The Fed’s Main Job Is Jobs, And A Coalition Plans To Keep It On Task
Campaign for America's Future - September 4, 2014, by Isaiah Poole - A lot of eyes will be on the Federal Reserve...
Campaign for America's Future - September 4, 2014, by Isaiah Poole - A lot of eyes will be on the Federal Reserve Friday when the Labor Department releases its August unemployment statistics. But where will the Fed’s eyes be focused? A group of activists are planning the next steps of their effort to keep the Fed focused on the continuing unemployment crisis, and keep the Fed from taking actions that will make things worse for millions still seeking work.
“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” said Shawn Sebastian of the Center for Popular Democracy, who was part of a group of activists and unemployed people who confronted members of the Fed at last month’s economic summit in Jackson Hole, Wyo. That includes following up on a promise by Fed chair Janet Yellen to meet with the group in Washington and pressing a more detailed plan for how the Fed should proceed to help the Main Street economy grow.
“We are going to be looking at the full range of policy options,” Sebastian said.
The “inflation hawks” were poised to seize the narrative when the members of the Fed attended the Jackson Hole summit. These Fed members, egged on by conservative academics and policymakers, want the Fed to put the brakes on economic growth and turn its attention to fighting inflation, even though there are no signs that inflation is an imminent threat. On the contrary, wages as a percentage of economic output are at their lowest level since the late 1940s (while corporate profits as a share of the economy are at record highs), one sign that there are far more people looking for work than there are jobs for them.
What the hawks did not count on was the Center for Popular Democracy’s ragtag group of 10 unemployed people and activist supporters. They trekked to Jackson Hole to confront Fed members with their stories of struggling to find decent jobs, along with a demand that the Fed not abandon its unfinished role in rebuilding the middle-class economy, in the form of a letter endorsed by more than 70 organizations. Their biggest success, Sebastian said, was a two-hour meeting with Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Esther George, who just before Jackson Hole said in an interview with CNBC that it was time for the Fed to begin thinking about raising interest rates “when you see the economy getting as close as we are to full employment.”
But Sebastian and his group told George that the economy was nowhere near full employment and that the analysis of the inflation hawks was “lacking in relevance, substance and rigor.” One member of the group told of how she went from being an MBA who had risen to a management job over 15 years to being laid off and unable to find work for months, finally settling for a job that paid half as much as the job she lost.
It’s not clear what substantive effect hearing these stories had on George and other inflation hawks on the Fed, Sebastian said. “But I do hope we contributed to her thinking and we also started an engagement” with the Fed, he said. Fed members now know that when they discuss economic policy, “you can’t make decisions without public scrutiny anymore, because we’re paying attention now.”
One of the ideas that the group will refine and attempt to build consensus around would have the Fed invest directly in infrastructure bonds and similar government instruments, in much the same way that it purchased billions in bonds to prop up the financial sector in the years following the 2008 financial crash. The bond-purchasing program, known as quantitative easing, helped boost Wall Street share prices, according to most experts, but had no direct effect on job-creation or on bringing the economic recovery to communities around the country hardest hit by the crash – as the nation has now vividly seen in Ferguson, Mo.
Having the Fed directly buy bonds that would enable federal, state or local governments to fund transportation projects, school construction or other public facilities would put the Fed’s power to work in ways that directly creates jobs in the short run and assets that enhance the nation’s competitiveness and well-being in the long run.
The Fed could also better use its regulatory authority to prod the banks to pour into the economy the close to $2 trillion that is now sitting in its vaults. That hoarded cash could be put to work creating jobs and lifting the wages of working-class people.
Whatever policies take shape during the next phase of the Center for Popular Democracy’s campaign to keep the Fed focused on full employment, Sebastian says that the opening round has been a success in sending the message that “we’re not in an inflation crisis … we are in an unemployment crisis. You can’t ignore an ongoing crisis for the sake of a ghost of inflation that may or may not appear.”
Report: Black Unemployment in Bay Area More Than Three Times the Average
SF Examiner - March 6, 2014, by Chris Roberts - After 200 unanswered job applications, Ebony Eisler finally landed a $...
SF Examiner - March 6, 2014, by Chris Roberts - After 200 unanswered job applications, Ebony Eisler finally landed a $15 an hour position as a medical assistant in Mission Bay. But since she's a temp worker, she earns less than her co-workers, who make $20 to $25 per hour for the same work.
Still, as a black woman in San Francisco, she is fortunate. The unemployment rate for black people in the Bay Area is 19 percent, according to 2013 U.S. Census Bureau data crunched by the Economic Policy Institute.
Blacks are unemployed at more than three times the rate of workers of other races, according to this data. The Bay Area finished 2013 with a 6 percent total unemployment rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In San Francisco, unemployment has dropped rapidly since Mayor Ed Lee took office in January 2011, when the jobless rate was 9.5 percent. The most recent figures from the state Employment Development Department — which does not publish jobless rates by race — pegged The City's unemployment rate at 3.8 percent, by far the rosiest employment figures since the first dot-com boom at the turn of the millennium.
The wide gulf in the jobless rate between ethnic groups living in the same city belies the idea that The City and state have fully recovered from the Great Recession, according to advocates with the leftist Center for Popular Democracy.
The group released the unemployment figures by ethnicity Thursday as part of a national campaign to convince the Federal Reserve Bank to keep interest rates low in order for the economic recovery to trickle down to all workers.
So far, "the recovery is based on white America alone," said Eisler, 36, a Bayview resident who holds an associates degree and a certified nursing assistant license. Her current job, the best she could find, does not cover her $1,800 a month rent, she said.
Statewide, the jobless rate for black people is 14 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, compared to 6.1 percent for whites, 8.5 percent for Latinos and 5.9 percent for Asians.
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Time for an accountable Fed
Andrew Levin, professor at Dartmouth College and former special adviser to former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke...
Andrew Levin, professor at Dartmouth College and former special adviser to former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and then-Vice Chair Janet Yellen, released a proposal for reform of the Federal Reserve Board's governing structure in a press call sponsored by the Fed Up campaign. The proposal has a number of important features, but the main point is to make the Fed more accountable to democratically elected officials and to reduce the power of the banking industry in monetary policy.
Under its current structure, the banks largely control the 12 Federal Reserve district banks. This matters because the presidents of these banks are part of the Federal Reserve Board's Open Market Committee (FOMC) which determines monetary policy. At any point in time, five of 12 district bank presidents will be voting members of the FOMC, but all 12 take part in the discussion. The voting presidents will typically be outnumbered by the seven Federal Reserve Board governors, who are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate, although there have been just five sitting governors for the last two years, as the Senate has refused to consider President Obama's nominees.
There is no obvious reason why the banking industry should have special input into the country's monetary policy. This would be comparable to reserving seats on the Federal Communications Commission's board for the cable television industry. While there is no way to prevent an industry group from trying to influence a government regulatory body, in all other cases, they at least must do so from the outside. It is only the Fed where we allow the most directly affected industry group to actually have a direct voice in the policies determined by its regulatory agency.
This is an especially important issue because the Fed's policies are so central to the health of the economy. If the Fed's fears over inflation lead it to raise interest rates to slow the economy and reduce the rate of job creation, there is little that Congress will be able to do to counteract the Fed's actions. For example, if the Fed wants to prevent the unemployment rate from getting below 4.5 percent unemployment, there will be little that Congress and the president can do to get unemployment lower. In that case, the Fed may have needlessly be keeping millions of people out work — disproportionately affecting minorities and less-educated workers — because of a possibly mistaken view of the economy's limits. Furthermore, by deliberately weakening the labor market, the Fed will be keeping tens of millions of workers from having the bargaining power they need to secure wage gains.
While governors who are appointed by democratically elected officials are likely to recognize the importance of reducing unemployment and balance it against the risk of inflation, the district bank presidents are likely to be less concerned about unemployment. It is worth noting that all the dissenting votes calling for more a hawkish stance since the start of the Great Recession have been cast by bank presidents. It is likely that the need to maintain the support of the bank presidents on the FOMC has prevented the Fed from being more aggressive in trying to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment.
It would be good to see the presidential candidates address the proposal put forward by Levin and the Fed Up campaign. There are very few areas of government that are more important in people's daily lives than the Fed's monetary policy. It literally determines how many people will hold jobs and has a huge effect on workers' wages.
While it would not be appropriate for the president or other politicians to try to micromanage monetary policy, they certainly should be setting its general course. This is analogous to the relationship with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). No one expects Congress or the president to decide which drugs get approved; however, if the FDA were to allow two years to pass in which it approved no new drugs, it would be entirely appropriate for Congress and the president to question its conduct. The same would apply if the FDA were found to regularly approve drugs that turned out to be harmful.
In the case of the Fed, it is appropriate for the presidential candidates to be telling voters what sort of people they would appoint to the Fed. It is also appropriate for them to comment on its governance structure, which can only be changed by an Act of Congress, which would have to be signed by the president.
Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
By Dean Baker, contributor
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Neel Kashkari Named Next Minneapolis Fed President
Neel Kashkari, a former financier who managed the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion rescue of banks in the 2008 crisis, was...
Neel Kashkari, a former financier who managed the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion rescue of banks in the 2008 crisis, was named the next president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
Kashkari’s resume includes stops at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Pacific Investment Management Co., and a failed run for governor of California last year. At the Treasury, he was Secretary Henry Paulson’s key aide in overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Kashkari will take over from Narayana Kocherlakota on January 1, 2016, according to a statement Tuesday from the Minneapolis Fed.
“He has a little bit of all the pieces you’d want in a Fed president,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut.
As head of one of 12 regional Fed banks, Kashkari will join the Federal Open Market Committee, the central bank’s policy making panel. The Fed is weighing ending a seven-year era of near-zero interest rates, with investors betting it will move next month. Kashkari is not scheduled to vote on policy decisions until 2017. Kocherlakota, as is customary for outgoing FOMC members, will not attend the December meeting.
QE ‘Morphine’
Kocherlakota is one of the Fed’s most dovish policy makers who has argued it should keep rates on hold into next year. Kashkari has offered observations on monetary policy via his twitter feed, without spelling out whether he would favor raising rates or delaying liftoff in the current climate. In an April 2013 comment he likened the Bank of Japan’s asset purchase program to “morphine. makes u feel better but doesn’t cure.”
“I don’t think we know that much” about Kashkari’s views on monetary policy, said Angel Ubide, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “My experience with people who get appointed is whatever they thought before and what they do later doesn’t necessarily correlate.”
Kashkari, 42, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He began his career as an aerospace engineer at TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach, California.
Goldman Sachs
Kashkari’s appointment places another ex-Goldman Sachs banker at the helm of a regional Fed bank. Robert Steven Kaplan at the Dallas Fed and New York’s William C. Dudley are Goldman alums. Philadelphia Fed chief Patrick Harker previously served as a trustee at Goldman Sachs Trust and as a member of the board of managers of Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund Partners Registered Fund.
“We’re disappointed that yet another former Goldman Sachs insider has been elevated to a regional president position,” said Jordan Haedtler at the Center for Popular Democracy in Washington.
Such appointments need “more transparency and public input,” said Haedtler, who’s deputy campaign manager at Fed Up, a national coalition that’s calling for changes at the central bank and wants to keep rates low to boost employment.
Kashkari worked at Goldman in the early 2000s before accepting a post at the Treasury in 2006. He joined Pimco, then led by bond fund manager Bill Gross, in 2009 to help oversee an expansion into equities, an attempt to reduce the firm’s heavy dependence on the fixed-income market. When he left in 2013, the company’s equity unit had attracted $10 billion in assets, or less than 1 percent of the firm’s total assets at the time.
Bank Bailout
TARP, approved by Congress in October 2008, remains one of the more controversial measures taken during the financial crisis. It authorized the government to purchase up to $700 billion in troubled assets from financial institutions, in an effort to bolster global credit markets. The government ultimately used $475 billion, including $250 billion to stabilize banks, $82 billion to bail out auto makers and $70 billion to save insurer American International Group Inc., according to the Treasury’s website.
“Mr. Kashkari is an influential leader whose combined experience in the public and private sectors makes him the ideal candidate to head the Minneapolis Fed,” said MayKao Hang, incoming chair of the Minneapolis Fed’s board of directors and co-chair of the search committee.
Kashkari, a Republican, was defeated by incumbent California Governor Jerry Brown in November 2014, getting 43 percent of the vote to Brown’s 57 percent.
Presidents of the 12 regional Fed banks are appointed by a portion of their respective boards of directors, subject to the approval of the Fed Board in Washington. Reserve bank boards typically consist of nine members, including three bankers. The banking members are excluded under Dodd-Frank from participating in the selection of presidents.
Source: Bloomberg Business
Woman who confronted Flake 'relieved' he called for delaying Kavanaugh vote
Woman who confronted Flake 'relieved' he called for delaying Kavanaugh vote
Maria Gallagher, who on Friday confronted Sen. Jeff Flake with her story of sexual assault, said she was "relieved"...
Maria Gallagher, who on Friday confronted Sen. Jeff Flake with her story of sexual assault, said she was "relieved" when the Arizona Republican called for an FBI investigation into allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Gallagher, a resident of New York, stood next to Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, earlier Friday as the two held open the doors of an elevator Flake was taking on his way to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Soon after, Flake said he would vote to advance Kavanaugh's nomination to the Senate floor, but he said he wanted a vote in the full body delayed for one week while the FBI investigated the allegations.
Read the full article here.
Fed Up group plans counter Jackson Hole conference
The Fed Up coalition, made up of community activist groups, has rented a conference room in the same hotel where the...
The Fed Up coalition, made up of community activist groups, has rented a conference room in the same hotel where the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank will be holding its annual Jackson Hole conference starting Thursday.
The group said Monday it will bring in low-wage workers from around the country who are struggling to make ends meet to emphasize the need for the Fed to do more to attack income inequality.
"Our life is a constant struggle. We know we have to pay the rent, buy food and pay the utilities on a very limited budget," Dawn O'Neal, a teaching assistant at a day care center in Atlanta, told reporters on a conference call Monday.
The mother of four said she made $8.50 an hour at her job and her husband, who is currently unemployed, has been trying to earn money by lining up early in the morning to compete for part-time construction jobs.
Ady Barkan with the Center for Popular Democracy and campaign director for Fed Up said that before Fed officials "can have a real discussion of raising interest rates and slowing the economy, they should understand firsthand who it would effect."
Barkan joked that while the Kansas City Fed charges $1,000 per person for its conference, participation in the teach-in will be free. In addition to arguing that raising rates now would be premature, the group will hold discussions on ways to reform the Fed's current selection process for the presidents of the Fed's 12 regional banks.
The group has protested the recent selection of Robert Kaplan, a former top executive at Goldman Sachs and currently associate dean at the Harvard Business School, as the new president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, saying the selection process shut out input from community groups.
While the Fed announced in May that Yellen would not be attending this year's conference, Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer is scheduled to deliver comments on inflation during a panel discussion at Jackson Hole on Saturday.
Financial markets will be closely examining those comments for any hints about whether the Fed is still likely to boost interest rates at its Sept. 16-17 meeting despite a huge sell-off in recent days in stocks that saw the Dow Jones industrial average fall another 588.47 points or 3.6 percent on Monday.
Source: CNBC
Connecting The Dots Between Banks and Immigrant Detention
July 26 was the deadline by which the government was ordered by a judge to reunite all immigrant children separated...
July 26 was the deadline by which the government was ordered by a judge to reunite all immigrant children separated from their parents in Trump's so-called zero-tolerance border policy earlier this year. But of the approximately 2,500 children that were separated 711 still remain without their parents after the deadline, lawyers for the government said. Of those, 431 cases remain where the parents were deported before getting their children back and the rest were "ineligible" to be returned as per the government. Meanwhile protesters across the country have continued confronting ICE offices and other institutions involved in the immigrant crackdown including banks that are financing private prisons for immigrants. JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and BlackRock, have been targeted by activists this week after the Center for Popular Democracy released a report called Bankrolling Oppression. Eight people were arrested while protesting outside the home of JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon.
Watch the video here.
Blow up the deficit!
As most working Americans could tell you, the economy is still not doing well. Right now, political pressure to fix...
As most working Americans could tell you, the economy is still not doing well.
Right now, political pressure to fix this tends to focus on the Federal Reserve. When the Fed hikes interest rates to curb inflation, it also risks squashing job growth. So activists like the Fed Up campaign are pushing Fed officials to lay off their recent interest rate increases. And a bevy of economists just released a letter urging the Fed to target inflation higher than 2 percent.
Read the full article here.
Lael Brainard, a Fed governor in the political glare
In the middle of meetings of the world’s central banking elite in Wyoming’s Jackson Lake Lodge in August 2015, Lael...
In the middle of meetings of the world’s central banking elite in Wyoming’s Jackson Lake Lodge in August 2015, Lael Brainard sat down with activists who were denouncing calls for tighter monetary policy amid America’s sluggish wage growth.
As the Federal Reserve Board member listened intently over the course of about an hour, protesters from New York ranging from fast-food employees to a worker on film sets talked about the difficulties of making ends meet on rock-bottom wages in a high-cost metropolis, recalls Shawn Sebastian, field director of the Fed Up coalition that arranged the meeting.
Ms Brainard’s decision to drop by carried a message. A fairly new member of the Board of Governors who had said relatively little about monetary policy, Ms Brainard was about to set out her stall as a vocal advocate of low interest rates at the Fed — based in part on the absence of wage growth.
Her steadfast calls for continued economic stimulus have burnished her credentials among pro-worker groups including Fed Up, which met a broader range of Fed officials at this year’s Jackson Hole gathering. They come amid speculation that she could be in line for a cabinet role if the Democrats hold the White House in November.
“When it comes to monetary policy, Lael Brainard is one of the strongest and loudest voices advocating for policies that working families across the US need,” says Mr Sebastian.
In Washington, Ms Brainard is being spoken of as one of the candidates for Treasury secretary in a Hillary Clinton administration — a move that would make her the first woman to head the department. At the same time she has become the target of Republican attacks because of her public support for the Clinton campaign and fury within the party over easy-money policies.
Early this year Ms Brainard donated $2,700 to the Clinton campaign, a decision described by former officials as a blunder for a sitting Fed governor during an election year — even if it is permissible under Fed rules. It increased the Fed’s political vulnerability at a time when it is a prime target for vituperative assaults on its independence by Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate.
The donation was the subject of sharp exchanges in Congress last month as Fed chair Janet Yellen was forced to reject claims by Republican representative Scott Garrett that the central bank is excessively cosy with the Democrats.
There are people who blather on and she is not one of them
Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Joe Biden
Ted Truman, a former Fed official who is a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says Ms Brainard’s donation was a personal mistake that “didn’t help the Fed at all”. He also argues that the issue pales in comparison with politically charged episodes in the past, such as the Nixon years when the Fed was leaned on heavily to keep rates low.
Ms Brainard’s forceful drive for easy monetary policy began two months after the 2015 Jackson Hole meetings, when she delivered a blunt speech that left some with the impression that she was at loggerheads with Ms Yellen. Ms Brainard warned against prematurely lifting rates amid slack in the labour market and subdued inflation — even as the chair was steering markets to expect a move by the end of the year.
Ms Brainard did not go on to formally dissent when Ms Yellen presided over a rate increase that December. Since then the two policymakers have appeared more closely aligned, with both recently arguing that the US recovery has further room to run before the central bank needs to increase rates again.
Ms Brainard has urged caution in part because of the risk that overseas shocks ricochet back to the US via highly integrated financial markets. This global focus builds on her work as the US’s top financial diplomat under former Treasury secretary Tim Geithner between 2010 and 2013, where in the gruelling post of undersecretary for international affairs she was a key US figure in discussions over the euro area debt crisis, as well as the broader global fallout from the financial crash.
Fed should not rush to raise rates, says Brainard
Already low expectations of a September increase fall further after policymaker’s cautious comments
One official who spoke with her regularly was George Papaconstantinou, Greece’s finance minister from 2009 to 2011. He recalls hearing from Ms Brainard two or three times a week during the febrile days of early 2010, as Europe dragged its feet over how to handle the Greek crisis and the US pushed for action. The calls were partly “therapy” for him and partly information-gathering by Ms Brainard so she had “a better sense of how close we were to the edge”. He says: “She clearly knew her stuff.”
Ms Brainard, who declined to comment for this article, developed her interest for global affairs in part on the back of her upbringing as a diplomat’s daughter, spending some of her childhood behind the iron curtain in Poland and East Germany. A former MIT economics professor, she has three children and is married to Kurt Campbell, a former top state department official.
A reserved individual, Ms Brainard left the Treasury with a mixed reputation among officials, some of whom found her unsupportive and distant. Others, including Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to vice-president Joe Biden, praise her straight-talking manner and clarity of thought. “There are people who blather on and she is not one of them,” he says.
When Washington observers size up potential Treasury secretaries, Ms Brainard’s name comes up alongside Gary Gensler, the former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook.
What gives Ms Brainard’s claim potency is not only her international and domestic economic experience, but also the helpful absence of a stint on Wall Street in her curriculum vitae. For many Democrats, her very public campaign for low rates has only strengthened her qualifications for the post.
By Lael Brainard
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Slew Of Organizations Denounce Civil Right Violations of Puerto Ricans on May Day and Demand Gov. Roselló To Stop Austerity Measures
05.03.2018 New York, NY - In response to the violent reaction of the Puerto Rico Police Department to a peaceful...
05.03.2018
New York, NY - In response to the violent reaction of the Puerto Rico Police Department to a peaceful assembly of students, families and activists on May Day protesting against austerity measures and the national debt, the Center for Popular Democracy signed on to an open letter to Governor Roselló and released the following statement through its Co-Executive Director, Ana María Archila, who was present at the event and recorded the state violence response in a video:
“This week, as teachers, students, and retirees in Puerto Rico were exercising their First Amendment rights with a peaceful march to demand dignity for their families, the police came out in riot gear and unleashed tear gas on the crowd. Children, elderly people, entire families were fighting to catch their breath. It was a scene that doesn’t belong in a democratic society.
But this scene is not new in Puerto Rico. The police are used to controlling and enforcing colonial rule on the island. And they are enabled by our silence stateside. The crisis confronting Puerto Rico is enormous, and it’s as much a crisis of democracy as it is an economic and climate crisis.
Governor Roselló must condemn the violence perpetrated against his own people. And he must address the root causes of the march: the austerity measures that prioritize banks over people and are putting the brakes on the island’s recovery. We will continue to stand in solidarity with the Puerto Rican people as they continue to demand dignity and a better life for themselves and their families.”
Below, the Center for Popular Democracy join several organizations in solidarity with the Puerto Rican people and sign on this open letter to Governor Ricardo Roselló demanding an investigation into the abuses perpetrated by the Police Department on May Day rally and demand a stop to austerity measures and cancellation of the debt:
Open Letter to the Governor of Puerto Rico Ricardo Roselló
Sign-On Letter Condemning the Actions of the Puerto Rican Government on May Day and Demanding Justice for the Puerto Rican People
We, the undersigned organizations, stand in solidarity with the Puerto Rican people and organizations that came together on May 1, 2018 to march against inhumane austerity measures that continue to drive a massive exodus of families in search of a better life. We stand with the millions of Puerto Ricans who remain on the island and fight every day to sustain their families and improve their collective quality of life. We write today to condemn the inhumane and violent police actions of the government of Ricardo Rosselló.
On May 1, 2018, thousands of Puerto Rican people, including elderly adults and children, who were exercising their First Amendment right to protest were met with state violence through the use of tear gas and violence at the hands of the police. Images captured at the event, corroborated by first-hand accounts, show crowds of people fighting to catch their breath as they ran away from police in riot gear. This type of scene has no place in a democratic society. The right to assemble and express frustration at the government is essential to the practice of democracy. We are deeply disturbed by Governor Roselló’s defense of the police brutality and demand that the local government take the appropriate actions to prosecute those who gave and executed the orders for these actions to take place.
On May 1, 2018, thousands of Puerto Ricans came out to protest the measures that the governor and the fiscal control board have put forward over the last two years. These measures adversely affect working class Puerto Ricans, and include:
1. Privatizing of the public school system and the power company;
2. Doubling the tuition costs in Puerto Rico's public university;
3. Closing over 300 schools;
4. Slashing labor rights;
5. Raising taxes; and
6. Cutting pensions.
This dire situation is forcing families to flee the island en masse. The Center for Puerto Rican Studies estimates that Puerto Rico could lose 14% of its population, 470,000 people, by 2019.
On May Day, the people of Puerto Rico came out with clear demands for their government. Today we stand with them and echo their demands in solidarity, and we commit to advocate for them in the United States.
We further demand immediate accountability for the May Day violence. Our demands are as follows:
1. Stop austerity: The Government of Puerto Rico should stop all austerity measures and invest in the working people of Puerto Rico by strengthening labor rights, raising the minimum wage, and promoting other policies that allow families in the island to live with dignity. Living with dignity includes rebuilding Puerto Rico’s power grid with 100% clean and renewable energy and keeping the power grid and power generation in public hands under community control, so as to mitigate the climate crisis and adapt for future extreme weather.
2. Cancel the debt: The Government of Puerto Rico should not make, and the U.S. government should stop promoting, any more debt payments to billionaire bondholders. Instead, all government efforts should focus on securing payments to pension holders. The Puerto Rican government should also prosecute any individual that has profited from the debt crisis.
3. Prosecute: The Government of Puerto Rico should conduct a full, transparent and impartial investigation into the police violence during the May Day actions and prosecute every police officer and civil servant who instructed and executed these acts of violence against the Puerto Rican people. We also encourage human right organizations to conduct their own independent investigations and oversight to guarantee that this process is done with full transparency.
We, the undersigned organizations, stand in solidarity with the Puerto Rican people and their demands, condemn the actions of the Puerto Rican government, and demand that the local government take the appropriate actions to prosecute those who instructed and executed these actions.
Sincerely,
SPACEs United for a New Economy Maryland Communities United Black Voters Matter Fund CT PR Agenda Progressive Caucus Action Fund The Bully Project Center for Popular Democracy Make the Road PA Make the Road CT 215 People Alliance Alliance for Puerto Rico-Massachusetts Make the Road NJ United We DREAM NYCC Chicago Boricua Resistance! OLÉ in Albuquerque, NM Organize Florida Delaware Alliance for Community Advancement CASA Mi Familia Vota Make the Road NY VAMOS4PR 32BJ Matt Nelson Action Center for Race and the Economy Refund America Proyect Massachusets Jobs with Justice DiaspoRicans DiaspoRiqueños New Haven Association of Legal Services Attorneys United Action CT Womens March Alliance for Quality Education National Economic and Social Rights Initiative Courage Campaign Action NC Harry Potter Alliance Blue Future Youth Progressive Action Catalyst Pennsylvania Student Power Network Movement Voter Project Student Power Networks About Face: Veterans Against the War Americas for Conservation Florida Immigrant Rights Coalition- FLIC One America Services, Immigrant Rights, and Education Network (SIREN) Arkansas United Community Coalition Make the Road NV Sunrise Movement Lil Sis American Family Voices Resource Generation Climate Hawks Vote The Shalom Center National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC) Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts Institute for Policy Studies, New Internationalism Project Korean Resource Center (KRC) HANA Center NAKASEC - Virginia Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN) Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN)
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