The Week Ahead in New York Politics, May 1
The Week Ahead in New York Politics, May 1
What to watch for this week in New York politics:
President Donald Trump is due back in New York City for the first time since taking office this week -- see below for details and expect...
What to watch for this week in New York politics:
President Donald Trump is due back in New York City for the first time since taking office this week -- see below for details and expect protests, traffic gridlock, and political statements from all corners.
Read full article here.
Transcript: Netroots Annual ConfeCPD and Local Progress Mentioned in C-Span during Netroots Conventionrence
Transcript: Netroots Annual ConfeCPD and Local Progress Mentioned in C-Span during Netroots Conventionrence
...codirector of Local Progress, a national group that unites progressive local officials and allied organizations. It is run by the Center for popular Democracy...
...
...codirector of Local Progress, a national group that unites progressive local officials and allied organizations. It is run by the Center for popular Democracy...
Read the transcript here.
What Housing Recovery?
New York Times - May 8, 2014, by Peter Dreier - Recently there’s been a lot of happy talk about the nation’s housing recovery. Frequent reports about rising prices suggest that the tens of...
New York Times - May 8, 2014, by Peter Dreier - Recently there’s been a lot of happy talk about the nation’s housing recovery. Frequent reports about rising prices suggest that the tens of millions of people whose homes lost value just have to wait until the recovery reaches their neighborhood to lift them out of crisis. But this supposed housing recovery is bypassing many of our cities and towns.
The total value of America’s owner-occupied housing remains $3.2 trillion below 2006 levels. According to Zillow, a real estate database, 9.8 million households still owe more on their mortgages than the market value of their homes. That’s one-fifth of all mortgaged homes. Without government intervention, many of them are at risk of joining the almost five million households that have already suffered through foreclosure since the housing bubble burst in 2007.
With my colleagues Alex Schwartz of the New School and Gregory Squires of George Washington University, I have identified the 15 metropolitan areas, 100 cities and 395 ZIP codes with the highest proportion of underwater mortgages.
How bad is it? More than 10 million Americans, spread across 23 states, live in ZIP codes where between 43 percent and 76 percent of homeowners are under water. The biggest concentrations are in Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio. The cities in the worst shape are Las Vegas, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Orlando and Chicago. Places with so many underwater homes are toxic; they depress the value of surrounding homes and undermine local governments’ fiscal health.
The blame for this tragedy lies mostly with banks’ risky, reckless and sometimes illegal lending practices. The story is a familiar one. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, millions of Americans bought or refinanced homes in an overheated market. Mortgage brokers lied or misled borrowers about the terms of these mortgages, often pushing borrowers into high-interest subprime loans, even when they were eligible for conventional mortgages.
They particularly targeted minority areas. In 2006, when subprime lending was at its peak, 54 percent of blacks, 47 percent of Latinos and 18 percent of whites received high-priced loans, according to the Federal Reserve Board.
Not surprisingly, the nation’s worst underwater areas are disproportionately in black and Latino neighborhoods. In almost two-thirds of the hardest-hit ZIP codes, African-Americans and Latinos account for at least half of the residents.
The banks’ risky loans eventually came crashing down, devastating communities and causing financial havoc. The federal government rescued the banks, but nobody came to the rescue of the communities the banks left behind.
The best solution to this quagmire is for banks and other financial institutions to modify underwater mortgages to their current market value, an approach called “principal reduction.” If lenders rewrote the loans to reflect fair-market values, owners would have lower monthly payments, which would free them to put millions of dollars into local economies. Cities would have more stable property tax revenues, and lenders would ultimately benefit by having fewer delinquent loans.
Of course, many banks no longer own the loans they made. They pooled large numbers of subprime loans into private securities and sold them. The companies that service these securities generally refuse to countenance the idea of “principal reduction.” Yes, some homeowners have been able to persuade lenders to reset their loans, but most get the cold shoulder or a bureaucratic runaround.
In some cities, though, nonprofit lenders, like New Jersey Community Capital and Hogar Hispano, have stepped into the void, raising capital and purchasing troubled loans in order to modify them on affordable terms. But too few loan holders have been willing to sell to these homeowner-friendly groups.
In 2012, some of the biggest banks signed a settlement agreement with 49 state attorneys general to modify mortgages, but many of them continue to heap abuse on their customers, and sufficient relief has not reached trapped homeowners.
The Obama administration created several initiatives to help troubled borrowers, but these programs do not require banks to reset loans as a condition of getting federal funds. The government’s Home Affordable Modification Program has helped only one-quarter of the four million homeowners it was supposed to reach.
Worse, the federal government has actually been an obstacle to reform. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has refused to allow these two mortgage giants to reduce the principal on underwater mortgages that they own or guarantee. All it would take is for President Obama’s new appointee as F.H.F.A. director, former Representative Melvin Watt, to change the policy, an action that does not require congressional approval. He should do so immediately.
Meanwhile, faced with this predicament, some municipalities have been trying to take matters into their own hands. Late last year, Richmond, Calif., was the first city to develop a plan to use its power of eminent domain to buy underwater mortgages at their current market value and to refinance them, but many other localities are likely to follow. A number of responsible for-profit and nonprofit lenders stand ready to do business with them so that local governments don’t have to use tax dollars to purchase these loans.
Dealing with this problem on a city-by-city basis may not be the most efficient way to confront a national crisis, but in the face of Wall Street intransigence and federal indifference, cities have had to find their own way to restore the lost wealth of their constituents.
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Newark schools should offer more social services, advocates say
NJ.com - 05-06-2015 - Newark's schools should add more social services and community programming to tackle issues of poverty afflicting local neighborhoods, a group of education advocates said...
NJ.com - 05-06-2015 - Newark's schools should add more social services and community programming to tackle issues of poverty afflicting local neighborhoods, a group of education advocates said Tuesday.
Dubbed the "community school" model, schools should strive to address needy students' health and emotional needs, teach content beyond what is included in standardized tests and include parental input in the decision making.
NJ Communities United organizer Roberto Cabanas told a packed audience in Kings Family Restaurant & Catering, that the district could work local nonprofit organizations to support a wider range of student needs.
"We need to bring the village inside of the school," he said.
Cabanas was one of four panelists at an education forum organized by activists and the city, including Newark chief education officer Lauren Wells, Evie Frankl of the Center for Popular Democracy and Mary Bennett of the Alliance for Newark Public Schools.
Wells said Newark Public Schools once adopted this approach about five years ago through the Global Village Zone, when the district attempted to turn around seven schools in the city's Central Ward.
At the time, the district announced that the program would implement longer days and provide more professional development and pay for teachers. Under the model, schools were set to turn schools into a place where students would be taught but also be able to go to health clinics.
"A community school is a place, a physical place, but it's also a practice," Wells said. "It is a way about going about doing things."
The program also sought input from teachers and parents when it designed it, Wells said.
"Teachers, specifically, at 18th Avenue School worked with the principal to design what (an) extended day would look like in their school," she said.
Bennett said when she was a principal in the district she tried to better serve students on probation by working with the county probation department to have one probation officer assigned to all the students in her school.
Under the community schools model, the district could streamline cooperation between government and universities, Bennett argued.
"You shouldn't have to spend a year to try and unify the services to support students," she said.
Frankl said districts around the country including in Baltimore, New York City and Lancaster, Pennsylvania are adopting this approach.
"Community schools can happen," she said. "There is no reason why a community school should not be the definition of a public school in the United States of America."
Source: NJ.com
Recaudan fondos para Puerto Rico con fiesta en el Museo PS1
Recaudan fondos para Puerto Rico con fiesta en el Museo PS1
El Museo de Arte Moderno (MoMA, por sus siglas en inglés) recibió en su sede en Long Island City a la comunidad artística puertorriqueña, en un esfuerzo de recaudación de fondos organizado por la...
El Museo de Arte Moderno (MoMA, por sus siglas en inglés) recibió en su sede en Long Island City a la comunidad artística puertorriqueña, en un esfuerzo de recaudación de fondos organizado por la sociedad civil en apoyo a la comunidad afectada por el huracán María.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
America's Worst Employer Pageant Launches Today
America's Worst Employer Pageant Launches Today
Today, Center for Popular Democracy launches the first-ever Worst Employer Pageant asking America to help crown the nation’s worst employer based on how abominably it treats its employees. By...
Today, Center for Popular Democracy launches the first-ever Worst Employer Pageant asking America to help crown the nation’s worst employer based on how abominably it treats its employees. By pitting the two worst employers within four different sector against each other, the site asks visitors to cast their votes in each of the following categories – banks, supermarkets, drug stores, and pizza chains.
The Worst Employer Pageant has gathered extensive information on the companies, allowing voters to make their decisions based on such bad behaviors as a poor CEO to median worker pay ratio, failure to pay minimum wage and overtime, worker lawsuits against companies, or forcing workers to work through breaks, among other egregious practices.
“America’s most recognizable brands are some of our biggest employers and we want to highlight their poor treatment of employees,” said JoEllen Chernow, Director of Economic Justice at Center for Popular Democracy. “Consumers are no longer just judging companies on how much they like their products or the efficiency of their services. In 2016, customers care about how companies treat their workers full stop. Yup, it’s a thing.”
The companies nominated for becoming the Worst Employer are:
· Bank of America
· Wells Fargo
· Sam’s Club
· Whole Foods
· CVS
· Walgreens
· Papa John’s
· Yum! Brands, Inc. (Pizza Hut)
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www.populardemocracy.org
The Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda
American Legislative Exchange Council lobbyist being exposed
American Legislative Exchange Council lobbyist being exposed
Niccolo Machiavelli would have been proud of the folks who support the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). At the end of September the U.S. Department of Education approved another $245...
Niccolo Machiavelli would have been proud of the folks who support the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). At the end of September the U.S. Department of Education approved another $245 million in grants to eight states under the federal Charter School Program. That brings to nearly $4 billion in charters in the last two and a half decades.
The Center for Popular Democracy spelled out in its report “Charter School Black Hole” how tax dollars have gone to “ghost schools,” charters that never opened. In the case of schools that did open only to fail, there was no accounting for money spent or assets purchased.
There was no accountability to the school children affected by charter fraud, waste, and incompetence. Virtual charters like the K12 operation performed markedly worse. They are similar to fantasy football games — those that are bet on but are never physically played.
Scores of major companies have abandoned ALEC after protests from their stockholders and clients. Recently the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees wrote to the CEO of AARP urging that group to get out of the lobbying group. They asked that the senior citizens group stop “endorsing an organization that brings corporate lobbyists and elected officials from around the country together to write anti-senior, anti-family legislation in a process that locks out the public and subverts our democratic process.” Among other things ALEC has pushed for is repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
Enterprise, the largest car rental company in the world, owns Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National and Alamo, has moved away from the lobbying juggernaut. Part of the push to accomplish that divorce came from a petition by a petition with 89,000 signatures.
The company’s membership in ALEC, which has poured considerable resources into denying and minimizing scientific efforts to quantify climate change, was brought to the Guardian’s attention by the watchdog group the Center for Media and Democracy.
Growing concern about climate change has led many high-tech companies such as eBay, Expedia, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to abandon the ALEC ship. In 2015, environmental concerns pushed energy-industry giants, Royal Dutch Shell and BP, as well as the American Electric Power and the Canadian National Railway to quit.
A laundry list of model bills proposed in many state legislatures is very long — and very threatening.
For a listing of bills sponsored by ALEC, go to the website for the Center for Media and Democracy: www.alecexposed.org. Download the zip files of ALEC model bills for agriculture, energy, and the environment. Consider one such bill aimed at land use controls.
One bill would repeal all land use planning and zoning in rural counties by both county and state governments. Under the bill property could be put to any use, without regard for single-family, agricultural, or industrial zoning, or environmental land use restrictions. Under that restraint, no one could prevent a nude bar or body shop next to a school. Nor could local government prevent polluting industries from building in their jurisdiction.
If you want more information about the machinations of this cabal, simply contact Senator Josh Harkins and Representative Jim Beckett, who are chairmen of the Mississippi chapter.
In closing, consider these words from the ALEC website: “When states resort to tax carve-outs in a misguided attempt to grow their economies, they are ignoring the bigger problem — an uncompetitive tax climate. More fundamentally, government should budget for outcomes. This means identifying the core functions of state government and measuring results.”
Reviewing their handling of budgets and tax give aways in the past year, one can only wish they had taken their own advice.
TJ Ray is a retired professor of English at Ole Miss.
By Oxford Eagle Contributors
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Still important to let our senators know what we think
Still important to let our senators know what we think
What do Credo Action, MoveOn, Idaho Medical Advocacy, CPD Action, Daily Kos, People’s Action, Elizabeth Warren, Mom’s Rising, Our Revolution, Change.Org, AARP, and the Economic Policy Institute...
What do Credo Action, MoveOn, Idaho Medical Advocacy, CPD Action, Daily Kos, People’s Action, Elizabeth Warren, Mom’s Rising, Our Revolution, Change.Org, AARP, and the Economic Policy Institute have in common?
Well, possibly lots of things — each is an advocacy group working to change America.
Read the full article here.
National advocacy groups are backing the sick-leave effort in Texas
National advocacy groups are backing the sick-leave effort in Texas
National advocacy groups based mostly in Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, N.Y., were responsible for $1.8 million of the $2.5 million contributed and loaned to the political action committee...
National advocacy groups based mostly in Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, N.Y., were responsible for $1.8 million of the $2.5 million contributed and loaned to the political action committee leading the effort to mandate paid sick leave for workers in Texas...The other major outside donors include...$95,000, Center for Popular Democracy, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Read the full article here.
The Fed, Full Employment, African-Americans, and an Event that Brings It All Together
Jared Bernstein Blog - March 3, 2015 - As a tireless (some would say tiresome) advocate for full employment and the benefits it yields for working people, you can imagine how I was thrown by this...
Jared Bernstein Blog - March 3, 2015 - As a tireless (some would say tiresome) advocate for full employment and the benefits it yields for working people, you can imagine how I was thrown by this NYT headline over a piece by economics reporter Bin Appelbaum:
Black jobless rates remain high, but Fed can’t do much to help.
“Shots fired!” as the kids say.
I find this hard to believe in the following sense. Black unemployment has averaged almost twice that of overall unemployment since the monthly data begin in 1972 (avg: 1.9, with standard deviation of 0.15, so not a ton of variation around that mean). Crudely, that implies that if overall unemployment fell from 6% to 5%, the black rate might fall more in percentage point terms, from 12% to 10%.
Next, if the Fed can push down the overall unemployment rate, which is certainly within its purview and, at a time like this, its job description, then the headline seems off.
Now, there are important nuances in play here.
First, these relationships are not always so clean. Over the long, strong recovery of the 1990s, black unemployment fell 4.5 points compared to 2.1 points for whites (and 2.5 points overall). Over the 1980s recovery, black unemployment—which was about 20% at the end of the deep early 1980s recession—fell 8.5 points compared to 4.7 for whites.
Those comparatively big declines show the disproportionate benefits that blacks reap from lower unemployment and, conditional on the Fed’s ability to lower unemployment, they belie the NYT headline. I could make similar claims based on wages and incomes, but I’m bound by secrecy for now (more on that in a moment).
However, more recently, that relationship isn’t generating such impressive results. Over this recovery, black and white unemployment have declined by similar amounts (4.5 points for blacks; 3.8 for whites). And, as Appelbaum points out, real median wages have fallen twice as much for blacks as for whites.
But that’s kinda the point: until recently this has been a uniquely weak recovery, and as such, tells us little yet about the extent to which full employment will lift the relative economic fortunes of black workers.
If we get to and stay at full employment, I’m confident it will work as it has in the past, based both on the history briefly cited above and on some truly exciting results from a new paper we’ve commissioned for our full employment project on the benefits of full employment to black workers, written by the economist Valarie Wilson from the Economic Policy Institute.
Valerie will be highlighting the results at an event we’re holding in DC on March 30th so far be it from me to steal her thunder. But she’s got some panel data regressions (which provide lots more observations and variance than the simple time series comparisons noted above) showing the impact of lower unemployment on black compared to white median wages, and man…all’s I can say is I’m employing great restraint not to just print them right here and now!
Here’s another point worth considering. Various economists on team full employment have been trying to get the Fed to hold off on its interest rate liftoff, but Appelbaum writes: “It’s not obvious, however, that holding down borrowing costs for a little longer would be an effective way to address the underlying problem. Indeed, the problem is a good illustration of the limits of monetary policy.”
That may be true in the following sense: if the Fed raises rates a little bit in 2015q4 instead of 2015q3, I doubt it will matter that much to anyone in the real economy (though financial markets would make a huge deal out of it). Similarly, if they hold to a 5.4% full employment rate and a firm 2% inflation ceiling that mustn’t be breached, or if they shift from being data driven to shooting at the phantom menace of inflation that’s allegedly hiding out of sight from the data just around the corner—well then, yeah, they won’t much help those who depend on lasting full employment to catch a break.
He’s also got a point re underlying problems. Even full employment may not be enough to reach the millions of workers with criminal records who face uniquely high barriers to the job market. I’ve written about fair-hiring policies to reach these workers, and so has Appelbaum.
But check this out: I mentioned our March 30 event. Well, another speaker on the panel that morning will be the guy from whom I learned all I know about fair-hiring, Maurice Emsellem from the National Employment Law Project.
I know what you’re thinking: what about macro, what about Fed policy? How can you call yourself a full employment maven and leave that out? Did I forget to mention our keynote speaker? A fella named Bernanke…Ben Bernanke. Here’s the flyer. Be there and be square.
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2 days ago
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