Campaign News

The St. Louis American - March 12, 2014, by Rebecca Rivas - African-American residents are sick and tired of hearing about an economic recovery that does not apply to them, said Derek Laney, an organizer for Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment.

In St. Louis, the unemployment rates for the black community remains triple the rate of white residents, 14.1 percent for blacks compared to 5.7 percent for whites, he said. However, some economists claim that the economy is rapidly approaching full employment.

“Is there only one set of the population that matters?” Laney said. “And if they are all right, we’re all right? That’s something we can’t accept.”

On Thursday, March 5, activists attempted to ask James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, those same questions. At noon, a coalition of community-based organizations, faith leaders, elected officials, labor unions and service organizations gathered in front of the St. Louis Fed in downtown St. Louis as a part of the national Fed Up Campaign (whatrecovery.org).

They pointed to a new report by the Center for Popular Democracy released this month that details the difficulties for African-American families to find living-wage employment. The report is titled, “Wall Street, Main Street, and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard: Why African Americans Must Not Be Left Out of the Federal Reserve’s Full-Employment Mandate.”

In response to the protest, a St. Louis Fed spokeswoman stated in an email to The St. Louis American: “We are aware of the protest at the St. Louis Fed and respect people’s right to protest peacefully.”

The coalition asked Bullard to prioritize full employment and rising wages for all communities. Laney said as the economy starts to recover, some are calling for the Fed to raise interest rates to prevent wages from rising – which would severely impact families still struggling to recover from the Great Recession. In mid-March, the St. Louis Fed and its leaders will meet to discuss policy. Laney said they hoped the action will help “shape those discussions.”

The report emphasizes that the Federal Reserve is responsible for keeping inflation stable, regulating the financial system and ensuring full employment.

“These mandates reflect the tension between the interests of Wall Street on the one hand and Main Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on the other,” the report states. “As a general matter, corporate and finance executives want to limit wage growth – or, as they call it, ‘wage inflation’ – and to maximize their future profits from lending money.”

The report argues that in past decades, the Federal Reserve resolved this tension in favor of banks and corporations, intentionally limiting wage growth and keeping unemployment excessively high.

“The Fed’s policy choices over the past 35 years have led to increased inequality, stagnant or falling wages, and an American Dream that is inaccessible to tens of millions of families – particularly black families,” the report states.

Since the Ferguson movement began, many local and national leaders have emphasized the need to address the “structural racism” in the region. 

“Economic racism cannot be delinked from racism by law enforcement and other governmental entities,” according to the coalition’s statement. “However, James Bullard has been silent on issues of economics and their impacts on communities of color in the region over the past seven months.  Today, we are bringing these issues to his front door.”

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For nearly 30 years, Juan González used his column in the New York Daily News to expose massive corruption scandals and further the cause of social justice. He retired his column last year, but has continued his work at Democracy Now! and as a journalism professor at Rutgers. In his new book, Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America's Tale of Two Cities, González argues that Mayor de Blasio, who is likely to win a second term, is the leader of a nationwide movement for progressives to take back municipal government, and recently wrote that de Blasio has presided over a $21 billion infusion of progressive benefitstargeted at the New Yorkers who need it most.

We spoke with González about Mayor de Blasio's first term, how he fits into the progressive movement nationwide, and whether the mayor is doing enough to fulfill his initial campaign promise to end the tale of two cities.

Read the full article here.

Behind Frenemy Lines - May 10, 2014, by Jason Stanford - This is a typical day for Greg Abbott’s gubernatorial bid: He goes into the office, screws up his own campaign and goes home. If it weren’t for his mistakes—Ted Nugent, thanking a supporter who called Wendy Davis “retard Barbie”, calling South Texas a “Third-World Country”, and his bungled opposition to equal pay come to mind—Abbott would seem to have no campaign at all. But it’s when you separate the wheat from the gaffe on education that Abbott’s campaign looks like a disaster waiting to happen.

The negative coverage of Abbott’s education plan—and boy howdy has there been a lot—is focused on Abbott’s mistakes. His education plan cites Charles Murray, whose retrograde views on race and gender got him called a “White Nationalist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. On page 20, his plan calls for “standardized tests” in pre-K. As a dodge, his campaign spokesmanclaimed that was in the plan “for informational purposes only.” And then he cancels campaign events at public schools when the Davis campaign points out that the schools are suing him over funding cuts.

But behind this façade of denials, backpedaling, and obliviousness sits the luckiest man in American politics, because almost no one has bothered to discuss his idea to create “takeover districts” for low-performing schools. He has reportedly modeled his plan on the privatization reforms in New Orleans.

That last bit should scare you. Education reformers—that is, those who think private charters would do better than public schools at educating poor children—call the Recovery School District in New Orleans a success. If the RSD is a success, I’m the third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles. No matter how much I wish that to be true, the facts say otherwise. Here’s why:

No one argues that schools in New Orleans were turning out Harvard scholars by the boatload, so the legislature created the RSD, a takeover district as Abbott has conceived. Davis also supports recovery districts, but Abbott likes the New Orleans model in which “failing” schools would be run by private charters that promised to get the schools shipshape and back into the public school system within five years.

Before taking a look at the results, we must first figure out what “failure” means, because they keep moving that target. RSD used to takeover any school that failed to get a passing score of 60 on the state performance index. After Katrina, the legislature changed that to allow RSD to scoop up any school that fell short of the state’s 87.4 average. The New Orleans private charter district took over 94 schools, 26 of which met the old passing standard. The state redefined failure to mean below average so more schools could get privatized.

Almost a decade later, the takeover district in New Orleans has failed to turn around even one school, so “improvement” became the new goal. Not one school has received an “A” or even a “B” grade. In fact, RSD stopped disclosing the grades their schools received, preferring to publicize percentages of improvement without disclosing the underlying data or that they were cherry-picking the data every year, making it impossible to honestly chart progress. By their original standards, though, all the RSD schools are still failing.

Remember, Louisiana was throwing millions of tax dollars at what were essentially startup small businesses. Fraud and bankruptcy are commonplace, and if you think that’s confined to New Orleans, think again.

Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy looked at 15 states that have charter schools, one of which was Texas and found “rampant fraud, waste and abuse,” according to a report released last week. The two groups found numerous cases of embezzlement, misuse of tax dollars, child endangerment, bilking taxpayers for services not rendered, inflated enrollment numbers, and general mismanagement. Private charters are running schools like a business. Unfortunately, that business is Wall Street.

It’s never the schools in the wealthy neighborhoods that get taken over. On average, poor children score worse than their wealthier peers. We have always known that, but we cannot get poor children to achieve in school simply by insisting they act like wealthy children.

Now Abbott is using the false dogma of education reform as cover to give up on public schools. Giving up on public schools will not fix public schools, but if Abbott becomes governor, he’ll go into the office every morning, screw up public schools, and go home.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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Gawker - December 2, 2013, by Hamilton Nolan - Last week, voters in SeaTac, Washington voted to raise the minimum wage for airport workers to $15 an hour. California recently approved a statewide minimum wage of $10. As low wage workers increasingly voice their frustration with their shitty lot in life, it's time to raise the minimum wage— everywhere.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25. If one were to work full time for 50 weeks a year at that wage, one would make $14,500, which is below the poverty line for a household of two. Add to that the fact that most minimum wage workers cannot get full time hours, and the fact that many of them are supporting families (only 12% of workers earning under $10 an hour are teenagers, contrary to popular stereotypes), and the self-evidently ludicrous nature of our national standard becomes clear.

The common argument against raising the minimum wage is that it would cause employers to cut back on hiring. Not so. The economist Arindrajit Dube wrote this weekend about the latest research into this topic, which finds that fears of job loss have been greatly overstated:

In my work with T. William Lester and Michael Reich, we use nearly two decades' worth of data and compare all bordering areas in the United States to show that while higher minimum wages raise earnings of low-wage workers, they do not have a detectable impact on employment. Our estimates — published in 2010 in the Review of Economics and Statistics — suggest that a hypothetical 10 percent increase in the minimum wage affects employment in the restaurant or retail industries, by much less than 1 percent; the change is in fact statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Dube estimates that a 10% rise in the minimum wage would reduce overall poverty by 2%. That's nice. It's also evidence that we need the minimum wage to rise by much more than 10% (which would only bring it up to about $8 an hour). A $10 minimum wage would offer a full time worker a salary of $20,000 a year—a shitty salary, but enough to raise a household of three over the official poverty line, at least. A $15 minimum wage would mean a $30,000 annual salary. Of course, the vagaries of hourly work and ever-shifting schedules would mean that annual take-home pay would probably fall well under those figures.

Later this week, fast food workers across the nation will stage a one day walkout as part of their ongoing quest to shame employers into raising their wages. Shame will not work, except as a tool for motivating political will. If low wage workers in dead end jobs are ever to gain some small measure of economic security, their wages will have to be raised by law. Ten dollars an hour is a good starting point. But that should be seen as a stopgap humanitarian measure meant to be temporary, until support can be gathered for another raise, or at least for a law indexing minimum wage to inflation.

Minimum wage earners are sometimes dismissed as people too lazy to find a better job. But a land of opportunity in which there is a higher-paying job available for everyone who works hard is a childish fantasy. With a different shuffle of the deck of fate, any one of us could be earning minimum wage. The question is not "How much do those people deserve?" The question is: How much would you accept to do that job?

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