Gillibrand Has Received Big Campaign Donations from Puerto Rico Bondholders
Gillibrand Has Received Big Campaign Donations from Puerto Rico Bondholders
“Politicians that receive money from hedge fund managers like Seth Klarman and Dan Loeb should understand that their...
“Politicians that receive money from hedge fund managers like Seth Klarman and Dan Loeb should understand that their money is coming from people who have pushed austerity and privatization as the solution to Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis,” Julio Lopez Varona, co-director of the Community Dignity Campaign with the Center for Popular Democracy, told Sludge. “This solution has proven to help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer while pushing hundreds of thousands to leave the island.”
Read the full article here.
Fed's Kashkari Gains Company in Concerns Over Raising Rates
Fed's Kashkari Gains Company in Concerns Over Raising Rates
Neel Kashkari labored through much of this year as the most prominent Federal Reserve official opposed to raising short...
Neel Kashkari labored through much of this year as the most prominent Federal Reserve official opposed to raising short-term interest rates. Lately, he's gained more company.
Mr. Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Fed, has argued the central bank shouldn't be raising borrowing costs when inflation persists below its 2% target. He cast the only votes against the Fed's rate increases in March and June.
Read the full article here.
Los trabajadores latinos quieren que la Fed les oiga
Lo cierto es que pese a la mejora económica la tasa de desempleo de latinos (6.8%) y negros (9.1%) es más elevada que...
Lo cierto es que pese a la mejora económica la tasa de desempleo de latinos (6.8%) y negros (9.1%) es más elevada que la de los blancos (4.6%) y asiáticos (4%) y muchos de ellos trabajan por sueldos muy bajos. Muchos de ellos, como Rubio no sienten la recuperación. “Yo paso por los bares y los veo llenos incluso los lunes pero no todos podemos hacer eso, yo no”, explica.
Su inquietud por los más desfavorecidos le ha llevado a integrarse en la asociación comunitaria Make the Road para ayudar a los trabajadores, muchos de ellos latinos, de forma diferente a como lo hacía en su país. Desde hoy está en Jackson Hole, Wyoming, donde se reunen economistas de todo el mundo y representantes de bancos centrales para hablar de política monetaria. Rubio forma parte de un grupo de trabajadores y asociaciones de base de todo el país, en las que hay representación latina, que quieren convencer a la Reserva Federal de que no suba las tasas de interés. Su argumento es que si se quedan bajas como ahora “ayudarán a mejorar las condiciones laborales y crear más empleo”.
Rubio dice que la recuperación no ha llegado a los trabajadores como ella y que por eso no es momento de empezar a subir unas tasas que reconoce que están históricamente bajas(0%-0.25% desde diciembre de 2008) para estimular el crecimiento durante la reciente Gran Recesión.
“Lo que decide la Fed nos atañe a todos”, explica con convicción Rubio antes de hablar de la fuerte desigualdad laboral que hay y el hecho de que apenas hay inflación, motivo por el que no debería haber prisa por subir tasas o como dicen los economistas, normalizarlas. El programa de Jackson Hole y la lista de asistentes se hace público por el organizador de este encuentro anual, la Reserva Federal de Kansas City, hoy mismo pero ya se sabe que la presidenta de la Fed, Janet Yellen, no va a asistir. Rubio espera estar en algunas reuniones con parte de los asistentes.
“Uno piensa que no les van a ver pero ha veces que hay que pedir y abrir un caminito”, dice.
De hecho, Rubio, junto con otros trabajadores y activistas, ya se reunió este mismo mes con el presidente de la Reserva Federal de Nueva York, William Dudley. Según esta hondureña les dio la razón cuando se planteó la existencia de una desigualdad laboral y que no hay empleo para todos. Dudley dijo que dada la situación económica fuera de las fronteras la necesidad de subir las tasas es ahora “menos imperiosa”.
Ady Barkan, abogado del Centro de Democracia Popular que está impulsando la campaña “Fed Up” y estas peticiones ante la Reserva, explica que es necesario que las autoridades monetarias “presten atención a los trabajadores”.
“La economía no se ha recuperado, hay mucho desempleo entre negros y latinos, subempleo, baja participación en el mercado laboral y apenas hay subidas de salarios”, resume Barkan. Este abogado cree que la economía necesita tasas bajas para que las empresas sigan invirtiendo de forma barata y que haya préstamos asequibles que reactiven el consumo de todos.
Lo cierto es que las empresas tienen cash y algunos tipos de préstamos como los hipotecarios no han remontado lo esperado. “No obstante, si las tasas suben la situación será peor”, explica Barkan, “porque las empresas tendrán más motivos para quedarse sentadas en sus montañas de cash si tienen rendimiento de ellas y por que para invertir necesitan una inflación que no hay, ni habrá si suben tasas”.
“La economía tiene que calentarse un poco más”, dice. Barkan admite que las tasas bajas no son suficientes y que sería bueno que el Congreso hiciera algo además de subir el salario mínimo.
Representantes de la campaña de Fed Up ya se han reunido con Yellen y presidentes de otras reservas como la de Kansas, San Francisco y Atlanta entre otras, miembros de la Federal.
Dean Baker co director del Center for Economic and Policy Research de Washington publicaba recientemente que la subida “reducirá ingresos y oportunidades para quienes menos tienen”, una posición que también comparte el nobel de economía, Joseph Stiglitz.
¿Cuál es la misión de la Reserva Federal?
La Reserva Federal o Fed es uno de los reguladores de la banca y la autoridad que tiene en sus manos la política monetaria, es decir, regula la cantidad de dinero en circulación. ¿Su misión? Asegurarse de que se creen las condiciones de crédito y monetarias para conseguir el máximo empleo, precios estables (ni inflación ni deflación) y tasas de interés a largo plazo moderadas.
¿Cómo funcionan las tasas?
La Reserva Federal sube las tasas de interés a corto plazo, el dinero que se prestan los bancos entre sí, para retirar dinero del mercado y evitar las subidas de precios o inflación. Cuando las baja es porque los precios están bajos y falla el consumo. Al bajarlas se pone más dinero en circulación lo que, en teoría, animando la economía. Estas tasas a corto terminan reflejándose en las de largo plazo que son las que se usan en hipotecas y otros préstamos que se usan para comprar e invertir. Cuanto más se invierte y más crece la economía más y mejor trabajo se crea.
Source: La Raza
One ex-banker's built-in advantage in the Fed chair race: Family ties to Trump
One ex-banker's built-in advantage in the Fed chair race: Family ties to Trump
With Gary Cohn’s chances of becoming chairman of the Federal Reserve diminished, another former banker is waiting in...
With Gary Cohn’s chances of becoming chairman of the Federal Reserve diminished, another former banker is waiting in the wings for the coveted post: Kevin Warsh.
A veteran of both the central bank and Wall Street, Warsh is already high on the White House’s list of possible successors to Fed Chair Janet Yellen. But he has an enviable reference: his billionaire father-in-law, who met Donald Trump in college and is a confidant to this day.
Read the full article here.
In Troubled Times, the Federal Reserve Must Work for Everyone
Global Shock It's true that many of the causes of the recent stock market turmoil are global, rather than...
Global Shock
It's true that many of the causes of the recent stock market turmoil are global, rather than domestic. But those distinctions are becoming less important in a world of unfettered capital flow. Regional markets, like regional ecosystems, are interconnected.
Europe is struggling because of a misguided attachment to growth-killing austerity policies. Like Republicans in this country, Europe's leaders are focused on unwise government cost-cutting measures that hurt the overall economy.
China's superheated markets have experienced a sharp downturn, and its devaluing of the yuan is likely to affect American monetary policy. Many of the so-called "emerging markets" are in grave trouble, their problems exacerbated by an anticipated interest rate hike from the U.S. Fed.
Plunging crude oil prices are a major factor in the events of the last few days. But questions remain about the underlying forces affecting those prices. Demand is somewhat weaker, and Saudi officials are refusing to cut production. But there is still some debate about whether these and other well-reported factors are enough to explain the fact that the price of a barrel of oil is roughly half what it was just over a year ago, in June 2014.
American Turmoil
Talk of recovery here in the U.S. has been significantly dampened by events of the last several days. The now-interrupted stock market boom had been Exhibit A in the case for recovery.
Exhibit B was the ongoing drop in the official unemployment rate. There, too, signs of underlying weakness can be found. The labor force participation rate remains very low for people in their peak working years, as economist Elise Gould notes, and has only come back about halfway from pre-2008 levels. Jared Bernstein notes that pressure to raise wages, which one would also expect in a recovering job market, also remains weak.
All this argues for a rational and coordinated policy, one in which the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government act together to restore a wounded economy. What would that look like?
It would not include raised interest rates -- something that nevertheless continues to be a topic of serious discussion. As Dean Baker points out, China's currency devaluation alone should have been enough to take that idea off the table. What's more, as Baker rightly notes, such a move would only make sense if the Fed "is worried that the U.S. economy was growing too quickly and creating too many jobs." That's a notion most Americans would probably reject as absurd. Most are not seeing their paychecks grow or their job opportunities multiply.
Anxiety about inflation, while all but omnipresent in some circles, is not a rational fear. A slow rise in prices (0.2 percent in the 12 months ending in July, as opposed to the Fed's recommended 2 percent per year) tells us that inflation is not exactly looming on the horizon.
Now what?
"Everything is going to be dictated by government policy," the chief investment officerof a well-known investment firm said this week. In that case, isn't it time for a national conversation about that policy?
Another investment strategist told the Wall Street Journal that today's challenges come at a time when "global central banks have exhausted almost all their tools ... It's difficult to see how central banks come in to support markets."
If they've exhausted all their commonly-used tools, it may be time to develop new ones -- not to support "markets," but to promote jobs and growth for everyone.
First, do no harm. The Fed needs to hold off on any move to raise interest rates. But inaction is not enough. It was given a dual mandate by Congress: to stabilize prices and keep employment at reasonable levels.
Activist groups like the "Fed Up" coalition, led by the Center for Popular Democracy (and including the Campaign for America's Future), are working to move the Fed toward that second objective. They've been pushing to change its governing boards, which are heavily dominated by big banks and other major financial interests, and have called for policies that focus on improving the economic lives of most Americans.
Those policies could take a number of forms. One idea comes from Jeremy Corbyn, the populist politician who's on track to become the next leader of Great Britain's Labour Party. Corbyn's economic plan includes "quantitative easing for people instead of banks." Corbyn proposes to grow the financial sector in a targeted way, by giving the Bank of England (the UK's version of the Fed) a mandate to "invest in new large scale housing, energy, transport and digital projects."
A headline on the website of the Financial Times says (with apparent surprise) that "Corbyn's "People's QE" could actually be a decent idea."
Corbyn also proposes to "strip out some of the huge tax reliefs and subsidies on offer to the corporate sector." The added revenue would go to "direct public investment," including the creation of a 'National Investment Bank' to "invest in the new infrastructure we need and in the hi-tech and innovative industries of the future."
Qualitative Easing
Call it "qualitative," rather than "quantitative," easing. It would increase the money supply, but for money that is to be invested in the real-world economy -- the one that creates jobs, lifts wages, and creates broad economic growth.
Could something like Corbyn's plan ever happen here? There's no reason why not. The Federal Reserve wasn't created by bankers, nor is it there to serve bankers -- although a lot of people inside and outside the Fed act as if it were. (The choice of a former Goldman Sachs executive for its latest major appointment won't help change that.)
The Federal Reserve was created by the American people through an act of Congress. Its governors and its policies are there to protect and serve the public. The Fed should use its oversight capabilities to ensure that banks don't behave in a reckless manner or help private funds and other unsupervised institutions to behave recklessly.
We are still paying the price for allowing big-money interests to dominate both lawmaking on Capitol Hill and monetary policy at the Federal Reserve. That must change. Congress and the Fed, acting together, should ensure that our nation's policies benefit the many who are in need of help, not the few who already have more than they need.
Richard Eskow is a writer and editor with the Bernie 2016 campaign, the host of The Zero Hour radio program, and a Senior Fellow with the Campaign for America's Future. The opinions expressed here are his own.
Source: Huffington Post
From a Contentious Election to a Stronger Democracy
From a Contentious Election to a Stronger Democracy
Reviving our democracy will be a paramount challenge for the new administration. The intertwined issues of race,...
Reviving our democracy will be a paramount challenge for the new administration. The intertwined issues of race, inequality, and democracy have been at the center of the 2016 campaign. Hillary Clinton put it well at the Democratic National Convention in July: “Our economy isn’t working the way it should because our democracy isn’t working the way it should.” The close primary challenge to Clinton by Senator Bernie Sanders was driven by the widespread feeling that big money is crowding out the voices and views of the people. Fights over voting rights have roiled states around the country. And in a perverted way, these issues have fed Donald Trump’s appeal, too. Many Americans feel unheard and unrepresented. Trump conflates real issues of the dominance of money with the paranoid message that voter registration and voting tallies are “rigged” as well.
Fifteen years ago, in the wake of the debacle election of 2000, The American Prospect published a special report entitled “Democracy’s Moment.” Today is another such moment, when we urgently need to reclaim our democracy in order to restore both the legitimacy of government and its capacity to solve problems. But the promise of democratic revival will be realized only if an effective fight is made. That will require serious presidential leadership, congressional courage, state and municipal experimentation, real change in the Democratic Party, and, most of all, the active engagement and sustained pressure of an organized democracy movement.
At the center of these efforts are three key areas: the need for expanding access to registration and voting; measures to keep money from crowding out citizens’ voices; and reforming gerrymandering and redistricting. These are not just “good government” or “process” issues. They are intimately connected to the ability of government to engage citizens and solve problems.
Reclaiming our democracy is connected to achieving real debate and progress on key substantive issues.
Reclaiming our democracy is connected to achieving real debate and progress on key substantive issues. These include raising the economic floor, protecting and rebuilding the middle class, crafting inclusive immigration policies, making college truly affordable, winning police and criminal justice reform, addressing the consequences of globalization, and protecting our planet. If politics can be about these deeply felt issues, people will be less cynical about democracy and government, and more willing to participate. In turn, the increased participation made possible by making the process more accessible, less manipulated, and less dominated by big money will dramatically change the dynamics of issues as well as elections, and enable far more substantive victories going forward.
I. Fighting Voter Suppression and Expanding Access
Immediately after the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013, which overturned federal preclearance authority for voting-system changes in jurisdictions with records of discrimination, almost every state previously covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act raced to put voting restrictions in place that made it harder for communities of color, poor people, and young people to vote. In the name of “preventing fraud,” and even of saving money, restrictive measures were successfully passed in 22 states.
Since then, hard-fought political and judicial fights have been waged. While the terrain is still sharply contested, important victories have been won in preventing these suppressive practices from being fully implemented. One emblematic fight was in Alabama, where the legislature passed a strict photo-ID requirement for voter registration and the Motor Vehicles Department closed down almost all of its offices as a “cost-saving measure.” The fight ensued, and the state reopened most sites, but on a more limited basis. In North Carolina, the omnibus voter-suppression law passed in 2013 has been rolled back in court, provision by provision, in rulings by the Fourth Circuit that were recently affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Cynical purging of voter rolls is a problem in several states. In Georgia, Ohio, and Virginia, lawsuits by Dēmos and Common Cause are in process, challenging aggressive purging procedures employed by secretaries of state, which erase hundreds of thousands of potentially eligible people from the rolls and violate National Voter Registration Act requirements. In Georgia, between October 2012 and November 2014, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged more than 370,000 voters from the rolls for failure to vote, a number that far exceeded the number of all new voters registered. In Ohio, Secretary of State Jon Husted purged 144,000 voters from the state’s three largest counties in 2015. (On September 23, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down this purge as violating the National Voter Registration Act.)
Even when they are not manipulated for partisan purposes, voting systems in many states are outmoded, inefficient, and underfunded—and vulnerable to attack. Improving administration and coordination, and winning stronger standards and enforcement, is less sexy but really important. When the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed in 2002, the Election Assistance Commission (no authority in that title!) was designed to be weak, and partisan obstructionism over recent years has rendered it virtually useless. States have found ways to cooperate, such as through the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). But there is a desperate need for national standards, for new investments in voting machines and technologies, better training and pay for poll workers, all with absolute safeguards against hacking and fraud. The issues now arising about the potential for sophisticated foreign hacking should force far more attention to these administrative security issues, and also be the pivot to open a real discussion of professionalizing and standardizing our elections, as well as protecting them from electronic attack.
As these fights over voter suppression in the states have raged, Republicans in Congress have refused even to hold hearings on restoring the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. This is a turnaround by House and Senate Republicans on the law. In the VRA’s most recent reauthorization, in 2006, the Voting Rights Act passed 98–0 in the U.S. Senate, 390–33 in the House, and was signed into law by then-President George W. Bush. Better than almost anything, this shift shows the need for a major push on a Democracy Agenda in 2017.
However, the struggles on the state level have not been only defensive. There is an affirmative voting-access agenda as well—real reforms have been achieved, and significant groundwork has been laid for dramatic advancements in the future.
Expanding Voter Registration. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have adopted online registration, often with bipartisan support. Same-day registration, which has been shown to increase participation by 5 percent to 7 percent, is now law in 13 states and the District of Columbia. In three other states—California, Hawaii, and Vermont—the law has been passed but not yet implemented. In North Carolina, the attempt to rescind same-day registration has been one of the policies blocked by recent court actions. Preregistration of 16- and 17-year-olds brings young people into the system so they can be prepared to vote at 18, and more than half the country now offers the reform, in red and blue states alike.
Restoring Voting Rights. Significant progress has been made in several states toward restoring the voting rights of citizens with felony convictions. Maryland last year passed legislation restoring the right to vote to individuals upon completion of prison sentences, without having to wait until after probation or parole. When Governor Larry Hogan vetoed the bill, the House and Senate overrode him in February, restoring the voting rights of 40,000 people. In Virginia, despite strong opposition, Governor Terry McAuliffe recently restored the rights of 13,000 people, as the beginning of a larger process.
Expanding the Use of the NVRA. One creative approach has been the use by advocates of the provisions of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA, often called “Motor Voter”), which requires state agencies—not just DMVs, but all agencies that offer federal benefits—to affirmatively offer people voter registration. De¯mos and Project Vote have led efforts to push state agencies to do their job, and more than three million additional voters have been registered at social-service agencies in 16 states that have changed their procedures, with the biggest gains being in Missouri and Ohio.
Automatic Voter Registration. AVR is a process in which the state, through state agencies (DMVs for now, but potentially others as well), places eligible voters automatically on the rolls. Oregon first passed the reform in March of 2015, and roughly 12,000 new voters per month have been added to the rolls—three times the registration rate before the state adopted AVR. California quickly followed Oregon, and Vermont, West Virginia, and Connecticut (by administrative order) have since adopted it, with some variations. The Illinois legislature passed AVR with strong bipartisan support just this May, but Governor Bruce Rauner vetoed the bill. With an override unlikely, advocates are uniting behind an effort for a veto-proof majority in 2017.
Expanding Early and Mail-in Voting. Early-voting opportunities have expanded significantly, and are now practiced in most states, either in precincts or at central vote centers. Voting by mail has been expanded as well. Both Washington and Oregon have gone almost exclusively to mail-in ballots, and Maryland recently expanded both mail-in and early-voting options. Colorado has built one of the most expansive systems, offering mail-in and early voting, with same-day registration available as well.
II. Fixing the Rigged System of Money in Politics
Despite the obvious and profound negative effects of our campaign-finance system, efforts to change the way money operates in our politics have been stymied at almost every turn. The campaign finance laws created after Watergate held for a while. But over the last 40 years, they have been undercut by a conservative legislative offensive, a relentless legal assault, terrible rulings from the Roberts Court, skillful evasion, partisan gridlock, and bipartisan political resistance at the state and national levels. Even though there is agreement among large majorities of voters of all party affiliations on the magnitude and impact of the problem, this has not produced the political will for the kind of major change that is needed.
Small-Donor Matching. Despite the money-is-speech doctrine, real gains can and have been made at the state and local level, mainly through systems of small-donor public financing. Maine, Arizona, and Connecticut, along with such cities as New York, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque, have succeeded in winning reforms that reduce or end reliance on the traditional donor class. Recently, reform coalitions have won new small-donor systems in Seattle and Montgomery County, Maryland. There are ballot initiatives set this November for Washington state, South Dakota, and Howard County, Maryland, and a successful advisory referendum in Chicago in February has set up the possibility for progress there.
These systems have been shown to produce real change. In Connecticut, whose system was adopted in 2005 and has been in place since the 2008 election cycle, candidates for governor, other state offices, and the legislature who opt in to the voluntary system raise a threshold amount in small donations, and then stop fundraising altogether, utilizing a state grant sufficient to run a serious campaign. Participation rates by Republicans and Democrats alike are very high—almost 75 percent in 2016—and there is strong bipartisan consensus that the system has been successful in changing how campaigns are run and—importantly—who can seriously contemplate running. It has also dramatically reduced the role of lobbyists, bundlers, and other moneyed players who traditionally dominated the halls of the State Capitol in Hartford.
In New York City, a strong matching program (6 to 1 for qualifying donations raised by candidates) coupled with term limits has been a powerful engine for change. It allowed a diverse and energetic pool of candidates to emerge, and set the stage for significant progressive victories at the city council and mayoral level. Efforts to expand the system statewide have so far met stiff resistance in the Republican Senate, but the expansion effort continues while the city system enjoys strong popular support.
The Courts and a New Jurisprudence. This is where major change could really begin. The new president will likely have multiple appointments to the Supreme Court. A new high court, looking objectively at what has happened to campaign spending and fundraising in the real world, could reverse the Citizens United and McCutcheon cases, and could and should go back to the original fundamentally flawed ruling in Buckley v. Valeo from 1976. That ruling laid down two horrible premises. First, that campaign spending is constitutionally protected speech. And second, that the only acceptable principle for limiting campaign spending is to prevent corruption or the appearance of corruption.
But there is an obvious additional principle that is simple common sense, which is that a set of rules can be adopted and justified to ensure that every voice is heard in our democracy, not just ones that can buy the biggest bullhorn.
But there is an obvious additional principle that is simple common sense, which is that a set of rules can be adopted and justified to ensure that every voice is heard in our democracy, not just ones that can buy the biggest bullhorn. Laws based on this equity principle could be passed, and cases can be developed and brought as assiduously and strategically as those on the right have done in their pro-big-money crusade. If judges are chosen and confirmed who prioritize restoring democracy, a major shift can happen without a constitutional amendment. They need only read retired Justice John Paul Stevens’s testimony to Congress in April 2014:
For years the Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence has been incorrectly predicated on the assumption that avoiding corruption or the appearance of corruption is the only justification for regulating campaign speech and the financing of political campaigns. That is quite wrong. … Like rules that govern athletic contests or adversary litigation, those rules should create a level playing field. … Just as procedures in contested litigation regulate speech in order to give adversary parties a fair and equal opportunity to persuade the decision-maker to rule in their favor, rules regulating political campaigns should have the same objective.
Disclosure. In addition to small-donor public financing, the voluntary nature of which abides by the Buckley and the Citizens United decisions, another set of reforms has expanded disclosure, to stem the tide of money from unrevealed and secret sources and shine the proverbial sunlight on how campaigns are paid for. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Colorado are among states that have strengthened their disclosure requirements.
Federal Reforms. Several pieces of reform legislation have been introduced in Congress. These have been stymied by Republican control of both houses, but that could soon change (see below).
III. Ending Gerrymandering and Fair Redistricting
In congressional delegations and many state legislatures, the partisan breakdown bears little resemblance to voter preferences. While it is difficult to argue exact correlations between craven district-drawing and the gap between the congressional party vote and the congressional delegation makeup (given unopposed races and other factors), the general relationship is very clear. In Pennsylvania, where Democrats received half the votes for Congress in 2012, the congressional delegation to the House is 13–5 Republican. In Michigan, the Democratic vote was more than 50 percent, and it is Republican by a 9–5 margin. In Florida, where Democrats received 45 percent of the vote, the delegation is Republican by 17 to 10. In Virginia, the vote was nearly half Democratic, while the congressional delegation is 8 to 3. And in North Carolina, the Democratic vote was more than half, and the delegation is 10 to 3. While this is not only a Republican offense (in Maryland, Democrats got 63 percent of the congressional vote, but the delegation is 7–1 Democratic), the preponderance of major recent examples are of Republican making. These are remarkable disparities, and similar ones can be shown for state legislative representation. (It is worth noting that in North Carolina in 2014, about half of the state legislative candidates ran unopposed.)
While scholars have pointed out that the country is re-segregating in its residential patterns, numbers this large can only be the result of conscious racial and partisan intent.
While scholars have pointed out that the country is re-segregating in its residential patterns, numbers this large can only be the result of conscious racial and partisan intent. And whereas gerrymandering once was a gentlemanly, bipartisan arrangement to protect incumbency, the more recent abuses have been to ensure partisan control of legislatures and to create absurd and permanent majorities in congressional delegations that do not reflect the state’s voting preferences by a long shot. The outcome was a direct result of “Operation REDMAP,” a successful Republican plan to target legislative races in 2010, specifically to ensure control of the redistricting process.
This kind of gerrymandering isn’t only about politics; it is also about race. The most egregious abuses are accomplished by “packing” and “cracking” black and Latino voters, either by putting them into very compact districts, or by spreading them across multiple districts while at the same time ensuring white and conservative dominance. Ironically, the defense of the redistricting plans most often offered is that they are not about race, but about partisan preferences. These are intertwined and unacceptable goals, both. In addition, the counting of prisoners as “residents” of rural districts where prisons are placed, rather than from the communities where they lived before their incarceration, is, given the racially skewed prison population, another way of limiting the power of communities of color. Again, some progress has been made recently, with states including California, Delaware, New York, and Maryland changing the way prisoners’ residence will be counted.
The good news on gerrymandering overall is that citizens around the country have been fighting back. Recent cases have been fought and mostly won in states as diverse as Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Florida.
Florida produced a major victory after a long fight when the state supreme court, generally regarded as conservative, ruled in 2015 that blatant partisan gerrymandering violated the state constitution, and required new districts to be drawn. This year, all of Florida’s districts have new boundaries, and significantly more are competitive. The number of competitive congressional seats rose from ten to 14, and in the State Senate, competitive seats rose from 14 to 20. In addition, districts are far more compact, adhere better to existing geographical boundaries, and give communities of color enhanced opportunities to elect candidates of their choosing.
In North Carolina, the courts have required congressional and state legislative maps to be redrawn this year to reduce the racially discriminatory districting process. When the legislature drew the new maps, they assured the public that the new maps, which would retain the 10–3 Republican majority in that state’s congressional delegation, were not racially motivated, but rather based on partisan considerations. The maps are now being contested by Common Cause and others in a new lawsuit.
In addition to the court cases, efforts to form independent redistricting commissions have been gaining steam. Arizona and California led the way years ago, in California through a ballot initiative for an independent Citizen Redistricting Commission to draw the lines. The results have been a legislature and congressional campaigns that are both more competitive and more reflective of the state’s population than ever before. And the Supreme Court last year upheld the Arizona Redistricting Commission against an argument from Arizona legislators that the citizens had “usurped” power from the legislature. Another approach, utilized by Iowa for a number of years, gives power to nonpartisan legislative staff to draw the districts with the assistance of a citizen advisory commission. The legislature can veto a plan, but cannot make changes.
In addition to changing who draws the district lines, a second area for reform is the question of what criteria to use. Criteria that have been proposed by reformers include: keeping communities of interest together, expressly protecting the rights of communities of color to have opportunities to elect candidates of their choice; prohibiting favoritism for incumbency or party advantage; requiring districts to be compact and contiguous; keeping cities and counties whole; and potentially even requiring districts to be politically competitive. In Florida, the key to the success of the reform community in the court victories was a constitutional amendment adopted in 2010 that prohibited drawing districts that diminished the ability of minority voters to elect representatives of their choice, or plans designed for partisan advantage. Secondary standards included compactness, contiguity, and equality of population.
In Ohio, a rare bipartisan coalition supported a successful ballot initiative last November that prohibited the drawing of state House and Senate districts for political advantage, and added protections that will prevent one party from dominating the process. The vote was more than two to one, and advocates will continue to push to add congressional districts to those covered by the new law. In North Carolina, following the court victories, the End Gerrymandering Now coalition, with strong bipartisan support, including in the much maligned North Carolina legislature, has real possibilities for victory in the next year. In Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Missouri, efforts are afoot to enact fair redistricting criteria as well.
On gerrymandering, too, a federal approach is needed.
On gerrymandering, too, a federal approach is needed. The Redistricting Reform Act, sponsored by Representative Zoe Lofgren based on California’s experience, sets standards and mandates independent commissions for the drawing of districts. The Voting Rights Act could be effectively used to win fair districts free of racial bias, if it were reauthorized. And, looking at the Supreme Court, there are four cases (Harris v. McCrory in North Carolina; Whitford v. Nichol in Wisconsin; Shapiro v. McManus in Maryland; and Common Cause v. Rucho in North Carolina) that could clearly be headed to the Court. The Court upheld the Arizona process, but it needs to take a step further, using one or more of these cases, and give critical guidance to states around the country as they develop their redistricting plans after the 2020 census.
What It Will Take to Win
Policy ideas are critical, but without a political strategy, they can just be words on paper. And saying we need a strategy is very different than really developing a successful one. Here are some of the keys to success.
I. Presidential Leadership
Hillary Clinton, strongly influenced by the Sanders campaign and by democracy organizations, has stated strong support for voting rights and for changing the campaign-finance system. But she will need to prioritize democracy issues with a serious focus, and it will not be easy. On the one hand, there is clear public support for all these issues, which resonate with voters who believe the system is stacked, and that their voices don’t count. With voters of color in particular, there are decades experiencing active attempts to keep them away from the polls and to minimize their representation through racially based gerrymandering.
On the other hand, there will be major countervailing pulls. There will be the press of crises, foreign and domestic. There will be the demands of other major issues and constituencies whose issues have been unable to move for so long. And there will be the lure of opportunities for unlimited and interested fundraising, and doing political business as usual. Pay-to-play politics is so deeply ingrained in our political culture that breaking free from it would be an extraordinary challenge and accomplishment.
What would real presidential leadership look like? One major marker is sustained attention by the president and consistent talk about these issues, utilizing the presidential pulpit in her inauguration speech, in her travels around the country, and in her legislative priorities. But what are other concrete steps that can be taken?
The President and the Congress. Legislatively, there are a number of important pro-democracy possibilities. If the Senate turns Democratic, there is real potential. Senators Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and others all have real commitments to a democracy agenda. The dynamics in the House are far less predictable, but even if it remains in Republican hands, there may be some real opportunity in the unsettled post-election months.
First and foremost should be moving the Voting Rights Advancement Act, sponsored by Representative John Lewis and Senator Leahy. Nothing would bring the Democratic Party together in the Congress, and send a signal that the issues of race and representation will not be afterthoughts, more forcefully than this. In addition, moving the bill would call out the Republicans, particularly the House leadership, to demonstrate that the racism so shamefully present in this year’s presidential campaign does not represent Republicanism in this new moment. Speaker Paul Ryan, James Sensenbrenner, Tom Cole, and other House Republicans have stated publicly that they support restoring the Voting Rights Act. Yet they have caved to the right wing of the caucus. House Judiciary Chair Robert Goodlatte refused to hold a committee hearing on its restoration, perhaps to appease the Tea Party and white nationalist elements of his Roanoke-area district. Will this pattern simply continue, or might this be an opportunity to lead in a different way? And if the leadership can’t or won’t move, this would seem to be a perfect vehicle for a discharge petition that might alter the voting dynamic in the House in major ways.
In a similar vein is the Democracy Restoration Act, which would require restoration of the voting rights of citizens with felony convictions upon release from prison. This could affect several million people around the country, and connects to the momentum on criminal justice reform, an issue already with bipartisan support.
On the campaign-finance side, Democratic senators this year introduced the “We the People” package of reforms, which Hillary Clinton said she supports. It includes strengthening disclosure and lobbyist reporting and revolving-door provisions, reforming the Federal Election Commission, and introducing a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Unfortunately, the package did not include a small donor–based public financing system for Congress. But the Durbin bill in the Senate (the Fair Elections Now Act) and the John Sarbanes bill in the House (Government by the People Act) create, in slightly different ways, such a system for congressional races. In addition, the Tom Udall-sponsored EMPOWER Act would restore the viability of the presidential public financing system. As of now, these bills have very little Republican support, and will be far more challenging to move than the Voting Rights Advancement Act. But the situation has gotten so clearly out of hand, and there is such strong support from voters across the spectrum, that it may be possible that with both presidential and congressional leadership, a new chemistry on the issue can be developed, at least enough to make the debate serious.
It seems as though this election season has shown the wisdom of clearly standing for the 99 percent, and for strengthening the Democratic Party’s commitment to fighting for racial and economic equity.
One important question the campaign-finance issue raises is where the Democratic Party wants to be on these fundamental issues of how the system runs. The Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Democracy Restoration Act have a very clear logic to them from Democrats’ political point of view. Fighting for an expanded electorate, increasing the representation of the new American majority, and opposing the forces of reaction on racial issues are clearly enough in the party’s self-interest. Even the restoration of voting rights for people with felony convictions, though it might have raised the specter of being “soft on crime” at one point, has moved into the Democrats’ advantage zone. But the issue of really changing the campaign-finance rules, like the issue of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the rules of globalization, goes to the heart of what the Democratic Party stands for, and risks raising the old progressive-versus-Democratic Leadership Council conflicts that were so central to the Bill Clinton era. It seems as though this election season has shown the wisdom of clearly standing for the 99 percent, and for strengthening the Democratic Party’s commitment to fighting for racial and economic equity. But the pulls of the business lobby and the donor class will be a powerful siren call.
Executive Actions. There are a large number of executive orders, appointments, and other actions that could be taken by the president.
An executive order could require federal contractors to disclose their political contributions, which would have a major impact, since most of America’s largest corporations have federal contracts. This has been discussed at great length with the Obama White House, but has not been done. Such an order would dovetail well with a strong order on ethics and revolving doors.
The president has the authority to mandate that exchanges under the Affordable Care Act be designated as voter registration sites under the NVRA, and to consider other potential strengthening of NVRA provisions.
The president and Congress need to make sure that the 2020 census is adequately funded so that a full count of our diverse population can truly be made. And the census must count prisoners from the communities from which they come, and not from their involuntary rural addresses.
The Justice Department has a strikingly important role to play. Obama has ramped up the intensity and performance of the department’s Civil Rights Division in challenging voter-suppression efforts in states and municipalities, through Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. President Hillary Clinton could go even further. The DOJ has had limited involvement in challenging purging procedures that violate the NVRA and in enforcing other NVRA provisions, which could have a major impact on the voting rolls, including ensuring that state agencies are doing all they should. And the DOJ should maintain regular, consistent contact with civil-rights organizations and the democracy community overall.
Appointments to key positions will also have a major impact. While major attention has been paid to the importance of potential Supreme Court appointments, the appointment of judges in other jurisdictions could be instrumental in rewriting jurisprudence on campaign finance and in protecting the right to vote. And President Clinton’s appointments, not only to the FEC but to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Internal Revenue Service, will all have major bearing on issues related to disclosure and political financing in general.
All of these actions would benefit tremendously if President Clinton were to create a serious program within the Domestic Policy Council to move a democracy agenda. It would be a critical boost to moving a legislative agenda and promoting its priority. It would also be an effective focal point for organizing the strategic elements of support for a multifaceted democracy agenda—cataloguing and promoting the variety of executive actions that could be taken, and coordinating with the broad range of constituency organizations and coalitions that have taken up democracy as a top-priority issue. Overall, it would be an effective and strategic way of demonstrating and concretizing presidential leadership.
II. States as Continuing Laboratories
Republicans hold 68 of 99 legislative chambers, and fully control redistricting in 18 states.
Beyond change at the federal level should Clinton be successful and gains are made at the congressional level, there will also be new opportunities for states to play their “laboratories of democracy” role. Republicans hold 68 of 99 legislative chambers, and fully control redistricting in 18 states. But there are 11 states where Democrats have the possibility of retaking control, including six Senate chambers—Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, New York, Washington, and West Virginia—where a shift of one seat would flip control, opening up possibilities on democracy issues as well as others.
New York is a very clear case in point. Over the last several years, a broad and strong coalition, led by Citizen Action of New York, Common Cause New York, major unions, and the Working Families Party, fought for a strong small-donor public financing system at the state level, modeled after the New York City program. The effort had strong legislative champions and passed the state Assembly. While the governor was the most unreliable of allies, the pivotal barrier was the Republican control of the New York State Senate, which is now evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. A major victory by Clinton could very possibly flip the Senate to Democratic control, which would give a major boost to the “Demand Democracy” campaign that is poised to renew its efforts in 2017. Given New York’s outsized role in national campaign finance, a victory there could have significant national implications.
III. Now More Than Ever, a Democracy Movement
Over the past decade, we have seen the intensification of strong grassroots action for democracy. To have any real hope that the president, Congress, state legislatures, the Democratic Party, and others will move these agenda items, there must be outside pressure, with real people, real numbers, and strong organizational coordination. Based on a number of developments, there is real hope that this can happen.
New social movements, organizations committed to fighting for racial equity, and organizations in the movement for immigrant inclusion have strongly connected to democracy and voting issues. For instance, the recent “Vision for Black Lives” platform adopted by Black Lives Matter and associated organizations strongly supported not only voting rights but also publicly financed elections. Organizations and movements that have not always given priority to democratic reforms, including the labor and environmental movements, have realized that democracy must be restored and enlivened if their issues are to have a real chance to win. Grassroots community and citizen organizations like People’s Action, PICO National Network, the Center for Popular Democracy, and the Gamaliel Foundation network have added these issues to their agendas more than ever before.
In addition, coordination among established organizations, and newer ones, in the money-in-politics field, the redistricting field, and in the voting-rights field has strengthened significantly over the last several years. This year’s combined effort under the banner of “Fighting Big Money,” led by Every Voice, Common Cause, Public Citizen, and others, has been a successful example, as were Democracy Spring and the Democracy Awakening. Civil-rights and voting-rights organizations, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Advancement Project, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, have worked well in a coordinated way to stand up to the onrush of voter suppression. And the Democracy Initiative, with 60 organizations from all of these issue areas, is an entity solely committed to advancing this collaboration.
And, of course, the Sanders campaign mobilized tens of thousands of activists and influenced millions of people on the connected issues of economic and political inequality, and highlighted the assaults on our democracy in a way that energized the fight for reform. The campaign’s offshoot, Our Revolution, will certainly be in this fight as well.
The key will be in building a coordinated campaign for democracy that has the breadth of issue makeup, the diversity of organizations, and the ability to coordinate and move effectively together on behalf of the Democracy Agenda. Racial justice, economic equity, and real democracy are inextricably intertwined, and the movements to achieve them will need to consistently make those links clear, and work together to move the president and Congress on all three in reciprocal ways. The movement will need a federal focus and a state focus, and will need to recognize that focusing on policy wins in the short term is essential, while continuously bearing in mind that these issues need to be made front and center for candidates running in the 2018 election as well. Candidates for office need to win or lose based on their commitment to these issues, and electing champions for democracy will be a critical component of the work ahead. All the while, the movement will need to be looking further ahead to the incredibly consequential election of 2020.
This election has the potential to open up an extraordinary moment in the life of our democracy, including in the way we practice democracy itself. Or it can be another missed opportunity, superseded by other issues and undone by a failure to creatively assemble the elements necessary to win and coordinate them in the most effective and inclusive ways. The elements for success are present in extremely propitious ways, but it will take determined leadership by the president, congressional leaders, state legislatures, and a real grassroots movement to seize this new Democracy Moment. If it can be done, the benefits of fighting and winning on these issues now will reverberate for a long time to come.
By Miles Rapoport
Source
New Video: Preying on Puerto Rico, The Forgotten Citizens of Hedge Fund Island
New Video: Preying on Puerto Rico, The Forgotten Citizens of Hedge Fund Island
Last month I returned to my native Puerto Rico to attend a wedding and was catching up with family still on the Island...
Last month I returned to my native Puerto Rico to attend a wedding and was catching up with family still on the Island one evening. A couple of sips of whiskey in, and the truth came out: My wife’s father reported that he hadn’t received a paycheck in 3 months.
He is a doctor. A highly specialized one, And, with most of his patients coming through government insurance, he hadn’t seen a dime in payment.
Most Puerto Rican health care professionals try to hang on as long as possible. They want to stay in their homeland, be with their families and help make things better. But increasingly, they have no choice. Now many doctors are among the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans who have become economic migrants, forced to flee from home because they simply cannot survive on patriotism and hope.
In 2014, 364 doctors left the island, the Puerto Rican Surgeons and Physicians Association reported. Last year, 500 practitioners packed up and got out.
“Don’t get hurt on a Sunday or a holiday,” one man recently told CNN after his uncle died because only 2 neurologists were on duty to serve the island’s 3.5 million “forgotten citizens.” (His family now calls the lines at the hospital “the walking dead.”)
Behind those staggering numbers is rapacious, hungry, heartless greed as embodied by two simple words: Hedge funds.
Just like Detroit, Greece and other places rocked by the recession and government mismanagement, Puerto Rico’s debt ballooned over the last decade, further exacerbated by colonial status and expiring tax incentives.
In 2012, hedge fund managers began to circle the Commonwealth, looking to reap billions – and experiment with new wealth extraction strategies that could be imported back to the American mainland. The short version: They bought Puerto Rican bonds after the price fell.
Now these “vulture” managers (as they are literally called for their creditor and distressed buying schemes – los buitres in Spanish) insist that any package from Washington that allows Puerto Rico to renegotiate its $72 billion debt puts Wall Street investors at the front of the line to get paid.
A handful are holding out for even more; refusing to accept any restructuring and demanding even more severe austerity measures and suffering so they don’t have to take any losses on their risky investment.
These carrion feeders are in fact, real human beings, acting in inhumane ways: Mark Brodsky, of the $4.5 billion Aurelius Capital and Andrew Feldstein, of the $20 billion BlueMountain Capital are two leaders of the vulture flock of hedge fund billionaires circling Puerto Rico trying to make huge profits from what’s turning into a full-scale humanitarian crisis.
Brodsky bought up the Island’s debt for as low as 29 cents on the dollar and now is demanding full repayment (Think Greece, and Argentina). He is helping fund economists who argue that vital government services must cease – and schools and hospitals must close - to extract full payment.
Feldstein has teams of lawyers fighting basic protections for Puerto Ricans in court and lobbyists taking the same case to Congress. On his dime they have launched a high profile and highly fraudulent media campaign to make sure Congress keeps working for the billionaires – and against teachers, students, the elderly… and my former neighbors and relatives.
Together with John Paulson – who literally bragged to his bros that together they could create the “Singapore of the Caribbean” and create a tax haven for themselves – these vulture investors are consuming the living, for their greed.
That’s why I’ve been working with Brave New Films and a large coalition, including Make the Road, New York Communities for Change, Organize NOW, Florida Institute for Reform & Empowerment, AFT, SEIU, NEA, New Jersey Communities United, Grassroots Collaborative , Center for Popular Democracy, Strong Economy for All, and Citizen Action, under the campaign banner Hedge Clippers, to help ordinary Puerto Ricans expose the truth about these bad actors and their flock.
Preying on Puerto Rico: Forgotten Citizens of Hedge Fund Island is a series of short film videos that Puerto Rican activists helped create to kick off an escalated series of large actions calling on those with the power to help to stand up for Puerto Ricans and stand up to los buitres.
These same leaders are behind a growing wave of protests on Capitol Hill, Wall Street, the Trump Towers and at the Federal Reserve Board offices in cities across the U.S.
They are getting attention and being heard, but the path forward is uphill. We need your help. With unemployment at 14% and 45 percent of Puerto Ricans living below the poverty line Puerto Rico is in a humanitarian crisis. PROMESA, the bill that just passed out of the US House and is on its way to the Senate, is a bad deal that will help the hedge funds, but not the Puerto Rican people.
Preying on Puerto Rico: Forgotten Citizens of HedgeFund Island is only the beginning of how we can use our voices and votes to help my father in-law remain on the Island to help save lives – and end this suffering caused by these vultures and the politicians that do their bidding.
Join us today to share these films – and call Feldstein and Brodsky to ask them: how many more billions do you need to make before you stop pillaging the poor?
By Julio López Varona / Brave New Films
Source
The Housing Recovery Has Skipped Poor and Minority Neighborhoods
On October 11, 2009, when Isaac Dieudonne was two years old, his family moved into a new home in Miramar, Florida. As...
On October 11, 2009, when Isaac Dieudonne was two years old, his family moved into a new home in Miramar, Florida. As they began to unpack, young Isaac bounded out the front door in search of fun. The parents found him several minutes later, floating dead in the fetid pool of a foreclosed house.
Since the financial crisis began in 2008, approximately 5.7 million properties have completed the foreclosure process, and stories like this begin to answer the critical question of what happens to all those homes. While many are resold, too often they fall into disrepair, creating blight that drags down property values and turns communities into potential deathtraps, attracting not just mosquitoes and mold, but crime and tragedy.
According to expert reports, this neglect occurs disproportionately in communities of color, part of a disturbing pattern. While the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the ability to use the Fair Housing Act to challenge discriminatory effects in neighborhoods, the nation’s neighborhood layout looks more segregated than ever, exacerbating the racial wealth gap. There’s no point in having an anti-housing discrimination law if it isn't vigorously employed to prevent a real societal division that drags down minority families. The Justice Department, free of uncertainty about the Fair Housing Act’s future, needs to work to realize the law's intended purpose.
The housing recovery has skipped more low-income neighborhoods.Fifteen percent of homes worth less than $200,000 are still underwater, where the borrower owes more on the house than it’s worth. This is compared to only six percent of homes over $200,000. Property values in low-income neighborhoods have not bounced back to the degree of their wealthier counterparts.
An important study from Stanford University shows how this housing divide doesn’t align with socioeconomic status, but with race. Middle-class black households are more likely to live in neighborhoods with lower incomes than the average low-income white household. This creates fewer opportunities for minorities, as neighborhood poverty can predict the quality of schooling and the availability of jobs for the next generation. Areport from the American Civil Liberties Union shows that median household wealth for African-Americans continued to drop after the housing collapse, long after median wealth for whites stabilized. They project this to continue well into the next generation, with a drop in the average black family’s wealth by $98,000 more than it would have been without the Great Recession.
Foreclosures are largely responsible for this widening disparity. Predatory lending was directed at minority homeowners. Subprime mortgages weregiven disproportionately to minority borrowers, and after the housing bubble collapsed, these loans failed at higher rates. Racial segregation prior to the crisis turned these neighborhoods into targets, with subprime lending specialists going door-to-door and luring even those who owned their homes outright into refinances with dodgy terms. Banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America paid fines for pushing minority borrowers into subprime loans, even when they qualified for better interest rates. But these fines—$175 million and $335 million, respectively—were substantially lower than they paid for other bubble-era abuses.
More black and Latino borrowers had their wealth exclusively tied up in their homes, and when they lost them, more of their wealth dissipated. Even after the collapse, the Federal Reserve found that from 2010-2013, net worth of nonwhite or Hispanic families fell 17 percent, compared to an increase of 2 percent for white families.
This wealth transferred in part to Wall Street. Private equity and hedge funds scooped up hundreds of thousands foreclosed properties in low-income communities, and converted them into rentals. This prevented minority homeowners from benefiting from any return in property values, and displaced many from their neighborhoods. And a recent survey of community organizations finds that this has created higher rents and more transient neighborhoods.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development, along with quasi-public mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, auction off these homes to investors at a discount, according to a study from the Center for Popular Democracy. The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently passed a resolution urging these government lenders to sell instead to non-profits that would work to protect homes from foreclosure.
And then there is the disparate treatment of foreclosed properties repossessed by banks, known as real estate owned (REO). The National Fair Housing Alliance’s findings in 29 metropolitan areas indicate that REO in communities of color are twice more likely to have damaged doors and windows, overgrown weeds and trash on the premises and holes in the roof or structure. This violates the Fair Housing Act: Banks are responsible for maintenance and upkeep on all properties, and if they neglect that in black and Latino neighborhoods, the Justice Department can sanction them.
The failure to maintain foreclosed properties has multiple negative effects for communities. Blight creates health and safety concerns, acts asmagnets for crime, and lowers property values for neighboring homes. It also reduces the tax base for municipalities, as nobody pays property taxes on an empty house. The city of Detroit has already lost $500 million from foreclosures in the past few years; 78 percent of homes with subprime loans are know foreclosed or abandoned.
Last week, fifteen Senate Democrats, including leaders Chuck Schumerand Dick Durbin and ranking member of the Banking Committee Sherrod Brown, asked regulators to open an investigation into the treatment of foreclosed properties. “The same communities of color that were victimized by predatory lending may now be facing the double whammy of racial bias when it comes to the upkeep of foreclosed homes,” said Brown. But policing foreclosed properties would only begin to close the gap between white and non-white neighborhoods.
The entire point of the Fair Housing Act, passed shortly after Martin Luther King’s death in 1968, was to reverse the findings of the Kerner Commission, that the country “is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” But reading through these statistics, you wouldn’t know the Fair Housing Act existed. We are further than ever from what Justice Anthony Kennedy described as the act’s “role in moving the Nation toward a more integrated society.” It has been impotent in the face of multiple discriminatory shots at people of color, which has opened up a historically large wealth gap and crippled their opportunity.
Until we figure out another way for the middle class to build wealth other than purchasing a mortgage, the discriminatory effects of our housing system will further a permanent underclass among people of color in America. The Justice Department has an enormous amount of work to do.
Source: The New Republic
A top regulator's close ties to Wall Street damage one of its most crucial functions 10 years after the crisis
A top regulator's close ties to Wall Street damage one of its most crucial functions 10 years after the crisis
“A new report from the Fed Up coalition, an activist group calling for more inclusive economic policies, says the key...
“A new report from the Fed Up coalition, an activist group calling for more inclusive economic policies, says the key regional Fed bank's conflicts lead to subpar regulation of Wall Street. As William Dudley, a former Goldman Sachs partner, prepares to retire as New York Fed president, Fed Up calls on the bank to "select a new president who will put the interests of the public before Wall Street. A new report from the Fed Up coalition, led by the Center for Popular Democracy, a Washington-based nonprofit, shows just how stark the lack of diversity in race, gender, and professional backgrounds has been at the New York Fed.”
Read the full article here.
States Expand Inquiry Into On-Call Scheduling
States Expand Inquiry Into On-Call Scheduling
Eight states and the District of Columbia have expanded their probe into on-call scheduling at retail companies,...
Eight states and the District of Columbia have expanded their probe into on-call scheduling at retail companies, asking a group of national chains to provide detailed information on their use of the controversial practice.
On-call shifts, where a worker must be available to work a shift that can be cancelled at the last minute without compensation, has become popular in retail. But the practice wreaks havoc on the lives of low-paid hourly workers trying to plan plan around child care, schooling, or second jobs, as a BuzzFeed News investigation found last year.
At the time, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent a letter to 14 chains (published below), inquiring about their use of on-call scheduling and warning it may be illegal. Since then, Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Workers, J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, and Gap have committed to ending the practice.
“On-call shifts are not a business necessity, as we see from the many retailers that no longer use this unjust method of scheduling work hours,” said Schneiderman in a statement.
A study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that the lowest income workers receive the most irregular schedules, with unpredictability leading to increased stress.
“It’s heartening to see more and more policymakers and regulators take action,” said Carrie Gleason, Director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal advocacy group.
On Tuesday, the offices of the Attorneys General in California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, and Rhode Island sent a letter requesting employee handbooks, schedules, and payroll information.
In these states, the Attorneys General warn, the practice may be a violation of a law mandating a minimum of four hours of pay for employees who report for work.
The following retailers received the letter: Aéropostale, American Eagle, BCBG Max Azria, Carter’s Inc., Coach, DavidsTea Inc., Walt Disney Co., Forever 21 Inc., Ascena Retail Group Inc.’s Justice, Pacific Sunwear of California Inc., Payless ShoeSource, Tilly’s Inc., Uniqlo, VF Corp.’s Vans, and Zumiez Inc.
Spokespeople from Uniqlo and Coach told the Wall Street Journal that the companies don’t use the practice. BuzzFeed News has reached out to the companies listed for comment and will update the post with responses.
UPDATE
A spokesperson for American Eagle Outfitters said in a statement, ““American Eagle Outfitters is committed to providing our associates with a positive working environment. We decided in November 2015 to cease the use of ‘on-call shifts’ and advised our stores. We are taking steps to reinforce and assure adherence to this policy across our store fleet.”
A spokesperson for Forever 21 said, “Contrary to published reports, Forever 21 does not permit on-call scheduling nor do we have a company policy around doing so.”
A spokesperson for Vans said the company does not use on-call scheduling and will comply with the request for information.
A spokesperson for Uniqlo said that Uniqlo has received the letter and that on-call scheduling is not a Uniqlo practice or policy.
A spokesperson for Payless ShoeSource says the company does not engage in on-call scheduling, has received the inquiry and will respond accordingly.
A spokesperson for Zumiez said, “It is our practice to cooperate with any request from the attorney general or other state agencies and we will do so in this case as well.” Apr. 14, 2016, at 10:21 a.m.
By Cora Lewis
Source
2 days ago
2 days ago