Campaign News

Nearly eight years after the start of the global financial crisis, hedge funds and private equity firms have found yet another way to make big profits: distressed housing assets. Often, the very same corporate actors that precipitated the housing crash in the first place are buying and selling off delinquent mortgages and vacant houses that are a product of the crash.

Together, these Wall Street entities have raised over $20 billion to buy the notes for as many as 200,000 homes in the United States. The newly consolidated single-family rental market is a lucrative business. A 2014 study estimated that the four largest holders of these assets have seen as much as a 23 percent rate of return on the properties they purchased in the last three years.Meanwhile, low-income communities of color across the country have suffered. Millions of Americans lost all the equity in their homes or experienced the hardship of foreclosure during the housing crisis and have not recovered from losing their greatest source of wealth.

This new report, co-authored by CPD and the ACCE Institute, reviews the track record of the HUD and FHFA single-family loan sale programs. It explores the troubling record of four of the top buyers of the loans, corporations who are benefitting from the way the loan sales are currently conducted.

Read the report here

MarketWatch - August 21, 2014, by Greg Robb - Protesters, worried that the central bank is about to put its foot on the brakes, have come to the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole retreat this year to urge the central bank to hold off and give the economy more time to heal. This is believed to be the first time there ever has been protesters at the event.

“We strongly urge the Federal Reserve to reject the calls to raise interest rates and slow the economy down,” said The Center for Popular Democracy, a coalition of 70 organizations, in a letter to Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen and her colleagues.

“Although the stock market has roared back to life, and the wealthiest Americans are richer than ever before, too many of us struggle to secure even basic levels of dignity,” the letter said.

Becky Dernbach, 28, an organizer with Neighborhoods Organizing for Change — an advocacy group for low-income residents in Minneapolis — said she came to Jackson Hole to make sure that the voices of average workers were being heard by the Fed.

Kendra Brooks, 42, a resident of Philadelphia who has an MBA but still found herself out of work even after her unemployment benefits ended, said the American dream has “fizzled” in this economy.

“We are not their [the Fed's] primary concern. They are more focused on the top end of the [income] scale,” she said.

The activists said the Jackson Hole protest was the start of a new effort to get officials to understand the economy is broken.

The group held a two-hour meeting with Kansas City Fed President Esther George, who has been one of several regional bank presidents advocating for a rate hike sooner rather than later.

Ady Barkan, a staff attorney with the Center for Popular Democracy, said that the group appreciated the meeting but that the two sides had talked past each other.

George told the group that higher rates might not come soon, but said are coming and will balance the economy, he said.

“That is completely wrong,” Barkan said. The way to combat imbalance in the economy is through strong regulation “not throwing people out of work,” he said.

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"Major corporations stand to profit from Trump's hateful agenda. That's why we call them Backers of Hate," the website states.

A new campaign, Corporate Backers of Hate is looking to expose the role some U.S. corporations are playing in profiting from the abuses suffered by the communities of color under the Trump administration.

Read full article here.

The Dallas Morning News - March 4, 2015, by Sheryl Jean - A coalition of community and labor groups in Texas is calling for the Federal Reserve to focus on full employment and higher wages for blacks and others in poor neighborhoods who have been left behind in the economic recovery.

The group also wants the board of the Fed’s regional bank in Dallas to keep that in mind as it searches for a replacement for Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher, who will retire March 19.

Liberal activists across the country on Thursday plan to protest outside seven Fed regional banks, including New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis, to highlight high unemployment among minority groups and to urge officials not to raise interest rates yet and instead focus on full employment and higher wages. A demonstration also was planned at the Dallas Fed’s office on the edge of downtown, but was canceled due to a forecast for bad weather.

Still, activists in Dallas plan to call attention to a new report showing that the nation’s economic recovery hasn’t reached many minority communities. Falling jobless rates maskhigh black and long-term unemployment and racial inequality in wages in Texas and across the country.

The 84-page report by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Economic Policy Institute shows that Texas’ average jobless rate was 5 percent in 2014, but it was 9.5 percent for blacks. In the Dallas metro area, the average rate was 5.1 percent last year, but it was 9.6 percent for blacks. Nationally, the black jobless rate was 10.3 percent, compared with a national average of 6.2 percent.

Wages also lagged. Texas’ median wage grew 3.9 percent from 2000 to 2014, but it rose 8 percent for whites and declined 0.8 percent for blacks, according to the report. Nationally, wages have been stagnant for most workers since 2000.

“If the Fed raises [interest] rates to banks, then our rates go up, but wages aren’t going up,” said Danny Cendejas, senior organizer in Dallas for the Texas Organizing Project, one of the groups in the coalition. “It’s something that is very concerning for most of our community. In the black and brown communities, where we know the unemployment rates are higher, how do we expect those people to pay their loans back?”

The Fed has kept interest rates near zero since 2008 to help spur business lending to create jobs and boost the economy.

Coalition members in Texas want a more open search process for Fisher’s replacement with more involvement by the community. Fisher, who was in El Paso on Wednesday, has been one of the most vocal advocates of raising interest rates sooner than later.

“Look around at all the construction cranes in Dallas,” said Becky Moeller, president of the Texas AFL-CIO. “I think the lower interest rates are spurring businesses to do work and then they’re hiring people. We just don’t want an interest rate policy that isn’t good for workers in the state.”

Moeller was among a group of 10 community leaders who met with three Fed representatives — general counsel John Buchanan; Alfreda Norman, head of community development and public affairs; and spokesman James Hoard — for about 90 minutes in January to discuss the search process for a new president, the timeline and the qualifications sought.

“We had a good conversation and thought we answered their questions,” Hoard said. The Dallas Fed put the name of the search firm and its email address on its website for anyone interested in nominating a candidate, he added.

Moeller has a different view of the meeting.

“We don’t have a candidate, but we felt like we had some input we wanted to share,” she said. “We don’t want it to be someone who wouldn’t be good for jobs in the future. We wanted to make sure they were looking at the economic factors that relate to real people in Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico. We have low-wage workers who can’t get their head above water. We have folks who are long-term unemployed.”

In addition to the Texas AFL-CIO, the groups that met with the Dallas Fed were the American Federation of Teachers, Communication Workers of America, Dallas Central Labor Council, Fort Worth Building Trades and Ironworkers, Harris County Central Labor Council, Jobs With Justice, Texas Organizing Project and Workers Defense Project.

Coalition members last summer protested the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole, Wyo., forum and met with Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen in November.

Yellen and three other Fed officials met with about 30 workers and activists, including some from Texas, for an hour to hear their plights of being long-term unemployed and struggling to make a living. As a result, the Fed created the Community Advisory Council in January to provide different perspectives on the economy, especially the needs of low- to moderate-income families.

“She listened very carefully and was very engaged and was grateful to us for requesting the meeting,” said Ady Barkan, staff lawyer for the Center for Popular Democracy, who was at the meeting. “It’s the kind of response we would like to see from others.”

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