CPD IN THE NEWS

New York Times – November 6, 2013, by Kirk Semple -

At about 1:15 p.m. on Wednesday, Maximino Leyva Ortiz, wearing an orange jumpsuit, his wrists shackled, stood before a judge in an immigration courtroom in Lower Manhattan, a lawyer at his side. The federal government was seeking to deport him.

He took an oath, lawyers’ identities were confirmed, and then Mr. Leyva told the judge he would not fight the order; he was prepared to be deported.

“You’re doing so voluntarily, sir?” Judge Brigitte Laforest asked.

Within minutes the hearing was over and Mr. Leyva was being led out of the courtroom by a bailiff; he was on his way back to Mexico.

The proceedings were quick and subdued. But the banality of the scene belied its significance. Mr. Leyva was the first client in a new program that seeks to provide public defenders for all poor immigrants residing in New York who have been detained and are facing deportation. The initiative is the first of its kind in the country.

Unlike in the nation’s criminal court system, defendants in immigration court have no constitutional right to a court-appointed lawyer. Fear and ignorance conspire with language barriers and poverty to keep detainees from securing legal counsel.

The new initiative, called the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, emerged from several years of study and lobbying among immigration lawyers and immigrants’ advocates. They were concerned that the absence of competent legal representation for many of New York’s immigrant detainees was resulting in unnecessary deportations that ruptured families and put an undue financial burden on government.

Last summer, the New York City Council allocated $500,000 to help pay for a pilot program to test the viability of the initiative. The project’s organizers said that money, plus a supplementary contribution from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, would allow them to provide representation to 190 immigrants.

“At its core, it’s a justice issue,” said Peter L. Markowitz, a professor at Cardozo who helped lead the initiative. “Most excitingly, it’s a chance to mark a sea change in the treatment of immigrants in this country.”

The organizations behind the project are the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic at Cardozo Law School, the Center for Popular Democracy, the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, the Vera Institute of Justice and Make the Road New York. They are ultimately seeking to provide representation for all indigent immigrants living in New York who have been detained and are facing deportation in immigration courts in New York City; Batavia, N.Y.; Newark; and Elizabeth, N.J. — an annual population of about 2,450.

Full funding would cost about $7.4 million per year, proponents said. But in a report to be released on Thursday, the advocates argue that by shortening detentions and reducing deportations, the full-blown program would save governments and private employers an estimated $5.9 million a year.

Though the pilot project opened on Wednesday with a deportation, Mr. Markowitz, who watched the proceedings from the gallery of the small, windowless courtroom, said the benefits of the program were immediately evident. Mr. Leyva had no legal relief from deportation, Mr. Markowitz explained, and to prolong his case would have meant postponing the inevitable, at great cost to the government and to Mr. Leyva.

“He didn’t spend needless time in detention,” Mr. Markowitz said.

By the end of the afternoon, 10 detainees had faced the court accompanied by lawyers from Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defender Services, which are providing legal counsel for detainees in the pilot program.

The efficiency of the hearings involving public defenders stood in sharp contrast to the first case on the docket. The detainee, Lewis Spencer Taveras-Mejia, was not included in the pilot project because his family had retained a lawyer for him.

But the lawyer failed to show up for the hearing.

“They told me that they hired a lawyer and that she would be here today,” Mr. Taveras-Mejia told the judge. He said he had never met the lawyer or learned her name, and then he began to cry. The judge decided to schedule a new hearing for Nov. 19.

“That’s 13 days of detention that the taxpayers have to pay for and that he’s unnecessarily spending in jail,” Mr. Markowitz said. He tapped on his phone, calculating the extra detention cost: $2,067.

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“If you are running to represent Puerto Ricans, and potentially harming Puerto Ricans through investments, then Puerto Ricans will hold you accountable,” said Julio López Varona of the Center for Popular Democracy, one of the leading activist groups on the Puerto Rican debt crisis. “There’s a question about what are those investments, and if that question is not answered that is extremely concerning.”

Read the full article here.

"The members of Congress do not think of Puerto Rico as a part of their constituency and responsibility, and that is what is underneath this crisis," says Ana Maria Archila from the Center for Popular Democracy. "It is a crisis of democracy as much as it's a climate crisis, as much as it's an economic crisis."

Read the full article here.

Clinton has been defending herself from accusations that she is too cozy with Wall Street since the primaries, when an obscure U.S. senator from Vermont built a movement in part by blasting her for collecting chunky speaking fees from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS). Trump has carried on with that line of attack, telling an Iowa rally in late September, "if she ever got the chance, she'd put the Oval Office up for sale." So it may seem odd that Trump's campaign finance chair and apparent favorite for the Secretary of the Treasury, according to a Fox Business report on November 3rd, is second-generation Goldman Sachs partner Steve Mnuchin.

There is less clarity about who Clinton would nominate if she won, perhaps because she has to contend with skepticism of capitalism-as-usual among fans of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, without veering too far to the left of the general electorate. Two names tend to pop up, however: Facebook Inc. (FB) COO and Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg, followed by Federal Reserve Board Governor Lael Brainard. Other possibilities include TIAA CEO and Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL, GOOG) board member Roger Ferguson.

Trump: Mnuchin

Steve Mnuchin may not seem to be the obvious choice to fashion economic policy for a populist, anti-establishment campaign like Trump's. Before taking over as the Republican's campaign finance chair in May, Mnuchin pursued a varied career as an investment banker, hedge fund manager, retail bank owner and film producer. (See also, Trump Announces New Economic Advisory Team.)

After graduating from Yale, where he roomed with Sears Holdings Corp.'s (SHLD) current CEO Edward Lampert, Mnuchin cut his teeth at Salomon Brothers. He joined Goldman Sachs, where his father was a partner, in 1985. According to a 2012 Bloomberg profile, Mnuchin was "front and center" when instruments such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps were created. Fairly or unfairly, such exotic securities carry a whiff of the financial crisis, as does Goldman Sachs' mortgage department, which Mnuchin headed for a spell before becoming chief information officer in 1999.

He left Goldman Sachs in 2002 to work at his college roommate's hedge fund. The next year he started another fund with George Soros, and a year after that he formed Dune Capital with two other Goldman alums. This period marked the beginning of Mnuchin's Hollywood career, with Dune Capital's production wing funding dozens of films including Mad Max: Fury Road, American Sniper and Avatar.

Mnuchin's biggest financial opportunity came with the collapse of the subprime mortgage bubble. "In 2008 the world was a scary place," Mnuchin told Bloomberg in 2012. The market for mortgage-backed securities, with which he was intimately familiar, had collapsed, and no one seemed able to assign a value to assets such as IndyMac, a bank the FDIC had taken over. Mnuchin and a consortium of private equity investors he managed to woo over, including Soros, bought it on the cheap. The deal included a loss-sharing agreement with the FDIC. They renamed the bank OneWest and began foreclosing on borrowers, attracting criticism from campaigners who portrayed it as overly zealous and possibly driven by a profit incentive – born of the loss-sharing agreement – to foreclose rather than pursuing other options. (See also, Lessons Learned from the Banking Crisis.)

Mnuchin has donated to Clinton in the past, as has Trump. Speaking to Bloomberg in August, though, he was on message: "she's obviously raised a ton of money in speaking fees, in other things, from special interest groups. This campaign is focused on people who want to help rebuild the economy."

Clinton: Sandberg, Brainard or Ferguson

Clinton suggested at a town hall meeting in April that she plans to fill half of her cabinet with women. Most reports regarding her pick for Treasury secretary, a position that has never been filled by a woman, mentioned Facebook's Sheryl Sanderberg and the Fed's Lael Brainard. Another, less-frequently mentioned name is Roger Ferguson, who would be the first African-American to hold the job.

Sandberg

Sandberg has Treasury Department experience. Before becoming one of the most successful women in notoriously macho Silicon Valley, she served as chief of staff to Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. She received her BA and MBA from Harvard in the 1990s and spent a year at McKinsey & Co. She worked for Summers, who had been her professor at Harvard, from 1996 to 2001, which offered her the experience of dealing with the Asian financial crisis. She spent the next seven years as a vice-president of Google, then Mark Zuckerberg hired her away as Facebook's chief operating officer. Within two years she had turned the company profitable. In 2012 she became the first female member of Facebook's board. (See also, Who Is Driving Facebook's Management Team?)

Sandberg has also become an icon for some feminists for her 2013 book Lean In – and its attendant hashtag – which documents the barriers women face in the workplace while encouraging them to dispense with internalized barriers, fears and excuses that hold them back. Despite a generally enthusiastic reception, some critics have labeled the book as elitist: the opportunity to network at Davos may have made Sandberg's barrier-breaking easier. (See also, Sheryl Sandberg's Latest Speech Goes Viral.)

Brainard

Lael Brainard spent part of her childhood in communist East Germany and Poland with her diplomat father. She studied at Wesleyan and went on to get a masters and a doctorate in economics from Harvard. She taught at MIT's Sloan School of Management and worked at McKinsey before joining the Clinton administration as deputy director of the National Economic Council. She went to work at the Brookings Institution during the Bush administration, then served in Obama's Treasury as undersecretary for international affairs. At that time, that position – often described as the Treasury's top diplomat – was the highest Treasury post a woman had held. (See also, Fed's Brainard Urges Caution on Interest Rate Hike.)

Brainard has been a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors since June 2014, where she's attracted praise from progressives and deep suspicion from conservatives for appearing to depart from the central bank's technocratic, apolitical norms. She engaged with "Fed Up" activists protesting plans to tighten monetary policy at August's Jackson Hole meeting. (See also, Rising U.S. Labor Productivity Cements Fed Hike.)

Brainard also gave the maximum amount of $2,700 to Hillary Clinton's campaign. That decision earned furious condemnation from Republican members of the House Financial Services Committee during Fed chair Janet Yellen's September testimony, which came just two days after Trump accused the Fed of "doing political things" at the first presidential debate. Yellen defended Brainard's donation, saying she had not violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees in the executive branch from engaging in certain political activities.

Ferguson

Roger Ferguson earned a BA, JD and Ph. D in economics from Harvard then worked as an attorney in New York from 1981 to 1984. He spent the following 13 years at McKinsey, then joined the Fed Board of Governors in 1997. He became vice chair two years later, and rumors began to swirl in 2005 that he would be the next chair. Bush nominated Ben Bernanke instead, and Ferguson resigned shortly after Bernanke's term began the following February.

In 2008 he became president and CEO of Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF, since shortened to TIAA). He has been a board member of Alphabet since June 2016.

By David Floyd

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