JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon: 'I'm a patriot' so I'll help Trump
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon: 'I'm a patriot' so I'll help Trump
JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon highlighted several critical issues confronting the United States during the bank's annual shareholder meeting Tuesday and urged the business community...
JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon highlighted several critical issues confronting the United States during the bank's annual shareholder meeting Tuesday and urged the business community and the Trump administration to come together to find meaningful solutions to these problems.
During Q&A with shareholders, Dimon was asked multiple questions related to his willingness to support President Trump. The CEO is on Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum.
Read the full article here.
Could Hillary Clinton Become the Champion of the 99 Percent?
Could Hillary Clinton Become the Champion of the 99 Percent?
In June of 2015, Felicia Joy Wong was in her car, awaiting with some apprehension the economic address that would officially open Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The speech was being...
In June of 2015, Felicia Joy Wong was in her car, awaiting with some apprehension the economic address that would officially open Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The speech was being staged at the F.D.R. memorial on New York City’s Roosevelt Island, and though Wong is a political operative of atypical modesty — she describes herself as a former schoolteacher whose accession to minor power has been entirely accidental — she had taken the choice of venue as auspicious. Wong runs the Roosevelt Institute, a small think tank (for lack of a better term) that originated in trusts established to promote the legacies of Franklin and Eleanor. Its chief economist, the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, indirectly coined the Occupy movement’s enduring slogan (“We are the 99 percent”), and Stiglitz and Wong each saw the election as an opportunity to channel Occupy energy into national politics. The country was perhaps ready once again, they believed, for what F.D.R. called “bold, persistent experimentation” in our economic affairs. Two of Wong’s senior staff members had gone to the island for the event, but she herself bowed out, claiming the duties of a part-time suburban soccer coach and mom.
In the car, Wong heard the candidate say: “The middle class needs more growth and more fairness. Growth and fairness go together. For lasting prosperity, you can’t have one without the other.”
Oh, my God, Wong thought, I can’t believe she just said that. Each time she repeated tis story to me, she narrowed her eyes toward an imaginary car radio and pointed in disbelief.
“Prosperity can’t be just for C.E.O.s and hedge-fund managers,” the candidate continued. “Democracy can’t just be for the billionaires and corporations.”
Oh, my God, Wong thought again, I can’t believe she just said that. It may have been political boilerplate, but Wong thrilled to it. Her incredulity had yielded to pleasure and admiration. Republicans, the candidate went on, “pledge to wipe out tough rules on Wall Street, rather than rein in the banks that are still too risky, courting future failures.”
Wong stopped the car to check her phone. Exultant emails were streaming in. “This is our plan!” one Roosevelt board member wrote. “This is your plan!”
“Our plan” was “Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy,” an inventive combination of narrative history and policy platform that Roosevelt published the month before. The report billed itself as a comprehensive agenda to ameliorate inequality. First, it said, inequality is a choice, not an inevitable byproduct of technology, globalization and the uneven distribution of personal virtue. Second, it held that the longstanding notion of an economic trade-off between growth and equality is a fiction.
Unlike the myriad other white papers that each week were drafted, edited, somnolently received at other think tanks and shelved without fanfare, this report — original not so much in its ideas as in its clarity and vigor — had captured wide and consequential attention. In the months leading up to its publication, the Roosevelt team was in close touch with Clinton speechwriters and advisers, and in subsequent rallies the candidate continued to draw upon the report, even at the level of explicit language; calls to “rewrite the rules” found their way into more of her addresses. The many news reports that linked the speech to Wong’s organization consistently and erroneously relocated her team to Washington. (Their headquarters are in Midtown Manhattan, in an Art Deco tower in the shadow of the Citigroup Center.)
Much of the left, including the significant bloc that rejected Clinton in the primaries in favor of Bernie Sanders and his call for “revolution,” finds Wong and her allies delusional in their hope that “Rewriting the Rules” might be realized in Democratic Party practice. But the Sanders and Trump insurrections revealed an appetite for economic populism that no one in either party establishment had quite anticipated. Now Roosevelt and other progressive groups are wagering that a mandate for economic overhaul might already exist, and that it might even be carried out by the woman who always was the party’s near-certain nominee. Wong herself believes that the financial crisis radically destabilized the politics of the American economy, possibly for decades to come, and that 2016 might well mark the early commotion of a genuine political realignment.
As the party heads into its convention in Philadelphia, this coalition sees encouraging signals — perhaps most notably the role that Elizabeth Warren, a key Roosevelt ally, has come to play in the campaign — that Hillary Clinton’s economic sympathies might ultimately lie further to the left than skeptics supposed. Roosevelt is a 501(c)(3), and though it does maintain a political-action arm, it does not work to elect specific candidates. Still, various representatives from Clinton’s speechwriting and policy teams regularly solicit the organization’s input. Roosevelt in turn has redoubled its efforts not only on advancing the ideas in “Rewriting the Rules” but also in recruiting the personnel necessary to carry them out, in the form of a methodical effort to find suitable candidates for economic positions in a future presidential administration.
Rob Stein, the liberal operative whose establishment of the Democracy Alliance in 2005 did perhaps more than any other act to funnel new money and new ardor into progressive causes, told me: “Like no other progressive institution, Roosevelt is bringing strategically relevant insight to the deeper structural problems of our economy.” Part of the reason Wong and her team remain mostly unheralded is that they eschew power politics for the quieter work of developing networks to act on ideas. They thus do not see themselves as pushing or pulling or dragging the Democratic nominee to their position. They believe that this candidate, of all candidates, is unlikely to respond to public hectoring or ultimatums. The greatest incentive they can offer is a demonstration that Clinton may well already be the candidate that progressives — and the electorate — have been waiting for.
A displaced Californian, Wong lives with her family in Westchester but makes routine Amtrak face-work pilgrimages to Washington. She has thick, artfully unruly cataracts of black hair and moves with a long, darting, buoyant stride. In meetings, she spends much of her time profusely, sweetly and genuinely thanking people for their thoughtful recommendations of white papers she has already read, studies she has already digested, arguments she could recite by heart, academics she already funds or would like to, funders who already donate and, often, information or ideas she herself has originated. Men of bulk in loosened ties have a way of talking at her for hours and then lifting her best notions, as if accidentally choosing a nicer umbrella on the way out of a restaurant.
One cold, dreary spring day I accompanied her to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. building on 16th Street NW, a foreboding grid of polished beige stone with a lobby dominated by a hallucinogenic two-story marble mosaic. Wong often proceeds by indirection, and the obvious contrast of this first meeting — between Big Labor’s encumbrances and Roosevelt’s dexterity — made, in retrospect, a deliberate point.
Damon Silvers, the organization’s policy director, greeted us in a cluttered low-floor office that looked as if it might belong to a law professor. He showed us seats at a wobbly round table and talked about wages and productivity and economic pain. “There have been a few years over the last 30 with broad-based wage growth,” he noted, “but those are the outliers, the exceptions — a few years under Reagan, some under Clinton, but stagnation has been the regime since 1980.” He praised Roosevelt as the source of “heavyweight economic thinking” on this, and for “upping the ante.”
Wong deflected the credit. “Well, you’ve been saying this,” she replied, “and Elizabeth Warren says it, and Stiglitz has been saying it for 30 years, but now it’s almost common knowledge.” Wong was more concerned about how they planned to put that common knowledge into action before the looming convention.
“Despite President Obama’s efforts, the rules of the economy continue to drive runaway inequality,” Silvers went on. “The power dynamics that were in place in 2008 are still in place now, and we don’t have all the time in the world to fix this.”
This continued for a while, as Silvers relaxed into the comfortable contours of his analysis and Wong steered the visit toward what might actually be done. Eventually she was summoned to see the union’s president, Richard Trumka, whose seigneurial berth looks down on the White House. Silvers directed me in the meantime to a vitrine of the fat blue bill-signing pens L.B.J. used to enact the Great Society — food stamps, public broadcasting, urban mass transport, water quality, wholesome poultry products. “If you want to see what structural change looks like,” he told me, tapping on the glass, “take a look at this.”
The progressive organizations in Wong’s rotation take as a matter of course the idea that the Obama administration was a significant missed opportunity for transformation on that order. They do not entirely blame Obama. He had his legislative victories — most importantly in the Affordable Care Act — but one lesson they drew from his time in office was that liberals had long been overly fixated on legislative success. (Johnson had a Congress he could work with; Obama mostly did not, and the next president probably won’t, either.) The right has set the agenda for the past 35 years because they built their economic movement deductively (from the first principle of the unregulated market) and took their victories where they could find them. The left, by comparison, tended to moralize, and spoke in the language of justice instead of growth. When they did talk about economics, it took the form of individual issues — minimum wage, student debt, paid family and sick leave — rather than overarching pronouncements. This muddle worsened during the Bush era, when urgent noneconomic concerns forced the left to privilege short-term electoral tactics over long-term strategy.
Roosevelt was designed to be a place, independent of the party establishment, to unite all of these factions under the banner of long-term, coherent economic thinking. Had such a movement existed in 2008, it might have seized on the financial crisis as an opportunity for structural economic reform. Obama’s recovery model, to the group’s lasting dismay, remained in thrall to old superstitions about growth. The goal of the bailout was to fix the existing financial system and get credit flowing back into the economy while keeping an eye on deficit spending. But today, though high-level macroeconomic numbers like monthly job growth or the headline unemployment rate have improved, almost half of the new jobs created in the first five years of the recovery were poverty-level. Repaired with a kludge, the system went right back to doing exactly what it did before: allowing the extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of the few to dominate the prospects of the many.
Roosevelt and its allies believe that the crisis could have been an occasion — unseen since the New Deal — for the diffusion of authority, large-scale infrastructural investment, attention to low-wage growth and relief for the plight of overextended homeowners rather than banks. But that opportunity passed by because, in the absence of a strong, organized countervailing force, responsibility for the bailout simply defaulted to the claque of Citigroup veterans and sympathizers that had administered Democratic economic policy for what was now a full generation. The critics didn’t think that these ex-bankers were unscrupulous, but rather that they acted in accordance with the free-market orthodoxy they inherited from their predecessors.
With all this resentment of bankers, a news consumer might have thought the enthusiasm in this milieu — that is, all the groups that resisted the legacy of deregulated, race-neutral, free-market bipartisanship — would accrue to Bernie Sanders. But Sanders in fact came up only rarely in my conversations with them, usually in praise of the sincerity of his message. The common view of the Democratic contest was that Sanders did a great service in pushing Clinton to the left. Though in some senses this was clearly the case — on the minimum wage and on college tuition — there was an alternate interpretation. As Sanders gained traction, it seemed to Wong and her partners that Clinton had simply ceded to him the territory of aggressive financial reform. Sanders, in their view, hadn’t so much pulled her to the left as pushed her to swivel.
The Roosevelt coalition agreed by and large with the direction of Sanders’s economic program, but they regretted the crudeness of his exposition. They understood, for example, the appeal of a call to break up the banks but found greater sophistication in Clinton’s proposals to regulate “shadow banking.” They wished his advisers had been more careful with the numbers. And the personal iconoclasm and moral purity of the Sanders campaign didn’t lend themselves to governance. How, given the way Obama’s ideals foundered on a kind of Washington default mode, did Sanders plan to staff an entire administration?
Wong and her allies spent a lot more time worrying about Donald Trump than they did valorizing Sanders. Their fear was, and is, that Clinton’s response to Trump’s faux populism, racism, xenophobia and misogyny — that we needed to make America not “great” but “whole” again — would crowd out everything she once said about corporations and inequality. Clinton’s central economic metaphor, “ladders of opportunity,” promised access to the current system rather than a wholly different one. But Roosevelt has found that a message of “leveling the playing field” polls much better with voters of color and the white working class. (Its recent follow-up to “Rewriting the Rules,” a paper about race by the fellows Dorian Warren and Andrea Flynn, acknowledges that the economic interests and political needs of the two constituencies may not always seem perfectly aligned.) The central preoccupation for Wong, and for Silvers and for Warren, was to demonstrate that it was the courageous thing, not the cautious one, that would capture the preponderance of the electorate.
It is common, in Washington, to view yourself as there by some celestial accident; Beltway insiders delight in a good sneering reference to Beltway insiders. But Wong really does seem like an improbable person to preside over a think tank. She grew up in Silicon Valley, studied poetry at Stanford, got a Ph.D. in political science at Berkeley, worked as a high-school teacher and then at a valley start-up and then happened into a job at the Democracy Alliance, a semi-secretive club of progressive donors. She can barely bring herself to utter the phrase “think tank,” much less “policy shop.” Late one evening in
Washington, we walked by a thickset monolith that glowed with a cold marmoreal light, as if James Turrell had built a fortress for some paranoid ice king. The front read CSIS: the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Wong rolled her eyes, theatrically shuddered and tucked her runaway hair behind her ear. “Now that’s a think tank.”
On the left, there are lots of small organizations in Washington that publish granular research on specific economic trends. But the most significant liberal think tank in recent years has been the Center for American Progress, founded in 2003 by the former Bill Clinton chief of staff (and current Hillary Clinton campaign chair) John Podesta as his party’s answer to the conservative Heritage Foundation. CAP has done a lot of innovative policy work, especially on universal preschool and health care, but it was always less of a research organization than a shadow government for an opposition in exile. When Obama was elected, roughly a third of CAP’s staff went into his administration. CAP was founded in an era when few liberals were of the opinion that the system itself was broken: If you just found slightly better Democrats, elected them to office and put smarter policies in their hands, they believed, the country would return to the prosperity of the 1990s. Liberal Washington was not equipped, when the financial crisis broke, to tender a holistic analysis of what was ailing the economy. (Today, CAP’s economic ideas are more in line with those of Roosevelt, and in 2015 it released a report on short-termism that anticipated part of “Rewriting the Rules.”)
In 2009, a political scientist named Andrew Rich, known for writing about the “war of ideas,” was drafted to reinvent the Roosevelt Institute as a place for the radical thinking that postcrisis politics seemed to require. Roosevelt at the time was an ad hoc collection of spare progressive parts, including the upkeep of the F.D.R. Library in Hyde Park, N.Y. Rich believed that if you weren’t in Washington, and you weren’t beholden to the party apparatus, and if you got the right people — people who were too idiosyncratic or rough-hewn for academia, or academics who wanted to be politically relevant but needed help with finding an audience for their work — you could create a new kind of institution on a looser, livelier model.
At that moment of upheaval and administration dithering, financial reform was the new Roosevelt’s obvious first priority. Rich brought on Stiglitz and Mike Konczal, whose pseudonymous financial-crisis blog had a cult following among progressives. In 2010, the organization held a conference that prominently featured Elizabeth Warren, then early in her career as a public figure. While Warren worked on the TARP oversight panel, she needed somewhere to park her aide-de-camp, Dan Geldon, to help draft the details of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was being set up on the basis of her ideas. He served as a fellow, and he and Warren maintain close ties to Roosevelt. Warren insisted I come into her office, though she was late to a vote, so she could tell me how enormously enthusiastic she was about Roosevelt’s work: “It’s a new voice in American political discourse. Their message is, We can do better than this! They’re bringing fundamental optimism back to the center of American life.”
To pretend the battles are the same as they were in 1994 ignores the fact that the economic realities have changed — and the electorate has changed.
When Wong took over in 2012, she continued to recruit staff members and fellows who were at once nonaligned and well connected: to the A.F.T. and S.E.I.U., Demos, MoveOn, the Clintons. By January 2015, Wong had decided, along with her communications director, Marcus Mrowka, and her vice president of research and policy, Nell Abernathy, to prepare for the coming election by creating a full-dress economic agenda that would be there for the candidates’ taking. “Rewriting the Rules” got funding from the Ford Foundation, whose decision last year to refocus around the issue of inequality was influenced by Roosevelt, and whose president, Darren Walker, effused to me about Wong as an “incandescent leader” for the progressive movement. While written by Stiglitz, the paper was worked out in consultation with labor officials, academics, congressional staff members and — unusually for a think tank — advocates from places like Color of Change, Naral and the Black Civic Engagement Fund.
The report lays out a stark narrative about the American economy as it exists today. Inequality, it maintains, is a function not of economic laws but of the preferences awarded to the powerful to extract rents — to exploit people who have little choice — especially on necessary goods like housing and health care. This may have been old wine, but it was poured into new bottles; economists after Keynes lost the habit of talking about power, and Roosevelt stressed that this vision was about the way that power and prejudice created not only distorted markets but also nonfunctional ones. The economy has stalled because too much wealth is being generated in nonproductive activity, hoarded to preserve for the rich all the things government no longer provides. The long-run situation, as Wong put it to me once, is America as “a fear-catalyzed gated community for a privileged few, and a violent, racially hostile, ‘Lord of the Flies’ race to the bottom for the rest of us.”
“Rewriting the Rules” then moves on to 37 policy recommendations. Some seek to reduce concentrated power via changes to the tax code, financial reform and labor-market interventions: enacting financial-transaction taxes; taxing corporations on global income; strengthening the right to collective bargaining; and rewriting laws — on intellectual-property rights, lending practices, health care — that present unfair opportunities for monopoly profits. There is a parallel pocketbook agenda: a Fed policy of full employment, via low interest rates and access to credit markets, rather than one designed to control inflation; higher living wages; gender and racial equality in pay; affordable child care. Last is infrastructure: public spending for public goods, and not just roads and bridges but also broadband, high-speed rail, smart grid, green buildings — and especially investments in schools and housing that might end racial segregation. All three categories rest in part on public options. The role of an activist government, as Roosevelt sees it, is not to monopolize any given service, on a command-economy model, but to exist as a permanently nonextortionate market player. The report calls for a postal bank, which would expand access to banking services to the underserved; a public option for mortgages; Medicare open to all; and an expansion of Social Security via voluntary public investment accounts modeled on I.R.A.s.
From a budgetary perspective, at least, the report takes care to present its recommendations as feasible and responsible, imagining that all of those public options (for example) would be run as break-even enterprises. “Rewriting the Rules” does call for an increase in top individual marginal tax rates to perhaps 45 percent, a substantial increase by today’s Republican standards but well in line with contemporary Europe or 20th-century America. What was novel was that, unlike the usual centrist Democrat call for more job training and an expansion of the earned-income tax credit, this was not about tinkering with the old tax-and-transfer liberalism but about changing the fundamental structure of the economy. Their demands were vaulting, but they held that an agenda offering freedom from exploitation (rather than freedom from regulation), and insisting that greater fairness would benefit everyone, would resonate with all Americans.
Joseph Stiglitz is a short, oracular man with gray hair and gray stubble trimmed to equal length, which gives his head the round softness of a late-stage dandelion. His minimal-cognitive-load uniform is a blue sportcoat, an open-necked blue dress shirt and roomy gray trousers over thick-soled black sneakers; I saw him wear this unvarying attire to work in his vast personal complex at Columbia University, meetings at the Ford Foundation, a public Roosevelt colloquy with the Black Lives Matter activist Alicia Garza and Hill briefings. His clothes, along with his trundling gait, give him the appearance of a curmudgeonly but twinkle-eyed shtetl tailor, come to dispense wisdom about structures of international trade-dispute arbitration as he fits the bar mitzvah boy for a suit. He has a dry wit but seems not entirely sure when jokes have been received as such, and so, as if someone once told him that he should soften his fearsome intellect by smiling more, he punctuates his speech with a randomized distribution of grins.
Everywhere it has been pointed out that this election feels like a prolonged rehash of 1990s enmities. Wong has a Faulknerian view: “It’s not just the same fights,” she told me, “but the exact same people.” The story goes that there were two distinct factions in the Clinton White House: the free-market, centrist, “neoliberal” wing that we now associate with such figures as Larry Summers and Robert Rubin and such institutions as the Democratic Leadership Council; and then people like Stiglitz — who was head of the Council of Economic Advisers for two years — and Robert Reich. The Summers/Rubin wing largely prevailed. An approach to crime and poverty was engineered to win back Reagan Democrats so they could pass a deregulatory program that would appeal to emerging managerial wealth. The party’s Rubinite/Citigroup lineage extended through Rubin’s protégé Michael Froman, who as part of Obama’s transition team helped usher Tim Geithner into the Treasury Department. It was this legacy that had, throughout the primaries, prevented so many people from taking the former first lady — especially as she tied herself to Obama’s tenure — as a credible voice for the economic reforms of “Rewriting the Rules.”
This Manichaean story is a vast oversimplification for a variety of reasons, but it did inform the way many voters, especially on the left, viewed the primaries. The fight between Clinton and Sanders often seemed like a choice between a repudiation of the long 1990s entirely (Robert Reich has been an outspoken Sanders supporter) or an avowal that this time the party will choose the vision of Stiglitz. The obvious mystery then becomes: Where does Hillary Clinton herself stand? The problem is not that there’s no answer, Wong and Stiglitz think, but that it’s a badly phrased question. To pretend the battles are the same as they were in 1994 ignores the fact that the economic realities have changed, economic thinking has changed, the party has changed and — perhaps more than anything — the electorate has changed.
On the left, Stiglitz — with his resignation in protest from the World Bank, in 2000; the 2002 publication of the bridge-burning anti-neoliberalism classic “Globalization and Its Discontents”; and the 2011 publication, in Vanity Fair, of an article titled “Of the 1 Percent, By the 1 Percent, For the 1 Percent” — is viewed, like Sanders, to have landed consistently on the right side of history. But even he believes that there’s little profit in trying to evaluate the decisions of the 1990s by contemporary standards. As he put it to me, “What the D.L.C. was about, to some extent, was the fact that the fall of the Iron Curtain had given a false euphoria to the market economy. We thought we had won. But, in reality, we hadn’t won; they had failed. And we read into their collapse the wrong thing.”
Now, though, there’s no excuse. “Between 1990 and 2015 we’ve had the financial crisis, growth of inequality to unbounded levels, slow growth over all for a third of a century,” Stiglitz said. “We’ve had a third of a century as an experiment, and if you don’t see the results of that experiment now, that’s willful neglect.”
Wong was a White House fellow in the Clinton administration in 1998 and had her own objections to the positions of that White House, though for her at the time it had more to do with a policy of race neutrality than with neoliberalism. (She helped write an 800-page book, in the voice of the president, about racial healing; it was spiked in part because it didn’t hew to the administration’s official line.) For Wong, too, this election has proved not that the disputes of the 1990s must be fought anew but that they have already been won, decisively and across the board. They have been won on the data, now that we have another two decades of it. And they have been won on the demographics, as the millennial generation — boisterously represented at Roosevelt by a large collegiate network and, in their office, by a young former U.C.L.A. activist named Joelle Gamble — has never known anything but market precarity.
One way that Clinton could signal that she really is serious about the remediation of inequality is through the decisions made by her transition team on personnel. In July, The Boston Globe reported that Roosevelt had been leading a campaign to help staff the economic-policy positions in future presidential administrations. The Clinton campaign appeared to be lagging in this regard behind Trump, who had long before named Chris Christie transition chairman. It seemed to Wong that appointments — especially as a proxy for the candidate’s relationship with Wall Street — were being taken as a matter of considerable seriousness, and, she told me, “everyone is watching.”
Since the 1970s, movement conservatism has consistently outperformed progressives in laying a talent conduit. Heritage identifies young candidates and grooms them for a smooth climb through the system; adjacent to its headquarters is a library-dorm for its interns, replete with piles of free Hayek. One of Roosevelt’s youngest fellows, the legal scholar K. Sabeel Rahman, likes to point out that Department of Justice regulators, drawn from conservative legal and economic circles and influenced by the ideas of Robert Bork, essentially rewrote the federal guidelines for mergers and acquisitions and thereby weakened the government’s power to make antitrust cases.
Roosevelt’s project, likewise, is about finding people with the economic, legal and regulatory experience to change the country’s balance of power. Wong and her staff have been clear that what they are compiling is nothing so simple as a list. It is, rather, a process by which qualified candidates from all 50 states might be matched to possible jobs. This goes for top positions, like cabinet secretaries or the heads of agencies, but also down to the deputy under secretaries and staff members, whom they could introduce to the system. The people who hold these jobs now are probably lucky if their own relatives know their titles, but theirs are positions with real leverage, especially collectively: the Treasury’s Domestic Finance Department’s chief homeownership preservation officer; HUD’s Office of Housing’s deputy assistant secretary for risk management and regulatory affairs; the Department of Justice’s deputy assistant attorney general for economics. It’s important to look at these jobs in aggregate because centers of power in Washington are not fixed: A position, like the chief of staff of the O.M.B., that is relatively weak when filled by one candidate might, occupied by someone else, represent a key node.
The team had a few different sources for leads: securities and banking regulators at the state and local levels; the offices of the state attorneys general, especially assistants in the departments of consumer protection, education and welfare; academics in law, economics and business; and other think tanks and policy institutes. “Where,” they would ask a local banking regulator or assistant city manager in Seattle or San Antonio or St. Paul, “do you think you’d want to be in five or 10 years?” The ideal candidates have experience taking (or advocating for) regulatory action, and would thus know how to use the varied, extensive antitrust powers that individual agencies like the D.O.J. and the Federal Trade Commission already possess. Many of the prescriptions advanced by “Rewriting the Rules” would require a congressional majority to make them real; the appointments project, by contrast, would help circumvent the congressional standstill on many issues where authority already resides in the executive branch.
Wong thinks it’s no longer accurate to even think of these issues in terms of left versus right. Instead, she holds, real political realignment means a long-term cultural change in the perception of government and its relationship to consolidated power. Wong has been resolute in refusing to draw a bright line, as some progressives would, to rule out bankers, in part because banks are only one element in the pattern. If most people have a hard time understanding or worrying about the concept of “financialization,” they have a much easier time recognizing — as Elizabeth Warren put it in a speech at the New America Foundation last month — that four airlines control 80 percent of American airline seats, three chains own 99 percent of drugstores and four companies sell 85 percent of the beef.
This appointments project is fundamentally about control, but its success lies beyond any one institution’s ability — even an institution working on behalf of and in concert with a lot of other parties — to determine. The work could see wholesale adoption in the weeks after the convention: Allies of Elizabeth Warren, Politico recently reported, ensured that a commitment to personnel who were “not beholden to the industries that they regulate” would be enshrined in the party’s platform. The project could place a few people in a scattershot way. Or, of course, it could be shelved entirely in favor of the familiar circuit of routine placement, and whoever lands the economic portfolio for the winning transition team will act, as usual, at his or her own personal discretion.
In June 2016, a little more than a year after the Roosevelt Island speech, Clinton gave her first major economic address as the presumed nominee, in Raleigh. She called for wage increases through stronger unions; portable benefits; an expansion of Social Security; the closing of the carried-interest loophole and an exit tax for corporate inversions; and policies to address the racial employment and racial wealth gaps. Most important for everyone at Roosevelt, she said that she planned an administration that would “rewrite the rules so more companies share profits with their employees and fewer ship profits and jobs overseas.” She used their phrase twice, and then used it again a few days later, at her first joint campaign appearance with Warren.
The next day, I went to see Wong in her office. She did not want to seem naïve, but she was optimistic. “All of my optimism now is based on all of the evidence — on all the polling, on all the people, on what the candidate herself has said. Hillary laid down a marker on Wall Street with her Roosevelt Island speech last year. We thought at the time, She’ll move away from this, and she did. But it was there for her to go back to. And I think that’s been vindicated in the last 48 hours.”
Wong and I walked out into the blinding late-spring sun, and she put on her mirrored aviators. The famously infirm Citigroup Center, which had been built on feeble stilts reinforced in secret under cover of night, was reflected in them. “My optimism wasn’t dumb. It wasn’t just based on the academic views on the trickle-down experiment. Yesterday’s speech was a great indicator. She hit every marker. I could go through every policy in that speech and tell you which constituency it was written for.” After running down into the subway, Wong — who can’t write a one-paragraph email without somehow mentioning eight books and 27 people — promptly emailed me an entire roster of the Clinton intimates who favored real reform, including Heather Boushey of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth; Maya Harris, one of Clinton’s senior policy advisers; and Gary Gensler, the campaign’s chief financial officer.
Not all of Wong’s allies take as rosy an outlook as she does. David Rolf, president of S.E.I.U. 775 told me, “I’m not optimistic enough to think that we’re out of those woods yet. The Democratic Party, its leaders and its infrastructure, is very much of two minds about economics. The progressives have gained a lot of ground, but to think that the trickle-down elements of the party are gone?” At Roosevelt’s board meeting a few weeks ago, the Center for Popular Democracy’s Marbre Stahly-Butts, an architect of the Black Lives Matter policy platform, worried that the evolving platform of the Democratic convention seemed — on matters of mass incarceration and policing in particular — to be anemically centrist.
To Wong, though, much of the hand-wringing about Clinton is beside the point. People like to kibitz on the subject of who a politician “really” is, to claim that some votes or statements or gaffes or alliances are deeply revealing and others merely accidents, frivolities or improvisatory performances. We isolate and label a politician’s essence in the hope we might predict with certainty how she’ll behave in the future. But in Wong’s view, the question of who a politician is — and above all who this particular presidential candidate is — is irrelevant. Her strategy is to proceed in public as if the candidate is certain to rise to the occasion.
A few days after the speech, Wong wrote me an email at 6 a.m. on a Sunday, her favorite time to think. “For the 40 years that she has been in the public eye,” she wrote, “Hillary Clinton has been the subject of constant political analysis, armchair psychoanalysis, horrible rumor verging on slander — and also adoration, especially from a number of women around her age who want to see her not just as a role model but a heroine.” She continued: “The good news for those of us arguing strenuously for the wisdom of structural economic and political reform: Whether Hillary ‘really believes in the cause’ or not does not matter. This surfeit of attention leaves out a bunch of other politically relevant factors beyond what is ‘true’ about Hillary internally.”
“After all,” Wong said to me more than once, “she is unknowable. Nobody can know her. I certainly can’t know her. All I can go by is what is on the public record, and who she’s got around her. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed again. Over the next few months, we’ll all be disappointed again. But I’m only optimistic because there’s evidence for me to be that way.”
By GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS
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These Southern Cities Are at the Heart of the Struggle Against White Supremacy
These Southern Cities Are at the Heart of the Struggle Against White Supremacy
The Black Lives Matter activists and anarchists, the socialists and anti-fascists, the religious leaders and local residents who risked their bodies and their well-being in Charlottesville this...
The Black Lives Matter activists and anarchists, the socialists and anti-fascists, the religious leaders and local residents who risked their bodies and their well-being in Charlottesville this month should be celebrated for their courage and praised for their good sense and smart tactics. Violent fascists, neo-Confederates, Ku Klux Klanners, and other racist extremists don’t care about justice or civility or our common humanity. Their express aim is to annihilate anyone who isn’t white, straight, and Christian. And they have made it clear that they are willing to use raw and murderous force to get their way.
Read the full article here.
The Fair Workweek bill is approved by City Council
The Fair Workweek bill is approved by City Council
Philly is following the example of New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and the state of Oregon, all of which have been lobbied by the "Fair Workweek Initiative," a program of...
Philly is following the example of New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and the state of Oregon, all of which have been lobbied by the "Fair Workweek Initiative," a program of the left wing non-profit Center for Popular Democracy, which has been funded by several large groups including the Ford Foundation and George Soros' Open Society Foundation.
Read the full article here.
New Zealand says tweak to c.bank mandate fits within "global zeitgeist"
New Zealand says tweak to c.bank mandate fits within "global zeitgeist"
New Zealand's decision to change its central bank's inflation-targeting mandate, which has served as a model for the rest of the world, partly reflects a global shift on the role of monetary...
New Zealand's decision to change its central bank's inflation-targeting mandate, which has served as a model for the rest of the world, partly reflects a global shift on the role of monetary policy since the 2008-09 financial crisis, according to Finance Minister Grant Robertson.
Read the full article here.
#WeRise Supporters Rally at the NH Statehouse
Concord Patch - March 13, 2015, by Tony Schinella - About 40 people gathered at the Statehouse this week to protest a political system rigged on behalf of big corporations and the wealthy,...
Concord Patch - March 13, 2015, by Tony Schinella - About 40 people gathered at the Statehouse this week to protest a political system rigged on behalf of big corporations and the wealthy, according to a press statement.
The rally was part of a “Day of Action” involving thousands of protesters in 16 states across the country.
In Concord, the event drew activists from NH Citizens Action, the NH Rebellion, American Friends Service Committee, Open Democracy, Granite State Progress, People For the American Way, Every Child Matters and other New Hampshire organizations.
“Congress needs to stop acting like a wholly-owned subsidiary of multinational corporations,” said Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and Head Stamper of StampStampede.org told the protesters. “When billions of dollars are being poured into our elections, government stops serving the people and serves the corporations instead.”
Cohen cited a Sunlight Foundation study showing that politically-active corporations get back $760 in government benefits for every dollar they spend influencing politics. “People watch this stuff happening, and they’re angry about it. People in both parties are angry about it. Our elected officials are supposed to be serving us, their constituents, and instead they’re spending our tax dollars subsidizing corporations.”
“It’s time to take our government back,” Cohen said. “If ‘We the People’ can’t out-spend the corporations, we can at least out-shout them. That’s why StampStampede.org is turning US currency into millions of miniature political billboards, by legally stamping it with messages like ‘Not to Be Used for Bribing Politicians.’ Every stamped dollar bill is seen by about 875 people. That means if one person stamps three bill a day for a year, the message will reach almost 1 million people. It’s a petition on steroids,” said Cohen.
There are over 30,000 stampers across the country and hundreds in New Hampshire. StampStampede.org has also recruited over 50 small businesses in the state to set up small point-of-purchase stamping stations where customers can stamp their dollars, buy a stamp and learn more about the influence of money in politics.
“Our goal is to stamp 3.4 million bills – that’s 10% of the currency in New Hampshire – before next February’s presidential primary,” said Cohen, “It’s monetary jiu-jitsu – we’re using money to get money out of politics”
The nationwide “Day of Action” was sponsored by National People’s Action, Center for Popular Democracy, and USAction. “All across the country, families are taking to the streets, parks and state capitols to send a clear message: ‘Our statehouses and our cities belong to us. It’s time for legislators to enact our bold agenda to put people and planet first.’”
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The Devastating Impact of School Closures on Students and Communities
The Devastating Impact of School Closures on Students and Communities
Shuttering “failed schools” can have painful consequences for children and neighborhoods.
By Rachel M. Cohen / The American Prospect April 22, 2016
In 2013, citing a $1.4 billion...
Shuttering “failed schools” can have painful consequences for children and neighborhoods.
By Rachel M. Cohen / The American Prospect April 22, 2016
In 2013, citing a $1.4 billion deficit, Philadelphia’s state-run school commission voted to close 23 schools—nearly 10 percent of the city’s stock. The decision came after a three-hour meeting at district headquarters, where 500 community members protested outside and 19 were arrested for trying to block district officials from casting their votes. Amid the fiscal pressure from state budget cuts, declining student enrollment, charter-school growth, and federal incentives to shut down low-performing schools, the district assured the public that closures would help put the city back on track toward financial stability.
One of the shuttered schools was Edward Bok Technical High School, a towering eight-story building in South Philadelphia spanning 340,000 square feet, the horizontal length of nearly six football fields. Operating since 1938, Bok was one of the only schools to be entirely financed and constructed by the Public Works Administration. Students would graduate from the historic school with practical skills like carpentry, bricklaying, tailoring, hairdressing, plumbing, and as the decades went on, modern technology. And graduate they did—at the time of closure, Bok boasted a 30 percent–higher graduation rate than South Philadelphia High School, the nearby public school that had to absorb hundreds of Bok’s students.
The Bok building was assessed at $17.8 million, yet city officials sold it for just $2.1 million to Lindsey Scannapieco, the daughter of a local high-rise developer. On their website, BuildingBok.com, Scannapieco and her team envision repurposing the large Bok facility into “a new and innovative center for Philadelphia creatives and non-profits.” They describe the “unprecedented concentration of space” in the Bok building for “Do-It-Yourself innovators, artists, and entrepreneurs” to congregate.
In August 2015, Scannapieco launched Bok’s newest debut, a pop-up restaurant on the building’s eighth floor, which served French food, craft beers, and fine wines. The rooftop terrace was decorated with student chairs and other school-related items found inside the building. Young millennials dubbed the restaurant “Philly’s hottest new rooftop bar,” while longtime residents and educators called it “a sick joke.” Situated in a quickly gentrifying community where nearly 40 percent of families still have incomes of less than $35,000, there was little question about who would be sipping champagne and munching on steak tartare on Bok’s top floor.
When it comes to closing schools, Philadelphia is not alone. In urban districts across the United States—from Detroit to Newark to Oakland—communities are experiencing waves of controversial school closures as cash-strapped districts reckon with pinched budgets and changing politics.
The Chicago Board of Education voted to close 49 elementary schools in 2013—the largest mass school closing in American history. The board assured the distressed community that not only would the district save hundreds of millions of dollars, but students would also receive an improved and more efficient public education.
Chicago Board of Education President David Vitale, center, listens to opponents of proposed school closures at a packed board meeting Wednesday, May 22, 2013, in Chicago.
Yet three years later, Chicago residents are still reeling from the devastating closures—a policy decision that has not only failed to bring about notable academic gains, but has also destabilized communities, crippled small businesses, and weakened local property values. With the city struggling to sell or repurpose most of the closed schools, dozens of large buildings remain vacant, becoming targets of crime and vandalism throughout poor neighborhoods. “These schools went from being community anchors into actual dangerous spaces,” says Pauline Lipman, an education policy professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
African Americans have been hit hardest by the school closings in Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. While black students were 40 percent of Chicago’s school district population in 2013, they made up 88 percent of those affected by the closures. In Philadelphia, black students made up 58 percent of the district, but 81 percent of those affected by closures. Closure proponents insist that shutting down schools and consolidating resources, though certainly upsetting, will ultimately enable districts to provide better and more equitable education. It’s easier to get more money into the classroom, the thinking goes, if unnecessary expenses can be eliminated. But many residents see that school closures have failed to yield significant cost savings. They also view closures as discriminatory—yet another chapter in the long history of harmful experiments deployed by governments on communities of color that strip them of their livelihood and dearest institutions.
Today “the pain is still so raw, it’s not business as usual,” Reverend Robert Jones told me, speaking inside the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, the oldest black grassroots center in Chicago. Indeed, threats of further closures have not abated since 2013. Jones was one of 12 local residents to go on a highly publicized hunger strike late last summer, starving himself for 34 days to prevent another beloved school from being shut down. Their dangerous efforts proved successful; the district reversed its decision and pledged to reopen Walter H. Dyett High School, located on the South Side of Chicago.
Rather than shutter schools, residents argue, districts should reinvest in them.
Rather than shutter schools, residents argue, districts should reinvest in them. They point to full-service community schools, a reform model that combines rigorous academics with wraparound services for children and families, as promising alternatives. The effort to fight back against school closures has grown more pronounced in recent years, as tens of thousands across the country begin to mobilize through legal and political channels to reclaim their neighborhood public schools.
TO TALK ABOUT SCHOOL CLOSURES, one must talk about school buildings. The average age of a U.S. public school facility is nearly 50 years old, and most require extensive rehab, repair, and renovation—particularly in cities. None of the school buildings constructed before World War II were designed for modern cooling and heating systems, and many schools built to educate baby boomers in the 1960s and 1970s were constructed hurriedly on the cheap. Studies find that poor and minority students attend the most dilapidated schools today.
But the federal government offers virtually no economic assistance to states and local districts trying to shoulder the costs of building repairs. And things don’t look much better on the state level, either. Jeff Vincent, the deputy director of the Center for Cities & Schools at University of California, Berkeley, says that state spending has failed to keep up with the needs in schools following the recession, leaving local districts to take on those capital costs even if they can’t afford to.
Despite contributing next to nothing toward school facility spending, the federal government encourages public-school closure and consolidation as a strategy to boost academic performance. Such school improvement interventions for “failing” schools began during the controversial No Child Left Behind era, but financial incentives to close schools and open charters really ramped up under the Obama administration.
“Our communities have been so demonized to the point that nobody thinks they’re good. But no, our institutions have been sabotaged,” says Jitu Brown, the executive director of Journey For Justice (J4J), an alliance formed in 2013 that connects grassroots youth and parents fighting back against school closures. “These districts—Newark, Chicago, Detroit—they all cry ‘broke’ as they shift major portions of their budget towards privatization while neglecting and starving neighborhood schools.”
Besides pointing to low performance, districts often justify closing schools on the basis of the facilities being “underutilized.” This refers to buildings deemed too large for the number of students enrolled, and thus too expensive for districts to operate. Critics of school closures say that how districts determine “utilization” insufficiently accounts for the variety of ways communities use and rely on school facilities. Moreover, Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund, says that urban districts tend to “completely underestimate” how much space is needed for special education and early childhood learning.
“When you’re resource-starved, you tend to take a defensive approach,” says Ariel Bierbaum, a Ph.D. student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. “You’re in a crisis mode, you’re looking to balance your books, so you’re not necessarily thinking the most creatively” about how to use some of the seemingly excess facility space.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS HAVE ALWAYS impacted communities in ways that go beyond just educating young people. Well-maintained school facilities can help revitalize struggling neighborhoods, just as decrepit buildings can hurt them. And whether it’s attracting businesses and workers into the area, directly affecting local property values, or just generally enhancing neighborhood vitality by creating centralized spaces for civic life, research has long demonstrated the influential role schools play within communities.
Custodian Felix Bonafe finishes placing letters on a sign announcing his school's closure on Monday, June 24, 2013, outside Trumbull Elementary School in Chicago.
Yet most existing research on school closures has failed to explore the ways in which shuttering schools impacts these civic spheres; instead researchers have adopted a narrower focus on how school closures impact school district budgets and student academic achievement. On both of these fronts, though, the record has not been impressive.
Researchers find that what districts promise to students, staff, and taxpayers when preparing to close schools differs considerably from what actually happens when they close. For example, most students who went to schools that were closed down in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Newark—whether for fiscal reasons or for low academic performance—were transferred to schools that were not much better, and in some cases even worse, than the ones they left. In Chicago, for example, 87.5 percent of students affected by closures did not move to significantly higher-performing schools. Children also frequently encounter bullying and violence at their new schools, while teachers are often unprepared to handle the influx of new students.
Moving students around can negatively impact student achievement, and closures exacerbate such mobility. In some cities, students have been bumped around two, three, four times—as their new schools were eventually slated for closure, too.
Not all research casts school closures in a uniformly negative light. One study found that New York City school closures had little impact—positive or negative—on students’ academic performance at the time the schools were shut down, yet “future students”—meaning those who had been on track to attend those schools before they closed—demonstrated “meaningful benefits” from attending new schools. Another study found that while most children experienced negative effects on their academic achievement during the year they transitioned to new schools, such negative effects were impermanent, and student performance rebounded to similar rates as their unaffected peers the following year. Essentially, researchers find that there can be substantial positive effects if students are sent to much better schools than they ones they left; however, the reality is that most students do not go to such schools.
In addition to overselling academic gains, districts also tend to overstate how much money they’ll save from shutting down schools.
In addition to overselling academic gains, districts also tend to overstate how much money they’ll save from shutting down schools. When Washington, D.C., closed down 23 schools in 2008, the district reported it would cost them $9.7 million. A 2012 audit found the price was actually nearly $40 million after taking into account the cost of demolishing buildings, transporting students, and the lost value of the buildings, among other factors. Another study conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2011 found that cost savings are generally limited, at least in the short term, and such savings come largely through mass employee layoffs.
Bierbaum, however, has been studying Philadelphia’s school closures from a broader community-development and urban-planning perspective to understand how school closures, sales, and reuses are related to larger issues of metropolitan-wide racial and class inequality. This means examining school closures in the context of neighborhood change, like gentrification or disinvestment, and in relationship to the city plans and policies that help facilitate that change.
In some cases, Bierbaum says that residents feel closures are “necessary” responses to dramatic demographic shifts, even if “draconian”; city officials are “doing the best they can to deal with things out of their control” in terms of fiscal management, she says. But in other cases, residents see closures as yet another manifestation of systemic oppression, closely related to other kinds of disinvestment within neighborhoods. “In this way, not only closures but also school building disposition is actually experienced as dispossession,” Bierbaum explains.
A majority of closed schools are converted into charter schools, with a second significant chunk repurposed into residential apartments. Other buildings are demolished or left vacant. Interviews with experts in several cities reveal that school district officials have not prioritized urban-planning questions, like those Bierbaum is asking, when deciding whether to close schools.
Clarice Berry, the president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association and member of a state legislative task force focused on Chicago school facilities, says the Chicago public school district was simply uninterested in discussing those sorts of civic topics. “At no time have they wanted to study that, or even been interested in discussing it,” she says. “The district spends all their time trying to keep us from getting data [on school closures] that could show us how they could make improvements.” While the task force has repeatedly asked the district to track kids who have been shuffled around from school to school, by and large Chicago and other urban districts have not carefully tracked how school closures have impacted students, families, and communities.
Signs are shown inside of closed Lakeview Elementary School in Oakland, California, Tuesday, June 19, 2012 during a protest against school closures.
SHORTLY AFTER J4J BEGAN ORGANIZING, another network formed—the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS)—comprising ten national organizations, including the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and J4J. Through weekly email newsletters and support for on-the-ground organizing, AROS has helped mobilize individuals looking to fight for public education. Parents and community groups hope they can agitate districts to think creatively about facility space, and invest more in neighborhood schools.
In mid-February, AROS helped stage the first-ever national day of “walk-ins,” where students, teachers, and parents at 900 schools in 30 cities across the country rallied in support of increased school funding, local schools with wraparound services, charter school accountability, and an end to harsh discipline policies, among other demands.
Their action built on momentum that’s been brewing over the past two years around the idea of “full-service community schools,” or schools that offer not only academics but also medical care, child care, job training, counseling, early college partnerships, and other types of social supports. This school model, which dates back more than a century, can be particularly beneficial for low-income residents who face challenges like accessing transportation.
In February, the Center for Popular Democracy released a report on the roughly 5,000 self-identified community schools across the country, lifting up particularly successful examples and offering strategies on how to replicate their success. One such school was Reagan High School, a poor and minority school in northeast Austin, Texas, which adopted a community schools strategy five years ago. In 2008, the local district was threatening to close Reagan due to its declining enrollment and its below–50 percent graduation rate. Parents, students, and teachers began organizing around a community schools plan to save Reagan from closure, and the district gave them permission to give it a shot. After expanding supportive services, like mobile health clinics and parenting classes, after changing its approach to discipline, and after expanding after-school activities, among other things, graduation rates at Reagan have now increased to 85 percent, enrollment has more than doubled, and a new Early College High School program has enabled many Reagan students to earn their associate’s degree before they graduate.
Implementing community schools can be difficult, particularly to the extent that it requires schools to adopt joint-use policies so that facility space can be shared with other public agencies and nonprofits, many of which have no prior experience working together. Some states and local districts have been much more amenable to these types of partnerships than others. “Yes, there’s complexity. But my response is ‘welcome to modern life.’ Stop whining, we know we can do this,” says Filardo of 21st Century School Fund.
Political support for full-service community schools is also on the rise.
Political support for full-service community schools is also on the rise. Philadelphia’s new mayor, Jim Kenney, has pledged to create 25 new community schools by the end of his first term. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio aims to create 200 community schools during his tenure. The new federal education bill passed in December even authorizes grant-funding for community schools, which has incentivized many other cities and states to begin thinking about how to take advantage of this opportunity.
I sat down with Antoinette Baskerville-Richardson, a member of Newark’s elected advisory school board, to learn more about her interest in expanding community schools. With more than one-third of Newark’s children living in poverty, Baskerville-Richardson says local leaders have been looking for ways to address the harms of poverty while also supporting student achievement and school success. After five years of controversial education reforms pushed by Republican governor Chris Christie and his appointed superintendent, Baskerville-Richardson says the Newark community is just plain tired.
“There was a period when all our efforts were basically just fighting against these reforms being imposed on our communities,” she explains. “At the same time, we realized that the conversation could not just be about what we were against, and we had to mobilize around what we were for.” And so, a little over two years ago, public school leaders and local advocates began to really home in on the idea of full-service community schools.
“We began to do a lot of research, we got in touch with experts, talked with people from the Center for Popular Democracy, the Children’s Aid Society, and people involved on the national level,” Baskerville-Richardson recalls. “We also started visiting community schools like in Paterson, New Jersey—which is also a state-controlled district—[and] in Orange, New Jersey, which has similar demographics as ours. We visited Baltimore, New York City; some of our people visited Cincinnati; we talked to people in Tulsa, Oklahoma. … We’re really looking to dig into a model that has been proven to work.” Starting in the fall of 2016, five full-service community schools are set to open up in Newark’s South Ward, its poorest area.
ON THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF Brown v. Board of Education in 2014, parents and community organizations in New Orleans, Chicago, and Newark filed federal complaints under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They alleged that school closures in their cities have had a racially discriminatory impact on children and communities of color. The groups received legal assistance from the Advancement Project, a civil-rights organization.
Jadine Johnson, an attorney with the Advancement Project, says they chose to file Title VI complaints because they wanted to raise disparate impact claims. “When districts are making these decisions they don’t say ‘we’ll close black and Latino schools.’ They’ll say ‘we’ll close schools that are under-enrolled or under-achieving,’” she says. “But those decisions can still have discriminatory effects on black and brown students.” In Newark, for example, during the 2012–2013 school year, white students were nearly 20 times less likely than black students to be affected by school closures, despite what would be predicted given their proportions of student enrollment.
Ariel Bierbaum says her field research demonstrated that many Philadelphians understood school closures as symbols of continued and consistent disrespect and disinvestment for poor communities of color. “Many of my interviewees tied school closures to urban renewal, to their parents’ experience, … [to] the Jim Crow south and migrating north,” a legacy that dates back to slavery, she says. “For them, these closures are not a ‘rational’ policy intervention to address a current fiscal crisis. School closures are situated in a much longer historical trajectory of discriminatory policymaking in the United States.”
Sharon Smith, a founder of Parents Unified for Local School Education, stands with supporters as she talks about a boycott of Newark public schools in a news conference on Thursday, September 4, 2014 in Newark, New Jersey.
J4J has also helped to bring a racial-justice lens to the school-closure conversation, namely by forcing the public to discuss it within the context of discrimination, segregation, underfunding, and marginalization—both inside and outside of schools. In some respects, there’s a seeming irony around efforts to save schools in poor and racially segregated neighborhoods—these are the same schools that were treated as expendable during the desegregation era. But residents understand that their schools aren’t closing for integration purposes, and if one looks closer, it is clear that aims to create more diverse neighborhood schools are still very much on the table.
In December, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Education reached a groundbreaking resolution with Newark Public Schools to aid those who may have been negatively impacted by Newark’s closures. Johnson, the Advancement Project attorney, says she believes the Newark OCR resolution “sends a loud message” to school districts that may be considering similar types of school closures. “We see this [as] a multi-year strategy,” she explains. “This resolution is hopefully the first of many agreements, and the first step to sounding the alarm for why public schools should remain public.”
Meeting with some parent activists who helped to file the Newark Title VI complaint, I wanted to see how they were feeling about the OCR resolution. Sharon Smith, the founder of Parents Unified for Local School Education (PULSENJ), thinks that irrespective of whatever remedies their superintendent proposes, it will take generations until Newark’s South Ward heals.
“It’s always very scary to me when people who are guilty of something, like the district is, say ‘Yes, we are guilty, but we’re going to fix this our own way without the input of the people who were hurt,’” says Darren Martin, another parent involved with PULSENJ. “We’re happy the OCR took our complaint seriously, but it feels almost like the police are policing themselves. How do you allow the person who helped design all these destructive policies [to] also design the remedy?”
IN FEBRUARY, I VISITED KELLY HIGH SCHOOL, a full-service community school on the southwest side of Chicago, serving a student body that’s more than 90 percent low-income. Kelly used to draw a large Italian, Polish, and Lithuanian population, but now predominately serves Hispanic students. With the help of the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, a local community organization, Kelly offers all sorts of programs for parents and children, ranging from tax-prep classes and English-language instruction, to tutoring and political organizing. The academic improvement Kelly students have shown over the past decade has also been substantial—targeted interventions have helped more at-risk students stay on track to graduate, and the school is now ranked as a Level 2+ in the district’s rating system—where the highest possible score is a 1+ and the lowest is a 3.
But Kelly’s progress, both academically and as a civic institution, is threatened by increasing budget cuts, declining student enrollment, and the growth of charter schools in the surrounding area. In July 2015, the Noble Network of Charter Schools, the largest charter chain in Chicago, submitted a proposal to open a new high school a few blocks away from Kelly. Students, parents, and teachers began mobilizing against the proposal, concerned that this new project would siphon even more resources from their already-pinched school, which had been forced to slash programs and teaching positions over the last few years. In October, 1,000 Kelly High School students walked out of class to protest the proposed new school. Yet despite overwhelming local opposition, the unelected Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously to open the new charter.
In this May 16, 2013 photo, a for sale/lease sign is displayed at the vacant Crosman Alternative School in Detroit which closed in 2007.
It’s possible that over the next few years, Kelly High School’s fiscal strain will become just too much to manage, and the school will be slated for closure, too. “The narrative to close schools is essentially a budget one, which can be extremely powerful,” says Filardo. Even if the budget savings turn out to be fairly small, or nonexistent.
One way to reduce budgetary pressures on schools, thereby helping prevent school closures, would be for states and the federal government to pay more, particularly toward local capital budgets. Decades of social-science research have shown how unsafe and inadequate school facilities can negatively affect students’ academic performance—particularly when a school has poor temperature control, poor indoor air quality, and poor lighting. Researchers also find that the higher the percentage of low-income students in a district, the less money a district spends on the capital investments needed to keep school facilities in good repair. The most disadvantaged students tend to receive about half the funding for school buildings as their wealthier peers. And often, low-wealth districts spend more from their operating budgets on facilities—paying for large utility bills, more demanding maintenance for old systems, and the high costs of emergency repairs. It’s not a coincidence that affluent communities invest more in their public school buildings. “They improve and enhance their school facilities because it matters to the quality of education, to the strength of their community, and the achievement and well-being of their children and teachers,” says Filardo.
In other words, increasing state and federal spending could both help struggling urban schools, and also help fortify communities more broadly. Filardo thinks districts should be able to leverage up to 10 percent of their Title I funds to help pay for capital expenses—right now, Title I funds can only go toward local operating spending. Or, even better, Filardo thinks the federal government should start contributing at least 10 percent toward district capital budgets, just as it contributes 10 percent to district operating budgets.
“Schools belong to the entire community, and it should be the state and federal government’s job to find the right policy levers so that we can really advance our educational and economic development together in the best, most equitable way,” she says.
Battles about how best to save and improve public education are sure to intensify in the coming months and years. No researcher has been able to conclusively say what the optimal policy intervention is for students in terms of boosting academic achievement. And some individuals are certainly more sympathetic to closing schools, particularly if it means their children could attend higher-performing district schools or charters. Even on the question of school governance, researchers have reached no clear consensus on whether state takeovers or local control is better for student outcomes or fiscal management. Nevertheless, there’s consensus that any system which generates uncertainty and distrust is a recipe for disaster.
Reflecting on the past four years in her city, Lauren Wells, the chief education officer for Newark Public Schools, notes that reform-minded leaders expanded charter schools quickly without really taking into account the impact such decisions would have on existing schools. A recent report from the Education Law Center, a legal advocacy group, found that the combination of the state’s refusal to adequately fund New Jersey’s school aid formula, coupled with rapid charter-school growth, has placed tremendous strain on district finances, forcing Newark to make significant cuts to district programming and staff. “We really want to move the conversation away from charters versus district schools,” Wells says. “We’re trying instead to build a coalition around this idea that we are the guardians of all children. That should be the basis of any decision that we make.”
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The Center for Popular Democracy and ACLU File FOIA Lawsuit Over Efforts to Limit Municipalities' Foreclosure Prevention Options
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
December 5, 2013
Contact: Ady Barkan,...
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 5, 2013
Contact: Ady Barkan, Center for Popular Democracy (917) 605-4345, abarkan@populardemocracy.org Inga Sarda-Sorensen, ACLU National 212-549-2666, media@aclu.org
The Center for Popular Democracy and ACLU File FOIA Lawsuit Over Efforts to Limit Municipalities' Foreclosure Prevention Options
SAN FRANCISCO – The Center for Popular Democracy and the American Civil Liberties Union today filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to compel the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to provide details about the agency's relationship with the financial industry and its efforts to block municipalities from using eminent domain to prevent foreclosures.
Banks have foreclosed on millions of homes, and vast numbers of homeowners remain at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure because their mortgages are “underwater,” meaning homeowners owe more than their properties are now worth. Communities with large African-American and Latino populations such as Richmond, Calif., and Irvington, N.J., have been particularly hard hit.
"Communities are trying to get back on their feet after one of the country's most devastating economic recessions," said Ady Barkan, staff attorney with the Center for Popular Democracy. "Struggling families need options, not threats. As cities explore solutions that can work for them, the FHFA should be encouraging programs to end the foreclosure crisis, reduce debt, and rebuild our economy, not clamping down on them. And it should be transparent with the American people about its relationship with the financial industry."
“For years, communities of color across the nation were targeted by banks peddling subprime toxic mortgages, greatly contributing to the current foreclosure crisis,” said Udi Ofer, executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey. “Now communities are responding by considering novel approaches to help save their neighborhoods. Municipalities should be able to consider all of their options.”
Some municipalities are exploring eminent domain as a tool that could help homeowners remain in their homes, bolster neighborhoods and maintain property values for all homeowners.
"If eminent domain can be used in blighted neighborhoods to seize property that will be turned over to private developers, then eminent domain should also be available to help homeowners stay in their homes and to stabilize neighborhoods," said Rachel Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU's Racial Justice Program.
Richmond, for example, has offered to purchase securitized underwater mortgages so it can re-issue new mortgages for the homeowners on terms that reflect the current value of their homes. If the owners of the securities refuse to sell at fair market prices, the city proposes to use eminent domain to buy them.
The FHFA has responded by threatening legal action against Richmond or any other city that uses eminent domain to reduce mortgage principals and by threatening to deny credit to people seeking mortgages in those communities. In October, community groups filed a FOIA request seeking information about the nature and substance of the FHFA's exchanges with the financial industry on this issue. The agency never responded, leading the groups to file suit.
"The FHFA has taken an aggressive stance on this issue in a way that has harmed minority communities. The public deserves to know why," said Linda Lye, staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California.
The complaint, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, et al. v. Federal Housing Finance Agency, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. It was brought by the Center for Popular Democracy, ACLU, the ACLU of Northern California, and the ACLU of New Jersey on behalf of a number of community groups across the country.
The complaint is available here.
Home Act Offers Hope for Immigrants
Times Union - September 17, 2014, by Andrew Friedman & Javier Valdes - With President...
Times Union - September 17, 2014, by Andrew Friedman & Javier Valdes - With President Barack Obama once again delaying immigration reform with a path to citizenship, immigrants aren't waiting any longer for Washington to act on their behalf.
Instead, they are uniting around a new strategy for progress: the extension of state citizenship to millions of noncitizen residents.
New York is at the forefront of this national effort.
Legislation called the New York is Home Act, recently introduced by state Sen. Gustavo Rivera and Assembly Member Karim Camara, would extend the full rights and responsibilities of state citizenship to nearly 3 million non-citizens who meet very specific criteria and apply through New York's Office for New Americans.
Earlier this week, Senate Republicans, aware of their political vulnerabilities this election season, launched a thinly-veiled fear-mongering campaign over the legislation. They are trying to turn a commonsense legislative proposal into a wedge issue and divide Democrats in the process.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Senate Democrats, and progressive leaders like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio should not take the bait. Instead, they should rally around this legislation, and recognize how sensible and pragmatic it is.
Today, as in the past, New York is home to many immigrants who make valuable contributions to the communities where they live and work.
From Buffalo to the Bronx, non-citizen residents overwhelmingly want the same things as native-born New York residents: good schools, decent jobs, safe neighborhoods, economic security, and real opportunities for inclusion and advancement.
According to the New York is Home Act, non-citizen residents who can show proof of identity, three years of residency, tax payments, and a commitment to follow the law and serve on juries would be eligible to become state citizens.
To non-citizen residents who meet those specific criteria, access to the following benefits would be granted: financial aid for higher education, health care, drivers' licenses, professional licenses, the right to vote, the right to run for office, and complete protection against racial profiling.
The argument for full equality and inclusion of immigrant residents is that state citizenship should recognize and reward the efforts of noncitizens who make our communities stronger.
We all stand to gain when everyone who calls New York home is treated as a real contributor to the greatness of our state. By the same token, viewing immigrants as expendable, exploitable and deportable hurts us all and undermines our shared values.
What happens in New York with this legislation is being closely watched around the country, especially in states like Oregon, California, Illinois, and New Jersey, where efforts to introduce and pass similar legislation are gaining traction because of Washington's failure on immigration.
The New York is Home Act would enable the full and equal participation of immigrants in all activities that define our democracy and economy.
It respects the federal government's authority over federal immigration, while asserting New York's authority to define its state citizenry and the beneficiaries of state citizenship.
State laws around the country have long excluded non-citizens from voting rights, higher education, health care, drivers' licenses, and professional licenses. This exclusion is a loss for all of us, because it limits the ability of immigrants to participate fully in activities that strengthen the social and economic fabric of our country and advance our common interests as Americans.
It's time to promote full inclusion and equality for all.
Taking all the necessary political steps to get this done in New York will be a challenge, but with a reunified Democratic state Senate and leadership from Cuomo, it can happen.
We should set a clear example for the nation and create a model for other states to follow.
Through the expansion of state citizenship, non-citizens can exercise greater economic and political power on behalf of everyone, and do more to help our entire state and country grow, thrive, and prosper. New York is the only home many noncitizen residents have ever known.
Now is the moment to start counting and respecting these New Yorkers as real citizens.
Andrew Friedman is co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy. Javier Valdes is co-executive director of Make the Road New York.
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Durham County judge, attorneys interested in filling seat held by Paul Luebke Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/community/durham-news/article118570918.html#storylink=cpy
Durham County judge, attorneys interested in filling seat held by Paul Luebke Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/community/durham-news/article118570918.html#storylink=cpy
Phil Lehman was officially sworn in to fill his longtime friend Paul Luebke’ seat last month, but his term as a state representative will only last a month or so.
Lehman, a a longtime...
Phil Lehman was officially sworn in to fill his longtime friend Paul Luebke’ seat last month, but his term as a state representative will only last a month or so.
Lehman, a a longtime consumer advocate in the state attorney general’s office who retired three years ago, was appointed to the seat the night before the Nov. 8 election and plans to step down in January.
“I don’t think there was enough time to do all the vetting process and consulting with the political groups to find somebody younger than I was to be in this for the long haul,” said Lehman, 70.
Luebke, 70, a Democrat who represented Durham for 25 years in the state House, died in late October. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma in 2015 and received treatment, but suffered a sudden return of the cancer.
Luebke, who was running for re-election to a 14th term, remained on the ballot for the general election
According to elected officials, a subset of the Durham County Democratic Party Executive Committee that included precinct chairs and vice chairs and elected officials in House District 30, initially planned to fill the seat after the election. That changed after concerns were raised about procedure and possible future complications.
“The recommendation was made by the state Democratic Party that we didn’t want to go through the election cycle without having somebody appointed to serve in his place on the ballot,” said Sen. Floyd McKissick, a Durham Democrat who said he preferred taking that route from the beginning.
The subset of the Durham committee met Nov. 7 and voted to appoint Lehman to the seat as a place holder to fill the existing term and the start of the new term.
At least four candidates want the seat when Lehman steps down.
▪ Danielle Adams, 32, is an eight-year member of the Durham County Soil & Water Conservation District Board of Supervisors who was recently re-elected. She is the southern coordinator for Local Progress, an arm of the national nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy. It encourages progressive policy making at the local level.
Adams wants to bring a strong, pragmatic, progressive voice that represents young people, women and people of color.
“I don’t think my voice has been reflected, and I think part of my desire comes in wanting to see that change and being that change not only for myself but for the many others like me,” she said.
▪ Shelia Huggins, 49, is a private attorney who worked for the city for eight years, most recently as a senior administration manager with the Department of Economic and Workforce Development. Huggins said she has focused on supporting entrepreneurship by serving on the N.C. Central University School of Business Board of Visitors and Alamance Community College Small Business Center Board of Advisers.
Huggins wants to improve the economic vitality of the state.
“I would really like to see us build a business climate that is supportive of people who are trying to build businesses and people who already have business in the state of North Carolina,” she said.
▪ Marcia Morey, 61, Durham County’s chief district judge, has served on the bench for nearly 18 years. She was a driving force behind the county’s misdemeanor diversion program, which was the first in the state after it was established in 2014 to give 16- and 17-year-olds charged with certain misdemeanors a second chance. The program was later expanded to18- to 21-year-olds and has been a model for other counties across the state
Morey said she is up for a new challenge to help make better policies and laws.
“I think after 18 years in the courts, you see many issues that would come before the General Assembly,” Morey said. “It has given me a lot of awareness and experience to kind of know how to look at laws, and how they are interpreted, and the impact they have on people’s lives.”
▪ Sherri Zann Rosenthal, 59, is a senior assistant city of Durham attorney. She worked as a contract attorney for the city for six years before becoming an assistant city attorney in 1995. Rosenthal served as president of the Durham-Orange Women Attorneys and created a committee on child sexual trafficking in Durham. The committee’s advocacy lead to the creation of the Durham County Task Force Against Child Sexual Exploitation, which is providing prevention training in schools and promoting the gathering of information of cases that come through the Durham County Department of Social Services.
Rosenthal said public policy has always been her core interest.
“I think that at the state level we have really gotten away from fact-based public policy, and we have gotten very polarized. It is very important that we join together so that we solve real problem,” she said.
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