Yellen to Meet Group Seeking Low Rates, Greater Openness
Bloomberg News - November 11, 2014, by Christopher Condon - Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen will meet Nov. 14 with a coalition of...
Bloomberg News - November 11, 2014, by Christopher Condon - Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen will meet Nov. 14 with a coalition of community groups, labor unions and faith leaders seeking to influence monetary policy and the way some Fed officials are appointed.
The group has called for the Fed to place greater weight on lowering unemployment. They also want more public say in the appointment of district Fed leaders, just as regional Fed presidents in Dallas and Philadelphia plan to retire next year.
“The most important thing is to keep interest rates low,” said Shawn Sebastian, a policy advocate at the Brooklyn-based Center for Popular Democracy, one of the organizers. “The hawks in the Fed are pushing hard to raise rates soon, but most people in the public realize we are not three months away from a recovery.”
The meeting comes as the Fed moves closer to a decision on when to raise interest rates for the first time since 2006.
Unemployment fell to 5.8 percent in October, and most Federal Open Market Committee officials expect the U.S. central bank will lift its benchmark rate at some point next year, after leaving it near zero since December 2008.
The organizers look to add to pressure on the central bank to be more transparent. The Fed has come in for criticism from Congress, where Republicans have proposed legislation limiting its discretion on monetary policy and banking supervision. Congress has already curbed the Fed’s emergency lending powers.
The FOMC, the Fed’s main policy-setting panel, has 12 voting seats. Eight of those are reserved for the bank’s board of governors and the president of the New YorkFed. The heads of the other 11 regional banks rotate through four remaining spots.
Regional Feds
The governors are appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the Senate. Regional bank heads are picked by their respective boards, which are typically dominated by business executives. The group meeting with Yellen say there should be more public input when Philadelphia’s Charles Plosser and Dallas’s Richard Fisherstep down in 2015.
“The Dallas Fed needs to create a transparent and inclusive process for selecting” a new president, Danny Cendejas, an organizer at the Texas Organizing Project, said in a statement. “Members of the public have the right to know who is making this crucial decision and what criteria they are using.”
The group sent an open letter to Yellen, and to the Philadelphia and Dallas boards, demanding more transparency and public engagement.
Marilyn Wimp, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Fed, said in an e-mail the bank had received the letter. She declined to comment further. James Hoard, spokesman for the Dallas Fed, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Plosser and Fisher have been among Fed officials favoring raising rates sooner to prevent inflation and financial-instability pressures from building.
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The Key to Making Economic Development More Equitable Is Making It More Democratic
The Key to Making Economic Development More Equitable Is Making It More Democratic
At the watery edge of Sunset Park, a working-class neighborhood of Chinese, Latino, and Indian immigrants in Brooklyn, lies the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, a vast plot of warehouses and...
At the watery edge of Sunset Park, a working-class neighborhood of Chinese, Latino, and Indian immigrants in Brooklyn, lies the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, a vast plot of warehouses and docks managed by New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC). The terminal is part of an ambitious plan to generate new industrial jobs, innovation, and economic development serving local residents and the city more broadly. The plan, which has been a top priority for the administrations of both Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio, involves efforts to invest in infrastructure and create incentives for new manufacturing businesses while creating new parks for local community members.
But in early 2015, a brewing dispute over the management of the project threatened to derail it. City Council member Carlos Menchaca, who represents Sunset Park, raised concerns about EDC’s role in managing the land and project, blaming the agency for insufficiently involving the local community in shaping the vision for Sunset Park’s future. This 11th-hour snag led to an unusually public war of words between Menchaca and the EDC. After months of further negotiations, the administration agreed to create a planning-and-jobs task force to engage community members, in addition to reinvesting 5 percent of the site’s revenue into a community fund and improvements to the nearby Bush Terminal Park.
While that task force has engaged local residents in a series of town-hall meetings, private investment has rapidly poured into the area as developers snatch up property for new industrial and commercial uses. The influx has left local residents fearful that, despite the new task force, they are still being left out of the conversations about the neighborhood’s future. While many say they welcome the influx of investment and jobs, they worry that, without a voice in the process, they might be displaced or left out of the economic gains.
In the midst of our national conversation about economic inequality, these questions of local-level economic development are critical. Although easily overlooked in favor of more sweeping policy issues, the reality is that cities have a disproportionate stake in the inequality crisis. Urban areas house more than 80 percent of the US population—and within these urban areas, policy decisions about how to attract investment, development, and jobs play a defining role in who gains from the resulting benefits and who loses, often for years to come.
But, as the debate roiling Sunset Park suggests, the concerns over development go even deeper than job-creation numbers and zoning. Beneath the surface is a new and more persistent anxiety about governance—about who makes decisions and how those decisions get made. If economic policy is to address inequality, it must not only be the right policy; it must also be formulated and driven by the right people.
At the national level, a growing body of scholarship indicates that the economic policies that have helped exacerbate inequality are themselves rooted in political inequalities, as industry, business, and economic-elite interests have continued to sway elections, legislation, and policymaking. As scholars like Larry Bartels, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, Nicholas Carnes, and Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have argued, economic policies skew to favor the interests of wealthier citizens, whether as a result of more sophisticated and better resourced interest-group lobbying, the decline of unions, or more subtle forms of social and cultural influence. The implication is that greater democratic accountability may be a necessity to shift economic policies in a more equitable and inclusive direction.
This same diagnosis and prescription applies to cities. In this New Gilded Age, cities are on the front lines of the battle to address economic inequality and declining opportunity. And the way they fight these battles matters. From minimum wages, gentrification, and affordable housing to neighborhood development, job creation, and local hiring, the process by which cities pursue urban economic policy can mean the difference between economic growth that continues to exacerbate inequality, and a more equitable, inclusive form of economic growth. Achieving this more equitable growth requires not only the right policies but also systems to empower stakeholders to hold policymakers, developers, and industry elites accountable to these more equitable goals.
A growing body of scholarship indicates that the economic policies that have helped exacerbate inequality are themselves rooted in political inequalities.
At the same time, by operating at the local level, cities offer real potential for rapidly engaging and empowering a wide range of stakeholders to remedy some of these structural disparities in political power. Cities can pioneer a new mode of democratic governance, where we build processes that include the full range of stakeholders, and provide them with a meaningful voice in shaping and driving economic policy. From New York to California, some of the most exciting innovations in urban development involve pioneering new ways to empower grassroots organizations and citizens—and in so doing, channel the benefits of growth more equitably.
* * *
This is not the first time economic inequality has led to greater efforts at political inclusion. Half a century ago, the War on Poverty took a similar tack. The centerpiece of President Lyndon Johnson’s domestic agenda, the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act, created expansive new programs to provide job training, early childhood education (in the form of Head Start), access to legal services, community health services, and more. But the most controversial and radical innovation of this agenda was its focus on grassroots political empowerment as a key to fighting poverty. The act called for local governments to form “community-action agencies” to oversee these programs, and to administer them to local communities of poor and minority constituents. Furthermore, these community-action agencies had a mandate to pursue “maximum feasible participation” of the poor, including through direct representation of poor and minority constituents on the boards administering community-action programs. The theory was that the only way to hold the War on Poverty accountable to its mission was by providing the poor with a role in designing and administering anti-poverty policies.
This influx of money into anti-poverty programs was important, but combined with these institutional forms of empowerment, the War on Poverty helped activate a huge wave of organizing and mobilizing at the local level as civil-rights activists jumped on the opportunity to demand representation on the community-action boards, and accountability for channeling funds and programs to their neighborhoods. As new historical accounts of the grassroots political mobilizations around the War on Poverty suggest, mayors and city officials, alarmed by these newly emboldened grassroots movements of poor and minority constituents, reacted with increasingly harsh measures, first attempting to coopt these movements by appointing representatives they could work with to the community-action boards, and then cracking down on protesters and activists, siphoning off funding for community organizations that were the most active in pressuring local leaders.
Even in Washington, DC, the participation mandate quickly came under fire. Local party officials pressured the Johnson administration to abandon the mandate, while Johnson himself had always been uneasy with the more radical political message of the War on Poverty, viewing the notion of “local action” as encouraging cooperation between Washington and local officials, not as a call for grassroots protest.
Despite these difficulties, the War on Poverty was enormously successful in reducing the poverty rate and creating new models for economic programs. More important, it laid a foundation for greater political empowerment of community groups and the poor as a vehicle for improving economic equity, in the process helping catalyze a wave of community organizing. It also established, or dramatically expanded, initiatives like legal-defense and tenant-advocacy programs to address economic disparities by politically empowering their constituencies.
This is not the first time economic inequality has led to greater efforts at political inclusion. Half a century ago, the War on Poverty took a similar tack.
This participatory aspect of the War on Poverty is compelling today because of how it contrasts with the specter of top-down, heavy-handed urban renewal of the sort championed by Robert Moses to the detriment of many minority and poor communities. Today the concern is somewhat different—not that officials will ram through policies, but that they will skew too far towards privatization and overly friendly collaboration with developers, industry, and the economic elite. By providing representatives of often-overlooked constituencies with a real seat at the table to shape, implement, and monitor economic development policies, grassroots participation offers the hope of a more equitable approach to economic development.
* * *
In a number of cities, efforts to empower stakeholders in economic-development projects have led to a more constructive and collaborative environment, which in turn has helped ensure a more equitable sharing of the gains. From housing to parks to infrastructure development, the economic and geographic environment within cities can undergo radical transformations, driven not by natural “market forces” but by an array of public policies—and by particular coalitions of political actors. These policies are often opaque to most residents. But empowering grassroots stakeholders in the nitty-gritty work of planning neighborhood redevelopment can help ensure that benefits of development are shared more equitably.
Consider the experience of Oakland. Rapid development and gentrification in the East Bay—in part fueled by the dramatic rise of housing prices in San Francisco—are creating both opportunities for economic growth and the threat of displacement of poorer and minority communities.
In 2000, the Oakland City Council designated the public land from the recently closed Oakland Army Base as a major redevelopment site, opening the way for construction of new public infrastructure, and laying the groundwork for new businesses and greater public access to the waterfront. Traditionally, community groups will seek a “community benefits agreement” (CBA) for redevelopment projects of this sort. A CBA is a three-way bargain between government, developers, and community representatives. In exchange for various tax and other incentives from the government, developers are required to provide some investments in neighboring communities, for example by hiring local workers in the construction projects, and setting aside funds for local parks and public spaces. The challenge with CBAs is that they can be time-consuming to negotiate and often lack meaningful grassroots community engagement. Moreover, they are rarely fully enforced, with the benefits failing to materialize long after developers have already cashed in their tax and other incentives.
The Oakland Army Base project, however, has been different. After lengthy negotiations that involved community groups, unions, developers, city government, and other stakeholders, the resulting CBA not only included provisions for local hiring and public investment in community needs such as parks, it also forged a deep collaboration between these different players. This agreement has proved remarkably effective and durable, in large part because of the effort to empower and include community representatives more directly in the negotiations, planning, and monitoring of the project.
In the buildup to the CBA, for example, a number of influential community organizations—from the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE) to the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment to Oakland Rising—formed a broad coalition engaging thousands of voters in the low-income areas to support an inclusive economic development agenda. This grassroots movement helped change the debate around the project to focus more directly on how the redevelopment would serve local residents and the local community. In the end, the campaign brought together city officials and developers around an agreement on the local-hire and public-investment demands now baked into the CBA.
More important, the goals of the CBA are being implemented and monitored through an innovative, inclusive process in which community members are participating not only as sources of input but also as actual partners. To implement the local-hire provisions, the city created the West Oakland Job Resource Center, operating it in close collaboration with EBASE and other community organizations. The CBA requires developers to work with the Job Center to hire local residents; the Job Center helps make this possible by enabling employers to find qualified local workers, while also providing services, support, and referrals to job seekers looking to transform their engagement with the army-base project into longer-term careers.
This collaborative and inclusive process surrounding the Oakland army-base redevelopment is perhaps best exemplified by the Community Jobs Oversight Commission, a new body chartered by the city, which is comprised of representatives of the developers and community organizations. These representatives are appointed by the mayor and charged with the task of overseeing the redevelopment project.
The commission serves as a unique focal point for civic engagement, operating as a forum for airing grievances, a mechanism for ensuring that local-hire and public-investment provisions are in fact being met, and a vital point of leverage for community members to continue to have a voice in the ongoing implementation and development of the army-base project. By providing a public process for monitoring outcomes and airing grievances—and by including representation from all the major stakeholders, including community members—the commission has helped create an extraordinarily effective process; the redevelopment project is not only meeting its local-hire targets but exceeding them, according to members of Revive Oakland.
The Oakland experience is a good example of how a commitment to political inclusion can help drive economic inclusion. But this isn’t just a product of greater advocacy; it required a number of different actors to commit to an inclusive process. Government officials had to create institutions like the Commission and Job Center—and imbue them with real authority. Community leaders had to decide to shift from an advocacy stance to a collaborative one, joining in and investing scarce human and financial resources to make these institutions function. And labor leaders had to see that their interests in winning good jobs on the development projects were aligned with the community groups’ interest in access to those jobs.
Empowering grassroots stakeholders in the nitty-gritty work of planning neighborhood redevelopment can help ensure that benefits of development are shared more equitably.
Similar models of inclusion in planning and implementation can help create a more democratic approach to equitable development. EBASE itself is part of the Partnership for Working Families, a national network of community organizations that is attempting similar strategies in a number of other cities.
On the implementation side, a number of cities are considering more participatory approaches to monitoring and enforcing wage-theft policies. San Francisco’s Department of Labor, for example, provides grants and partnerships with community groups to expand their capacity to monitor and report violations. The national network of progressive local officials, Local Progress, has helped share lessons from this model, as other cities from Seattle to New York are now considering similar approaches.
Beyond their particular urban contexts, these examples indicate a broader potential. Participation and community engagement in these examples involve more than just town-hall meetings or comment periods. Rather, they involve empowering stakeholders to actually shape the strategy and vision for development plans, and to engage in the work of executing, implementing, and monitoring. This deeper engagement helps shapes policies at an early stage to make them equitable. If engaged early and in good faith, these community representatives can become important partners in implementing development policies and project goals.
* * *
These examples echo the War on Poverty attempt to empower a wider range of stakeholders, especially within poor communities and communities of color, by providing them with institutionalized points of leverage. The difference this time is that there is a greater potential for governments themselves to invest in and support this kind of engagement. In Oakland, New York, and elsewhere, the active efforts of city officials to create opportunities for early and active engagement makes participation genuine.
Equitable development is about more than getting the policies right; it is also about empowering stakeholders to outline the vision, implement the strategy, and monitor outcomes. Achieving this requires an ecosystem of actors committed to political inclusion and democratic participation. As a start, it requires government officials to create and manage an inclusive process that provides a meaningful voice to stakeholders, including institutionalized forms of representation or leverage—as with the War on Poverty Community Action Boards, or with the more contemporary efforts at participatory planning and monitoring. Next, it requires civil-society actors and other stakeholders willing to engage not just as advocates but as partners in implementing and enforcing standards. Finally, it also requires transparency and data. Beginning with stated public commitments to goals—such as the local-hire commitments in Oakland’s CBA—and metrics for monitoring compliance and impact through objectively trackable metrics.
We now have all the ingredients to do this; it is up to us to make the most of this opportunity.
By K. Sabeel Rahman
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Companies End On-Call Scheduling After NY Attorney General’s Letter
Gap Inc. is the latest retailer to end its practice of requiring workers to remain on-call for short-notice shifts following an inquiry from New York’s attorney general.
A spokeswoman for...
Gap Inc. is the latest retailer to end its practice of requiring workers to remain on-call for short-notice shifts following an inquiry from New York’s attorney general.
A spokeswoman for the San Francisco-based retailer says the decision also applies to Gap’s other brands, including Banana Republic, Old Navy and Athleta and was part of an effort to “improve scheduling stability and flexibility” for workers.
Spokeswoman Laura Wilkinson says the change will apply “across our global organization” and that the company is working to establish scheduling systems giving store employees at least 10 to 14 days’ notice.
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office sent letters to Gap and 12 other retailers earlier this year questioning them about on-call scheduling, which required hourly workers to stay on-call for shifts set the night before or the same day, giving them little time to arrange for child care or work other jobs.
“Workers deserve stable and reliable work schedules, and I commend Gap for taking an important step to make their employees’ schedules fairer and more predictable,” said Schneiderman, a Democrat.
Abercrombie & Fitch and Victoria’s Secret also ended the practice this summer.
Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, said in a statement that Gap’s decision reflects not only Schneiderman’s concerns but also a new ordinance in San Francisco requiring chain retailers to set schedules in advance. Similar proposals are pending before other city governments.
“Working people in hourly jobs are starting to speak out about the impact that employers’ scheduling practices has on their lives,” Gleason said in a statement.
Source: CBS DC
Tipped Workers Fight for Higher Wages
Amsterdam News - July 17, 2014, by Stephon Johnson - Last week, a new coalition of food delivery workers, low-wage tipped workers and women’s rights leaders across New York called for an end to...
Amsterdam News - July 17, 2014, by Stephon Johnson - Last week, a new coalition of food delivery workers, low-wage tipped workers and women’s rights leaders across New York called for an end to subminimum wages for tipped workers. This campaign begins right when Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is preparing to appoint a Wage Board charged with recommending an increase in the minimum wage for tipped workers.
The broad coalition fighting for subminimum wage workers includes Make the Road New York, the Center for Popular Democracy, Fast Food Forward, the Labor-Religion Coalition, the National Employment Law Project, New York Communities for Change, the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, Strong for All, United New York and other community groups.
On July 10, Domino’s delivery workers rallied outside of a Manhattan Domino’s restaurant to call for an end to subminimum wages for tipped workers, citing wage theft, and demanding an administrative wage order that requires companies to directly pay tipped workers the state’s minimum wage, with tips as an addition.
“The public might think we do well, but the reality is that many times we don’t even get a tip,” said Alfredo Franco, a tipped Domino’s delivery worker in New York City. “Delivery fees are often confused with a tip for the drivers. We never see a penny of that. Many of us have to work two or three jobs just to get by, sacrificing everything, including time with our families. We need a reliable income. The tipped [sub]minimum wage has to go.”
According to a report released on July 9 by the National Employment Law Project, a wage order eliminating the tipped subminimum wage would benefit close to 229,000 low-wage tipped workers in New York. Women make up more than 70 percent of the low-wage work force. The wage order would benefit working women and, according to the report, make progress in addressing the gender pay gap in New York.
Michael Stewart, executive director of United NY, released a statement championing the NELP’s report. “As New York faces one of the worst economic inequality crises in the nation, it should put an end to the subminimum wage for tipped workers that leaves so many of our neighbors living in extreme poverty,” said Stewart. “The minimum wage is already too low. Allowing employers to pay below it does further damage to workers and our economy.”
As a result of legislation signed by Cuomo last year, New York’s minimum wage is scheduled to go up to $9 an hour by Dec. 31, 2015, and the minimum wage for tipped food service workers is still stuck at $5 an hour, with tipped hotel workers earning slightly more at $5.65 an hour.
Zenaida Mendez, president of the National Organization for Women of New York State, said the gender pay gap needs to close, and no longer allowing the subminimum wage for tipped workers would help it along.
“The poverty rate for waitresses is three times the rate for the American workforce as a whole,” said Mendez. “For this reason, the National Organization for Women is seeking to eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped workers. This pay inequality must end.”
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Report slams Louisiana charter school oversight
The Times-Picayune - 05-08-2015 - Louisiana understaffs its charter schools oversight offices and, instead of proactively investigating...
The Times-Picayune - 05-08-2015 - Louisiana understaffs its charter schools oversight offices and, instead of proactively investigating these schools, relies on charters' own reports and whistleblowers to uncover problems, according to a report released Tuesday (May 12) by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Coalition for Community Schools. That allows theft, cheating and mismanagement to happen, such as the $26,000 stolen from Lake Area New Tech High and the years of special education violations alleged at Lagniappe Academies.
The report also casts a skeptical eye on the veracity of the data that Louisiana uses to calculate the performance scores that keep charters open and determine their renewal terms. And it faults the state for closing struggling charters instead of intervening to improve them.
The Center for Popular Democracy's partners include the American Federation of Teachers, which has an uneasy relationship with charters, and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, which studies charter school oversight. Kyle Serrette, the center's director of educational justice campaigns, said its parent members had children in charter and conventional public schools.
That said, one of the report's recommendations is to "impose a moratorium on new charter schools until the state oversight system is adequately reformed."
The Louisiana-based Coalition for Community Schools opposes charter schools outright and filed a civil rights complaint against the state Education Department in 2014. That complaint also included a demand to freeze chartering in New Orleans.
The two groups' report said Louisiana charters could suffer from "tens of millions of fraud in the 2013-14 school year alone," based on the methodology of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. In that time, employees of three New Orleans charter schools stole about $110,000, and two charter operators were accused of meddling with retirement payments.
Oversight agencies play almost no role in helping charter schools improve academic outcomes."
"The state has invested heavily in increasing the number of charter schools while failing to create a solid regulatory framework that truly protects students, families and taxpayers," the authors write. Furthermore, "oversight agencies play almost no role in helping charter schools improve academic outcomes. ... The state has no system in place to provide a path to high-quality academics for all struggling charter schools."
Charter schools are publicly funded but run by independent non-profit boards. They control their own curriculum and hiring but must meet academic and operational standards to stay open. The state Education Department oversees most of Louisiana's 130-plus charters; local school systems oversee the rest.
Read the report
However, as of December, the Education Department's charter audit team consisted of only three people, according to a critical December report from the Louisiana legislative auditor's office. Education Superintendent John White defended his team at the time, saying they reviewed charter schools' audits, among other activities.
Tuesday's paper says that isn't enough. Not only do charters hire their own accountants to conduct annual audits, but the audits are not designed to prevent or detect fraud. Indeed, reports typically contain a disclaimer saying they are not expressing an opinion on fraud controls. The legislative auditor's office might dig deeper but rarely does so, the report states.
"The only audits Louisiana charter schools routinely undergo are the ones they pay for themselves," the authors write.
The report faults the Education Department for not spending enough time on-site at charters. Charters receive regular visits and reviews from state inspectors, and Louisiana Recovery School District officials said their own findings of wrongdoing at Lagniappe Academies in New Orleans showed that their oversight procedures worked.
The authors of Tuesday's report disagreed. The state's 2013-14 review of Lagniappe Academies gave full points for special education, the two organizations said, and it was only later that state inspectors uncovered extensive reports of violations during that time period.
"The situation at Lagniappe shows exactly the problems with the state's oversight structure for charter schools," the report says. "The state relies on a largely self-reporting oversight structure that is easily manipulated by the schools themselves."
The authors doubt the accuracy of the test scores that are used to measure charters' academic performance, writing that the data "is vulnerable to manipulation."
Finally, the authors disagree with the state's readiness to close charters, including Lagniappe.
"Clearly there are times when problems are significant enough that a school must be closed. Yet, the current intervention (process) is designed to make school closure a normal and common part of the state's accountability system," the authors write. "The system needs to be updated to produce more stability for Louisiana children." In six years, more than 1,700 New Orleans students have seen their charter schools close, according to the report.
Louisiana's laws are "designed to set a high standard but not to help," Serrette said.
The state does at times intervene instead of closing schools, although this is not mentioned in the report. The Recovery School District has chosen successful charter operators to take over failing schools, for example, and White directed Lycée Français to find a new chief executive and assigned it a consultant team. Lycée has gone on to make a B grade, and its charter contract has been extended.
The report's recommendations include:
Require fraud audits every three years, to be conducted by the state legislative auditor's office
Train charter staff and boards on preventing fraud
Hire more staff for the legislative auditor's office and charter school oversight teams
Require "mandatory, hands-on, long-term, strategic support" for charters in trouble
Go beyond test scores when calculating school letter grades
Create local committees, including neighbors and parents, to design schools that serve the needs of a community
Coordinate social services at and around schools
Release raw testing data to the public.
Some of these issues are not unique to charters. Louisiana's conventional public schools also face pressure to keep test scores high: If they don't, they may be taken over by the state. There have been numerous examples of corruption and fraud in school boards and systems. Serrette said it was likely Louisiana's regular school systems needed stronger oversight as well.
Source: Nola.com
Climate Justice activists to EPA: make Clean Power Plan work for fossil fuel afflicted communities!
While the fossil fuel industry and Republican states and senators step up legal and political challenges to Obama's Clean Power Plan, protests have also been flooding in to the EPA's ten regional...
While the fossil fuel industry and Republican states and senators step up legal and political challenges to Obama's Clean Power Plan, protests have also been flooding in to the EPA's ten regional offices from climate activists - demanding that it cut out dirty biofuels and 'carbon trading' loopholes, and protect vulnerable communities from fossil fuel pollution.
Last week, activists at each of the Environmental Protection Agency's ten regional offices issued their own corrective on the Obama administration'sClean Power Plan.
Days before the end of the federal comment period, theClimate Justice Alliance's Our Power Campaign - comprised of 41 climate and environmental justice organizations - presented its Our Power Plan.
The document identifies "clear and specific strategies for implementing the Clean Power Plan, or CPP, in a way that will truly benefit our families' health and our country's economy."
Introduced last summer, the CPP looks to bring down power plants' carbon emissions by 32% from 2005 levels within 15 years. The plan was made possible by Massachusetts vs. EPA, a 2007 Supreme Court ruling which mandates that the agency regulate greenhouse gases as it has other toxins and pollutants under the Clean Air Act of 1963.
Under the CPP, states are each required to draft their own implementation plans by September of this year, or by 2018 if granted an extension. If they fail to do so, state governments will be placed by default into an interstate carbon trading, or 'Cap and Trade', system to bring down emissions.
After COP21, OPP is the next logical step
Michael Leon Guerrero, the Climate Justice Alliance's interim coordinator, was in Paris for the most recent round of UN climate talks as part of the It Takes Roots Delegation, which brought together over 100 organizers from North American communities on the frontlines of both climate change and fossil fuel extraction.
He sees the Our Power Plan (see goals, below) as a logical next step for the group coming out of COP21, especially as the onus for implementing and improving the Paris agreement now falls to individual nations:
"Fundamentally we need to transform our economy and rebuild our communities. We can't address the climate crisis in a cave without addressing issues of equity."
The Our Power Plan, or OPP, is intended as a blueprint for governments and EPA administrators to address the needs of frontline communities as they draft their state-level plans over the next several months. (People living within three miles of a coal plant have incomes averaging 15% lower than average, and are 8% more likely to be communities of color.)
Included in the OPP are calls to bolster what CJA sees as the CPP's more promising aspects, like renewable energy provisions, while eliminating proposed programs they see as more harmful. The CPP's carbon trading scheme, CJA argues, allows polluters to buy 'permissions to pollute', or carbon credits, rather than actually stemming emissions.
The OPP further outlines ways that the EPA can ensure a "just transition" away from fossil fuels, encouraging states to invest in job creation, conduct equity analyses and "work with frontlines communities to develop definitions, indicators, and tracking and response systems that really account for impacts like health, energy use, cost of energy, climate vulnerability [and] cumulative risk."
The all-too predictable fightback
Lacking support from Congress, the Obama administration has relied on executive action to push through everything from environmental action to comprehensive immigration reform. The Clean Power Plan was central to the package Obama brought to Paris. Also central to COP21 was US negotiators' insistence on keeping its results non-binding, citing Republican lawmakers' unwillingness to pass legislation.
Predictably, the CPP has faced legal challenges from the same forces, who decry the president for having overstepped the bounds of his authority. Republican state governments, utility companies, and fossil fuel industry groups have all filed suit against the CPP, with many asking for expedited hearings.
Leading up the anti-CPP charge in Congress has been Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has called the plan a "regulatory assault", pitting fossil fuel industry workers against the EPA. "Here's what is lost in this administration's crusade for ideological purity", he wrote in a November statement, "the livelihoods of our coal miners and their families."
Organizers of last Tuesday's actions, however, were quick to point out that the Our Power Plan is aimed at strengthening - not defeating - the CPP as it stands. Denise Abdul-Rahman, of NAACP Indiana, helped organize an OPP delivery at the EPA's Region 5 headquarters in Chicago, bringing out representatives from Black Lives Matter Minneapolis, National People's Action and National Nurses United.
"We appreciate the integrity of the Clean Power Plan", she said. "However, we believe it needs to be improved - from eliminating carbon trading to ensuring that there's equity. We want to improve CPP by adding our voices and our plan, and we encourage the EPA to make it better." Four of the six states in that region - which includes Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin - are suing the EPA.
Endorsed by the National Domestic Workers' Alliance, Greenpeace and the Center for Popular Democracy, among other organizations, the national day of action on the EPA came as new details emerged in Flint, Michigan's ongoing water crisis - along with calls for Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder's resignation and arrest.
The EPA has also admitted fault for its slow response to Flint residents' complaints, writing in a statement this week that "necessary [EPA] actions were not taken as quickly as they should have been." Abdul-Rahman connected the water crisis with the need for a justly-implemented CPP:
"The Flint government let their community down by not protecting our most precious asset, which is water. The same is true of air: we need the highest standard of protecting human beings' air, water, land."
Source: The Ecologist
Fed Up With Being Shut Out of Federal Reserve, Activists Descend on Summit
Specifically, the coalition is warning against the very real prospect of higher interest rates, saying a rate hike would slow the economy and harm those for whom the so-called "recovery" has been...
Specifically, the coalition is warning against the very real prospect of higher interest rates, saying a rate hike would slow the economy and harm those for whom the so-called "recovery" has been weakest, including poor people, women, and communities of color.Instead, the coalition is calling on the Fed to ditch those plans and give vulnerable communities, including "tens of millions of Black Americans who are still struggling," a say in economic policy.
Fed officials have for months signaled an intent to raise short-term interest rates—which were slashed to zero in 2008 in an effort to spur spending and investment—as soon as this fall or winter. As the Washington Post reported Thursday, reported wage growth "combined with the strong hiring and a rapidly falling unemployment rate, gave the Fed hope that the economy would be able to withstand the first rate hike in nearly a decade by the end of the year."
But recent volatility in stock markets in the U.S. and globally, as well as internal policy disagreements, are leading some economic observers to predict that the Fed may now beless likely to set a rate hike at its September meeting.
Regardless, the Fed Up campaign—anchored at the Center for Popular Democracy and supported by 25 groups including the Economic Policy Institute, Demos, and the AFL-CIO—says raising interest rates would be foolhardy.
And they're in Wyoming to make that view known. According to the Huffington Post, "Fed Up's member organizations brought over 100 primarily low-income grassroots activists from across the country for the gathering. It's a dramatic increase from its inaugural visit to Jackson Hole last year, when the campaign brought a group of 10 activists."
As Sam Ross-Brown wrote at the American Prospect this month, "Fed Up's goal is a more 'pro-worker' Federal Reserve, and their first step is stopping the Fed from hiking interest rates before wages and employment have a chance to catch up with the recovery. Building on a similar action last year, the coalition began circulating a petition this week demanding the Fed keep rates low until wages and employment rise."
"There is no data supporting the Fed's push for higher interest rates," said Ady Barkan, campaign director for Fed Up. "While they toy with halting the recovery, there is a crisis of stagnant wages and a lack of good jobs."
According to Whose Recovery? A National Convening on Inequality, Race, and the Federal Reserve—the Fed Up Coalition's policy agenda for three days of teach-ins and workshops in Jackson Hole—a rate hike would slow down the economy so that there are fewer new jobs and workers have less power to negotiate raises.
"By raising interest rates, the Federal Reserve will make it more expensive for us to pay our credit card, student loan, car, and mortgage payments," the Fed Up campaign says. "That means we will have less money in our pockets to buy the goods and services we need. And that will have a terrible ripple effect throughout the economy: businesses will earn less revenue, so they will lay off workers (or avoid hiring new workers) and they won’t be able or willing to give workers any raises. With bad job prospects and stagnant wages, working families won’t earn enough to buy the goods and services they need, which starts the whole cycle again."
"If this sounds like a terrible idea," the coalition continues, "that's because it is."
The Fed Up perspective is supported by economist Joseph Stiglitz, who spoke alongside the grassroots activists at an event on Thursday. The same day, Stiglitz wrote in an LA Timesop-ed:
It is hard to see why the Fed would choose slower job and wage growth for most Americans just to protect against the theoretical risk of moderately higher inflation. But, then again, it's often hard to understand the Fed's policy choices, which tend to contribute to widening inequality in the United States.
Too often, after the end of one recession, the Fed, fearing inflation, has used monetary policy to dampen the economic expansion. Its maneuvers keep inflation low but unemployment higher than it otherwise would be, negatively affecting all workers, not just those out of a job. Workers in jobs face greater stresses, downward pressure on wages and diminished opportunities for upward career mobility. The costs of higher unemployment are borne disproportionately by people in lower-income jobs, who also tend to be disproportionately people of color and women.
Beyond the particulars of interest rates and inflation, however, the Fed Up Coalition iscalling for the central bank to facilitate more robust public engagement and greater transparency, given its position as "arguably the nation's most powerful economic actor."
"For far too long, our communities have been isolated from the Federal Reserve’s policy choices," the coalition writes in Whose Recovery? "Monetary policy has been left up to the bankers and the economists, with the public largely shut out and confounded by its seeming complexity."
Unsurprisingly, the document continues, "[t]he consequences of this disengagement have been profound. For the past 45 years, with only a few exceptions, the Federal Reserve has set policy that benefits banks and harms borrowers, helps employers and hurts workers, and privileges the voices and needs of corporate elites rather than those of America's working families."
Source: CommonDreams
The Fed’s “Hammer” Can Be Used to Great Effect to Improve Prospects for Minority Workers
Economic Policy Institute Blog - March 4, 2015, by Josh Bivens - Update: Binyamin Appelbaum has made a useful change to...
Economic Policy Institute Blog - March 4, 2015, by Josh Bivens - Update: Binyamin Appelbaum has made a useful change to his article that I comment on below, noting that Black workers do indeed stand to benefit disproportionately from any demand boost that keeps overall unemployment rates falling in coming years. Again, however, I think that while he makes an important point, it still doesn’t strike me as right to frame it as about the limits of monetary policy. His point (as I read it) is that the gap in unemployment rates between Black and White workers is an economic problem that policymakers should seek to end, but this end-goal of no racial unemployment gap at all cannot be achieved with any single policy lever.
But while an expansionary monetary policy is not a sufficient condition to erase the racial unemployment gap, it is a necessary condition. That is, the first step towards tearing down racial bias in hiring is to rob employers of the economic power they can use to indulge this bias. And the best way to rob them of this economic power is to have tight labor markets that force employers to compete to hire workers. So, macroeconomic policy (which is dominated by the Federal Reserve) is just crucial to meeting the long-run goal of ending racial unemployment gaps.
Finally, while the existence of a racial unemployment gap in both good and bad times is a terrible problem, it’s an even bigger problem when the respective White and Black unemployment rates are 5.3 and 11.3 percent (like they were in 2014) than when they are 3.5 and 7.6 percent (like they were in 2000). So while ending the racial unemployment gap entirely should be the long-game, we also need to be keenly aware of what can alleviate economic pain in the short run. And that short-run is just dominated by what the Fed decides to do.
Simply put, the most effective policy lever to reduce the black unemployment rate in the next few years is for the Fed to keep its foot off the economic brakes by keeping short-term interest rates low until we see real signs of healthy wage growth for American workers.
Binyamin Appelbaum gets one deeply wrong in the New York Times, riffing off a report released by the Center for Popular Democracy with (full disclosure) data assistance from EPI and concludes with a version of the old saying that the Fed’s “hammer” can’t effectively address non-nail problems like excessive unemployment.
Appelbaum notes that the report shows that Black unemployment rates are significantly higher than White (or overall) unemployment rates in both recessions and recoveries. Fair enough. And if his conclusions had simply been that because the gap persists in both booms and busts that monetary policy alone cannot completely erase these unemployment gaps, that would also have been fair enough.
But instead he pushed this idea way too far, and ended getting something completely wrong. In his words (brackets and emphasis added by me):
“The same factors [that keep unemployment rates higher for Black workers in both good times and bad] help to explain why black workers are quicker to lose jobs and slower to return to work. Any given level of economic stimulus, as a result, helps black workers less than it helps white workers.”
This is totally backwards. Because Black unemployment is almost exactly double White unemployment in both recessions and booms, this means that Black workers are indeed “quicker to lose jobs” during recoveries, but they are actually faster, not “slower” to return to work. And any given level of economic stimulus reduces Black unemployment by twice as many percentage points as it reduces White unemployment, helping Black workers more than it helps White workers. In short, as the CPD report shows, the stakes regarding at what pace the economy improves and overall unemployment falls are highest for Black workers. And this means that the stakes regarding Fed decisions are highest for Black workers.
He also notes, “And it follows that the level of stimulus necessary to reduce excessive black unemployment may well be excessive for the economy as a whole.”
Maybe, though lots depends on both instances of “excessive” in that sentence. Regarding current debates over the Fed (ie, what they do in the next 6-12 months) we know that current Black unemployment is indeed “excessive” and we also know that it will be significantly reduced (at twice the pace of the overall rate!) the longer the Fed allows the recovery to proceed without braking it by raising interest rates.
And worries about “excessive” overall aggregate demand growth and monetary stimulus are still completely theoretical. This demand growth can be labeled “excessive” with respect to the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target only when there is a sustained period of wage-growth that is about double its current pace (which really hasn’t picked up since the recession’s trough).
The late 1990s offers a good reminder on both these points. First, when overall unemployment fell far enough to average just over 4 percent for two full years in 1999 and 2000, Black unemployment fell to levels (7.0 percent for a month, and below 8 percent for a majority of months in 1999 and 2000)) far lower than the 11.3 percent it averaged during 2014. And there was no evidence from that earlier period that these levels of overall unemployment and demand-growth were excessive – inflation actually fell in the late 90s, even as wages rose across-the-board.
What CPD and EPI (and others) are calling for when they ask the Fed to keep its foot off of the economic brakes in the name of helping the lot of the most vulnerable workers is precisely to probe the limits of excessive stimulus. That is, the Fed should be much more willing to experiment with very low rates of unemployment even if it risks a period of above-average inflation. If the Fed pursued this it would do more to help the most vulnerable workers than nearly any other single policy. So in this regard, the economic health of minority communities is one problem that the Fed’s policy hammer is very well designed to help.
Source
In NYC Schools, Racial Disparity in Suspension Length
10.15.2018
NEW YORK, NY -- A...
10.15.2018
NEW YORK, NY -- A report released last week by the Independent Budget Office (IBO) in New York City found a shocking racial disparity in the duration of school suspension length for the same offense.
In the study, the IBO compared the average length of all suspensions for the 10 most frequent infractions—totaling about 25,000 in 2016-2017—for students in the four largest ethnic groups in grades 6-12.
Top findings include:
Black students received relatively longer suspensions on average for eight of the top 10 infractions, with the exception of insubordination and possession of drugs.
The three infractions in which black students were suspended for roughly twice the number of days as students in one of the other ethnic groups were: bullying, reckless behavior, and altercation.
"This report is an insult to the thousands of Black and Latinx young people of color in my city,” said Andrea Colon, a participant in the Urban Youth Collaborative. “We continue to engage with legislators and policy makers around the solutions that we know work, but we don't feel like anyone is listening to us. It's time for people in power to pay attention to the traumatic experiences we go through with suspensions and the racism connected to this data."
Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza can eliminate the deep and persistent racial disparities across discipline and policing outcomes by mandating guidance interventions before the use of suspensions -- which significantly limits the length of long-term suspensions from 180 days to 20 days -- and ending arrests, summons, and juvenile reports for violations and misdemeanors.
The full report can be found here.
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Students from the Urban Youth Collective are available for comment. Please reach out to Lia Weintraub at lweintraub@populardemocracy.org for the connection.
Protesters backing undocumented immigrants locked out of Bank of America HQ
Protesters backing undocumented immigrants locked out of Bank of America HQ
The south doors of Bank America’s corporate headquarters were locked at 10:30 a.m. Monday, to keep out a immigrant advocates who tried to enter the building to advocate for undocumented immigrants...
The south doors of Bank America’s corporate headquarters were locked at 10:30 a.m. Monday, to keep out a immigrant advocates who tried to enter the building to advocate for undocumented immigrants.
A dozen protesters sought to enter a branch on the building’s first floor, to present staff with a letter asking that Bank of America distance itself from elected officials who support the immigration policies of President Donald Trump.
Read full article here.
5 days ago
5 days ago