Campaign News

Fox News Latino - June 16, 2014, by EFE - A group led by New York state Sen. Gustavo Rivera launched Monday a campaign that proposes awarding state "citizenship" to the estimated 2.7 million immigrants who live in the Empire State, regardless of their immigration status.

"We have failed with immigration reform nationally and what we want is to provide an opportunity for the almost 3 million people who live and contribute to the public treasury in our state to take part in its political, civic and economic life," Rivera told Efe Monday before introducing the bill.

Dubbed the New York Is Home Act, the bill contemplates granting citizenship to immigrants who can show they have lived in the state and paid their taxes for the past three years, and who promise to obey state laws, continue paying their taxes and agree to serve on a jury.

Immigrants who fulfill these requisites will receive a new document allowing students to pay in-state tuition and receive financial aid to attend state universities, be eligible for healthcare under Medicaid, obtain a driver's license, have the right to vote in local and state elections and even run for public office.

"We're starting out here in New York but the idea is to extend this movement across the country to other states like California, Illinois and Texas, and to treat our fellow workers, students and store owners as they deserve," Rivera said.

The campaign that kicked off Monday at Manhattan's Battery Park, with the Statue of Liberty in the background, has the backing of political and religious leaders of the region, along with the support of organizations like the Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road New York and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

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Austin, Tex. — I’m a member of the Austin City Council, and this month Texas State Troopers arrested me for refusing to leave Gov. Greg Abbott’s office during a protest against the anti-immigrant Senate Bill 4.

The bill, which Mr. Abbott signed May 6, represents the most dangerous type of legislative threat facing immigrants in our country. It has been called a “show me your papers” bill because it allows police officers — including those on college campuses — to question the immigration status of anyone they arrest, or even simply detain, including during traffic stops.

Read the full article here.

The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it will keep its benchmark interest rate at current levels in response to lackluster job creation in recent months and other discouraging economic data.

The decision will shield American consumers from higher borrowing costs, but it also reflects the fragility and unpredictability of the current economic recovery, some seven years after the Great Recession officially ended.

The central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee is keeping the influential target federal funds rate — the Fed-set interest rate banks charge one another for overnight lending — at a range of 0.25 to 0.5 percent. Since the rate is a benchmark for lending throughout the economy, leaving it unchanged will likely prevent higher interest rates on mortgages, car loans and other household debts.

The Fed has a dual mandate to craft monetary policy that both maximizes employment and keeps inflation in check. The FOMC lowers the federal funds rate to accelerate job growth by reducing borrowing costs. It raises the rate to limit price inflation by slowing the pace of job growth.

The FOMC’s decision not to do the latter in June was widely expected. Fed officials signaled earlier this month that disappointing job creation had undermined the case for a rate hike. The economy created just 38,000 jobs in May, and new data show that the preceding two months produced fewer jobs than previously believed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The central bank is also responding to tepid inflation. The price of consumer goods, excluding food and energy, rose 1.6 percent in the 12 months ending in April, according to the price index favored by the Fed — well below the Fed’s 2-percent target. And a University of Michigan survey revealed on Friday that U.S. households’ expectations of long-term inflation are lower than they have been at any point since the survey began collecting data in 1979.

In a press conference following the announcement, Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen acknowledged the role that those developments played in the central bank’s decision, noting that “recent economic indicators have been mixed.”

Yellen also said that the prospect of a “Brexit,” or British exit from the European Union, was “one of the factors” that led the central bank to hold off on an interest rate hike. The United Kingdom will vote on the country’s membership in the EU on June 23.

If the U.K. chooses to leave the EU, which functions as a single market, it could ultimately have adverse effects on the U.S. economic outlook, Yellen suggested. A higher percentage of British voters supported Brexit than opposed it in a poll released on Monday.

The Fed last raised the federal funds rate by one-quarter of a percentage point in December, the first increase since the financial crisis. The rate had been at or near zero — 0 to 0.25 percent — since December 2008.

With the December interest rate increase, the Fed seemed to express confidence that the economic recovery had entered a new phase, indicating it was time to pivot to the work of preventing inflation. Yellen predicted that the move would be the first in a series of small interest rate hikes that would gradually raise rates to levels that are more historically normal.

Since then, however, disappointing economic data have repeatedly delayed the pace of those increases. Slower global demand reduced the availability of credit, and wage growth remained sluggish, prompting the Fed not to raise the federal funds rate in March.

Fed officials suggested in May that economic conditions would finally permit them to raise the rate again in June. But the May job creation data, released on June 3, rapidly dashed those plans.

The central bank’s next opportunity to announce a rate hike will be July 27, after a meeting of the FOMC.

Wednesday’s announcement will come as welcome news to many progressive economists and activists who have long argued that the job market has much more room to grow before inflation becomes a serious problem.

While the official unemployment rate is 4.7 percent, much of its recent decline is due to people dropping out of the workforce altogether. The labor force participation rate, which measures the percentage of people actively seeking work in addition to those who are working, is significantly lower than it was in 2000.

In fact, when you exclude workers 55 or older who may have retired voluntarily, labor force participation is lower now than it was at its worst point during the past two business cycles, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

A job market where people continue to give up on finding work is part of the reason wage growth has failed to meet expectations, since employers still have little reason to compete for workers, progressive economists argue. Average hourly pay rose 2.5 percent in the 12-month period ending in May, not enough for a significant boost in most Americans’ paychecks.

The Fed Up campaign, a coalition of progressive groups that advocates for Fed policy that is favorable to workers and communities of color, cites figures like those when pleading with the Fed to hold off on raising rates. Fed Up has called on the Fed not to raise the benchmark interest rate until “the economic recovery reaches all communities,” said Jordan Haedtler, Fed Up campaign manager.

Progressives were overjoyed when presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton expressed her sympathy with these concerns last month. The campaign said in a statement that as president, Clinton would appoint Fed officials who take seriously the central bank’s mandate to maximize employment, in addition to its duty to tamp down inflation.

Clinton stands to benefit politically from Wednesday’s announcement, since voters typically judge the candidate of the incumbent party for the economy’s performance. A rate increase would have squeezed economic demand, risking even slower job growth in the months ahead of the general election.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has expressed a wide variety of views about the Fed. He most recently suggested that he supports low interest rates, but that he plans to replace Yellen as Fed chair.

Yellen said Wednesday that the central bank will act based on economic data in the coming months, even if its actions are perceived as affecting the general election in November. “We are very focused on assessing the economic outlook and making changes that are appropriate without taking politics into account,” she said.

This piece has been updated with Yellen’s comments.

By Daniel Marans

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In part one of this two-part posting, I looked at the gender bias at the Federal Reserve, showing how men vastly outnumber women in key posts at Federal Reserve Banks throughout the United States despite the Fed's Congressional mandate.  In part two of this posting, I want to take an additional look at the Fed's bias; its failure to represent the economic diversity of America.

For those of you that either didn't read part one or who are unaware of the Federal Reserve's organizational setup, here is a graphic from a report by the Center for Popular Democracy showing the link between the Federal Reserve and its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and its district banks known as Federal Reserve Banks:

Here is a map showing the regions covered by each of the 12 district banks (Federal Reserve Banks) and the 24 branches within each district:

Note that Alaska and Hawaii are covered by the San Francisco district.

If we start at the top of the organizational chart, the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for a 14-year term of office.  The President (and Senate) also confirm two members of the Board to be Chair (currently Janet Yellen) and Vice Chair for four year terms.  The FOMC consists of 12 members; the seven aforementioned Board members, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and four other regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents on a rotating, one-year term basis. The Federal Reserve Banks form an important link between the Federal Reserve and their local economy and help to dictate the Federal Reserve's monetary policies.  Each of the twelve district banks has their own president and boards of directors (nine directors in total for each bank); in addition, each of the 24 district branches has its own directors (seven directors in total for each branch).  The Board of Directors for each Reserve Bank are appointed in two ways; the majority are appointed by the Reserve Bank and the remainder are appointed by the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors.  The directors for each district bank then appoint their own president and vice president.  It all sounds rather nepotistic, doesn't it? 

By law, under the Federal Reserve Reform Act of 1977, the Boards of Directors of the Federal Reserve are to be

"...elected with due but not exclusive consideration to the interests of agriculture, commerce, industry, services, labor and consumers.". 

That is, each of the leaders/directors of the world's most influential central bank and its district banking system are to represent a wide variety of each of the economic sectors that make up the American economy.

The report by the Center for Popular Democracy compares the economic sector representation during the period from 2006 to 2010 when the Government Accountability Office examined the composition of the Federal Reserve Bank Boards and the present.  Here is a graphic showing the past and present composition:

In both 2006 to 2010 and 2016, directors from the banking sector filled over one-third of the board seats, growing by 3 percentage points over the timeframe of the study.  In combination, in 2016, representatives from the commercial and industrial sector and the banking sector filled 68 percent of seats, up from 63 percent in 2006 to 2010.   The service sector's representation fell from 26 percent of seats to 18 percent and agriculture and food processing saw their representation fall from 6 percent of seats to 3 percent.  Interestingly, even though they are relatively poorly represented compared to the other sectors, the number of directors affiliated with consumer and community organizations rose from 3 percent to 8 percent.

For your illumination, here are a few of the Directors for each of the Federal Reserve Banks that you can get a sense of who is dictating America's monetary policies:

If you are interested in who is on the boards of the other Federal Reserve Banks, please see the original report.

Interestingly, during the "financial crisis" of 2008, there was some question about directors' independence and actions taken by the Federal Reserve banks since there was at least the perception of conflicts of interest when director-affliated institutions took part in the Federal Reserve System's emergency programs.  With a preponderance of representation from the banking and commercial sectors, it certainly doesn't take a genius to figure out which sectors of the economy will likely be favoured by Federal Reserve policies should there be another "financial crisis", does it? 

By A Political Junkie

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