Sexual assault testimony in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing triggers trauma, reports
Sexual assault testimony in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing triggers trauma, reports
The political became personal for many this week, as Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony of sexual assault reopened old wounds for other victims — including two women who dramatically confronted a...
The political became personal for many this week, as Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony of sexual assault reopened old wounds for other victims — including two women who dramatically confronted a key US senator Friday in a Capitol elevator.
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Immigration Reform Moves to States; New York Eyes Citizenship After 3 Years of Taxes
The Washington Examiner - June 16, 2014, by Paul Bedard - The frustration with Washington's inaction on any type of immigration reform has forced proponents to shift their attention to states such...
The Washington Examiner - June 16, 2014, by Paul Bedard - The frustration with Washington's inaction on any type of immigration reform has forced proponents to shift their attention to states such as New York where a new plan was offered Monday to grant citizenship and voting rights after an illegal immigrant pays three years of taxes.
The Washington-based Center for Popular Democracy said the New York legislative effort to provide citizenship benefits to three million immigrants is the result of the fallout of congressional gridlock and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's defeat last week, which pundits blamed on his support for reform.
But that doesn’t mean immigration reform supporters have given up on a national solution. Center Co-Executive Director Andrew Friedman told Secrets, “We will definitely continue to work hard for federal reform, even as we push states to show leadership and do everything they can to promote immigrant inclusion and dignity, as well as economic expansion and growth.”
The New York legislation, titled “New York is Home Act,” sets requirements for immigrants to meet before they can apply for citizenship with New York's Office for New Americans, created by Gov. Andrew Cuomo:
Proof of identity.
Proof of three years of New York state residency.
Proof of three years of New York state tax payments.
Commitment to abide by New York laws and uphold the state constitution.
A willingness to serve on New York juries and to continue to pay state taxes.
In return, said Friedman's group in a release, immigrants would get New York state citizenship, financial aid for higher education, health care, drivers' licenses, professional licenses, the right to vote, the right to run for office, and protection against racial profiling.
“This bill is about New York state doing everything it can to promote the full equality of immigrants. State powers, though, are very different than federal powers, so the package of opportunities and benefits are different from any federal bill,” said Friedman, whose group is promoting similar plans in other states.
“Our state's hardworking non-citizens should have the opportunity to fully participate in the health and growth of our state,” said New York State Sen. Gustavo Rivera, the lead sponsor of the legislation.
“State citizenship should recognize and reward the contributions of noncitizen residents who play by the rules while living and working here,” added the state assembly sponsor, Karim Camara.
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Fed Officials to Meet With Activists Ahead of Jackson Hole Conference
Fed Officials to Meet With Activists Ahead of Jackson Hole Conference
When Federal Reserve officials gather for the Kansas City Fed’s high-profile policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo. this week, some of them will start with an unprecedented event.
On...
When Federal Reserve officials gather for the Kansas City Fed’s high-profile policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo. this week, some of them will start with an unprecedented event.
On Thursday, eight central bankers, among them Fed governor Lael Brainard and New York Fed President William Dudley, will meet with and answer questions from about 120 activists from the Campaign for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up Campaign, a left-leaning group working to change the way the powerful central bank works.
The meeting marks a turn for the invitation-only Jackson Hole symposium, which draws top central bankers and economists from around the world to discuss monetary policy issues behind closed doors. Though journalists cover the proceedings and Fed officials give press interviews on the sidelines, this is the first time the Kansas City Fed, which hosts the event, has organized a public forum for policy makers to meet with their critics beforehand.
“My sense is that we are starting to see real changes, ”said Ady Barkan, leader of the Fed Up campaign. He said he was prompted to launch the effort after realizing how little public attention was focused on the U.S. central bank, which directly affects the lives of U.S. workers, consumers, home buyers, business owners and investors.
Formally launched in 2014, the coalition of policy activists, labor and community groups has lobbied the Fed to keep interest rates very low to ensure the economic recovery benefits all Americans and not just the well off. The group has called for more diversity among the central bank’s predominantly white, male leadership; more openness about how regional Fed bank presidents are chosen and changes in the Fed’s century-old structure to reduce the influence of the banking industry.
Mr. Barkan, a 32-year-old lawyer, recalled wondering how to get the public to care about “the absurdly opaque issue” of Fed policy. He found more interest that he expected. Speaking with community groups, he found “everybody is fascinated, everybody gets the importance of it.”
The group has gained a notable amount of high-level access. Its members met in November 2014 with Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen and several Fed governors, and later with Fed staff. Fed Up members have met with all 12 regional Fed bank presidents, even conducting public events with some, as it did with the Minneapolis Fed’s Neel Kashkari in early August.
The regional Fed bank leaders have largely welcomed their meetings with Fed Up. “I’ve been at the Fed 22 years. When you’ve been at an institution that long it is hard to know how other people view you” and how your policies play out in the real world, San Francisco Fed President John Williams told reporters in July.
“Understanding the perspectives of people outside of financial markets, outside of our own circles—that’s healthy,” Mr. Williams said. “Hearing what I think is supposed to be constructive criticism is healthy.”
Over the past year, Fed Up also has met regularly with lawmakers and their staff on Capitol Hill, held press briefings in front of the central bank’s Washington, D.C., offices and stacked congressional hearings with activists wearing their trademark green shirts.
Among the results: A large number of congressional Democrats and the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have echoed Fed Up’s call for barring bankers from the boards that oversee the regional Fed banks and urged the central bank to focus more on promoting job growth. The Democratic legislators have recently expressed concerns over a lack of diversity among Fed leaders.
In congressional hearings in February, House and Senate Democrats peppered Ms. Yellen with more questions than in the past on issues such as inequality, stagnant wages and jobless rates for low-income Americans.
“For black Americans, we’re still in the midst of a very serious depression or recession,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D., Minn.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus who had met with Fed Up, told Ms. Yellen in February.
When she returned to Capitol Hill in June, Ms. Yellen came armed with data and talking points addressing the diverging economic circumstances between white and black and Hispanic households.
“It’s important for us to be aware of those differences and to focus on them as we think about monetary policy and work that the Federal Reserve does in the area of community development,” she said.
That contrasted with Ms. Yellen’s previous comments that the Fed’s options for addressing the economic troubles of minority groups were limited. Some Fed watchers said her shift in tone suggests policy makers are paying closer attention to such concerns.
The gestures may not seem like much to outsiders, but to people familiar with the Fed—an institution that is slow to change and resistant to criticism—they are viewed as a significant shift.
“It’s kind of monumental to get the Fed to change,” said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, noting the creation last year of an advisory council at the Fed focused on the concerns of low-income communities.
That said, a number of the Fed bank presidents have argued against the structural reforms Fed Up is advocating. In May, Mr. Dudley said “the current arrangements are actually working quite well, both in terms of preserving the Federal Reserve’s independence with respect to the conduct of monetary policy and actually leading to pretty, you know, successful outcomes.”
Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart expressed skepticism about the call for more openness about the selection of regional reserve bank chiefs.
“When it comes to picking new bank presidents, are you going to get that with a completely open process much like an election? I don’t think these are roles that should be filled by public election,” he said.
Fed Up’s funding comes primarily from the Open Philanthropy Project, which provides grants and funds to projects on justice reform, immigration and economics. Open Philanthropy committed $1 million toward Fed Up’s 2016 budget. In 2015 Open Philanthropy donated $750,000 toward Fed Up’s $1.1 million annual budget. Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder who left that firm in 2008, is one of the primary sources of Open Philanthropy’s funds.
Some former central bankers worry Fed Up has unreasonable expectations in a world in which central bank policy can’t change economic fundamentals such as long-run growth in productivity, output or wages. They also fret it was the Fed itself, via its response to the financial crisis, that created the perception it has the tools to affect more than short-term fluctuations in inflation and hiring.
Charles Plosser, former president of the Philadelphia Fed, said the Fed officials, through word and deed, “continually raised expectations about what they can do.” And having made the public believe it was more powerful that it actually is, officials “are setting themselves up for exactly this sort of attack” by those who want more out of the Fed.
Former Dallas Fed leader Richard Fisher said he had long warned that ultra-aggressive Fed stimulus policies that he said primarily benefited the rich would end up “stoking the fires of populism.”
The Fed has faced populist critics before. What is different about Fed Up, Ms. Binder said, is it seems to be well-funded and well-organized and have a constructive agenda, as opposed to some groups who have called for abolishing the Fed or limiting its powers.
“They’re kind of working through the system in a way, which is to say, ‘Look, [Congress has told the Fed] to care equally about inflation and jobs—it’s not time to give up on jobs,’” she said.
Corrections & Amplifications:
Rep. Keith Ellison is a Democratic congressman from Minnesota. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a Republican. (Aug. 25)
By Michael S. Derby and Kate Davidson
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Dean Baker: Why We Must Oppose the Coming Fed Interest Rate Hike
That message comes amid a grassroots effort this week designed to line up organizations behind a call on the Fed to not increase interest rates before the economy reaches full employment.
There is a widespread expectation that the Fed will raise interest rates sometime in 2015, ostensibly to keep the economy from “overheating” and driving up the rate of inflation. The problem is, as Baker pointed out in his presentation, there is no inflation threat on the horizon, but there is a very real threat of choking the economic recovery and driving up unemployment if interest rates rise.
“This is a huge, huge issue and it is largely ignored by much of the progressive movement, largely because people don’t understand it,” Baker said. “And I would say to a large extent that’s how they” – the bankers and the corporate class that has the ear of the Federal Reserve’s members – “want it.”
Baker has been working closely with the Center for Popular Democracy’s “Fed Up” campaign, which has been pushing the Fed to focus on moving the economy toward full employment as a top priority.
The campaign has emphasized that after more than five years of supposed economic “recovery,” labor participation rates remain at historic lows, wages are only now beginning to increase slowly, and unemployment rates among African Americans and in a number of low-income communities remain well into double digits.
Citing the push in Congress to get the Keystone XL pipeline built, which some estimates say would produce about 36,000 jobs during its construction, Baker said, “if the Fed raises interest rates we’re talking about kicking millions of people out of jobs.” If instead the Fed worked to get the unemployment rate down to about 4 percent, “that’s about 4.5 million people … that’s more than 100 XL pipelines.”
The Fed Up Campaign is seeking organizations willing to sign a petition calling on the Federal Reserve to not increase interest rates while there are segments of the economy with high unemployment and stagnant wages. “Raising interest rates in 2015 would be a catastrophic mistake. The American economy needs to see significantly more wage growth, not less,” the petition says.
The full petition is posted on our website. Progressive organization leaders who want to sign the petition can do so via this link.
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Urban Outfitters heeds call to end on-call shifts
WELL, THAT was fast!
Yesterday I wrote about an "on-call" scheduling practice at Urban Outfitters that's unbelievably abusive to its lowest-wage workers. Within...
WELL, THAT was fast!
Yesterday I wrote about an "on-call" scheduling practice at Urban Outfitters that's unbelievably abusive to its lowest-wage workers. Within hours of the column hitting print, Urban announced it was killing the practice for good.
Coincidence? You decide.
Here's yesterday's statement from the Philly-based billion-dollar retailer, which also owns the brands Anthropologie, Free People, Terrain and Bhldn.
"We are always looking for ways to improve, and as such we have decided to end on-call scheduling for all [Urban] brand associates throughout North America. We look forward to continuing to find ways to better fulfill our mission of providing fashion and lifestyle essentials to our dedicated customers."
This is amazing news for employees at Urban's 518 North American stores.
For years, they'd been receiving their work schedules only a few days in advance, with some shifts designated as "on call." But they wouldn't be told, until three hours before the shift was to begin, whether they'd actually be needed to work. If they weren't, they wouldn't be paid, even though they'd been required to hold that time for the company.
The unpredictability had wreaked havoc on workers, who are mostly young and female.
They were unable to schedule classes if they were in school. Or to schedule hours at a second job if they needed a full-time income. Or to reliably arrange day care or pay their bills, since their cost to do both was fixed even though their working hours weren't.
What a crappy way to treat members of the demographic that Urban targets so heavily.
"It's pretty messed up," one worker, a college student, told me. She was paying her way through school, but Urban's scheduling meant she couldn't schedule other work to help pay tuition. "It's hard to plan."
Readers reacted with disgust to the column.
"Retail needs to be called on the carpet!" wrote emailer rgrassia. "We need more people with the ability to do something to pressure these companies to change the ways they conduct themselves."
Reader Madeleine Pierucci excoriated Urban for "co-opting the '60s struggles and playing it to the detriment of its 2015 workers. Not cool." She also planned to picket Urban's Center City store next week.
And a furious churchgoer named Samantha C. vowed to spread the word throughout the National Baptist Convention to have its 100,000 church members boycott Urban's stores in protest.
"It's time for slavery to stop," she declared.
Urban's change of heart is a testament to the power of the press, says Carrie Gleason. She's director of the fair-workweek initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy and has been working for a very long time to get employers to end on-call staffing.
"The media has helped shift the public opinion in terms of what is acceptable around employers' expectations of their employees' time," she told me. "I think Urban's announcement is a direct response to the fact that the public is now holding the whole retail industry to higher standards."
I'd like to take credit for Urban's reversal, but the truth is, another media outlet has been hammering at on-call scheduling by retailers - and not just Urban - for a while now.
The online news site BuzzFeed has chronicled the issue so doggedly that the New York state attorney general in April called companies on the carpet for the practice, following his investigation into the legality of on-call staffing at 13 retailers whose New York stores employ thousands of low-wage workers.
As a result, huge chains like Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body Works, Abercrombie and Gap announced plans to discontinue the practice not just in New York but nationally, improving hundreds of thousands of workers' lives.
Urban, though, had said it would discontinue the practice only in New York. Everywhere else, it would be exploitation as usual.
It turned my stomach that Philly-based Urban - a company that so many of us grew up with and feel affinity for - would treat its workers so shabbily. And I said as much in my column, which we - ahem - pushed on the Daily News front page and on Philly.com.
If that helped nudge Urban into doing the decent thing, then yesterday was a good day.
Not just for Urban's workers. But for Urban's shareholders:
As news hit that Urban would end its on-call scheduling, CNBC reported, the company's stock rallied 4.68 percent.
You're welcome, Urban.
And thank you.
Source: Philly.com
Rally calling for immigration reform include scores of undocumented immigrants
Penn Live – August 5, 2013, by Ivy DeJesus - Close to 100 protesters rallied on Monday within ear shot of a political event in Harrisburg headlined by House Speaker John Boehner and...
Penn Live – August 5, 2013, by Ivy DeJesus - Close to 100 protesters rallied on Monday within ear shot of a political event in Harrisburg headlined by House Speaker John Boehner and Rep. Scott Perry (PA-4) to demand immigration reform.
Chanting in English and Spanish, protesters made their way from the City Island parking lot up to the path leading to Metro Bank Park where the Republican lawmakers held a fundraiser.
Protesters carried placards and shouted in unison a string of chants, including: “Serve the needy, not the greedy,” and “Move Boehner, get out of the way. You’re not welcome in Pa.”
The rally was organized by a coalition of advocacy groups, among them Keystone Progress, Pennsylvanians United for Immigration Reform, Center for Popular Democracy and Central PA Area Labor Federation. The majority of participants drove in from other parts of the state or were bused in.
As House members return to their districts for August recess, representatives of the coalition said they intended to take their messages to lawmakers’ local offices.
Perry’s 4th congressional district encompasses York County and parts of Dauphin County.
Hiro Nishikawa, one of the protesters, said that the long-simmering debate is finally getting widespread public attention.
Nishikawa said immigration policy continues to be dictated by outdated laws, including the 1996 law that mandates detention and apprehension of undocumented immigrants who have any prior police records. The law has led to approximately 400,000 undocumented immigrants being detained under the Obama Administration.
“People recognize things are messed up,” Nishikawa said. “The huge concern is the fairness of the law. It needs to be changed.”
Amid widespread calls for an immigration policy overhaul, a deeply divided Congress has been unable to advance any comprehensive reform. President Obama has used his executive power to push some laws that provide pathways to citizenship, including an amnesty program for qualified young people. In spite of a bipartisan Senate bill approved in June, Washington insiders are largely in agreement that the House is not likely to agree on a major bill this year.“We are entrenched in the culture that is America..we are part of the people that are here.” – Jorge Salazar
Rally participants represented a diverse group of people, including church and labor groups, immigrants from a number of countries, and even undocumented immigrants.
Carmen Guerrero, a community organizer from outside Philadelphia, said lawmakers have not given the immigration issue the urgency it deserves.
“The law is broken,” Guerrero said in Spanish. She came from Mexico 13 years ago. “This is a country of immigrants. It’s a country where immigration has to keep moving forward with its law. It’s been too long without reform. It has been reformed but only to attack the immigrant community, to suppress the community.”
Guerrero said that U.S. immigration policy is so cumbersome, many immigrants prefer to sidestep the system and enter the country illegally. She said most countries face daunting obstacles for legal entry, including excessively long waiting periods.
“The opportunity to come here legally is too small,” she said. “At the end of the day, we rather break the law. There is no realization to be able to come legally and be part of society, as we should.”
Guerrero, a single mother of three who has worked two full-time jobs back to back as a hotel housekeeper and restaurant dishwasher, says she pays taxes and is in no way taking jobs away from citizens.
“We are the landscapers, the service, the dishwashsers at the restaurants and hotels,” she said. “I don’t think a professional would want those jobs.” -Jorge Salazar
Another undocumented immigrant, Jorge Salazar acknowledged that it would be difficult to process 11 million undocumented immigrants through the immigration system, but that in the end, it would not burden taxpayers.
“It’s not going to be costly,” he said. “We are going to pay for it. Immigration is one of the few government programs funded by the applicants.”
Salazar’s family arrived from Bolivia 23 years ago, but due to a series of legal mistakes, his family found itself staying put once their visa expired.
Salazar said he considers himself a part of the American society; he said he works and goes to school and is an active member of his community. He traveled to Harrisburg from his Philadelphia suburb home.
He said he and his family were concerned that they were risking deportation by being vocally and actively involved in calling for immigration reform.
“The reality is we have to do this,” he said. “People need to know that we are your neighbors, we are next to you in school, we are next to you in church. All my friends are American citizens. We are entrenched in the culture that is America..we are part of the people that are here.”
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Why the Federal Reserve is due for a radical reinvention
Why the Federal Reserve is due for a radical reinvention
The Federal Reserve is a hot topic in the news these days. Usually, the stories revolve around the merits of its decisions: Was quantitative easing a good idea? Should it raise interest rates...
The Federal Reserve is a hot topic in the news these days. Usually, the stories revolve around the merits of its decisions: Was quantitative easing a good idea? Should it raise interest rates again in April? But Andrew Levin, a Dartmouth economist and former aide to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, thinks our questions need to go much deeper.
On Monday, Levin and the activist campaign Fed Up proposed four major reforms that would radically alter the structure of the Federal Reserve. The reason they cite is compellingly simple: How the Fed works is basically out of whack with what it does today.
The Federal Reserve began around a century ago as a decentralized and private institution aimed at avoiding financial panics and making sure the interactions between the nation's for-profit banks remained stable. Since then, it's basically become a kind of government agency, with a fundamental role in shaping the American economy and the supply of wages and jobs for everyday workers. But the design and governance of the Fed has not kept up with that shift in responsibilities.
To understand why, let's start at the very beginning. Western economies began creating central banks several centuries ago as modern capitalism was first coming into focus, to serve as a "lender of last resort." Private banks could go and borrow from the central bank when times were tight — even if was just for a few days — and that would quell potential financial panics and bank runs. As a result, central banks were generally created by government charters, but as private corporations whose shares were owned by the banks that borrowed from them. "When the Bank of England and some other major central banks were founded, they were viewed as mostly providing services to commercial banks," as Levin explained to The Week.
America's Federal Reserve was created in 1913 under very similar circumstances. A potential financial crisis in 1907 was averted only when J.P. Morgan stepped in to backstop the country's private banks with his own personal fortune. No one wanted a repeat of that, so the Fed was created. It's actually a system of 12 regions, each overseen by a Fed branch bank — there's one in Dallas, in Richmond, in New York City, and so forth — with the private banks owning the shares of whatever Fed bank oversees their region.
More importantly, each regional Fed bank is run by a board of nine directors, six of whom are appointed by the private banking industry. The other three are appointed by the Federal Reserve system's national Board of Governors — a seven-member group appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the Senate. Together, the directors appoint a president to run their particular regional bank, rather like a CEO and a corporate board: They set the president's salary, review his or her performance, etc. All nine used to do that, but Dodd-Frank reformed the system in 2010 so that three of the six governors appointed by the private banks no longer play a role in selecting the president.
Over the course of the 20th Century, various developments like the end of the gold standard and the creation of federal deposit insurance diluted the importance of the regional banks as lenders of last resort. At the same time, however, the regional banks found themselves owning large amounts of financial instruments as a result of serving that role. So they created a joint national group to manage all those holdings called the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), and over time it grew in importance. Its decisions are determined by 12 votes: the seven members of the Board of Governors, plus five of the 12 regional presidents. (The 12 presidents rotate through the voting positions, while the other seven sit in on the FOMC but don't vote.)
Today, when we talk about the Fed setting interest rates or meeting to decide monetary policy — which in turn decides the rate of wage growth and the supply of jobs throughout the entire national economy — we're talking about the FOMC. "For all practical purposes, the Federal Reserve today is a public enterprise," Levin said. "It's serving the public. It's making nationally critical decisions."
The problem is the Federal Reserve system was originally conceived of and designed as an add-on to the private banking industry, and that design has remained even as the nature and responsibilities of the Fed have change enormously: "This whole rationale that made perfect sense in 1913 doesn't make sense anymore," Levin said. The result is an institution that, while of enormous import to the public good, is incredibly complex, opaque, and governed with comparatively little input from everyday Americans.
"The Fed, in order to be effective, has to have the confidence of the public," Levin said. But allowing the banks to hold such enormous sway over the decision-making of the institution tasked with both setting national interest rates and regulating the financial system undermines that confidence. Economist Dean Baker analogized it to "reserving seats on the Federal Communications Commission’s board for the cable television industry." Levin himself likened it to allowing criminal attorneys or defense lawyers to select the director of the FBI and set his or her salary and performance review.
So Levin has put forward four major reforms. They're broad, and the details for how they could play out are negotiable, but they're aimed at starting a conversation around the topic.
One is to eliminate private ownership of shares in the Federal Reserve system and make it fully public, but more importantly to completely reform how the nine directors of each regional bank are appointed. This could involve reducing the number of directors, but mostly it would involve selecting them all via the same process, one that brings in all aspects of the community — small businesses, community groups, unions, non-profits, etc. In particular, directors should not come from institutions — i.e. private banks and financial entities — that the Fed system is tasked with overseeing.
The next step would be to make the process by which the nine directors for each region select their president public and transparent. As Ady Barkan, the campaign director for Fed Up, pointed out in a press call, when all 12 regional president slots were up for replacement in February, all 12 were quietly and opaquely re-appointed — even after the Fed Up campaign pressed Fed officials to lay out a system by which the public could participate. The ones for Dallas, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia were all previously associated with Goldman Sachs. St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard once told Barkan that, "To call the reappointment process pro forma would be an understatement."
Third would be to set term limits for Fed officials. Make them long enough to insulate those officials from political pressure. But don't allow them to serve multiple terms one after the other as they can now.
And finally, apply the same transparency standards to the Fed that are applied to other government agencies: Allow the Government Accountability Office to publish an annual review of all the Fed's operations and policies, and make sure both the Fed's Inspector General and the Freedom of Information Act apply to the 12 regional banks as well as the national Board of Governors.
"What I've proposed is something that seems incremental, workable, and helpful," Levin concluded. And despite arguments over whether the Fed is making the right choices in the here and now about things like interest rates, Levin's goal is much bigger: to make the Fed a healthy functioning member of our democracy long after the current economic situation — and whatever particular monetary policy stance it calls for — has passed.
"These reforms are to improve governance, accountability and transparency," Levin said. "We live in a democracy — and the government is supposed to serve the public."
By Jeff Spross
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There’s officially a Medicare for All caucus in Congress
There’s officially a Medicare for All caucus in Congress
House Democrats formally announced the formation of the Medicare for All caucus on Thursday, and were joined by representatives from various progressive groups — like National Nurses United,...
House Democrats formally announced the formation of the Medicare for All caucus on Thursday, and were joined by representatives from various progressive groups — like National Nurses United, Social Security Works, and Center for Popular Democracy — who helped save Obamacare last summer and now demand more than the status quo. So far 66 members, or one-third of House Democrats, have joined the caucus led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (WA), Debbie Dingell (MI), and Keith Ellison (MN).
Read the full article here.
We, The People, Defeated Republican Attempts To Repeal The Affordable Care Act
We, The People, Defeated Republican Attempts To Repeal The Affordable Care Act
After months of grandstanding and cloak-and-dagger meetings by Republican leaders, we dealt a final blow to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Who are we? We are the thousands of people who...
After months of grandstanding and cloak-and-dagger meetings by Republican leaders, we dealt a final blow to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Who are we? We are the thousands of people who attended town hall meetings around the country to confront our elected officials, marched on the streets, and occupied the offices of our senators until we got arrested.
Early Friday morning, dozens of us who have been active in the fight against the ACA repeal stood outside the Capitol, bleary-eyed from exhaustion and tears and holding on to each other for moral support. We were stunned and elated when the ‘skinny’ repeal vote failed.
Read the full article here.
“Shamelessness Is All The Rage”
“Shamelessness Is All The Rage”
Trump’s own lawyer compares him to a mob boss, McConnell helps open the door for Trump to fire Mueller, Beto O’Rourke closes in on Ted Cruz, and Mike Pompeo meets Kim Jong Un. Then activist Ady...
Trump’s own lawyer compares him to a mob boss, McConnell helps open the door for Trump to fire Mueller, Beto O’Rourke closes in on Ted Cruz, and Mike Pompeo meets Kim Jong Un. Then activist Ady Barkan joins Jon and Dan to talk about the special election in Arizona and his new project, beaherofund.com.
Listen to the conversation here.
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