Campaign News

Why Are Progressive Groups Slamming Julián Castro?

Castro,Julian-Clinton,HillaryTexas Insider Report: WASHINGTON, D.C. – In the middle of April, POLITICO reported that several progressive groups have targeted HUD Secretary Julián Castro, questioning his vice presidential qualifications if Hillary Clinton were to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The fight between a new-school Latino group and some old-school Latino groups erupted into chatter that kept getting stronger, so much so that Castro had to address it with NBC News.  

The new-school latinos campaign led to dissension among Latino organizations. Others have weighed in on the story, claiming that Castro being Latino is just irrelevant. In the midst of all this hubbub, one thing became clear — none of those old-guard Latino groups countered on the merits of the attack against Castro. Apparently, he is untouchable, regardless what he does.

Joe Velasquez, a former deputy political director in the Clinton Administration, submitted his resignation letter from the board of American Family Voices (AFV), which was part of the coalition of groups that hit Castro for a HUD policy the groups argue is too friendly to financial institutions looking to buy distressed homes.

berniesanders-hillaryclintonAnd, the Sanders campaign denied having any part in the effort to discredit Castro.

Progressive groups target Julián Castro

They say the record of the HUD secretary makes him unsuitable to be Clinton’s VP.

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

The 41-year-old Julian Castro is seen by many as the perfect balance to Hillary Clinton. But the veepstakes oppo war has begun.

With Bernie Sanders’ durability exciting progressives at their potential to shape the Democratic race, a coalition of groups — many of them backers of the Vermont senator — are launching a preemptive strike against Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, aimed at disqualifying him from consideration to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate.

Tuesday morning, the group emailed petitions to several million people attacking Castro on the relatively obscure issue of his handling of mortgage sales and launching a website with an unsubtle address: DontSellOurHomesToWallStreet.org.

They’re just as open with their political aims: to publicly discredit Castro as a progressive, latching onto the mortgage issue to seed enough suspicion to keep him off Clinton’s shortlist.

“It’s a situation where the Clinton campaign wants Castro to be a major asset to her chances of winning the White House, and unless he changes his position related to foreclosures and loans, he’ll be a toxic asset to the Clinton campaign,” said Matt Nelson, the managing director for Presente.org, the nation’s largest Latino organizing group that focuses on social justice.

“All year, we’ve seen the candidates tripping over themselves to show how tough they’ll be on Wall Street,” said Kurt Walters, the campaign manager for Root Strikers, a 501(c4) group of Demand Progress and its 2 million affiliated activists, who is planning to deliver the petitions to Castro’s office when they’re ready. “Then to turn around and take a step backwards on that exact question, and Castro, Julian3hput someone who has been doing the exact opposite — I think it would be tough for a lot of people who care about Wall Street accountability to get excited about that pick.”

By the coalition’s calculations, HUD under Castro has sold 98 percent of the long-delinquent mortgages it acquired through a program aimed at preventing foreclosures to Wall Street banks under Castro’s watch, without anywhere near the number of needed strings attached. (HUD says that figure is way off.) And Nelson and Walters say that for a politician who’s aiming to be considered the vice presidential prospect for both progressives and minorities, Castro has done too much to help private equity firms like Blackstone, instead of black and Latino communities.

“If Secretary Castro fails to create significant momentum in terms of stopping the sale of mortgages to Wall Street, then I do think it disqualifies him. But there’s time left on the clock,” said Jonathan Westin, the director of New York Communities for Change, which was formed out of the remains of the community activist group ACORN. “I think a lot of the progressive movement would not be in support of a Castro ticket if he fails to make traction here.”

The 41-year-old Castro is seen by many as the perfect balance to Clinton — younger and Latino, with a history as mayor of San Antonio and now two years in the Obama administration, handsome and with a 2012 convention keynote speech that immediately made him a rising star to watch in the party. And people close to him say he’s a proven progressive across the board.

“Castro has a strong record at HUD fighting on behalf of progressive issues including protecting those with criminal records, standing up for LGBT rights and advocating for more inclusive communities through affirmatively furthering fair housing,” said one person close to the secretary.

But Maurice Weeks, an Atlanta-based organizer who works on housing justice in communities of color for the Center for Popular Democracy/CPD Action, said that Castro’s lack of action at HUD is breeding more gentrification and suffering in a way that should make blacks and Latinos pay attention.

“What I wouldn’t be excited about is any candidate, not just Julián, who is looking to further some of these practices,” Weeks said.

At issue is the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, started in 2010 to allow mortgages going toward foreclosure to be sold to what HUD calls “qualified bidders and encourages them to work with borrowers to help bring the loan out of default.”

The progressives attacking Castro say they believe the mortgages should be sold instead to nonprofits and other institutions that would care more about the communities involved. What Castro’s done, they say, has essentially amounted to a fire sale for Wall Street firms.

Castro,Julian3hRep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and one of Sanders’ few endorsers in Congress, complained about the program to Castro last week in a letter obtained by Politico.

“Your own Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, which was designed to help right the wrongs of the meltdown years, has been selling homes that once belonged to the families I’ve spoken with at rock-bottom prices to the Wall Street entities that created this situation in the first place,” Grijalva wrote.

HUD says that Castro has continued to meet with advocates, in the hopes of improving the policy, and points to several changes that have been made — including those that have increased the number of mortgages sold to nonprofits. An official pointed to changes made a year ago that, among other things, now require servicers buying loans to delay foreclosure for a year.

“Providing an option for homeowners to remain in their homes is one of the reasons the DASP program was created” said a HUD spokesperson. “We’ve received feedback from stakeholders which has led us to make a number of important changes to the program including the creation of nonprofit-only pools and delaying foreclosure for a year. Additionally, we are still evaluating further enhancements to the program to meet our core mission.”

But that’s not enough for the groups joining the coalition to attack Castro. Those include the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action, American Family Voices, Color of Change, Courage Campaign, CPD Action, Daily Kos, MoveOn, New York Communities for Change, Other 98%, Presente, RootsAction, Rootstrikers and the Working Families Party.

With the exception of the Working Families Party, which is backing Sanders, the groups have not formally endorsed a candidate in the presidential primaries.

Most conversations about Clinton’s prospective pick center on Castro and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and the secretary’s ambitions to be the vice presidential nominee are well known.

But among progressives, so are the suspicions about his bona fides. The red banner across the website proclaiming “TELL HUD SECRETARY JULIAN CASTRO: STOP SELLING OUR NEIGHBORHOODS TO WALL STREET!” amounts to the opening salvo in doing something about it.

“There’s a lot of hope around him,” said Brandi Collins, campaign director for the 1.2-million member Color of Change, who said she was one of the people excited by the possibilities opened up by his keynote speech.

Collins said this complaint about Castro’s leadership is reflective of a whole range of issues her organization has had with what members say is the secretary’s closeness to Wall Street and lack of attention to black and brown communities.

“If he’s not showing up for our communities while the cameras aren’t there, we don’t know that he’ll show up when he’s on his way to the White House,” Collins said.

According to Julia Gordon, formerly at the Center for American Progress and currently an executive vice president at the National Community Stabilization Trust, the coalition may have a point — if only because it is taking advantage of opaque accounting at HUD. Gordon said she’s met often with HUD about these issues but hasn’t seen the kind of progress she’d like or evidence that the program matches the claims that officials make.

“We know it’s been good for investors. According to HUD, it’s been good for the fund, although the level of detail that they release to account for it is minimal. We really don’t know how good it’s been for the homeowners, and that’s where this wave of protests is coming from,” Gordon said.

Laurie Goodman, the director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, said that the people who are attacking Castro for selling the loans to Wall Street are misinterpreting the pragmatic realities about what’s in play.

The mortgages in question tend to be delinquent for over two years, she said, and getting them out of HUD with its limited resources and tools to deal with them is a positive step for homeowners. Only big banks can take on mortgages like that, she argued, making the nonprofit issue moot.

“The only way to help these borrowers is to sell the loans. You don’t have any other buyers big enough in size,” she said. “Even if you wanted to do something different, you couldn’t.”

Within that, though, Goodman credited HUD under Castro for making “some really big improvements.”

Not nearly enough, according to Gordon.

“Both HUD and [the Federal Housing Finance Agency] have let down communities by not focusing on what they want the buyer to do with these,” Gordon said, arguing that they’ve been focused instead on offloading the debt. “They’re just like, ‘Get it away from me.’”

The idea that Castro would be the first Latino on a national ticket means something, Nelson said, though he argued that this only adds to the burden for the secretary to show leadership on the mortgage issue in the way progressives want at this moment of added attention to their concerns.

Nelson said that at Presente, they think of it like a parable — it doesn’t make it any better to be hurt if the hurt is coming from one of their own.

There are two trees in a forest, Nelson said, and they see an ax coming to chop them down. “Don’t worry,” says one tree to the other, “the handle’s one of us.”

“Basically,” Nelson said, “we’re fighting to make sure Castro isn’t the handle.”

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

Source

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

Source

The man with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, who caught national attention for confronting Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) last year about the Republican tax bill, has launched a new “Be a Hero” campaign targeting Republicans. In a new minute-long TV and online ad running ahead of an April 24 election in Arizona’s 8th congressional district, Ady Barkan slams Republicans for pushing tax legislation that could affect his health care if lower tax revenue leads to eventual federal benefit cuts.

Read the full article here.

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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