Campaign News

July 26 was the deadline by which the government was ordered by a judge to reunite all immigrant children separated from their parents in Trump's so-called zero-tolerance border policy earlier this year. But of the approximately 2,500 children that were separated 711 still remain without their parents after the deadline, lawyers for the government said. Of those, 431 cases remain where the parents were deported before getting their children back and the rest were "ineligible" to be returned as per the government. Meanwhile protesters across the country have continued confronting ICE offices and other institutions involved in the immigrant crackdown including banks that are financing private prisons for immigrants. JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and BlackRock, have been targeted by activists this week after the Center for Popular Democracy released a report called Bankrolling Oppression. Eight people were arrested while protesting outside the home of JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon.

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Left-leaning groups affiliated with the Fed Up campaign, including CREDO Action, the Working Families Party and Daily Kos, estimate that over 400 of their members called the Federal Reserve Board of Governors’ public comment hotline and the phone numbers of the Fed’s special economic advisers late last week and early this week to express opposition to an interest rate hike. The activists, along with many liberal economists, believe the Fed should wait for higher wage growth before raising rates. 

Around 9 a.m. Monday, activists reported being unable to record additional messages on the public comment hotline because it apparently was full, according to Fed Up. This continued for another two to three hours. 

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors’ communications office declined to confirm the account or otherwise comment on the calls. 

The Fed Up campaign’s opposition to an interest rate hike is part of a broader goal of making the Fed more accountable to average workers and their concerns. Fed Up convened dozens of grassroots activists to make their case to Fed officials in person at the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium in late August.

The Fed’s inability to receive more phone calls confirms it is "unused to actual public engagement," Fed Up campaign director Ady Barkan wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. 

The Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee is meeting on Wednesday and Thursday to decide whether to raise its benchmark interest rate, and plans to announce its decision Thursday afternoon. The Fed has indicated it may decide to raise the rate slightly above the near-zero level, where it has remained since December 2008. 

Proponents of an interest rate hike note that the official unemployment rate is down to 5.1 percent and argue that although inflation is well under the Fed’s 2 percent target, it is better to raise rates gradually sooner to avoid having to take more dramatic action later. 

Opponents of a rate hike, however, observe that the official unemployment rate does not account for people who have given up looking for work or are working part-time involuntarily. That is why they believe the declining unemployment has not been accompanied by more significant wage growth.

"Millions of working families know from their own experiences that the economy is still struggling," said Murshed Zaheed, deputy political director of CREDO Action, in an email statement. "Intentionally slowing down the economy now would reduce job creation and prevent wage growth. It’s the last thing the Fed should be doing."

Source: Huffington Post

The campaign manager for a group trying to raise Arizona's minimum wage said on Wednesday that the effort was helped considerably by his own timely loan of $100,000.

Bill Scheel is one of three founding partners of the public-relations and political-strategy firm Javelina, which Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families hired to run its campaign. The Phoenix-based firm got the job done in the form of Proposition 206, which will appear on the November 8 ballot.

Preliminary state campaign-finance records show that Bright Owl, a limited liability company of which Scheel is the sole member and manager, made a $100,000 contribution to the campaign on August 4.

Asked on Wednesday about the cash infusion, Scheel said the money is an interest-free loan, not a donation, and that it will be classified as such on the campaign's official pre-primary report, which is due to the state on Friday.

According to Scheel, the loan came in the nick of time to cover legal fees for an unexpected court challenge to the initiative, and was made possible by money he inherited after his parents died a few years ago.

"I couldn't think of a better way to honor their memory than to provide this loan, which has helped get our Healthy Working Families initiative on the ballot," he said.

If Arizona voters approve the measure, the state's minimum wage would go up to $10 an hour next year and rise to $12 in 2020.

But it almost didn't make the ballot. The Arizona Restaurant Association sued, claiming many of the petition gatherers hired by the campaign ineligible to collect signatures. The association wanted tens of thousands of signatures thrown out, potentially enough to knock the initiative off the ballot.

The campaign itself was in need of a raise.

Before Scheel's loan, the two largest payments to the campaign were a July 19 donation of $25,000 from the United Food and Commercial Workers union Region 8 States Council, and a May 12 donation of $25,000 from the California-based Fairness Project. Prior to that, records show, from January 1 to May 31, the effort was funded with $384,642 donated by the nonprofit activist group Living United for Change in Arizona, (LUCHA), which reportedly received money for the effort from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Popular Democracy.

During that same period in the first half of 2016, the group spent $337,975.59 on signature gatherers, printing services, and other expenses, including $3,000 in consulting fees paid to Tomas Robles, the campaign's chairman and LUCHA's executive director.

Scheel says the campaign pays his company $10,000 a month for campaign management, plus another $5,000 a month for communications, all of which is split by several people at Javelina.

On top of all those expenses came the legal bills for the lawsuit by the restaurant association.

"We didn't have money set aside for legal expenses," Scheel explained, adding that his loan was a "huge help" to the campaign. It was also a risk to put his own money on the line, he admitted.

"If the court had ruled against us last Friday, my $100,000 would be gone," he said. "Legal fees is basically what [the money] was spent on."

Arizona's Minimum-Wage Initiative Saved by Political Consultant's Inheritance

Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families

The group's tenacity, along with Scheel's inheritance money, paid off in the courtroom. Last week, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge dismissed the lawsuit because the association filed the complaint seven days after the signatures were submitted to the Arizona Secretary of State's Office, exceeding the statutory limit of five days.

Now, the website for Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families lists Bright Owl as a major funding source, along with LUCHA, the UCFW, and the Fairness Project.

Scheel, who hasn't made any other contributions to the campaign, expects to be repaid out of donations that come in between now and November, he said.

"There will be future donations coming into the campaign from donors," he said. "About $1.5 million."

In response to questions from New Times, he said he hasn't made any deals with the unions and activist groups behind the campaign, nor does he expect anything in return other than repayment, if the group can manage it. His loan simply came at the right time and was a "huge help" to the legal effort that saved the initiative, he said.

"This really is a labor of love for me," Scheel said. "When I work on a campaign, I go all in. I want it to succeed."

By Ray Stern

Source

The Wall Street Journal - November 14, 2014, by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa - Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen met Friday with a coalition of community activists who are urging the central bank to resist pressures to raise interest rates before the labor market has fully recovered and calling for greater public input into the selection of regional Fed bank presidents.

At a press briefing outside the Fed before the meeting, organized by the Center for Popular Democracy and featuring workers, community organizers and liberal economists, the activists said the idea that the economy was close to full recovery was belied by the joblessness and underemployment of millions of Americans.

“We’re here to launch a national campaign for a stronger economy and for a reformed Federal Reserve,” said Ady Barkan, staff attorney at the center, a left-leaning national nonprofit organization. “The economy is not working for the vast majority of people,” he said, citing high unemployment, inequality and large racial disparities.

The Fed declined to comment on the meeting or the activists’ recommendations.

The Fed last month ended its bond-buying program aimed at supporting economic growth, citing “substantial improvement” in the outlook for the labor market. Those present at the briefing said the experience of many communities across the country suggests otherwise.

One of their biggest complaints was the inability of workers to find full-time work, a problem that has worried Fed officials and suggests the job market is still some way from full health.

“My job used to be steady, something you could count on,” said Jean Andre, 48, of New York, who works on logistics in the film industry. “I’m one of the names at the end of the movies that nobody reads. But I’m underemployed, I just can’t get full-time work anymore, not like I used to before the crash.”

With the unemployment rate 5.8% in October, Fed officials are debating when to begin raising interest rates from near zero. Many investors expect the central bank to start raising its benchmark short-term rate sometime in the summer of 2015.

Josh Bivens, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington, noted that black unemployment is generally double the overall level. Black communities would be among those hit hardest by potentially premature Fed rate increases, he said.

The activist group also called for greater public input into the selection of the presidents of the Fed’s 12 regional banks. This comes ahead of the retirements next year of Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher and Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser. The two have been some of the most vocal opponents of aggressive Fed efforts to reduce unemployment—such as holding short-term rates near zero and buying bonds to lower long-term rates–arguing such policies risk fueling excessive inflation and asset bubbles while doing little good for the economy.

Fed presidents are selected by the boards of directors of the regional Feds, with the approval of the Washington-based Fed board of governors. The regional boards are composed of bankers, business executives and community representatives,

Kati Sipp, a director of the Pennsylvania Working Families Party who spoke at the briefing, said many of the regional bank board members designated as community representatives are not truly representative of the communities they are supposed to serve. “Right now in Philadelphia we have Comcast CMCSA +0.10% executives that are representing the public, and we think that it’s important for us that real people are also representing the public in Federal Reserve policy making.”

Michael Angelakis, vice chairman and CFO of Comcast Corp., is deputy director of the Philadelphia Fed’s Board.

“In Philadelphia we’ve had an 8% average unemployment rate for this year and it’s a 14.5% unemployment rate for the black community,” Ms. Sipp said. If Mr. Plosser believes the economy is back to full health, she said, then he hasn’t visited many of his own city’s troubled neighborhoods. “If he had, he would not believe that our economy has really recovered.”

Mr. Plosser has said he believes the job market is close to full employment and the economic recovery is genuine, if unremarkable.

The Philadelphia Fed announced Friday that Korn Ferry KFY -0.15%, the executive search firm hired to conduct the search for a new president, established an email address “to receive inquiries.” Asked if the move was in response to the protests, a spokesperson said it was “one part of our broad search process.”

Source