Immigrants need sanctuary — and lawyers
Ali, a green card holder and father of three young daughters in Baltimore, was driving his friend home when they were pulled over by police in a routine traffic stop. Ali's friend, who was...
Ali, a green card holder and father of three young daughters in Baltimore, was driving his friend home when they were pulled over by police in a routine traffic stop. Ali's friend, who was undocumented, had a baggie of marijuana in his possession, and Ali, wanting to save his friend, took the blame. Ali believed his own immigration status would protect him even if convicted of possession. But a year later, he was threatened with deportation. He was arrested and, lacking a lawyer, detained for months, keeping him away from his family. Without a breadwinner, his wife, who was undocumented and unable to work, and children were evicted from their home.
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Who were the women who confronted Sen. Jeff Flake about Kavanaugh vote in an elevator?
Who were the women who confronted Sen. Jeff Flake about Kavanaugh vote in an elevator?
Two women who said they were survivors of sexual assault angrily confronted Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona in an elevator Friday morning over his decision to vote yes on Brett Kavanaugh’s...
Two women who said they were survivors of sexual assault angrily confronted Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona in an elevator Friday morning over his decision to vote yes on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Read the article and watch the video here.
Charter Schools Had Tough Week
Times Online - October 5, 2014, by The Times Editorial Board - It’s been a tough week for supporters of the charter school movement in Pennsylvania.
On Tuesday, PA...
Times Online - October 5, 2014, by The Times Editorial Board - It’s been a tough week for supporters of the charter school movement in Pennsylvania.
On Tuesday, PA Cyber School founder Nick Trombetta and his attorney were back in a federal courtroom trying to have evidence suppressed in his upcoming criminal trial on charges of mail fraud, theft, tax conspiracy and filing false tax returns. Trombetta is accused of siphoning off millions of taxpayer dollars for his own gain.
On Wednesday, a new report was released citing Trombetta as an example of $30 million in fraud and financial mismanagement among the state’s charter schools since 1997.
The report was done by three organizations — the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education and Action United. It follows a national report in May by the first two groups that claimed $136 million has been lost to waste, fraud and abuse by charter schools.
While the numbers are alarming, we know that all charter schools are not part of the problem. Still, it only takes a few incidents — such as the case against Trombetta — to give the entire movement a black eye.
What we will say is that state’s charter school law is badly in need of revision, particularly in the area of accountability. State legislators need to step in now and address the problems if charter schools are to remain part of the state’s education program.
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The very vocal protesters who took on the Fed are now fighting to protect it
The very vocal protesters who took on the Fed are now fighting to protect it
Liberal advocacy group Fed Up launched a campaign nearly three years ago in hopes of persuading the nation's central bank to hold off raising its benchmark interest rate.
The group...
Liberal advocacy group Fed Up launched a campaign nearly three years ago in hopes of persuading the nation's central bank to hold off raising its benchmark interest rate.
The group organized protests at the Fed's annual retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It demonstrated outside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And it recruited prestigious economists and former top central bank officials to the cause.
But now, Fed Up has a new target: Republicans who want to curtail the central bank's power.
House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, is expected to introduce legislation soon that would require the Fed to set rules for conducting monetary policy and explain any deviation from those rules. The Fed has bristled at the proposal, arguing that the proposal limits its power to revive the economy in moments of crisis.
Fed Up agrees, finding common ground between itself and the central bank it was created to criticize. The group mobilized its members at Fed Chair Janet Yellen's appearance Tuesday before the Senate Banking Committee. The group held protests ahead of her semi-annual testimony and intends to pack the hearing room with members wearing bright green shirts bearing slogans such as, "Whose Recovery?" Executive Director Shawn Sebastian said Fed Up met with several senators before the hearing to voice its concerns.
"We see the [bill] as speeding us toward another financial crash and preventing the Fed's ability to respond to another financial crash," Sebastian said.
The so-called Financial Choice Act would also roll back some of the regulatory authority handed to the Fed following the 2008 financial crisis. Sebastian said his group would be closely watching President Donald Trump's nominees to fill the three vacant seats at the central bank's board of governors in Washington. Fed Up has pushed for greater diversity among Fed appointees, both on the board and among the 12 regional central bank presidents.
The alliance could provide the Fed with its own grassroots support as it attempts to steer clear of the populist anger against economic elites that helped propel Trump into the White House. The president has promised to "do a number" on the post-financial crisis reforms known as the Dodd-Frank Act that were designed to, among other things, curtail risky behavior among banks and protect consumers from unscrupulous practices by lenders.
A draft version of Hensarling's bill includes shifting the Fed's annual bank stress tests into two-year cycles and changing the way banks calculate risk, among other things, according to a memo obtained by CNBC.
"Donald Trump and [Treasury Secretary] Steven Mnuchin, the foreclosure king, don't care about stories like mine. They only care about their billionaire friends," Philadelphia resident Tyrone Ferguson said in a prepared speech. "Now Trump and his billionaire friends want to take over the Fed, too."
Fed Up has proven adept at navigating the often esoteric world of central banking. The group has met with Yellen and Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer. It also raised pointed questions about racial diversity and ties to Wall Street during a discussion with top central bank officials at the Jackson Hole conference last year.
Sebastian compared the Fed's 14-year appointments to those of the Supreme Court. He said he will continue to press the central bank on those issues — as well as the lawmakers responsible for confirming the Fed's new governors.
"The entire world has shifted around us," Sebastian said. "But our principles have remained the same on this."
By Ylan Mui
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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.
Read the full article here.
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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Starbucks employees still face ‘clopening,’ understaffing, and irregular workweeks
Starbucks employees still face ‘clopening,’ understaffing, and irregular workweeks
Starbucks employees say their schedules aren’t nearly as sweet as those pumpkin spice lattes they’re serving up this fall.
In a new report from the ...
Starbucks employees say their schedules aren’t nearly as sweet as those pumpkin spice lattes they’re serving up this fall.
In a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy, a nonprofit that works with community groups, Starbucks workers said the coffee company has failed over the past year to make good on a promise to improve employees’ schedules. Instead, employees said they still face unpredictable workweeks, obstacles to taking sick leave, insufficient rest and staffing, and a failure to honor their availability.
“Starbucks’ frontline employees bear the brunt of the management imperative to minimize store labor costs, which takes precedence over attempts to stabilize work hours, provide healthy schedules, and to ensure employees have real input into their working conditions,” the report states.
The issues detailed in the report are familiar to anyone to many who work on “non-standard” schedules common among low wage jobs.
Starbucks first came under fire after a New York Times article from August 2014 described the struggle of a Starbucks barista and single mother, whose irregular work schedule caused turbulence in her personal relationships, other jobs and parental routine. The source of such chaos was supposedly Starbucks’s sophisticated scheduling software that cuts labor costs by arranging workers’ weeks based on sales patterns.
While this technology can boost a business’s profits, it can also leave workers working back-to-back shifts (also known as ‘clopening’), or not receiving enough hours to make ends meet. Sometimes, as the Timesarticle pointed out, employees would commute to work just to find their schedule changed.
After the public backlash, Starbucks promised to revise its policies and end the irregular scheduling practices for its roughly 130,000 baristas in the U.S.
To achieve this, Starbucks said it would post all work hours 10 days in advance, and give any baristas with more than an hour long commute the option to transfer to a more convenient location. Starbucks also said it would revise the scheduling technology and kill the clopening shift.
But much has remained unchanged, according to the 200 workers across 37 states the Center for Popular Democracy interviewed.
Nearly half of the surveyed Starbucks employees said they received their schedule one week or less in advance, and one in four workers said they still had to work clopening shifts.
Employees also reported feeling as though managers disregarded their availability, and denied them more hours when they needed additional work. Finally, 40 percent of employees said they faced barriers to taking sick leave when they were ill.
None of this seems to fit with Starbucks’s reputation as a “fabulous company” to work for, as jobs and recruiting website Glassdoor described it in its annual ranking of the 50 best places to work in 2014. Starbucks came in at No. 39.
The Center for Popular Democracy’s report did have some suggestions for improvement, however, recommending that Starbucks guarantee minimum hours and full-time work for those who want it. It also said the company should mandate that managers provide predictable schedules so working families can have a more stable work-life balance, in addition to taking the pressure off sick employees to find a replacement for a shift.
Source: Boston.com
Warren calls for diversity in Federal Reserve leadership
WASHINGTON – The latest crusade in the name of diversity commenced on Thursday, this time aimed squarely at the makeup of the Federal Reserve’s leadership and spearheaded in part by Elizabeth...
WASHINGTON – The latest crusade in the name of diversity commenced on Thursday, this time aimed squarely at the makeup of the Federal Reserve’s leadership and spearheaded in part by Elizabeth Warren, the senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts.
The Cambridge Democrat recently linked up with fellow Democrat, Michigan U.S. Rep. John Conyers, to send a letter to Janet Yellen, chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, asking the former Clinton administration adviser to take action. They cited a 1977 law that requires the bank regulator to reflect the nation’s diversity.
The progressive duo began their missive by praising her work under President Barack Obama before stating that they “remain deeply concerned that the Federal Reserve has not yet fulfilled its statutory and moral obligation to ensure that its leadership reflects the composition of our diverse nation.” Instead, they said, the central bank’s leadership “remains overwhelmingly and disproportionately white and male,” and is drawn mainly from major banks and corporations.
The letter cites a statistic reported in February by the left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy that indicates that “83 percent of Federal Reserve head office board members are white” while “men occupy nearly three-fourths of all regional bank directorships.”
The lawmakers assert that the discussions among Fed leaders regarding labor market conditions never once mentioned the situation confronting blacks in 2010, the most recent year for which full transcripts are available. The lawmakers point out that the unemployment rate for blacks that year never fell below 15.5 percent, while the nation’s average jobless rate hovered just below 10 percent during most of that post-recession period.
Fellow Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Ed Markey put his signature on the letter, alongside those of more than 120 other Democrats in Congress
Warren and Conyers later took to social media to rally the public around the cause:
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, was also quick to throw her support behind the call for diversity:
“The Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole,” Jesse Ferguson, a Clinton campaign spokesman, told the Associated Press Thursday, adding that Clinton also opposes the fact that three private-sector bankers currently sit on each regional Fed bank board.
The Fed is actively working to further diversify its ranks, bank spokesman Dave Skidmore said in a statement provided to AP.
“Minority representation on Reserve Bank and Branch boards has increased from 16 percent in 2010 to 24 percent in 2016,” Skidmore told AP. “The proportion of women directors has risen from 23 percent to 30 percent over the same period. Currently, 46 percent of all directors are diverse in terms of race and/or gender (with a director who is both female and a minority counted only one time).”
“We are striving to continue that progress.”
By BY EVAN LIPS
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Albany Must Keep the Charter Cap
Earlier this year, the New York City Council passed my resolution urging the state legislature to keep the cap on charter schools. That was nothing new: Council Members have long showed their...
Earlier this year, the New York City Council passed my resolution urging the state legislature to keep the cap on charter schools. That was nothing new: Council Members have long showed their opposition to raising the cap. But, with recent efforts by powerful special interests, including more than $13 million spent in lobbying and campaign ads, we need to remind New York why raising the cap is not only unnecessary, but also harmful to our public school children.
First, there is the capacity question. Charter schools have 2,500 unfilled seats in New York City. In addition, current charter agreements could allow for more than 27,000 additional authorized seats. In other words, these charter schools already are not handling their assigned share of students, and that burdens crowded public schools, making it more difficult for those schools to provide quality education.
Second, charter schools are not required to serve students who transfer to or join schools mid-year because of disciplinary measures or because of a family's choice. They also do not serve nearly the same amount of students with special needs as public schools. This means that when the school year starts, charters receive funding for a certain number of students yet actually end up teaching fewer than they are budgeted for. They then pocket the remainder and can boast lower class sizes while public schools again shoulder the burden.
Finally, the Center for Popular Democracy reported that New York stood to lose over $54 million to charter school-related fraud in 2014 alone. Audits can help uncover instances of fraud, mishandling of funds, conflicts of interest within governing boards, and a number of other troubling findings, yet charter schools largely oppose efforts to increase transparency. The State Comptroller's attempt to audit charter schools has already been foiled at every turn, meaning New Yorkers are left in the dark about how exactly our public dollars are spent.
Meanwhile, more than $5 billion in state money is owed to our traditional public schools to provide every child access to a "sound basic education" per the Campaign for Fiscal Equity ruling. Forty-four percent of all schools in New York City are overcrowded. The City's Independent Budget Office reports that most schools are at 102 percent capacity or more, and 88 percent of the city's charter schools are co-located within a district school, adding to the space crunch.
Co-located charter schools, by the way, are an exercise in inequality: privately run schools, with access to both private and public funds, that are taking resources from underfunded district schools. What does this mean for the social climate in these schools? Many students feel, and rightfully so, that district schools and their students are not valued the way they should be.
It is sensible to provide the money and attention owed to our public schools to keep them strong. Charter schools already divert resources from the majority of students, who attend public schools. Charter schools do not serve our children, especially the most needy, with enough accountability to justify increasing their share of funding.
All children deserve an education system that celebrates their potential by giving them the space and funding necessary to achieve educational excellence. The raising of the charter cap would be damaging to our public school system in terms of morale, space, funding, and overall quality. Leaders in Albany should finish their legislative session without altering the cap. Instead, it is time to ensure a feasible means of success for public schools by giving them the focus they need and not investing in a private enterprise that has yet to fulfill its promise to New Yorkers.
***Daniel Dromm is the Education Committee Chair of the New York City Council.
Source: Gotham Gazette
When To Raise Rates? Boston Fed Chief Pokes Fellow Liberals
When To Raise Rates? Boston Fed Chief Pokes Fellow Liberals
Eric S. Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, has been famous as an inflation dove – until now.
Being a dove means he almost always favors smaller and fewer interest...
Eric S. Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, has been famous as an inflation dove – until now.
Being a dove means he almost always favors smaller and fewer interest rate increases by the Fed, in the hope that more money from the spigot will lead to more jobs and wage increases for workers. Rosengren and Janet Yellen, the Fed chair, have led the dove charge in recent years.
But on Wednesday, Rosengren dissented when the central bank postponed a rate hike at least until December. That surprised his fellow dovish liberals because, to oversimplify, lower rates tend to help workers, while higher rates, making money harder for borrowers to get, can protect accumulated wealth by warding off inflation.
The pro-hike dissent was his first in almost 10 years as a Fed governor; he has certainly opposed rate hikes and urged faster cuts, sometimes with formal dissents.
The move ignited debate not along the usual lines of doves and hawks – those who favor rate hikes to control inflation even before it appears – but between doves and doves, in much the same way that, for example, foreign trade deals divide liberal Democrats.
All of this might seem like an esoteric spat to Joe Grabasandwich, as my old politics professor used to say. But it lies at the heart of how the central bank can prod the economy to help more people, sooner. And it matters especially in Connecticut, where growth is slow even in good times, making rate hikes hurt worse than elsewhere.
On Friday, Rosengren explained his dissent in a public statement in which he said the economy is stronger than many people think.
"By 2019, I expect the unemployment rate to have declined below 4.5 percent," Rosengren said in the statement. "While I have a long track record of advocating for policy that supports robust labor market conditions, that is below the rate that I believe is sustainable in the long run."
What Rosengren is saying is that a 4.5 percent unemployment rate is so low that it would heat up the economy to the point of inflation above 2 percent, and that's the big no-no the Fed is trying to prevent – a clear charge to anyone who remembers the nightmare of the 1970s.
Taking the medicine of a one-quarter of 1 percent rate increase now, immediately, will, in his view, allow for relatively low rates over the long haul. That's part of the so-called soft landing from an expansion that is so hard to achieve.
Not so fast, left-leaning economists say. Or rather, not so slow. In the big picture, economist Jared Bernstein said, workers only see wage increases when the unemployment rate is at or near full employment – as we saw in the Sept. 15 Census report. The report showed a robust 5.2 percent 2015 jump in the income of households at the middle of the scale.
Did Eric Rosengren, of all people, turn his back on this?
"I've always considered him sympathetic to my view, which is that the last thing you'd want to do is tap the brakes and slow down job growth at a time when the economy is finally starting to...help people who have been left behind," said Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and author of a new book, "The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity."
Bernstein, a former chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden, doesn't believe Rosengren is suddenly looking out for capital at the expense of labor. Rather, the issue comes down to the murky relationship between inflation and unemployment.
The financial media widely reported Rosengren's 4.5 percent jobless figure Friday. But in itself, it's not news, considering the rate is now 4.9 percent. The real news, Bernstein said, is that Rosengren thinks he can tell when too hot is too hot, without data.
Rosengren, in a visit to New Britain in April, explained that the "natural" or "full" rate of employment, the level that delivers the maximum benefits to the economy without accelerating inflation, will be reached when the jobless rate is 4.7 percent.
The trouble with that view, Bernstein said, is that "it is widely understood by people who look very closely at this question that we cannot reliably estimate that rate within 2 points one way or another."
There are too many variables in play, such as productivity and distribution of income, so, why risk punishing workers by applying certainty to a mystery?
Rosengren explained, in his statement Friday: "My goal is to achieve a long and durable recovery – a sustainable expansion...I believe a significant overshoot of the full employment level could shorten, rather than lengthen, the duration of this recovery."
As I noted when Rosengren visited in April, his view of the economy, literally, from his downtown Boston office, is full of cranes in the torrid market of a red-hot city. Is that coloring his fear of inflation? Maybe.
No one thinks another quarter-point increase in the Fed's overnight borrowing rate, after last December's uptick, will make a big difference by itself. But the signal the Fed sends can and does move markets and the economy.
"If we want this recovery to reach down and help people it has yet to reach, that's inconsistent with even a small rate increase," Bernstein said. "Where's the inflation?"
"It's gradually coming up," Rosengren told a Quincy, Mass. audience on Sept. 9.
That's the $15 trillion debate as the U.S. economy either is, or is not, nearing its speed limit.
By Dan Haar
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