Campaign News

New York City Bar - July 19, 2013 - The New York City Bar Association applauds the New York City Council for allocating $500,000 for the “nation’s first public defender system for immigrants facing deportation,” as the New York Times described it. The Council’s effort is a model for what Congress should enact nationwide, to support justice, economic fairness and efficient administration of the courts.

The City Bar salutes the City Council’s commitment to fund lawyers for New York’s low-income immigrants through the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project. Research by a study group convened by Second Circuit Judge Robert Katzmann has demonstrated the inability of immigrant detainees to represent themselves, with only three percent of them achieving success in their cases without counsel. Lenni Benson, the chair of the City Bar’s Immigration and Nationality Committee, and Lynn Kelly, the Executive Director of the City Bar Justice Center, are participants in Judge Katzmann’s efforts.

Congress should build upon New York’s model and provide appointed counsel to indigent non-citizens in immigration proceedings nationwide. In its position letter and in continued meetings with Congressional members and staff, the City Bar, through its Immigration & Nationality Committee, has emphasized that a right to counsel advances fundamental American values of fairness and due process. As the letter stated, “There is no citizenship test for counsel in America.” The familiar words “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you” do not include “only if you are a citizen.”

City Bar President Carey R. Dunne said, “When you consider that Congress, with bipartisan support, has granted a right to counsel to sex offenders and Al Qaeda suspects in detention hearings, and that 76 percent of Americans support a right to counsel for immigrants facing deportation, it’s hard to see why appointed counsel is still denied to non-citizen residents facing detention and deportation.”

Counsel also provides economic and social benefits that outweigh its costs. Appointing counsel in these cases pays for itself by reducing costly detention, increasing court efficiency, and reducing societal costs due to the splitting up of families and the resulting abandonment of children. “Increasing access to justice by funding legal services for the City’s poorest residents actually benefits the entire City’s economy,” said Dunne. The City Bar’s 2013 Policy Recommendations for New York City’s Next Mayor sets out these benefits in more detail, and the City Bar’s Immigration & Nationality Law Committee is currently preparing a report to more specifically articulate these benefits in the immigration context.

The City Bar’s efforts to expand the right to counsel in immigration proceedings follows its decades of advocacy to provide lawyers to those unable to adequately represent themselves when liberty and basic needs are at stake. In 1959, the City Bar’s groundbreaking report Equal Justice for the Accused advocated appointed counsel for criminal defendants as reflecting society’s interest in “fundamental human rights,” and provided support for the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963’s Gideon v. Wainwright decision. In 2006, the City Bar co-sponsored the American Bar Association’s resolution supporting a right to appointed counsel in civil proceedings. In 2009, the City Bar’s Immigration & Nationality Committee released a report arguing for a right to appointed counsel for detainees in immigration removal proceedings.

Source

Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker is set to tell a congressional panel Wednesday the U.S. central bank’s structure is effective, and that he is reluctant to see it altered in any major way.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Lacker said the U.S. central bank—with its Washington-based board of governors and 12 quasiprivate, quasigovernmental regional banks across the country—“works well.”

The Federal Reserve, created more than a century ago, might seem like “an archaic structure, but the choices and trade-offs they were facing then are still relevant choices and trade-offs now. Our federated structure reflected a desire to ensure that the diversity of views were reflected in monetary policy,” he said.

Mr. Lacker spoke to the Journal on Thursday in his office overlooking the James River, ahead of speech in which he argued the Fed was increasingly likely to face trouble if it doesn’t raise short-term interest rates soon.

The veteran central banker—he is the longest-serving regional Fed bank president—and Kansas City Fed President Esther George are scheduled to testify Wednesday before the House Committee on Financial Services’ Monetary Policy and Trade subcommittee. They will discuss the structure of their banks and “how it relates to the conduct of monetary policy and economic performance.”

The Fed in recent years has faced critics from the right and left who would like to change the way the central bank operates. Some Republican lawmakers, for example, want to give Congress more scrutiny over the Fed’s interest-rate-setting policy actions via formal government audits, something central bankers have long argued would make policy-making more political and ultimately less effective.

Some left-leaning activists and Democrats, including the campaign of presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, have called for bankers to be removed from the boards overseeing the regional Fed banks.

Members of the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign, working with a former top Fed staffer, have gone further. They have called for the regional Fed banks, which are technically owned by private banks via nonvoting shares, to be moved fully into government. The group also has sought a more open process to select bank presidents, and to take stock of their performance once they are on the job.

“I completely understand the heightened attention the Fed has gotten” in light of the dramatic actions it took over the course of the financial crisis and its aftermath, Mr. Lacker said. “We’re America’s central bank. And I think it’s a discussion worth having.”

Some of the criticism of the Fed owes to misunderstandings, Mr. Lacker said. But he added, “I’d agree we could do a better job of explaining our governance.”

By and large, Mr. Lacker said the current setup has proved to be the best in terms of setting policy and achieving the independence most economists believe is critical for effective central banking, a view shared by other regional Fed bank chiefs.

He said the regional banks, part-private and part-public organizations, are afforded independence to provide views protected from political interference. Turning the regional Fed banks into fully governmental institutions would compromise that and relieve the board of governors of a vital counterweight, Mr. Lacker said.

“Preserving that diversity of views, preserving the independence of the reserve bank president’s role in monetary policy, is an exceptionally high value,” he said.

Mr. Lacker also said the regional Fed banks’ boards of directors, drawn from a mix of local business and community leaders, as well as bankers, provide insight into local economic developments. These directors also offer operational insight to the central bank, a large service provider to financial institutions on a variety of fronts, he said.

The U.S. central bank, which is a major financial industry regulator, has long faced criticism because bankers serve on the boards of directors of the regional Fed banks. Critics say it is a conflict of interest because it allows banks to oversee their supervisor. Fed officials reject this view, saying that its regulatory activities, while carried out largely by the regional banks, are directed out of Washington.

“I think we all appreciate the—you know, I think [former Treasury Secretary and New York Fed President] Tim Geithner called it the optics issue, or optics problem” of the ownership structure and board composition, Mr. Lacker said. “As a practical matter, it’s not an issue.”

Mr. Lacker said that private bank ownership of the regional Fed banks isn’t like corporate ownership because the banks’ shares don’t have voting rights. He also said the regional boards have “a classic American governance role” and he rejected the idea that there would be any conflicts of interest faced by the board members.

Mr. Lacker said he welcomes meeting with Fed critics.

Many are activists “trying very hard to do what they can to improve lives. And you know, you can’t help but come away from conversations like that with a deep appreciation of the struggles and challenges that many of our—you know, many people in our country face,” Mr. Lacker said. He added, “I commend them for their interest in us and the willingness to engage in conversation with us.”

By Michael S. Derby

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Community organizers have been planning the 2016 People’s March downtown for several weeks, but recent shootings in Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas have upped safety concerns for the gathering, meant to protest inequality and injustice. 

More than 100 people have RSVP’d on Facebook to the  “Still we Rise People’s March,” hosted by One Pittsburgh, a coalition of community organizers and activists. The march will begin outside the David L. Lawrence Convention Center at 2:30 p.m. on Friday at the same time as the People’s Convention inside the center.

In preparation for the march, the Pittsburgh Department of Public Safety released a statement Friday saying officers will “exercise extreme caution.”

The statement came amidst nationwide tension following the shooting of unarmed black men in several cities across the U.S. and sniper fire in Dallas, Texas Thursday night that left five police officers dead and several wounded.

“The Pittsburgh Bureau of Police is committed to keeping people safe during this afternoon’s planned [march],” the statement said. “There will be a visible presence of uniformed officers along with a not so visible presence of plain clothes officers.”

The statement also said the Public Safety Department is “in communication” with the FBI.

Organizers for the People’s March say it is a response to toxic messages from political candidates.

“We will march to rise up against Trumpism and the right’s politics of hate.” the description on the Facebook page for the march reads.  “We will march to demand and win the radically different vision for the country that our families and communities deserve — the people’s vision.”

By Alexa Bakalarski

Source

For the fifth year in a row, the liberal Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign is on hand for the Jackson Hole gathering. It organized a Thursday panel on slow wage growth and market concentration.

Read the full article here.