of now, the proposed policy gives employers a week of wiggle room after setting the schedule to make changes before locking it in.
The policy initiative is in the beginning stages, Lander stresses, and the city council may push for any number of changes, including broadening the law to include the entire service industry. As of now, the policy is aimed at the same group of fast-food employers that Cuomo’s wage board dealt with—chains with 30 or more locations nationwide. It’s those bigger chains that already utilize sophisticated scheduling software to minimize labor costs. They can use that same software, Lander says, to ensure that workers have a predictable and secure workweek.
To date, fair-scheduling laws have lagged behind wage hikes and paid sick-day ordinances in city halls and statehouses.
To date, fair-scheduling laws have lagged behind wage hikes and paid sick-day ordinances in city halls and statehouses. At the federal level, in 2014, Representative Rosa DeLauro and Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the Schedules that Work Act, which protects hourly workers from scheduling abuses—though with Republican control of Congress, the bill hasn’t gone anywhere.
But fair workweek policies now appear primed to become the next front in the low-wage worker movement.
But fair workweek policies now appear primed to become the next front in the low-wage worker movement. In response to pressure from SEIU’s Local 32BJ, a powerful force along the Eastern seaboard, policy-makers in Connecticut, Washington, D.C., and Jersey City may soon pass new rules that mandate 30-hour workweeks for service workers, like security guards and janitors, in large commercial and residential buildings. In November, voters in San Jose will decide on a ballot measure that would require companies with 35 or more workers to offer additional hours to part-timers before taking on new employees.
Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis are also considering fair-scheduling measures for retail and fast-food chains, though both efforts have run into heavy resistance from the business lobby. Workers and organizers are also pushing for a fair-scheduling law in Emeryville, a small city between Berkeley and Oakland that is a major retail-shopping destination for the east Bay Area.
“The momentum with the Fight for 15 has opened up this new space where policy-makers are starting to listen to the real needs that the country’s workforce has been talking about for a long time,” says Carrie Gleason, director of the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fair Workweek Initiative, which is assisting with local fair-scheduling efforts. “This isn’t a new issue,” Gleason adds. But “the accelerated pace in which these types of work-hour policies have taken off is a demonstration of the moment we’re in.”
By Justin Miller
Source
Turmoil Among Progressive, Latino Groups After Julian Castro Attacked
Turmoil Among Progressive, Latino Groups After Julian Castro Attacked
Why Are Progressive Groups Slamming Julián Castro?
Castro,Julian-Clinton,HillaryTexas Insider Report: WASHINGTON, D.C. – In the middle of April, POLITICO reported that several progressive...
Why Are Progressive Groups Slamming Julián Castro?
Castro,Julian-Clinton,HillaryTexas Insider Report: WASHINGTON, D.C. – In the middle of April, POLITICO reported that several progressive groups have targeted HUD Secretary Julián Castro, questioning his vice presidential qualifications if Hillary Clinton were to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The fight between a new-school Latino group and some old-school Latino groups erupted into chatter that kept getting stronger, so much so that Castro had to address it with NBC News.
The new-school latinos campaign led to dissension among Latino organizations. Others have weighed in on the story, claiming that Castro being Latino is just irrelevant. In the midst of all this hubbub, one thing became clear — none of those old-guard Latino groups countered on the merits of the attack against Castro. Apparently, he is untouchable, regardless what he does.
Joe Velasquez, a former deputy political director in the Clinton Administration, submitted his resignation letter from the board of American Family Voices (AFV), which was part of the coalition of groups that hit Castro for a HUD policy the groups argue is too friendly to financial institutions looking to buy distressed homes.
berniesanders-hillaryclintonAnd, the Sanders campaign denied having any part in the effort to discredit Castro.
Progressive groups target Julián Castro
They say the record of the HUD secretary makes him unsuitable to be Clinton’s VP.
By Edward-Isaac Dovere
The 41-year-old Julian Castro is seen by many as the perfect balance to Hillary Clinton. But the veepstakes oppo war has begun.
With Bernie Sanders’ durability exciting progressives at their potential to shape the Democratic race, a coalition of groups — many of them backers of the Vermont senator — are launching a preemptive strike against Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, aimed at disqualifying him from consideration to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate.
Tuesday morning, the group emailed petitions to several million people attacking Castro on the relatively obscure issue of his handling of mortgage sales and launching a website with an unsubtle address: DontSellOurHomesToWallStreet.org.
They’re just as open with their political aims: to publicly discredit Castro as a progressive, latching onto the mortgage issue to seed enough suspicion to keep him off Clinton’s shortlist.
“It’s a situation where the Clinton campaign wants Castro to be a major asset to her chances of winning the White House, and unless he changes his position related to foreclosures and loans, he’ll be a toxic asset to the Clinton campaign,” said Matt Nelson, the managing director for Presente.org, the nation’s largest Latino organizing group that focuses on social justice.
“All year, we’ve seen the candidates tripping over themselves to show how tough they’ll be on Wall Street,” said Kurt Walters, the campaign manager for Root Strikers, a 501(c4) group of Demand Progress and its 2 million affiliated activists, who is planning to deliver the petitions to Castro’s office when they’re ready. “Then to turn around and take a step backwards on that exact question, and Castro, Julian3hput someone who has been doing the exact opposite — I think it would be tough for a lot of people who care about Wall Street accountability to get excited about that pick.”
By the coalition’s calculations, HUD under Castro has sold 98 percent of the long-delinquent mortgages it acquired through a program aimed at preventing foreclosures to Wall Street banks under Castro’s watch, without anywhere near the number of needed strings attached. (HUD says that figure is way off.) And Nelson and Walters say that for a politician who’s aiming to be considered the vice presidential prospect for both progressives and minorities, Castro has done too much to help private equity firms like Blackstone, instead of black and Latino communities.
“If Secretary Castro fails to create significant momentum in terms of stopping the sale of mortgages to Wall Street, then I do think it disqualifies him. But there’s time left on the clock,” said Jonathan Westin, the director of New York Communities for Change, which was formed out of the remains of the community activist group ACORN. “I think a lot of the progressive movement would not be in support of a Castro ticket if he fails to make traction here.”
The 41-year-old Castro is seen by many as the perfect balance to Clinton — younger and Latino, with a history as mayor of San Antonio and now two years in the Obama administration, handsome and with a 2012 convention keynote speech that immediately made him a rising star to watch in the party. And people close to him say he’s a proven progressive across the board.
“Castro has a strong record at HUD fighting on behalf of progressive issues including protecting those with criminal records, standing up for LGBT rights and advocating for more inclusive communities through affirmatively furthering fair housing,” said one person close to the secretary.
But Maurice Weeks, an Atlanta-based organizer who works on housing justice in communities of color for the Center for Popular Democracy/CPD Action, said that Castro’s lack of action at HUD is breeding more gentrification and suffering in a way that should make blacks and Latinos pay attention.
“What I wouldn’t be excited about is any candidate, not just Julián, who is looking to further some of these practices,” Weeks said.
At issue is the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, started in 2010 to allow mortgages going toward foreclosure to be sold to what HUD calls “qualified bidders and encourages them to work with borrowers to help bring the loan out of default.”
The progressives attacking Castro say they believe the mortgages should be sold instead to nonprofits and other institutions that would care more about the communities involved. What Castro’s done, they say, has essentially amounted to a fire sale for Wall Street firms.
Castro,Julian3hRep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and one of Sanders’ few endorsers in Congress, complained about the program to Castro last week in a letter obtained by Politico.
“Your own Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, which was designed to help right the wrongs of the meltdown years, has been selling homes that once belonged to the families I’ve spoken with at rock-bottom prices to the Wall Street entities that created this situation in the first place,” Grijalva wrote.
HUD says that Castro has continued to meet with advocates, in the hopes of improving the policy, and points to several changes that have been made — including those that have increased the number of mortgages sold to nonprofits. An official pointed to changes made a year ago that, among other things, now require servicers buying loans to delay foreclosure for a year.
“Providing an option for homeowners to remain in their homes is one of the reasons the DASP program was created” said a HUD spokesperson. “We’ve received feedback from stakeholders which has led us to make a number of important changes to the program including the creation of nonprofit-only pools and delaying foreclosure for a year. Additionally, we are still evaluating further enhancements to the program to meet our core mission.”
But that’s not enough for the groups joining the coalition to attack Castro. Those include the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action, American Family Voices, Color of Change, Courage Campaign, CPD Action, Daily Kos, MoveOn, New York Communities for Change, Other 98%, Presente, RootsAction, Rootstrikers and the Working Families Party.
With the exception of the Working Families Party, which is backing Sanders, the groups have not formally endorsed a candidate in the presidential primaries.
Most conversations about Clinton’s prospective pick center on Castro and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and the secretary’s ambitions to be the vice presidential nominee are well known.
But among progressives, so are the suspicions about his bona fides. The red banner across the website proclaiming “TELL HUD SECRETARY JULIAN CASTRO: STOP SELLING OUR NEIGHBORHOODS TO WALL STREET!” amounts to the opening salvo in doing something about it.
“There’s a lot of hope around him,” said Brandi Collins, campaign director for the 1.2-million member Color of Change, who said she was one of the people excited by the possibilities opened up by his keynote speech.
Collins said this complaint about Castro’s leadership is reflective of a whole range of issues her organization has had with what members say is the secretary’s closeness to Wall Street and lack of attention to black and brown communities.
“If he’s not showing up for our communities while the cameras aren’t there, we don’t know that he’ll show up when he’s on his way to the White House,” Collins said.
According to Julia Gordon, formerly at the Center for American Progress and currently an executive vice president at the National Community Stabilization Trust, the coalition may have a point — if only because it is taking advantage of opaque accounting at HUD. Gordon said she’s met often with HUD about these issues but hasn’t seen the kind of progress she’d like or evidence that the program matches the claims that officials make.
“We know it’s been good for investors. According to HUD, it’s been good for the fund, although the level of detail that they release to account for it is minimal. We really don’t know how good it’s been for the homeowners, and that’s where this wave of protests is coming from,” Gordon said.
Laurie Goodman, the director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, said that the people who are attacking Castro for selling the loans to Wall Street are misinterpreting the pragmatic realities about what’s in play.
The mortgages in question tend to be delinquent for over two years, she said, and getting them out of HUD with its limited resources and tools to deal with them is a positive step for homeowners. Only big banks can take on mortgages like that, she argued, making the nonprofit issue moot.
“The only way to help these borrowers is to sell the loans. You don’t have any other buyers big enough in size,” she said. “Even if you wanted to do something different, you couldn’t.”
Within that, though, Goodman credited HUD under Castro for making “some really big improvements.”
Not nearly enough, according to Gordon.
“Both HUD and [the Federal Housing Finance Agency] have let down communities by not focusing on what they want the buyer to do with these,” Gordon said, arguing that they’ve been focused instead on offloading the debt. “They’re just like, ‘Get it away from me.’”
The idea that Castro would be the first Latino on a national ticket means something, Nelson said, though he argued that this only adds to the burden for the secretary to show leadership on the mortgage issue in the way progressives want at this moment of added attention to their concerns.
Nelson said that at Presente, they think of it like a parable — it doesn’t make it any better to be hurt if the hurt is coming from one of their own.
There are two trees in a forest, Nelson said, and they see an ax coming to chop them down. “Don’t worry,” says one tree to the other, “the handle’s one of us.”
“Basically,” Nelson said, “we’re fighting to make sure Castro isn’t the handle.”
By Edward-Isaac Dovere
Source
Health industry giants get tax windfall. But it's unclear how it will be used.*
Health industry giants get tax windfall. But it's unclear how it will be used.*
The man with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, who caught national attention for confronting Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) last year about the Republican tax bill, has launched a new “Be a Hero” campaign...
The man with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, who caught national attention for confronting Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) last year about the Republican tax bill, has launched a new “Be a Hero” campaign targeting Republicans. In a new minute-long TV and online ad running ahead of an April 24 election in Arizona’s 8th congressional district, Ady Barkan slams Republicans for pushing tax legislation that could affect his health care if lower tax revenue leads to eventual federal benefit cuts.
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.
Education ‘Day of Action’ set Monday in 60-plus cities
The Washington Post - December 6, 2013, by Valerie Strauss - A coalition of education, labor, civic and civil rights organizations, led by the American Federation of Teachers, is staging a “...
The Washington Post - December 6, 2013, by Valerie Strauss - A coalition of education, labor, civic and civil rights organizations, led by the American Federation of Teachers, is staging a “National Day of Action” on Monday with dozens of coordinated events in cities across the country that are aimed at building a national movement to fight corporate-influenced school reform and offer alternative ways to improve public education. The AFT is buying $1.2 million in radio, print and online ads to get out the message.
Protests have been building this year in different parts of the country against the education reform movement that is dominated by the use of standardized test scores as the chief “accountability” metric and school “choice” that has led to the growing privatization of public schools. The AFT says that Monday will be the first time so many events — protest marches, news conferences, and town halls scheduled in 60 cities including Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Austin, Houston and other Texas cities, Boise, Los Angeles and several locations in Florida — have been coordinated to send a message to policymakers that school reform should be focused not on closing schools, punishing teachers and deluging kids with tests but on providing teachers and students with the resources they need to teach and learn.
“Teachers, parents, students and community members are banding together to demand a new direction for public education,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said. “In some ways, this Day of Action is years in the making. Parents, students, teachers and community members have been coming together in places like Chicago, Philadelphia and New York to call out what’s not working and create solutions that do. Text-fixation, austerity, privatization, division, competition are not working for our students – as we saw in the PISA results this week. Our schools need evidence-based, community-based solutions like early childhood education, wraparound services, professional autonomy and development, parent voices and project-based learning. That’s what this Day of Action is about. That’s what reclaiming the promise is about. These are our schools and they need our solutions.”
Dozens of organizations representing parents, educators, clergy, civil rights activists, and community groups are participating in the event, which is being sponsored nationally by these groups: Alliance for Educational Justice, American Federation of Teachers, Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Dignity in Schools Coalition, Gamaliel Network, Journey for Justice Alliance, Leadership Center for the Common Good, League of United Latin American Citizens, National Education Association, National Opportunity to Learn Campaign and the Service Employees International Union.
In October, a number of organizations came together to come up with a strategy to build a national movement around shared principles, which you can read find here. Among the principles:
Public schools are public institutions.
Our school districts should be committed to providing all children with the opportunity to attend a quality public school in their community. The corporate model of school reform seeks to turn public schools over to private managers and encourages competition — as opposed to collaboration — between schools and teachers. These strategies take away the public’s right to have a voice in their schools, and inherently create winners and losers among both schools and students. Our most vulnerable children become collateral damage in these reforms. We will not accept that …
Our voices matter.
Those closest to the education process — teachers, administrators, school staff, students and their parents and communities — must have a voice in education policy and practice. Our schools and districts should be guided by them, not by corporate executives, entrepreneurs or philanthropists. Top-down interventions rarely address the real needs of schools or students …
Strong public schools create strong communities.
Schools are community institutions as well as centers of learning. While education alone cannot eradicate poverty, schools can help to coordinate the supports and services their students and families need to thrive. Corporate reform strategies ignore the challenges that students bring with them to school each day, and view schools as separate and autonomous from the communities in which they sit.
• “Community Schools” that provide supports and services for students and their families, such as basic healthcare and dental care, mentoring programs, English language classes and more, help strengthen whole communities as well as individual students …
Assessments should be used to improve instruction.
Assessments are critical tools to guide teachers in improving their lesson plans and framing their instruction to meet the needs of individual students. We support accountability. But standardized assessments are misused when teachers are fired, schools are closed and students are penalized based on a single set of scores. Excessive high-stakes testing takes away valuable instructional time and narrows the curriculum — with the greatest impact on our most vulnerable students.
Quality teaching must be delivered by committed, respected and supported educators.
Today’s corporate reformers have launched a war on teachers. We believe that teachers should be honored. Teaching is a career, not a temporary stop on the way to one. Our teachers should be well-trained and supported. They should be given the opportunity to assume leadership roles in their schools. Highly qualified teachers and school staff are our schools’ greatest assets. Let’s treat them that way …
Schools must be welcoming and respectful places for all.
Schools should be welcoming and inclusive. Students, parents, educators and community residents should feel that their cultures and contributions are respected and valued. Schools that push out the most vulnerable students and treat parents as intruders cannot succeed in creating a strong learning environment. Respectful schools are better places to both work and learn …
Our schools must be fully funded for success and equity.
More than 50 years ago, in Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that African-American students were being denied their constitutional right to an integrated and equitable public education. We have not come far enough. Today our schools remain segregated and unequal. When we shortchange some students, we shortchange our nation as a whole. It is time to fund public schools for success and equity, for we are destined to hand off the future of our nation to all our young people.
• We must end the practice of funding our schools based on local property wealth. Only when we take responsibility for all our schools, and all our children, will schools succeed for all our society …
The events planned for Monday’s National Day of Action include a town hall in Washington, D.C., at which teachers and parents will develop a community-driven vision for public schools, starting at 6 p.m. at Eastern High School. In New York City, union, community and youth partners fighting to win universal full-day prekindergarten will host a rally marking the start of a joint labor-community campaign to support new education initiatives as part of a “new day for public education in New York City” under Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio.
In Houston, union and community partners will hold a news conference and rally outside the school board offices, where they will call for an end to an overreliance on tests and for fair teacher evaluations. In Chicago, organized parents, teachers and youths will hold a news conference at City Hall and a march to the headquarters of corporate agents such as Loop Capital to demand equitable funding and a public voice in education. In Boise, Idaho, parents, teachers and several community organizations will gather around the state Capitol to support school funding for Idaho public schools, which have some of the lowest state funding in the country.
Here’s how an action in Philadelphia is described on the event list:
A powerful contingent of community and youth groups, parents and labor unions will rally outside Gov. Tom Corbett’s Philadelphia office in coordination with partners in Pittsburgh, followed by a march to the corporate office of Loop Capital, an Illinois bank that has contributed to the privatizing of schools in Chicago and handed out bad interest loans that have crippled Philadelphia’s school system. The union-community alliance is fighting to restore statewide education funding, establish a new equitable education funding formula in 2014, and demand that Loop Capital pay back the bad loans.
The sponsors are the National Day of Action are planning more action in the spring.
Source
Report Spotlights the New York Elites Who Fund Nativist Groups
Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is at the right end of his party's spectrum on immigration issues, but according to a new report put out by...
Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is at the right end of his party's spectrum on immigration issues, but according to a new report put out by advocates for the undocumented, titled “Backers of Hate in the Empire State,” he's hardly alone in pushing a nativist agenda in New York. The report names the names of others who help fund and organize the institutions of American nativisim.
To these advocates, the Center for Public Democracy Action and Make the Road Action Fund, the Trump campaign's restrictionist immigration policies, backed up by an emphasis on the undocumented’s supposed criminality and the need to “take our country back,” are dangerous and extreme. Early on in his campaign, Trump described Mexican immigrantsas drug dealers and “rapists," released a plan for the mass deportation of 11.3 million undocumented immigrants, and called for the abolition of birthright citizenship.
The report argues that the prominence of such discourse in our politics does not reflect public opinion, which broadly supports a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented. Rather, this rhetoric is driven by the activism of an impassioned minority, which influences immigration politics through organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). And groups like FAIR are driven by New Yorkers like Alan and Donald Weeden.
The Weedens are best known as the directors of the Weeden Foundation, an environmentalist nonprofit based in New York. On its website, the foundation calls the “protection of biodiversity” its top priority. But in the name of “population stabilization,” the foundation and its directors have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on groups that the report asserts are working to limit the ethnic diversity of the United States.
The Weeden Foundation donated $100,000 to FAIR in 2013, and Alan Weeden has served on the group’s Board of Directors, according to the report. In Washington, FAIR is treated like a legitimate lobby, and its leaders have been invited to testify before Congress on matters of immigration more than 100 times. But the Southern Poverty Law Centerclassifies FAIR as a hate group, and the Anti-Defamation League has called the group reckless and xenophobic.
FAIR was founded in 1979 by John Tanton, a retired ophthalmologist and pioneering anti-immigration activist. Tanton has well-documented ties to several white nationalist leaders, and once authored a paper titled “The Case for Passive Eugenics.” In a letter from 1993, Tanton wrote, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” While Tanton is no longer in FAIR’s leadership, he remains a celebrated figure in the organization. And FAIR’s current president, Dan Stein, appears to share much of Tanton’s basic worldview. In 1998, Stein said, “Immigrants don't come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing … Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans.” FAIR was instrumental in the passage of Arizona’s SB 1070 law, which requires police to determine the immigration status of someone arrested or detained when they have “reasonable suspicion” that the individual is not in the U.S. legally — a measure that critics argued would encourage the racial profiling of Hispanic immigrants.
Donald E. Weeden sits on the board of NumbersUSA, and his family foundation gave the group $350,000 in 2013. Founded by Tanton ally Roy Beck, NumbersUSA operates as a grassroots-driven lobby for reducing immigration to pre-1965 levels. One of NumbersUSA’s “sensible solutions” for immigration is the elimination of birthright citizenship, a fringe policy that gained mainstream visibility with Trump’s recent backing.
Former New York University professor and conservative author Carol A. Iannone sits on the Board of Directors at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Spun off from FAIR in 1985, CIS is a putatively nonpartisan think tank whose self-described mission is to provide policymakers with "reliable information about the social, economic, environmental, security, and fiscal consequences of legal and illegal immigration into the United States." The think tank’s research and statistics are often cited by members of Congress and mainstream news outlets, despite falling under perpetual criticism for their distortions. In 2014, a CIS blog post provided readers with a map titled “A Town Near You? ICE Reveals Locations of Convicted Murderers It Freed.” The map underscored the alarmism of a CIS report that claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had released 68,000 criminal aliens in 2013. Both ICE and an investigation by the Daily Beast found the report to be significantly misleading, both for the way it grouped traffic convictions with more serious crimes, and suggested that the U.S. government has the authority to indefinitely detain or deport any undocumented immigrant who is guilty of any crime. A 2001 Supreme Court ruling requires the U.S. to release undocumented immigrants who have served out their prison sentences, even if they cannot be deported because of their home country's denial of reentry.
In her own work, Iannone has echoed Tanton’s concerns with immigration’s threat to American culture, writing in The American Conservative that the 1965 Immigration Act brought about a “significant change in our national character,” as it allowed for mass immigration “to overwhelm our assimilative capacity.”
Among the other individuals singled out in the report is Barbara Winston, president of the Bruce Winston Gem Corporation and a prominent donor to the GOP, who Newsmax once put on its list of 2015’s “75 Most Influential Jewish Republicans.” Winston sits on the board of Keep Identities Safe, a group founded in the wake of September 11 to lobby for restricting access to driver's licenses, so as to prevent future terrorists from being able to board airplanes. However, the group has gone on to advocate for policies combating “ID fraud” of all kinds, including the fake IDs that allow teenagers to purchase alcohol. While much of the group’s advocacy is founded on the premise that the undocumented are more likely to commit acts of terrorism than non-U.S. citizens, Keeping Identities Safe is less intimately tied to the broader American nativist movement than the other organizations the report derides.
But the group has had a profound impact on the lives of undocumented New Yorkers. In 2007, while operating under their former name, Coalition for a Secure Driver’s License, the lobby helped defeat a bill that would have granted undocumented immigrants access to state licenses in New York. At the time, that opposition was hardly limited to hard-core nativists — current Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton came out against the measure during her last presidential campaign.
This time around, Clinton is campaigning in support of state licenses for the undocumented. Her reversal is a testament to the success that groups like Make the Road Action Fund have had in shifting the boundaries of the immigration debate within the Democratic Party.
With its new report, the group hopes to extend its influence to the other side of the aisle. The true target of the report is not the individual donors and activists it names, who are all perfectly familiar with their own associations and work. Rather, the research is aimed squarely at the New York GOP.
“We think that the Republican Party of New York should dissociate themselves, not only from the candidates that are pushing this hateful rhetoric, but also from the institutions and individuals that are supporting them,” Make the Road Action Fund co-director Javier Valdés told Daily Intelligencer.
The group will hold a protest outside of a storefront owned by Barbara Winston Tuesday afternoon, with the aim of highlighting the diamond seller’s ties to both the New York GOP and nativist causes.
For now, though, New York’s most prominent Republican continues to push the boundaries of the immigration debate ever rightward, whilesteadily advancing toward a presidential nomination.
Corrections: An earlier version of this story identified Carol Iannone as a current professor at NYU. Ms. Iannone has not been affiliated with the university since 1999. It also failed to properly credit the assertion that FAIR and CIS are organizations that seek to "limit the ethnic diversity of the United States" to the report's authors. Both organizations dispute that characterization of their work.
Source: New York Magazine
Another Study Finds Unaccountable Charter Schools Dogged by Corruption
Moyers & Company - October 6, 2014, by Joshua Holland - In today’s Washington Post, Jeff Bryant, director of the Education Opportunity Network,...
Moyers & Company - October 6, 2014, by Joshua Holland - In today’s Washington Post, Jeff Bryant, director of the Education Opportunity Network, writes about the promises that were first offered by advocates of the charter school industry:
When former President Bill Clinton recently meandered onto the topic of charter schools, he mentioned something about an “original bargain” that charters were, according to the reporter for The Huffington Post, “supposed to do a better job of educating students.”
A writer at Salon called the remark “stunning” because it brought to light the fact that the overwhelming majority of charter schools do no better than traditional public schools. Yet… charter schools are rarely shuttered for low academic performance….
In a real “bargaining process,” those who bear the consequences of the deal have some say-so on the terms, the deal-makers have to represent themselves honestly (or the deal is off and the negotiating ends), and there are measures in place to ensure everyone involved is held accountable after the deal has been struck.
But that’s not what’s happening in the great charter industry rollout transpiring across the country. Rather than a negotiation over terms, charters are being imposed on communities – either by legislative fiat or well-engineered public policy campaigns. Many charter school operators keep their practices hidden or have been found to be blatantly corrupt. And no one seems to be doing anything to ensure real accountability for these rapidly expanding school operations.
But in May, BillMoyers.com looked at a report issued by Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy — two groups that oppose school privatization. The study examined charter schools’ performance in 15 states, and revealed $136 million in fraud, waste and abuse in those states. The authors of that study wrote that, “where there is little oversight, and lots of public dollars available, there are incentives for ethically challenged charter operators to charge for services that were never provided.”
Last week, they released a follow-up study of charter schools in Pennsylvania. It found that “charter school officials have defrauded at least $30 million intended for Pennsylvania school children since 1997.”
Yet every year virtually all of the state’s charter schools are found to be financially sound. While the state has complex, multi-layered systems of oversight of the charter system, this history of financial fraud makes it clear that these systems are not effectively detecting or preventing fraud. Indeed, the vast majority of fraud was uncovered by whistleblowers and media exposés, not by the state’s oversight agencies.
The authors found that while the auditing techniques used by Pennsylvania regulators could identify inefficiencies, oversight agencies don’t use tools “specifically designed to uncover fraud.” It also found that oversight agencies were understaffed and underfunded. “With too few qualified people on staff, and too little training, agencies are unable to uncover clues that might lead to fuller investigations and the discovery of fraud,” write the report’s authors.
They also noted that their findings weren’t unique:
Numerous government entities have raised the flag about the risk of fraud nationally and in Pennsylvania. Reporting in 2010 on the lack of charter-school oversight in states throughout the country, the Office of the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Education raised concerns that state-level education departments were failing “to provide adequate oversight needed to ensure that Federal funds [were] properly used and accounted for.” Also in 2010 in Philadelphia (which educates 50 percent of all Pennsylvania charter-school students), the Office of the Controller performed a “fraud vulnerability assessment” of the city’s oversight of charter schools and reported that the Charter School Office… made the city’s more than $290 million paid to charter schools “extremely vulnerable to fraud, waste, and abuse.” A 2014 follow-up report found that the School District of Philadelphia continues to provide “minimal oversight over charter schools except during the charter renewal process.”
You can download the entire report on Pennsylvania charter schools at The Center for Popular Democracy.
‘Patriot’ Dimon dodges calls to disavow Trump policies
By Ben McLannahan
Jamie Dimon endured a rough ride at the annual meeting of America’s biggest bank on Tuesday morning, as shareholders repeatedly attacked the JPMorgan Chase chief over his...
By Ben McLannahan
Jamie Dimon endured a rough ride at the annual meeting of America’s biggest bank on Tuesday morning, as shareholders repeatedly attacked the JPMorgan Chase chief over his ties to the administration of Donald Trump.
In December Mr Dimon was named chairman of the Business Roundtable, a group of almost 200 CEOs which is among the most prominent lobbying groups in Washington. Mr Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan for the past 11 years and chairman for 10, is also a member of Mr Trump’s strategic and policy forum, which meets regularly to shape the economic agenda.
At the meeting in Wilmington, Delaware, a succession of shareholders challenged Mr Dimon to publicly disavow some of Mr Trump’s policies, such as his curbs on immigration from predominantly Muslim countries and his building a wall on the border with Mexico. One shareholder noted that users had sent more than 4000 messages to a website, backersofhate.org, urging Mr Dimon to “distance himself from hateful policies of human suffering”.
After staying silent throughout several speeches from the floor, Mr Dimon defended the bank’s record on Mexico, its support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and its funding of private prisons.
Finally, he said of Mr Trump: “He is the president of the United States, he is the pilot flying the aeroplane. I’d try to help any president of the US because I’m a patriot. That does not mean I agree with every policy he is trying to implement.”
Mr Dimon has long been the most outspoken of the big-bank chiefs in the US, often using his shareholder letter as a platform for taking positions on matters of public policy, and for challenging the regulatory framework put in place since the 2008 crisis.
In the weeks after the presidential election, the 61 year old was approached by members of Mr Trump’s transition team to serve as Treasury secretary but declined, saying he was unsuited to the role, according to people familiar with the discussions.
As hostile questioning resumed after his remarks at the Tuesday meeting, Mr Dimon tried to lighten the mood, saying “you’re starting to hurt my feelings”. The shareholder admonished him by saying that just by hearing him out, the chief executive would earn more than $100.
“I hope it’s worth it!” said Mr Dimon, who was paid $28m last year.
“This is not a laughing matter,” the shareholder replied.
The meeting stood in contrast to the peaceful gathering at the Goldman Sachs building in Jersey City at the end of last month, when chief executive Lloyd Blankfein faced just two questions from the floor, both of them friendly. Mr Blankfein, who is also chairman of the board, closed the meeting within just 24 minutes.
Mr Dimon wrapped up Tuesday’s proceedings by saying the entire board “takes this feedback seriously”.
Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, said after the meeting that until Mr Dimon takes a stronger stand her organisation would continue to associate JPMorgan Chase with Mr Trump’s “anti-immigration” agenda.
Ms Archila arrived in America 20 years ago to reunite with her father, who had fled political violence in Colombia.
“I don’t think we have a plan to really inflict economic damages on the bank just yet,” she said. “But what we do have a plan for, is to force them to clarify whose side they’re on.”
Did two women in an elevator just change everything?
Jeff Flake loves decorum, but it doesn't look like it was decorous behavior that moved him to reconsider a vote that could change the country's future. Was it two women in an elevator, yelling at...
Jeff Flake loves decorum, but it doesn't look like it was decorous behavior that moved him to reconsider a vote that could change the country's future. Was it two women in an elevator, yelling at him?
Read the full article here.
Charter Financing: Study Finds Too Little Accountability in California
San Jose Mercury News - April 9, 2014, by Raymond Blanchard - Every parent wishes their children will reach their highest potential to live the life they choose. We do everything in our power to...
San Jose Mercury News - April 9, 2014, by Raymond Blanchard - Every parent wishes their children will reach their highest potential to live the life they choose. We do everything in our power to make this wish a reality, and we know an extraordinary education is essential.
Fulfilling this wish is difficult, particularly in the Bay Area. When California, the eighth largest economy in the world, ranks 49th among the states in school spending, we know it's difficult for our schools to provide the best education possible.
That's why I enrolled my children in Gilroy Prep Charter School, a Navigator school that achieved the highest API score -- 978 -- in California for a first-year charter school in 2011-12. I also served on the Navigator Board for three years but recently resigned due to transparency and accountability concerns with the Charter Management Organization (CMO), a service some charters use to manage their finances.
Now I find that my concerns were not an aberration. A recent study by the Center for Popular Democracy (linked with this article at mercurynews.com/opinion) found mismanagement of funds, fraud and abuse to the tune of $80 billion, or $160,000 per child, across all California charter schools, and our state could lose another $100 million in 2015 to charter school fraud. That's enough money to pay full tuition and board for every student in California at a University of California school for four years.
The report found that charter schools in California undergo little monitoring of finances, and the districts that oversee charter schools do not have the resources to provide sufficient oversight. Over my three years on the Navigator board, the local districts only attended seven board meetings.
Charter schools were created to bridge the achievement gap by granting increased freedom to administrators, teachers and parents to innovate without being subject to most California education laws. I support charter schools and think many of them provide an excellent education: 60 percent of Santa Clara County charter schools outperform the districts in which they reside. As a former entrepreneur and venture investor, I am all for freedom, innovation, competition and choice.
But the charter school financial model is at risk of failing.
Charter Management Organizations use public money with little public accountability and transparency, and that's starting to cause material financial problems. Not all charter schools have a CMO and run very well on their own, and some CMO-run charter schools are clearly better than others.
In 2014, charter schools authorized by the Santa Clara County Board of Education received $42 million in public revenue, excluding the millions of dollars in philanthropic investments. Some CMOs charge the schools they manage up to 25 percent of school revenue, while our local district charges about 6 percent per school.
In Santa Clara County, 73 percent of charter schools spent $1,287 less per student than their district school peers in 2012-2013. That's worth a musical instrument, computer, books, iPad and field trip per child. Where does the money go? It's not clear, and that's a problem.
To avoid financial risks, charter schools should be held to the same types of regulations as other public schools and the boards that oversee them. All public schools should be given the same freedoms charter schools have to innovate.
My wish is that all public schools be excellent educational institutions and stewards of our tax money. However, we must improve transparency and accountability. I think this is a wish we can all agree on.
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