Puerto Rico is on Track for Historic Debt Forgiveness -- Unless Wall Street Gets its Way
Puerto Rico is on Track for Historic Debt Forgiveness -- Unless Wall Street Gets its Way
For bondholders sitting on Puerto Rican debt, Hurricane Maria may have come just when they needed it, just as a yearslong battle over the fate of the island’s financial future was beginning to...
For bondholders sitting on Puerto Rican debt, Hurricane Maria may have come just when they needed it, just as a yearslong battle over the fate of the island’s financial future was beginning to turn against them. Or, depending on how the politics shake out, they could see their entire bet go south.
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Rep. Blanc arrested, then released following D.C. demonstration
Rep. Blanc arrested, then released following D.C. demonstration
Blanc was in Washington participating in a sit-in along with advocates from Living United For Change in Arizona, or LUCHA, and national groups like United We Dream and Center for Popular Democracy...
Blanc was in Washington participating in a sit-in along with advocates from Living United For Change in Arizona, or LUCHA, and national groups like United We Dream and Center for Popular Democracy. The groups demanded that Congress pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill protecting the more than 700,000 young undocumented immigrants protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program or DACA.
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Gillibrand Has Received Big Campaign Donations from Puerto Rico Bondholders
Gillibrand Has Received Big Campaign Donations from Puerto Rico Bondholders
“Politicians that receive money from hedge fund managers like Seth Klarman and Dan Loeb should understand that their money is coming from people who have pushed austerity and privatization as the...
“Politicians that receive money from hedge fund managers like Seth Klarman and Dan Loeb should understand that their money is coming from people who have pushed austerity and privatization as the solution to Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis,” Julio Lopez Varona, co-director of the Community Dignity Campaign with the Center for Popular Democracy, told Sludge. “This solution has proven to help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer while pushing hundreds of thousands to leave the island.”
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System Failure: Louisiana's Broken Charter School Law
Executive Summary
In the ten years since Hurricane Katrina, post-storm changes to the state’s charter school law have dramatically grown the number of charter schools in...
Executive Summary
In the ten years since Hurricane Katrina, post-storm changes to the state’s charter school law have dramatically grown the number of charter schools in the state. Since 2005, charter school enrollment in the state has grown 1,188 percent. Through this growth, the Louisiana Department of Education’s Recovery School District—created to facilitate state takeover of struggling schools—has become the first charter-only school district in the country, with other states lining up to copy its model. Louisiana taxpayers have invested heavily, paying billions of dollars to charters and state takeover schools since the storm, including over $831 million in the 2014/2015 school year alone.
The rapid growth and massive investment in charter schools has been accompanied by a dramatic underinvestment in oversight, leaving Louisiana’s students, parents, teachers and taxpayers at risk of academic failures and financial fraud. The state’s failure to create an effective financial oversight system is obvious, as Louisiana charter schools have experienced millions in known losses from fraud and financial mismanagement so far, which is likely just the tip of the iceberg. According to standard forensic auditing methodologies, the deficiencies in charter oversight throughout Louisiana suggest tens of millions of dollars in undiscovered losses for the 2013-14 school year alone.
Download the full report here.
In this report, we identify three fundamental flaws with Louisiana’s financial oversight of charter schools:
Oversight depends too heavily on self-reporting by charter schools or the reports of whistleblowers. Louisiana’s oversight agencies rely almost entirely on audits paid for by the charters themselves and whistleblowers. While important to uncover fraud, neither method systematically detects or effectively prevents fraud. The general auditing techniques used in charter school reports do not uncover fraud on their own. The audits commissioned by the charter schools use general auditing techniques designed to expose inaccuracies or inefficiencies. Without audits specifically designed to detect and uncover fraud, however, state and local agencies will rarely detect deliberate fraud without a whistleblower. Inadequate staffing prevents the thorough detection and elimination fraud. Louisiana inadequately staffs its charter-school oversight agencies. In order to carry out high-quality audits of any type, auditors need enough time. With too few qualified people on staff—and too little training for existing staff—agencies are unable to uncover clues that might lead to fuller investigations and the discovery of fraud.As the state has insufficiently resourced financial oversight, it has failed to create a structure that provides struggling schools and their students with a pathway to academic success. While underinvesting in the dissemination and implementation of successful strategies to lift academically struggling schools up, state lawmakers have continued to invest in both charter expansion and conversions of public schools to charters. Coupled with an unwillingness to help failing schools succeed, the rapid growth of charters has failed Louisiana children, families and taxpayers. Since 2005, approximately $700 million in public tax dollars have been spent on charter schools that currently have not achieved a C or better on the state’s grading system.
In this report we identify two fundamental flaws with Louisiana’s academic oversight of charter schools:
Underinvestment in systems that help struggling schools succeed. Lawmakers and regulators have invested in systems that set high standards and then close schools that fail to meet them, rather than helping them improve to meet the standards. This investment in a severe accountability system does not support schools achieve academic success. Heavy reliance on data that is vulnerable to manipulation. The state’s academic oversight system relies largely on sets of data that can be manipulated by regulators, authorizers, or the charters themselves. Without reliable data, schools, parents and the public have no way to accurately gauge academic quality at their schools.To address these serious deficiencies in Louisiana’s system, we recommend the following:
Mandate New Measures Designed to Detect and Prevent Fraud
Charter school governing boards should be required to institute an internal fraud risk management program, including an annual fraud risk assessment. Charter school governing boards should be required to commission an annual audit of internal controls over financial reporting that is integrated with the audit of financial statements charter schools currently commission. The Louisiana Legislative Auditor should conduct regular fraud audits, prioritizing charter schools with heightened levels of fraud risk. Auditing teams should include members certified in financial forensics trained to detect fraudIncrease Financial Transparency & Accountability
Oversight agencies should create a system to categorize and rank charter audits by level of fraud risk they pose to facilitate public engagement. Center for Popular Democracy & Coalition for Community Schools 3 The Louisiana Legislative Auditor should create a dedicated charter school fraud hotline for whistleblowers. Charter school governing boards should post the findings of their annual fraud risk internal assessments on their websites. Oversight agencies should determine what steps the nonprofit governing boards and executives of charter schools have taken to guard against fraud over the past 10 years and issue a report to the public detailing their findings and recommendations. Charter school governing boards should provide parents of students enrolled in charter schools free access to all materials related to their fraud risk management program.The state should impose a moratorium on new charter schools until the state oversight system is adequately reformed.
Redesign the System to Support Struggling Schools
Under the current system, when regulators find that a school is not performing well, they put the school on the “Intervention Ladder”. The Intervention Ladder should be replaced with mandatory hands-on long-term strategic support from the state and stakeholders. Lawmakers should invest additional resources to ensure that regulators have enough staff with the appropriate expertise to meet the significant turnaround needs in the state.Redesign the Data Collection System
Lawmakers should mandate that underlying data comparators remain consistent from year-to-year to allow oversight officials and the public to accurately compare school performance. In cases where changes to underlying data are unavoidable, data should be presented using both old and new cut-scores for a period of three years. The state should invest in ongoing test erasure analysis. Regulators should implement a process to ensure that the school reported data used to calculate the School Performance Score (SPS) is reliable by conducting regular audits of school-reported data. The state and authorizers must make funding for regular data audits a priority. The Louisiana Legislative Audit should include a review of the LDOE’s data auditing in its regular audits of the agency. Finally, the legislature should mandate that all of the data used to calculate School Performance Scores be made available to the public, in its raw form.Given the rapid and continuing expansion of state school takeovers and the charter school industry in the state through the investment of public dollars, Louisiana must act now to reform its oversight system. Without reform, Louisianans face many more years of failing schools and millions—if not billions—of dollars more lost to charter school fraud and financial mismanagement.
Download the full report here.
Progress Conventions Take On New Meaning In Wake Of Police-Related Shootings
Progress Conventions Take On New Meaning In Wake Of Police-Related Shootings
Hundreds of activists, community organizers and progressive elected officials from around the country are meeting in Pittsburgh this weekend.
The two conventions, aimed at social and...
Hundreds of activists, community organizers and progressive elected officials from around the country are meeting in Pittsburgh this weekend.
The two conventions, aimed at social and economic progress, will take on new perspectives in the wake of the police shooting deaths of two black men in Minnesota and Louisiana.
Pittsburgh Bureau of Police officials also said Friday that officers will have a heightened awareness of safety in the wake of Thursday night's shooting in Dallas, Texas that killed five police officers and injured seven more.
The Center for Popular Democracy, a national nonprofit that fights for racial equality, worker and immigrant rights, is hosting its first People’s Convention. It’s taking place in Pittsburgh, partly because of the city’s labor roots, location and number of organizations willing to partner, organizers said.
The CPD’s Co-Executive Director Andrew Friedman said attendees are on the front lines of groups demanding higher wages, affordable housing and racial equality. The goal is to build a community of action and share best practices for inciting change.
“I think there’s a huge value in folks realizing they’re not fighting alone,” Friedman said, “and learning about other campaigns in other parts of the country, and sharing strategies that are proving effective.”
Friedman said the Convention will focus on new conversations in light of the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, two black men shot by police this week.
“I think it’s going to have a huge influence, I think folks are coming to the convention with broken hearts and in very low spirits,” Friedman said. “I think folks are in mourning and in shock frankly from these two very painful videos that have surfaced.”
Across the street from the People’s Convention, the annual Local Progress Convening, a gathering of 100 elected officials from across the country, is also taking place this weekend. The convening is another event headed by the CPD, hosted by Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and though separate from the People’s Convention, will have some coinciding events.
“In order to get any change accomplished, you need allies on the inside that are willing and able to move the levers of governmental power,” said Convening Co-Director Ady Barkan. “And you need advocates and community members and organized institutions on the outside pushing for those changes.”
Barkan said representatives from each gathering will speak at one another’s conventions.
Friedman said gun violence and opportunities for the African American community will now have a larger focus on the conference’s agenda. He said attendees include activists who focus on ending police violence in Minneapolis – the site of one of the recent shootings.
One of the conference’s events is a march through Pittsburgh protesting inequality in immigration policies, environmental care and workers’ wages.
Organizers said another stop at the courthouse has been added to the march to honor Black Lives Matter and discuss the week’s news.
By VIRGINIA ALVINO
Source
Calling all mayors: This is what police reform should look like
The coverage of police brutality over the last year, both in the mass media and through civilian video footage, has been a wake-up call for many Americans, shining a spotlight on what many...
The coverage of police brutality over the last year, both in the mass media and through civilian video footage, has been a wake-up call for many Americans, shining a spotlight on what many communities of color already knew—our policing and criminal justice systems are infused with systemic racial bias.
Thanks to the relentless work of community advocates, the aggressive police tactics that routinely threaten the lives and safety of people of color have garnered unprecedented national attention.
This attention, however, is no guarantee of real change. In fact, one year after Michael Brown’s killing, police shootings and protests continue in Ferguson, Missouri.
Despite the growing body of evidence on the nature and extent of the problem, the path towards meaningful reform has not been clear, leaving many local leaders at a loss as to how to move forward.
But the actions of local government—mayors in particular—couldn’t be more important. Channeling the current momentum into transformative change will require leadership across local, regional, and federal levels, but mayors are in a unique position to be the vanguard, taking trailblazing steps towards transforming how police departments interact with their communities.
While some have bemoaned a lack of consensus around a roadmap to police reform, those on the ground—community members, organizers, elected officials, police officers and chiefs—raise the concepts of accountability, oversight, community respect, and limiting the scope of policing again and again. Our organizations spent close to a year collecting success stories and insight from communities across the country, from Los Angeles to Cleveland to Baltimore, to create a toolkit for advocates working to end police violence. We identified several common principles that all mayors can—and should—put in place to establish sustainable, community-centered and controlled policing.
Several of these principles have received national attention, such as demilitarizing police departments, providing police recruits with training in racial bias, de-escalation, and conflict mediation, and making police more accountable to communities through civilian oversight bodies and independent investigations of alleged police misconduct. Thanks to the commitment of a proactive mayor, this kind of community accountability is already being put in place in Newark, which just approved a progressive Civilian Complaint Review Board that provides landmark community oversight in a city with a long history of police brutality.
Mayors should also institute policies that scale back over-policing, especially for minor ‘broken-windows’ offenses that criminalize too many communities and burden already-impoverished households with exorbitant fees and fines. Ferguson’s court system became an infamous example, but routine targeting of and profiteering off of low-income communities of color is pervasive throughout the country. Local governments must not only fix broken municipal court systems but should also scale back the tide of criminalization through decriminalizing offenses that have nothing to do with public safety. With the strong support of the mayor, the Minneapolis City Council recently decriminalized two non-violent offenses—spitting and lurking—which had been used to racially profile.
The last piece of the puzzle may be politically controversial, but is absolutely fundamental to transforming our broken systems of policing and criminal justice and supporting safer and stronger communities. Local governments cannot continue to pour ever-increasing sums into city police budgets, while ignoring the most basic needs of residents living in over-policed areas: better schools, job opportunities, access to healthy food, affordable housing, and public transportation. Neighborhoods most afflicted by aggressive policing and high incarceration rates also have high levels of poverty, unemployment, and racial segregation. In many urban neighborhoods where millions of dollars are spent to lock up residents, the education infrastructure and larger social net are completely crippled. Investments to build up vulnerable communities need to be viewed as part of a comprehensive public safety strategy.
Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called for a Department of Justice investigation of the city’s police department only after tragedy struck and the community rose up in protest. It is time for the mayors of this country to instead take a proactive Mayoral Pledge to End Police Violenceto heal the wounds of broken policing and criminal justice policies before another devastating police killing.
Blackwell is the founder and CEO of PolicyLink. Friedman is the co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy.
Source: The Hill
Activists to Protest at Regional Feds Ahead of Jobs Data
Wall Street Journal - March 3, 2015, by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa - A network of liberal activists is planning a series of small demonstrations outside of several Federal Reserve...
Wall Street Journal - March 3, 2015, by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa - A network of liberal activists is planning a series of small demonstrations outside of several Federal Reserve district banks Thursday, intending to highlight elevated unemployment among minority communities and urging officials not to raise interest rates any time soon.
Fed officials have indicated they plan to lift their benchmark short-term interest rate from near zero, where it has been since late 2008, sometime this year if the economy continues to strengthen as expected.
The activists say the nation’s 5.7% jobless rate understates the underlying weakness of the labor market, pointing to high long-term and black unemployment as symptoms of an economy that is still ailing. The unemployment rate for blacks was 10.3% in January.
“The Federal Reserve has the power–and responsibility–to foster stronger economic conditions that create opportunity for all communities,” the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank backing the demonstrations, said in a statement.
The activists are planning actions outside the regional Fed banks of New York, San Francisco, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Charlotte, N.C. (home to a branch of the Richmond Fed) and Dallas.
The Labor Department releases its February employment report on Friday.
Becky Moeller, president of the Texas AFL-CIO, said she and other community leaders have been frustrated by what they see as an opaque process for selecting the next Dallas Fed president. The current chief, Richard Fisher, is set to step down March 19.
Ms. Moeller said instead of getting a meeting with members of the Dallas Fed’s board of directors, which is in charge of the search, she and her delegation met with the bank’s general counsel in a session she described as not very helpful.
“This has been a comedy of pass the buck,” she said. “We don’t have a candidate—we’re just trying to talk processes.”
The Dallas Fed said it had recently met with the following groups regarding the search for a new bank president: Texas AFL-CIO, Texas Organizing Project, Jobs With Justice, Fort Worth Building Trades and Ironworkers, Workers Defense Project, Communication Workers of America, Dallas Central Labor Council, Harris County Central Labor Council and American Federation of Teachers.
“We had a productive conversation with representatives from these groups,” said James Hoard, a spokesman for the Dallas Fed. “We were interested in hearing their views on the selection of a new Dallas Fed president, and hope we were able to provide useful information to them, as well.”
The Center for Popular Democracy and the Fed Up Coalition, the umbrella groups coordinating the protests, expressed dismay at the lack of transparency in the selection of Patrick Harker as the new Philadelphia Fed President.
“Despite repeated requests from community, consumer, labor and academic organizations and public officials within the region, the Philadelphia Fed refused to create any mechanisms for engagement with the public,” said Kendra Brooks of Action United in Philadelphia.
“Instead, the process was entirely opaque: nobody outside of the Federal Reserve knew who the candidates were or what the criteria were for selection. This process did a disservice to the Federal Reserve System and the people of the Philadelphia region.”
The Philadelphia Fed said in response: “Several of our staff members did meet with members from Action United to hear their concerns. The Philadelphia Fed also provided them the opportunity to provide names of potential candidates to our executive search firm.”
The same group of activists showed up at the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole symposium last summer and held a meeting with Janet Yellen at the Fed in November.
Last week, Ms. Yellen met with a group of conservative activists who argued the Fed’s low-rate policies were hurting rather than boosting employment.
The Great Recession has brought increased political scrutiny on the Fed, with prominent Republican and Democratic politicians calling for various changes in the central bank’s governance.
Source
Low-paid earners at risk for theft
Times Union - March 21, 2014, Letter to the Editor by The Rev. Sam Trumbore - Hard-working employees are often at a significant disadvantage when dealing with their employers.
Employees...
Times Union - March 21, 2014, Letter to the Editor by The Rev. Sam Trumbore - Hard-working employees are often at a significant disadvantage when dealing with their employers.
Employees sometimes don’t know that they are not being paid according to the law. Overtime is often not given appropriately. Employers liquidate their businesses without paying their workers.
A 2009 National Employment Law Project study determined workers in New York City lose $1 billion per year due to wage theft. A recent survey of fast-food workers in New York City found that 84 percent suffered some form of wage theft over the previous year.
That was supposed to be fixed with the Wage Theft Protection Act that went into effect in 2011. The problem now is that when a worker files a claim, it can take years to resolve it. Employers often appeal settlements, which takes even longer.
The state Department of Labor just does not have the required number of investigators to enforce labor law in a timely fashion. More than 14,000 cases were waiting resolution in 2013, cases that could take as long as five years to complete.
This is a very unfair hardship on low-income workers who need those wages to put food on the table and pay the rent and utilities.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature need to add funding to the Department of Labor to increase the number of investigators and judges working on these cases and decrease this backlog. The working people of New York need the assurance that employers will treat them fairly. The growing backlog of cases is not sending this message.
The Rev. Sam TrumboreMinister, First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany
Source
Democratic Lawmakers Say Fed Should Increase Its Diversity
Democratic Lawmakers Say Fed Should Increase Its Diversity
The predominantly white male composition of Federal Reserve leadership is facing criticism from Democratic elected officials who believe the institution doesn’t adequately reflect the demographics...
The predominantly white male composition of Federal Reserve leadership is facing criticism from Democratic elected officials who believe the institution doesn’t adequately reflect the demographics of the nation it is meant to serve.
The legislators said in a letter to Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen on Thursday that central bank leaders also are drawn too frequently from business and financial backgrounds. The letter to Ms. Yellen received support from the leading Democratic candidate for the White House, Hillary Clinton.
Eleven senators and 116 members of the House of Representatives signed the letter, which was organized by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan. No Republicans participated, although they were given the opportunity to do so.
“Given the critical linkage between monetary policy and the experiences of hardworking Americans, the importance of ensuring that such positions are filled by persons that reflect and represent the interests of our diverse country, cannot be understated,” the letter said. “When the voices of women, African-Americans, Latinos, and representatives of consumers and labor are excluded from key discussions, their interests are too often neglected.”
While the Fed has made “some progress” on diversity issues, the central bank has “considerable work to do” to comply with its legal mandate to represent the interests and diversity of the American people, the letter said.
The Fed said in a statement that it “is committed to fostering diversity—by race, ethnicity, gender, and professional background—within its leadership ranks.” It added that when it comes to the members of the regional boards, “by law, we consider the interests of agriculture, commerce, industry, services, labor, and consumers. We also are aiming to increase ethnic and gender diversity.”
The Fed also cited a rise in both racial and gender diversity on the regional Fed boards, with 46% of all directors now meeting the label of “diverse.”
In February, Ms. Yellen also addressed the issue in testimony to Congress, saying officials in Washington are “constantly attentive in its oversight of the reserve banks to the issue of diversity of representation on those boards. And it has improved considerably.”
The legislators’ letter follows a report earlier in the year from the Center for Popular Democracy’s left-leaning Fed Up Coalition, which took a look at the Washington-based Fed governors, regional bank presidents and boards of directors overseeing the 12 regional banks. That report flagged the fact that even as the Fed is now led by a woman, three of five current governors are men, and all are white. Of the 12 regional Fed bank presidents, 11 are white, two are women, and one is Indian-American. The last black person to hold a top leadership role at the Fed was Roger Ferguson, a vice chairman who left in 2006.
Fed governors are nominated by the president and are subject to Senate approval. Regional Fed bank presidents are nominated by their local boards by members representing firms not regulated by the central bank, subject to the approval of the Fed board in Washington.
The Clinton campaign said the central bank is indeed ripe for change. “The Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole,” it said in a statement, adding that “commonsense reforms—like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks—are long overdue.”
Much of the criticism over Fed diversity centers on the make-up of the regional bank boards of directors, which are populated by members of the private sector and oversee the operations of the Fed banks.
The makeup of Fed bank president ranks has been criticized for other reasons as well. The leaders of the New York, Philadelphia, Dallas and Minneapolis branches have all worked for investment bank Goldman Sachs in some capacity.
The Federal Reserve in recent years has faced criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Many on the right have been angered by the central bank’s aggressive stimulus actions and its role in bailouts of the financial system, and some have wanted to audit the central bank’s process for making monetary policy and force the Fed to set policy based on an explicit and simple rule.
On the left, some have said the Fed has pursued policies that have promoted income inequality and the interests of the financial sector. The low level of diversity has become a more prominent concern in recent months in part because of the report from the Fed Up Coalition.
Meanwhile, former Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota said in a blog post in January that a lack of black representation at the Fed appears to have left central bankers insufficiently attuned to the economic troubles of the African-American community.
The Fed has become an issue in the presidential campaign. Last week, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump said he likely would replace Ms. Yellen if he were president. On the Democratic side, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has long been a critic of the Fed.
By MICHAEL S. DERBY
Source
Fed Up on Nightly Business Report
Nightly Business Report - November 11, 2014
...
Nightly Business Report - November 11, 2014
Source
6 days ago
6 days ago