In $15's Wake, Fair Scheduling Gains Momentum
Worker movements have had tremendous success in blue cities and states in securing higher minimum wages and access to paid sick leave. Now those wins are blazing a trail for another critical...
Worker movements have had tremendous success in blue cities and states in securing higher minimum wages and access to paid sick leave. Now those wins are blazing a trail for another critical policy for low-wage workers: the right to a fair workweek. After enacting a $15 minimum wage and paid sick leave in recent years, two cities are now leading the way on granting workers the right to a sane and predictable schedule.
Last week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his support for legislation currently pending in the city council that would give Gotham’s fast-food workers the right to more predictable work hours. On Monday, the Seattle City Council passed a comprehensive fair workweek law that advocates hope can serve as a model for other cities.
These policy developments come at a time when many workers say that service-sector employers’ scheduling practices make it impossible for them to live their lives. On-call scheduling—in which workers can be told to report to work with little advance notice—make it hard for employees to schedule parenting, school, doctor visits, and much else. Scheduling software aimed solely at efficiency can lengthen or eliminate their shifts at the last minute. On top of that, the prevalent practice of “clopening”—where a worker has a closing shift followed just a few hours later by an opening shift—often leaves workers with little time to rest. Meanwhile, workers are on the hook for the costs of uncertainty, like a last-minute taxi ride to work or unexpected child-care costs.
In one nationwide survey, four out of five early-career adult workers said that their weekly hours fluctuated by an average of 87 percent compared with their usual hours; 45 percent of hourly workers who are parents said they have no input on their schedules.
Fair-scheduling advocates say it's time for employees to have more say in scheduling practices—and for employers to finally pay their workers for the costs that their flexible schedule imposes on employees (like those taxi rides and child care). They are also demanding that companies stop hiring more and more workers to maximize flexibility while cutting hours for existing workers.
In 2014, San Francisco became the first jurisdiction in the country to mandate fair-scheduling practices with its unprecedented “Retail Workers Bill of Rights.”
In 2014, San Francisco became the first jurisdiction in the country to mandate fair-scheduling practices with its unprecedented “Retail Workers Bill of Rights.” The new Seattle law will build on that by requiring that employers give workers two weeks advance notice on shift schedules—any changes made to schedules after that requires additional compensation for the worker, including half-time pay for any hours an employer cuts or cancels. Workers will have the right to request flexible scheduling without fear of retaliation.
Workers will also have protections against “clopening.” The proposed law would be the first in the country to require an employee’s consent for shifts that allow less than ten hours of rest, and to mandate that “clopening” workers get paid time and a half. Additionally, employers would be required to offer available hours to part-time workers before hiring additional workers. Companies that have been found to consistently under-schedule workers and make last-minute shift changes would be subject to fines.
“These are critical steps forward. If you don’t get that many hours, earning $15 only goes so far.”
On the opposite coast, the New York City legislation focuses on the 65,000 workers in the city’s fast-food industry. As such, it follows the pattern set by Fight for 15 organizers, who first convinced Governor Andrew Cuomo to convene a wage board for fast food last year, later to be followed by a general increase in the state minimum wage. “We are in a battle to restore dignity and decent living to retail and service workers in industries where that really has been badly eroded in recent years,” New York City Councilmember Brad Lander told the Prospect in an interview. “These are critical steps forward. If you don’t get that many hours, earning $15 only goes so far.”
As in the Seattle legislation, New York fast-food employers would be required to give workers two weeks advance notice on expected shifts, mandate additional compensation for last-minute changes to a worker’s schedule, and provide protections for workers who are “clopening.” However, as of now, the proposed policy gives employers a week of wiggle room after setting the schedule to make changes before locking it in.
The policy initiative is in the beginning stages, Lander stresses, and the city council may push for any number of changes, including broadening the law to include the entire service industry. As of now, the policy is aimed at the same group of fast-food employers that Cuomo’s wage board dealt with—chains with 30 or more locations nationwide. It’s those bigger chains that already utilize sophisticated scheduling software to minimize labor costs. They can use that same software, Lander says, to ensure that workers have a predictable and secure workweek.
To date, fair-scheduling laws have lagged behind wage hikes and paid sick-day ordinances in city halls and statehouses.
To date, fair-scheduling laws have lagged behind wage hikes and paid sick-day ordinances in city halls and statehouses. At the federal level, in 2014, Representative Rosa DeLauro and Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the Schedules that Work Act, which protects hourly workers from scheduling abuses—though with Republican control of Congress, the bill hasn’t gone anywhere.
But fair workweek policies now appear primed to become the next front in the low-wage worker movement.
But fair workweek policies now appear primed to become the next front in the low-wage worker movement. In response to pressure from SEIU’s Local 32BJ, a powerful force along the Eastern seaboard, policy-makers in Connecticut, Washington, D.C., and Jersey City may soon pass new rules that mandate 30-hour workweeks for service workers, like security guards and janitors, in large commercial and residential buildings. In November, voters in San Jose will decide on a ballot measure that would require companies with 35 or more workers to offer additional hours to part-timers before taking on new employees.
Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis are also considering fair-scheduling measures for retail and fast-food chains, though both efforts have run into heavy resistance from the business lobby. Workers and organizers are also pushing for a fair-scheduling law in Emeryville, a small city between Berkeley and Oakland that is a major retail-shopping destination for the east Bay Area.
“The momentum with the Fight for 15 has opened up this new space where policy-makers are starting to listen to the real needs that the country’s workforce has been talking about for a long time,” says Carrie Gleason, director of the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fair Workweek Initiative, which is assisting with local fair-scheduling efforts. “This isn’t a new issue,” Gleason adds. But “the accelerated pace in which these types of work-hour policies have taken off is a demonstration of the moment we’re in.”
By Justin Miller
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Risking Public Money: Illinois Charter School Fraud
Best Practices to Protect Public Dollars & Prevent Financial Mismanagement
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Executive Summary
In 2010, fourteen years after Illinois passed its charter school law, the U.S. Department of Education raised a red flag about the state’s oversight of fiscal controls at its charter schools, finding that the state “has no system in place for monitoring [charter schools].” Four years later, this problem continues. To date, $13.1 million in fraud by charter school officials has been uncovered in Illinois. Because of the lack of transparency and necessary oversight, total fraud is estimated at $27.7 million in 2014 alone. Our research uncovered three fundamental flaws with the state’s oversight of charter schools:
Oversight depends heavily on self-reporting by charter schools, or by whistleblowers. Illinois oversight agencies rely almost entirely on complaints from whistleblowers and audits paid for by charter operators. Both methods are important to uncover fraud; however, neither is a systematic approach to fraud detection, nor are they effective in fraud prevention. General auditing techniques alone do not uncover fraud. The audits commissioned by the charters and provided to Illinois oversight agencies use general auditing techniques, not those specifically designed to uncover fraud. The current processes may expose inaccuracies or inefficiencies; however, without audits targeted at uncovering financial fraud, state and local agencies will rarely be able to detect fraud without a whistleblower. Adequate staffing is necessary to detect and eliminate fraud. We found evidence that the government agencies tasked with investigating fraud are severely understaffed, which is prohibitive to conducting high quality, time-intensive audits of any type.We propose the following targeted reforms of the existing oversight structure to remedy these flaws:Mandate Audits Designed to Detect and Prevent Fraud
Charter schools should institute an internal fraud risk management program, including an annual fraud risk assessment and audits that specifically investigate high-risk areas; Charter schools should commission audits of internal controls over financial reporting that are integrated with an audit of financial statements; Existing oversight bodies should perform targeted fraud audits focused on areas of risk or weakness through the annual fraud risk assessments; and Auditing teams should include members certified in Financial Forensics trained to detect fraud.Increase Transparency & Accountability
All annual audits and fraud risk assessments should be posted on the websites of charter school authorizers, typically the local school system; Charter authorizers should create a system to categorize and rank charter audits by fraud risk levels to facilitate transparency and public engagement; Charter schools should voluntarily make the findings of their internal assessments public; Charter school authorizers should perform comprehensive reviews once every three years; The Attorney General’s office should conduct a review of all charter schools in Illinois to identify inadequate school oversight by boards of directors or executives and publicize the findings; and The state should impose a moratorium on new charter schools until the state oversight system is adequately reformed.Despite the possibility of almost $30 million lost to fraud in the last year alone, charter schools continue to experience unprecedented growth. Since 2003, charter school enrollment in Illinois has grown by 680 percent. Illinois students, their families, and taxpayers cannot afford to lose a dollar more in public funds as a result of fraud, misspending, or misdirection within the charter school system. The reforms proposed herein require a smart investment and a commitment to the future of Illinois’ youth and all its communities.
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Nan Goldin, Activists Bring Sackler Protest to Harvard Art Museums
Nan Goldin, Activists Bring Sackler Protest to Harvard Art Museums
“Protestors threw pill bottles on the floor of the atrium, handed out pamphlets, and held banners and posters with phrases like “MEDICAL STUDENTS AGAINST THE SACKLERS,” and “HARM REDUCTION NOW/...
“Protestors threw pill bottles on the floor of the atrium, handed out pamphlets, and held banners and posters with phrases like “MEDICAL STUDENTS AGAINST THE SACKLERS,” and “HARM REDUCTION NOW/TREATMENT NOW.” A number of speakers gave speeches about the Sacklers and the opioid crisis in the atrium, including Jennifer Flynn Walker of the Center for Popular Democracy and Goldin, who began organizing against Purdue and the Sacklers, who are major donors to cultural institutions throughout the United States and Europe, following treatment for opioid addiction last year. She said she became addicted after being prescribed OxyContin in 2014 following wrist surgery.
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Is 'Audit the Fed' going mainstream?
Auditing the Federal Reserve, a financial reform long pushed by the libertarian right, just got a boost this week from an unexpected quarter: A respected Dartmouth economist who issued a new...
Auditing the Federal Reserve, a financial reform long pushed by the libertarian right, just got a boost this week from an unexpected quarter: A respected Dartmouth economist who issued a new proposal to impose transparency and oversight on the nation’s powerful central bank.
Though largely dismissed by mainstream economists, “Audit the Fed” has become an applause line for central banking skeptics like Sen. Rand Paul, who believe the Federal Reserve wields too much power too secretly. In recent years the idea has spread from right-wing politicians to the conservative mainstream, and even critics on the left: A Senate vote on Paul’s “Audit the Fed” legislation in January garnered 53 votes. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) voted for that bill and has pushed for increased transparency at the Fed to the delight of campaign crowds suspicious that the central bank is rigged in favor of Wall Street.
This week, the Fed Up campaign, a 30-month-old group of labor and community organizations pushing for more openness at the Fed, released its own platform for reforming the Fed’s governance structure, including a new idea for an audit—or "annual review"—that could give the idea more mainstream credibility.
The author is Andrew Levin, an economist now at Dartmouth College who has decades of experience at the Fed and a reputation as a thoughtful observer of the institution. While most financial insiders have long dismissed “Audit the Fed” as an unserious political slogan from people unversed in economics, Levin’s proposal has provoked a more serious reckoning with Fed transparency. And increasingly, economists are coming to the same conclusion: More sunlight might do the central bank some good.
“The Fed is overly sensitive about reviewing its policies,” said Joseph Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who has worked at the Fed off-and-on for the past 30 years.
At issue is whether decisions made by the top officials of the Fed should be open to review by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Technically speaking, the Fed is already audited – it’s subject to the same GAO scrutiny of its operations as any other federal agency. But its most influential decisions, deliberations on monetary policy that attract global attention and can move stock markets dramatically, are conducted in secret by a dozen top Fed officials. Seven of them, known as Fed governors and based in Washington, are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The remaining five spots are reserved for the presidents of the 12 regional Fed banks on a rotating basis. Collectively known as the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the group generally meets eight times a year, with minutes released three weeks afterwards. Transcripts of those meetings are released on a five-year lag, effectively sealing its deliberations in the short-term.
Because banks ultimately own the regional Fed banks, and have a say in nominating many of their directors, critics say this structure leaves the door open for favoritism to Wall Street, and needs outside scrutiny to ensure it properly balances its dual mandate of stable inflation and full employment. Supporters say the Fed's relative independence is a virtue, and worry its monetary decisions would be worse in the long run if its officials constantly felt Congress breathing down their necks.
The more traditional right-wing “Audit the Fed” legislation would call for a GAO audit of the Fed within 12 months of passage, and thereafter enable any lawmaker or congressional committee to request an audit of the central bank, including the FOMC’s monetary policy decisions, whenever they wanted.
In his new plan, Levin proposes something slightly different: it would require the GAO to conduct a review of all aspects of the Fed, including monetary policy, but make the review annual and determined by GAO staff rather than Congress. “[Paul’s legislation] just seemed like a way to threaten the Fed,” said Levin.
His proposal would also call for seven-year term limits for Fed officials and reform the process that the regional Fed bank presidents are selected. Though he recoiled against terming the GAO review an “audit,” his proposal would give the GAO new powers to examine different aspects of the Fed, as it does with other agencies in the federal government. Instead of called by Congress, it would be annual and determined by agency staff. “From one year to the next, it might focus on some aspects of the Fed's operations. One year, maybe it would focus on monetary policy strategy and communications,” Levin said. “Another year, maybe it wouldn't spend much time on that.” The results would be publicly available.
Narayana Kocherlakota, the former president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, expressed support for the idea of regularly scheduled GAO audits of the Fed’s monetary policy. He didn't take a position on earlier audit proposals, but echoed Levin’s concern that allowing lawmakers to request a GAO audit “would be very bad and would lead us down a bad path where essentially Congress was running monetary policy.”
The Federal Reserve declined to comment on Levin’s plan. But Fed Chair Janet Yellen and other Fed officials have aggressively attacked prior proposals to increase oversight over the FOMC’s deliberations. In January, before the Senate voted on Paul’s legislation, Yellen sent a letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Harry Reid opposing the bill. “These reviews could only serve to create public doubt about the conduct and independence of monetary policy,” she wrote.
“All of that criticism does apply to my proposal,” Levin said after reading those lines from Yellen’s letter. But he argued that such oversight is necessary in a democracy. He added, “After all, the Congress is the Fed’s boss.”
Levin enters this debate with considerable experience. He spent two decades as an economist for the Fed and then was a special adviser to then-Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Vice Chair Yellen from 2010 to 2012. He also advised many other central banks, including the European Central Bank, the Bank of Canada and the Bank of Japan. Those policy bona fides mean he’s being taken seriously even by people who have dismissed previous “Audit the Fed” proposals.
“Levin knows a lot about the internal workings [of the Fed] that I don’t,” said Jared Bernstein, the former top economist to Vice President Joe Biden and a frequent critic of “Audit the Fed” proposals. “He’s not coming at this from the perspective of some radical protester.”
The underlying question is whether an annual review by GAO—not one triggered by individual lawmakers or committees—will cause the Fed to be influenced by politics in its monetary policy decisions. To some extent, that already happens. The Fed, like every institution, faces criticism from an array of politicians, outside economists, and pundits. “Independence is not as black and white as many people make it seem,” said Kocherlakota.
Finding the right balance between giving the Fed room to make independent policy and holding it accountable is a constant challenge—one that extends beyond “Audit the Fed" proposals. Sanders, for instance, has proposed that FOMC transcripts be released within six months, instead of the current five years.
Few serious Fed watchers, however, have spent much time developing detailed ideas for increased Fed transparency. “I felt like there was a vacuum in the discourse,” Levin explained.
Levin’s reforms are unlikely to become law anytime soon: Lobbying efforts around such a change would be fierce, and groups like the Fed Up campaign are likely to be heavily out-spent by Wall Street banks skeptical of changes intended to reduce their influence over Fed decisions. The Federal Reserve would likely oppose the reforms as well.
By DANNY VINIK
Source
NY furioso con plan tributario aprobado por el Senado
Las principales autoridades y activistas de Nueva York rechazaron este sábado el plan tributario aprobado en la madrugada por el Senado federal que deberá ser armonizado con el de la Cámara Baja...
Las principales autoridades y activistas de Nueva York rechazaron este sábado el plan tributario aprobado en la madrugada por el Senado federal que deberá ser armonizado con el de la Cámara Baja antes de llegar al despacho del presidente Donald Trump.
“Los republicanos han votado por un plan que ni siquiera tuvieron tiempo de leer. Una vez más probaron que les importan más sus donantes de campaña que las familias trabajadoras”, indicó el alcalde Bill de Blasio en un comunicado tras agregar que esta votación significa un incremento de impuestos para 87 millones de familias.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
In New York, a Bill to Grant Undocumented Immigrants State Citizenship
Bloomberg Businessweek - June 16, 2014, by Josh Eidelson - While Congress drags its feet on immigration reform, New York State lawmakers are mulling an immigration bill of their own: It would...
Bloomberg Businessweek - June 16, 2014, by Josh Eidelson - While Congress drags its feet on immigration reform, New York State lawmakers are mulling an immigration bill of their own: It would grant state citizenship to some noncitizen immigrants, including undocumented residents, allowing them to vote and run for office. Under the New York Is Home Act, noncitizen residents who have proof of identity and have lived and paid taxes in the state for three years could apply for legal status that would let some qualify for Medicaid coverage, professional licensing, tuition assistance, and driver’s licenses, as well as state and local—but not federal—voting rights. The responsibilities of citizenship would also apply, including jury duty.
“It’s mind-boggling,” says Michael Olivas, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center who specializes in immigration law. “I don’t believe there’s ever been a serious attempt to codify so many benefits and opportunities.”
Democratic State Senator Gustavo Rivera, who’s sponsoring the legislation, sees it as a precedent. “We have a bill here that could be a model of what we need to do across the country,” he says. Rivera acknowledges the bill “certainly will not pass this session,” comparing it to same-sex marriage, a cause which took years to travel from fringe to mainstream. But he expressed hope that the primary defeat of Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, widely construed as a final nail in the coffin of near-term federal immigration reform, would create interest in state-level reforms like his. Democratic Assemblyman Karim Camara is introducing the same bill on the other side of the Capitol. Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
If it did pass and Cuomo signed it—again, not at all likely—the new law would certainly be challenged in court. Olivas says some aspects of the bill are on safe ground (in-state tuition for undocumented students has become widespread), while others involve “unsettled or untested” areas of the law. Olivas says that by “appropriating the term ‘citizen,’” a word he says “is really truly a federal term,” the bill’s authors have made it more vulnerable to legal challenge.
The state law wouldn’t trump federal immigration statutes, so undocumented workers in New York would still be denied some important benefits of citizenship. One big example: They’d be subject to federal laws barring them from legally working in the U.S.
Supporters insist the bill, unlike Arizona’s largely overturned SB 1070, is well within the law. “The problem with the Arizona law and the copycat laws around the country is that they were intruding upon the unique province of the federal government to determine who gets to enter the United States and who gets deported,” says Peter Markowitz, a professor at New York’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He says the bill, which he helped draft, is instead “exercising a firmly established, constitutionally enshrined authority of the state to determine the boundaries of its own political community” and is consistent with Supreme Court precedents that recognize “state citizenship” as well as “federal citizenship.”
“The very nature of our dual-sovereign federal structure,” says Markowitz, “means that New York gets to decide who are New Yorkers.”
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Seattle’s Lessons for Bernie Sanders Activists After the Elections
Seattle’s Lessons for Bernie Sanders Activists After the Elections
According to Licata, progressives must develop the ability to “see the small things that generate the big things,” linking voter concerns about global threats like climate change to concrete and...
According to Licata, progressives must develop the ability to “see the small things that generate the big things,” linking voter concerns about global threats like climate change to concrete and achievable steps that city government can take to address local manifestations of the larger problem.
As the 2016 primary season draws to an end and Bernie Sanders backers look beyond next month’s Democratic convention in Philadelphia, many who have “felt the Bern” have their eye on local politics.
Hundreds, if not thousands, will be heeding the call of Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, a Sanders’ endorser and convention delegate. “We need people running for school boards,” Ellison told the New York Times in May. “We need people running for City Council. We need people running for state legislatures. We need people running for zoning boards, for park boards, to really take this sort of message that Bernie carried and carry it in their own local communities.”
Fortunately for those seeking relevant political advice, former Seattle City Councilor Nick Licata has just published a handbook called Becoming A Citizen Activist: Stories, Strategies, & Advice For Changing Our World (Sasquatch Books, 2016). His book draws on 17 years of experience as a progressive elected official and varied campus and community organizing work before that.
Like Sanders, Licata was a sixties radical. He belonged to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Bowling Green State University and first learned retail politics at the dormitory level when he ran successfully for student government president.
Like some Sanders supporters who may become candidates in the near future, Licata had an unconventional resume when he first sought public office. He had lived in a well-known Seattle commune for 20 years and founded two alternative publishing ventures, the People’s Yellow Pages and the Seattle Sun. A Democrat with Green Party sympathies, he defeated a candidate who was backed by the mainstream media and out-spent him two to one.
“In the previous 128 city council elections, only two candidates had won when both daily newspapers endorsed their opponent,” Licata reports, so “the odds didn’t look good.” Fortunately, his message that the city should invest more resources “in all neighborhoods and not concentrate them in just a few” resonated with an electoral coalition of “young renters” and “older home-owners.” Licata’s own track record of neighborhood activism gave him the necessary name recognition and grassroots street cred to win.
Becoming A Citizen Activist is full of useful tips about how activists and allied politicians can collaborate on issue-oriented campaigns. His book makes clear that “going local” is different from backing a presidential campaign focused on national and international questions. According to Licata, progressives must develop the ability to “see the small things that generate the big things,” linking voter concerns about global threats like climate change to concrete and achievable steps that city government can take to address local manifestations of the larger problem.
He describes how Seattle’s four years of skirmishing over plastic bag regulation originated in one neighborhood’s opposition to a new waste transfer station. What might have been just another exercise in NIMBYism evolved into a city-wide push for waste reduction at its source, plus much greater recycling. A plastic bag fee, imposed by the city council, was overturned after a plastic bag industry-funded referendum campaign, but the city’s ban on Styrofoam containers survived. In 2011, the city council passed a broad ban on single-use plastic bags, which the industry opted not to challenge either in court or at the polls.
Licata’s other examples of progressive policy initiatives include raising local labor standards, strengthening civilian oversight of the police, providing greater protection for undocumented immigrants, decriminalizing marijuana possession and using cultural programs to foster a sense of community.
Several of his most interesting case studies reveal the tendency of legislators—even liberal-minded ones—to be overly timid and skeptical about policy initiatives that push the envelope. In 2011, for example, Licata tried to lower the expectations of constituents who met with him about a paid sick leave mandate opposed by local employers.
“I cautioned that it was not likely that we’d see it anytime soon,” he admits in the book. Yet, less than nine months later, he was “shown to be wrong.” Not only was there sufficient public support, but “well-organized advocacy groups” marshaled “a wealth of data to prove that the sky wouldn’t fall if paid sick leave passed.”
Several years later, when some Seattle fast food workers staged union-backed job actions to highlight their minimum wage demand, it was the same story:
Politicians like me were sympathetic but also felt that fifteen dollars was way too big a lift. In my own case, I thought there were more readily achievable goals—like fighting wage theft. I found myself initially offering cautious verbal support and not much more.
What made Seattle’s “Fight for 15” winnable was grassroots organizing by local labor organizations and left-wing activists, who were able to inject the issue into the 2013 mayoral race between incumbent Mike McGinn and his challenger, state senator Ed Murray. Shortly before the election, Murray endorsed a minimum wage hike to $15 an hour while McGinn insisted that Washington state should take action instead of the city.
Key socialist presence
That year, it also made a big difference to have an energetic and charismatic socialist candidate running for city council under the “Fight for 15” banner. Kshama Sawant took on Richard Conlin, “a well-liked liberal politician” who cast the city council’s lone vote against paid sick leave and opposed raising the minimum wage without further study. According to Licata, Conlin, like McGinn, was defeated due to the votes of “many disaffected Democrats who wanted more aggressive council members willing to speak out on issues.”
Once elected, Sawant was quick to utilize what Licata calls “the unique means that public officials have to help mobilize the public”: holding public hearings, forming issue-oriented or constituency-based task forces and commissions and backing ballot measures like the threatened popular referendum on “15 Now” that kept Mayor Murray and his allies from weakening minimum wage legislation more than they did in 2014.
Yet when Sawant—a generation younger than Licata—first ran against his longtime colleague, Richard Conlin, the council’s most left-leaning member didn’t support her. In Becoming a Citizen Activist, Licata now acknowledges Sawant’s unusual strengths as a radical politician, including her social media savvy, “dedicated following” and ability to project “a message that resonated with the public.” Her tweets, blogging and website use “helped her obtain 80 percent citywide name recognition after a year on the council, far surpassing all the other council members,” Licata reports.
According to the author, local pollsters surveying the relative popularity of city councilors prior to Seattle’s 2015 election found that Sawant’s “numbers were higher than all the others but mine, and I beat her by only one point.” These results might explain why Mayor Murray and the Seattle business community failed to unseat their Socialist Alternative critic when she ran for re-election last year, with Licata’s backing this time. (Licata himself chose to retire from the city council.)
New Forms of Organization
Readers interested in further detail about their over-lapping council careers will have to wait for American Socialist, a political memoir by Sawant (to be published by Verso next year) or Jonathan Rosenblum’s forthcoming book for Beacon Press about labor and politics in Seattle. Rosenblum worked on Sawant’s re-election campaign which, in his view, demonstrated “the indispensability of organization” and an “independent political base.”
Unlike Licata’s own more typical electoral efforts in the past, Sawant’s “campaign strategies and tactics were not directed by a single candidate or campaign manager.” Instead, Rosenblum points out, they were “developed through collective, thoughtful discussions” among Socialist Alternative members who live in Seattle and “are connected to a broader base of union and community activists.”
One limitation of Licata’s book is the absence of any discussion about fielding slates of progressive candidates who are committed to a common platform that includes rejection of corporate contributions. To his credit, Licata did play a major role in creating the multi-city network of progressive elected officials known as Local Progress. In the Bay Area, this group includes Richmond, Calif., city councilor (and former mayor) Gayle McLaughlin, whose Richmond Progressive Alliance only runs candidates who spurn business donations.
Nationally, about 400 mayors, city councilors, county supervisors and school board members use Local Progress as a “think tank” and clearing house for alternative public policies. Assisted by the Center for Popular Democracy in New York, the group distributes a 60-page handbook for improving labor and environmental standards, housing and education programs, public safety, and municipal election practices. At annual conferences—like its national meeting in Pittsburgh on July 8-9—local victories of the sort Licata describes in his book are dissected and their lessons disseminated.
Local Progress leaders believe that neither street politics nor electoral victories alone will make a sufficient dent in the status quo. As Licata told his fellow “electeds” when they met in New York two years ago, municipal government changes for the better only when progressives have “an outside and inside game…people on the inside and people protesting on the outside to provide insiders with backbone.” Licata’s new book provides many useful examples of that necessary synergy.
By STEVE EARLY
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Democrats are back in the fight for the Arizona Eighth Congressional District: All Bets are Off.
Democrats are back in the fight for the Arizona Eighth Congressional District: All Bets are Off.
Trump won by over 20 points, the Democrat leads in fundraising as well, aided in part by Ady Barkan, a wealthy Democratic activist with the Center for Popular Democracy who was recently diagnosed...
Trump won by over 20 points, the Democrat leads in fundraising as well, aided in part by Ady Barkan, a wealthy Democratic activist with the Center for Popular Democracy who was recently diagnosed with A.L.S. (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). In speaking with Bill Roe, the First Vice Chair of the Arizona Democratic Party, he indicated that this race is unpredictable for several reasons.
Read the full article here.
Report Spotlights the New York Elites Who Fund Nativist Groups
Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is at the right end of his party's spectrum on immigration issues, but according to a new report put out by...
Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is at the right end of his party's spectrum on immigration issues, but according to a new report put out by advocates for the undocumented, titled “Backers of Hate in the Empire State,” he's hardly alone in pushing a nativist agenda in New York. The report names the names of others who help fund and organize the institutions of American nativisim.
To these advocates, the Center for Public Democracy Action and Make the Road Action Fund, the Trump campaign's restrictionist immigration policies, backed up by an emphasis on the undocumented’s supposed criminality and the need to “take our country back,” are dangerous and extreme. Early on in his campaign, Trump described Mexican immigrantsas drug dealers and “rapists," released a plan for the mass deportation of 11.3 million undocumented immigrants, and called for the abolition of birthright citizenship.
The report argues that the prominence of such discourse in our politics does not reflect public opinion, which broadly supports a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented. Rather, this rhetoric is driven by the activism of an impassioned minority, which influences immigration politics through organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). And groups like FAIR are driven by New Yorkers like Alan and Donald Weeden.
The Weedens are best known as the directors of the Weeden Foundation, an environmentalist nonprofit based in New York. On its website, the foundation calls the “protection of biodiversity” its top priority. But in the name of “population stabilization,” the foundation and its directors have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on groups that the report asserts are working to limit the ethnic diversity of the United States.
The Weeden Foundation donated $100,000 to FAIR in 2013, and Alan Weeden has served on the group’s Board of Directors, according to the report. In Washington, FAIR is treated like a legitimate lobby, and its leaders have been invited to testify before Congress on matters of immigration more than 100 times. But the Southern Poverty Law Centerclassifies FAIR as a hate group, and the Anti-Defamation League has called the group reckless and xenophobic.
FAIR was founded in 1979 by John Tanton, a retired ophthalmologist and pioneering anti-immigration activist. Tanton has well-documented ties to several white nationalist leaders, and once authored a paper titled “The Case for Passive Eugenics.” In a letter from 1993, Tanton wrote, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” While Tanton is no longer in FAIR’s leadership, he remains a celebrated figure in the organization. And FAIR’s current president, Dan Stein, appears to share much of Tanton’s basic worldview. In 1998, Stein said, “Immigrants don't come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing … Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans.” FAIR was instrumental in the passage of Arizona’s SB 1070 law, which requires police to determine the immigration status of someone arrested or detained when they have “reasonable suspicion” that the individual is not in the U.S. legally — a measure that critics argued would encourage the racial profiling of Hispanic immigrants.
Donald E. Weeden sits on the board of NumbersUSA, and his family foundation gave the group $350,000 in 2013. Founded by Tanton ally Roy Beck, NumbersUSA operates as a grassroots-driven lobby for reducing immigration to pre-1965 levels. One of NumbersUSA’s “sensible solutions” for immigration is the elimination of birthright citizenship, a fringe policy that gained mainstream visibility with Trump’s recent backing.
Former New York University professor and conservative author Carol A. Iannone sits on the Board of Directors at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Spun off from FAIR in 1985, CIS is a putatively nonpartisan think tank whose self-described mission is to provide policymakers with "reliable information about the social, economic, environmental, security, and fiscal consequences of legal and illegal immigration into the United States." The think tank’s research and statistics are often cited by members of Congress and mainstream news outlets, despite falling under perpetual criticism for their distortions. In 2014, a CIS blog post provided readers with a map titled “A Town Near You? ICE Reveals Locations of Convicted Murderers It Freed.” The map underscored the alarmism of a CIS report that claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had released 68,000 criminal aliens in 2013. Both ICE and an investigation by the Daily Beast found the report to be significantly misleading, both for the way it grouped traffic convictions with more serious crimes, and suggested that the U.S. government has the authority to indefinitely detain or deport any undocumented immigrant who is guilty of any crime. A 2001 Supreme Court ruling requires the U.S. to release undocumented immigrants who have served out their prison sentences, even if they cannot be deported because of their home country's denial of reentry.
In her own work, Iannone has echoed Tanton’s concerns with immigration’s threat to American culture, writing in The American Conservative that the 1965 Immigration Act brought about a “significant change in our national character,” as it allowed for mass immigration “to overwhelm our assimilative capacity.”
Among the other individuals singled out in the report is Barbara Winston, president of the Bruce Winston Gem Corporation and a prominent donor to the GOP, who Newsmax once put on its list of 2015’s “75 Most Influential Jewish Republicans.” Winston sits on the board of Keep Identities Safe, a group founded in the wake of September 11 to lobby for restricting access to driver's licenses, so as to prevent future terrorists from being able to board airplanes. However, the group has gone on to advocate for policies combating “ID fraud” of all kinds, including the fake IDs that allow teenagers to purchase alcohol. While much of the group’s advocacy is founded on the premise that the undocumented are more likely to commit acts of terrorism than non-U.S. citizens, Keeping Identities Safe is less intimately tied to the broader American nativist movement than the other organizations the report derides.
But the group has had a profound impact on the lives of undocumented New Yorkers. In 2007, while operating under their former name, Coalition for a Secure Driver’s License, the lobby helped defeat a bill that would have granted undocumented immigrants access to state licenses in New York. At the time, that opposition was hardly limited to hard-core nativists — current Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton came out against the measure during her last presidential campaign.
This time around, Clinton is campaigning in support of state licenses for the undocumented. Her reversal is a testament to the success that groups like Make the Road Action Fund have had in shifting the boundaries of the immigration debate within the Democratic Party.
With its new report, the group hopes to extend its influence to the other side of the aisle. The true target of the report is not the individual donors and activists it names, who are all perfectly familiar with their own associations and work. Rather, the research is aimed squarely at the New York GOP.
“We think that the Republican Party of New York should dissociate themselves, not only from the candidates that are pushing this hateful rhetoric, but also from the institutions and individuals that are supporting them,” Make the Road Action Fund co-director Javier Valdés told Daily Intelligencer.
The group will hold a protest outside of a storefront owned by Barbara Winston Tuesday afternoon, with the aim of highlighting the diamond seller’s ties to both the New York GOP and nativist causes.
For now, though, New York’s most prominent Republican continues to push the boundaries of the immigration debate ever rightward, whilesteadily advancing toward a presidential nomination.
Corrections: An earlier version of this story identified Carol Iannone as a current professor at NYU. Ms. Iannone has not been affiliated with the university since 1999. It also failed to properly credit the assertion that FAIR and CIS are organizations that seek to "limit the ethnic diversity of the United States" to the report's authors. Both organizations dispute that characterization of their work.
Source: New York Magazine
Appointment of Another Former Goldman Sachs Insider Shows Why Fed Presidential Appointment Process Needs Reform
Appointment of Another Former Goldman Sachs Insider Shows Why Fed Presidential Appointment Process Needs Reform
Jordan Haedtler, Campaign Manager for the Fed Up coalition, released the following statement following the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank’s announcement that it would appoint Neel Kashkari...
Jordan Haedtler, Campaign Manager for the Fed Up coalition, released the following statement following the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank’s announcement that it would appoint Neel Kashkari as its president:
“For the past year, the Fed Up coalition has worked to develop relationships with the presidents of all 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, and we look forward to developing a relationship with Neel Kashkari. When he ran for California Governor last year, Mr. Kashkari spent a week posing as a jobseeker in some of the hardest hit parts of the state. We hope Mr. Kashkari recognizes that job prospects remain far too weak for too many people, particularly Black and Latino people, and that his brief experiences searching for jobs in California are the real, lived experience for millions of people every day. Our partners in Minneapolis look forward to welcoming Mr. Kashkari to the Minneapolis region, and showing him the many communities in the region that are still struggling with economic recovery.
"Mr. Kashkari joins a Federal Reserve System that too often excludes the perspectives of working families and communities of color. We are very disappointed that his appointment marks the third presidential appointment this year of a regional Bank president with strong ties to Goldman Sachs. Come January, 1/3rd of the 12 regional Bank presidents will have served in senior roles at the investment bank that most epitomizes the problems that led to the financial crisis.
"Kashkari’s appointment illustrates the problem with the regional Bank president selection process. Federal Reserve Bank presidents are some of the most influential economic policymakers in the country, and they have an obligation to represent the public. Unfortunately, the public is completely shut out of the process for their selection, which is dominated by corporate and financial elites.
"We were very pleased when the Minneapolis Fed took a small and unprecedented step toward transparency by outlining the criteria for their next president. We wish the Minneapolis Fed had gone a step further, publishing the list of candidates being considered, and giving the public an opportunity for input. A history of working with labor and community groups, and an understanding of how working families and communities of color have been impacted by a sluggish economic recovery should qualify candidates for consideration. But the presidential appointments we have seen this year suggest that regional Banks are looking for a history of working at Goldman Sachs instead.”
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