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Last week, the Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change, Enlace International, and the Strong Economy for All Coalition released a report, “Bankrolling Oppression: How Wall Street Corporations Finance the Private Prison and Immigrant Detention Industry.” This report investigates the influential role that major Wall Street corporations - including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and BlackRock - play in maintaining and expanding the private prison and immigrant detention industry. As the Trump administration advances a “law and order” agenda and anti-immigrant policies, private prison companies are taking advantage of new opportunities to benefit from potential increases in incarceration and detention rates. Companies like JPMorgan, Wells, and BlackRock, are ready and willing to finance their operations and expansion, regardless of the cost in human suffering.
Specifically, the report shows that:
- After Trump’s election, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and BlackRock saw a significant in shares in the private prison and immigrant detention industry. Comparing stock holdings now to those before the election, JPMorgan, Wells, and BlackRock’s shares in the private prison and detention industry have collectively increased 28.3 times.
- GEO Group and CoreCivic, the two largest private prison companies, have borrowed billions of dollars from corporations like JPMorgan, Wells, and BlackRock to maintain and expand their facilities. At the end of 2017, nine of every ten dollars CoreCivic had on hand were borrowed. For GEO Group, it was nineteen of every twenty dollars.
- In exchange for funding private prisons, Wall Street banks earn hundreds of millions of dollars in interest and fees. In 2017, lenders earned $217.5 million in interest.
Executives of Wells, JPMorgan, and BlackRock have publicly articulated a commitment to human rights, social responsibility, and the welfare of immigrants, and yet their financial entanglements clearly indicate otherwise. By continuing to finance the debts that enable GEO Group and CoreCivic to operate and expand, and by continuing to invest in the industry, these companies are facilitating the abuses of the private prison and detention industry—and, by extension, the hateful policies of the Trump administration. Read the full report on our website.
Wall Street is taking over America’s biggest employers and bankrupting them – destroying jobs and hurting local economies. When Toys R Us recently announced it would close all of its US stores and lay off 30,000 workers, CPD’s Fair Workweek Initiative (FWI) and CPD affiliate Organization United for Respect (OUR) jumped into action. OUR is supporting thousands of Toys R Us workers across the country whose families are in crisis facing these layoffs. We are calling for severance pay and calling on members of Congress to prevent this happening to other hard-working people in retail.
More than 27,000 supporters have already signed petitions to get severance from Toys R Us’ private equity owners – KKR and Bain Capital who raked in hundreds of millions while workers are left empty-handed. Together with progressive elected leaders, we are working with our network and other advocacy organizations, including Make the Road NJ, Good Jobs Now MI, Hedge Clippers, and Strong Economy for All Coalition, on a number of strategic actions to lift up workers’ voices and to call for justice for workers hurt by Wall Street greed. Since Toys R Us announced its closure, stories from OUR worker leaders have made headlines in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Reuters.
We are also working with partners and allies around the country to escalate the public debate over unregulated Wall Street speculation and its role fueling economic instability in our communities. Standing with Toys R Us workers, we are promoting a bold policy and regulatory agenda that holds Wall Street accountable for itsexplosive profits at the expense of workers. It’s not good for our economy when Wall Street owns America’s biggest employers – and chooses short-term profits instead of creating jobs for working families.
What happened at Toys R Us? Contrary to popular narratives of pressure from Amazon and changing habits of millennial shoppers, the so-called “retail apocalypse” is a Wall Street-made disaster. Toys R Us is the third largest bankruptcy in US history, despite $11 billion in profits. In 2005, private equity firms Bain Capital, KKR & Co. and Vornado Realty Trust bought Toys R Us in a $6.6 billion leveraged buyout through which they saddled the toy seller with a reported $5 billion debt. Despite solid profits, Toys R Us had struggled to service this overwhelming debt and, on March 15, announced plans for liquidation. More than 30,000 working people across the country will lose their jobs in the coming weeks.
Who is hurt by the “retail apocalypse”? Private equity buyout deals like what happened with KKR and Bain with Toys R Us account for over 130,000 jobs lost in the last 2 years. Women are paying the biggest price, facing the vast majority of this mass job loss. A retail rust belt is emerging in states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where vulnerable communities with embattled economies feel the greatest pain from shuttered storefronts - losing both jobs and a vital commercial tax base.
Now is the moment where we can come together to support Toys R Us workers in their movement for justice. Stand with Toy R Us families by signing this petition for severance pay, and join us in moving Congress to stop the “retail apocalypse” by holding Wall Street accountable.
Young people in Milwaukee, led by a youth organizing group, Leaders Igniting Transformation (LIT), launched a campaign last week calling on the city’s public school district to radically rethink and change its approach to school policing and discipline. LIT developed their Youth Power Agenda, which calls for the removal of metal detectors and police officers in schools and more investments for teachers, social workers, guidance counselors, and jobs programs. You can support their platform by signing on here!
The campaign comes as Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) move to implement a resolution agreement from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to change their policies after an investigation revealed racial disparities in discipline. In the 2016-2017 school year, 80 percent of the students MPS suspended were Black, while they make up only 53 percent of the student population.
The systemic criminalization of youth of color, youth with disabilities, and youth of color with disabilities in schools is one of the most egregious examples of structural racism and violence in this country. The presence of police officers, guns, handcuffs, and metal detectors in schools creates hostile teaching and learning environments that are reinforced by harsh, punitive, and exclusionary school discipline policies. LIT aims to end this oppressive system in Milwaukee.
The pressure is already working. After the launch of a petition that generated over a thousand emails to the school board and a press conference outside the school board meeting, the district agreed to hold six public meetings on the DOE agreement.
This campaign comes as young people across the nation face an onslaught of proposals that aim to reconstruct the school-to-prison pipeline by effectively militarizing schools with armed teachers, police officers, and metal detectors. This campaign, along with similar ones in New York and cities across the country, seek to underline how such policies disproportionately affect students of color. There is a better way. Policy makers must listen to young people by following the Youth Power Agenda and other proposals like it that can pave a new national model for school safety, centered on support like guidance counselors, support services, and restorative justice, rather than criminalization.
On March 15, CPD Wisconsin affiliate Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC) moderated a conversation with Former Attorney General Eric Holder about the importance of redistricting and the upcoming WI Supreme Court race. BLOC has been working with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee for the last several months.
Over 60 people joined BLOC’s Angela Lang and Holder to discuss the significance of redistricting, particularly to African American communities, and what is at stake in the upcoming state Supreme Court race this fall. General Holder mentioned the importance of supporting groups like BLOC and talking to people about elevating our collective voices in the political process, no matter how difficult it may feel. BLOC was able to spend a few minutes talking to the Attorney General about the work they are accomplishing on the ground, and stories from the community.
Watch the event livestream on BLOC’s Facebook page, and read about it in the Milwaukee Courier, CBS, and WPR.
CPD’s newest initiative, the State Power Project (SPP), is designed to build the grassroots organizational strength of nine state affiliates by engaging and recruiting the public to join as members and engage in individual and collective action. The program launched in LA last month, working with our Sustainability Initiative to train these CPD affiliates to build field membership and canvass programs that will recruit new members and raise essential funding. Organizers came to LA from New Florida Majority, Good Jobs Now, Organize Florida, LUCHA, Make the Road Nevada and Make the Road PA, One PA, New Virginia Majority, Maryland Communities United, Action NC, and CASA (MD, VA, PA).
In it’s next phase, SPP partnered with our Organizing & Capacity Building team to train affiliate staff in essential organizing skills from March 21-23. Twenty organizers and nine supervisors from Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina participated in the three-day training in Phoenix, AZ, home of CPD partner and SPP participant - LUCHA.
Trainees developed essential organizing skills, including how to follow up with leads and how to conduct one-on-one meetings to deepen their activism and turn them into leaders. The training, led by CPD national staff, also focused on the use of a new organizing database created specifically to support CPDs SPP program.
On March 5, the CPD Network joined United We Dream, the Women’s March, and a number of other groups to organize a mass march and act of civil disobedience in Washington, DC. It was the self-imposed deadline for a crisis that President Trump created six months ago when he ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and left hundreds of thousands of young immigrants living in uncertainty – wondering if they will lose their jobs, have to dropout of school, be torn away from their families or uprooted from their home. Trump gave Congress until March 5 to solve this crisis and then – along with Republican Congressional leaders – sabotaged any bipartisan effort to pass the Dream Act.
Rallying behind a banner that read: “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t realize we were seeds,” a thousand immigrant youth and allies marched to the Capitol to denounce Trump’s political games and to demand that Congress take action to protect young immigrants – without harming their families or other members of the immigrant community – and reject Trump’s demands to fund a racist border wall and his mass deportation agenda. Nearly 100 people were arrested during acts of civil disobedience in the streets in front of the Capitol and in visits to offices of Members of Congress. The action made headlines in ABC News, NBC News, Univision, NPR, Associated Press, CNN, and Arizona Republic, among other local outlets. For real-time action, watch the event livestreams on BuzzFeed and Time.
CPD affiliates traveled from all over the country to participate in the DC action, including NYCC, Make the Road Nevada, LUCHA, Action NC, Sunflower, and Delaware Alliance for Community Advancement. Immigrant youth and families were joined by faith leaders, healthcare activists, and other allies. Many other CPD affiliates organized powerful local actions around the country. See photos on CPD Action’s Facebook page.
The New York Federal Reserve is choosing the second most influential monetary policymaking position in the country -- arguably the most powerful position in the U.S. that President Trump will not appoint. The next NY Fed President could be our last line of defense against another devastating financial crash, or they could let another one happen. That’s why, on March 12, ten years after one of the worst economic recessions in American history, a coalition of working families, labor leaders, and community organizations, led by CPD’s Fed Up coalition, gathered on Wall Street to tell the NY Fed that they can’t afford another crash.
This action marked the launch of the campaign’s ambitious effort at membership development and popular education, and called on the NY Fed to resist turning to Wall Street in its search for its next president. Using a report titled 10 Years After: the Financial Crisis and the New York Federal Reserve, Fed Up showed the extent of those consequences, examining the lasting impact of the crash in the NY Fed district, finding that more people in the NY Fed district live in poverty today than before the financial crash, while the top one percent of earners have captured a greater share of income.
On March 12, with this context, CPD affiliates SPACES, NYCC, Action NC, Our Walmart, One PA, New Georgia Project, Taller Salud and MORE, joined New Economy Project and New Yorkers still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, including those who lost homes and jobs, to demand the NY Fed prioritize working people over Wall Street interests with its next appointment. In 2008, when the entire financial system was melting down, the NY Fed met behind closed doors to funnel billions to the big banks. Ten years later, the banks are more profitable than ever, but New Yorkers are still living with the consequences.
This week, news broke that San Francisco Fed President John Williams is the frontrunner to become the next NY Fed President -- another white, male, hawkish Wall Street insider. Just days after the announcement, the Fed Up campaign quickly organized resulting in Senator Cory Booker weighing in with an op-ed in Bloomberg, Senator Warren calling for federal hearings on the process, the New York Times calling the process into question, and the Wall Street Journal noting that there was a "degree of public criticism rarely seen in the relatively obscure world of regional central bank chiefs."
Following the public support, Fed Up released an unprecedented compilation of opposition to the NY Fed's process and appointment that included statements from Senator Kirstin Gillibrand, Mayor Bill DeBlasio, 17 members of the New York City Council, 35 local upstate officials, the City Comptroller Stringer, State Comptroller DiNapoli, and four public representatives from within the Federal Reserve system. Reuters described it as "extraordinary public opposition" and Bloomberg described "intense scrutiny from city hall to Capitol Hill."
The Federal Reserve has never seen anything like this -- and it isn't over yet. Take action today and tell the NY Fed to start the process over, listen to the public and appoint a zealous advocate for full employment and a tenacious regulator as president of the New York Fed!
The first weekend in March, Local Progress members from across the Empire State descended on Saratoga Springs, NY for the third annual Local Progress New York (LP NY) Convening. Despite a winter storm that dumped 32 inches of snow in parts of the state, progressive leaders from cities big and small came together to learn, train, and work together to ensure New York becomes a more equitable and just place to live.
The event opened with Albany Common Council Member Dorcey Applyrs highlighting the dramatic growth of Local Progress New York which is now made up of over 150 members and is officially the first State Chapter of the national Local Progress network. Council Member Applyrs and the other eleven members of the Organizing Committee were integral to the planning of the convening and in leading the work of the chapter. Mayor Meg Kelly of Saratoga Springs gave a warm welcome and reminded everyone how localities can resist and lead in the fight for gun safety by announcing the cancellation of a long-standing gun show in her city.
This year’s inspiring keynote address was given by national leader and activist Linda Sarsour, who gave a sobering, historic breakdown of the policies that have attempted to suppress communities for generations. Her call to action to members was to be bold and brave in their local fights to resist the current actions coming from Washington. The following day, New York City Council Member Jumaane Williams spoke about how localities can effectively overcome decades of systemic racism and was followed by Local Progress founding board member Lea Webb and Council Member Brian Rowland from Prairie View, Texas, who presented a new tool to encourage community conversations about racial equity.
Some of the topics discussed in break out sessions were just policing, protecting immigrants, affordable housing and more. Members were trained in racial justice deliberation, fighting runaway inequality, communications, and social media strategy.
In the opening plenary, New York City Council Member Brad Lander was joined by fellow Local Progress board members, Philadelphia Council Member Helen Gym, St. Louis Alderwoman Megan Green and Local Progress Texas Coordinator Mercedes Fulbright to discuss the enormous impact and growth of the Local Progress network across the nation. When LP NY members were asked to share victories from the last year, many of the victories or initiatives that people shared focused on policing, immigrant protections, and criminal justice reform – including Mayor Steve Noble announcing that Kingston would follow Albany in introducing the Right to Know Act.
The convening’s second plenary launched LPNY’s two statewide campaigns to Let NY Vote, a statewide coalition of grassroots and legacy organizations working together to modernize NY’s voting laws, and pass paid sick days policies in Westchester and Albany counties. These policies will help thousands of workers across our state, and create momentum for more cities and counties across New York (and the country) to follow their lead.
On March 20, on the six month anniversary of Hurricane Maria which devastated Puerto Rico, hundreds of Puerto Rican families traveled across the country to demand a just recovery for the island. The slow and neglectful response by the federal government had added to the immense devastation Hurricane Maria left in its path.
#6MonthsAfterMaria, hundreds of thousands of people like Mariangely Ortiz are still struggling to survive without power, a roof over their heads, or potable water. Read about Mariangely Ortiz in the New York Times. Thousands of displaced Puerto Ricans, like Daiza Aponte, are still stranded in temporary housing across the country, having to start from scratch in a new land. Read about Daiza’s story in the New York Times.
The day of action began with a rally in front of FEMA’s offices, with families carrying blue tarps that read “HELP” under heavy rain and snow. The families also visited and held sit-ins with Members of Congress, including Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Mitch McConnell, and Sen. Pat Toomey. The day ended in the Senate rotunda, where more than 20 people were arrested in powerful acts of nonviolent civil disobedience.
The rally was organized by Power 4 Puerto Rico, a coalition made up of CPD, the Hispanic Federation, the American Federation of Teachers, SEIU 32BJ, Hedge Clippers, Vamos 4 PR, and the civil disobedience organized by CPD with affiliates NYCC, CASA in Action, Organize FL, and Make the Road NY, NJ, and CT. The event was covered by Univision, Telemundo, ThinkProgress, La Opinión, EFE, Getty Images, El Nuevo Dia and many more, including interviews with Co-Executive Director Ana Maria Archila in NBC News and UPI.
Stand strong with us on Thursday, March 15 in Los Angeles at The Underground Museum! Join us as we celebrate incredible activists Nina Tassler, Sarah Timberman and Ady Barkan, and leading, powerful grassroots California CPD affiliates Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), The Center on Policy Initiatives (CPI), and Working Partnerships USA!
Featuring an exclusive musical performance by Jon Huertas (actor, producer, known for This is Us, Castle, and Generation Kill) and Kris Angelis (actress, producer, known for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Visible Scars, and Sister Mary's Angel). This is an event you don't want to miss. Get your tickets today!
