Campaign News

Unions and groups advocating for retirees, teachers, housing, and workers' benefits are among those visiting the ornate conference rooms of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to lobby for a less conventional candidate to serve as its next president.

New York Fed directors leading the search for a successor to chief William Dudley, seen as the second most influential policymaker at the U.S. central bank, invited the guests to last week's meeting to seek their advice. According to attendees and others familiar with the search, the directors are close to a "long list" of candidates and appear set to begin formal interviews within weeks.

Read the full article here.

Polish Daily News - November 7, 2013 - Contrary to the defendants under the criminal justice system, people in immigration detention have no right to a lawyer from the office. As part of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project about 190 immigrants in detention facing deportation, you can seek legal help.

New York immigrate Family Unity Project (NYIFUP) is an initiative that emerged from seven years of research and interviews with immigration lawyers and defenders of the rights of immigrants. They gave their opinions that the lack of a competent legal representation for many New York immigrants, unfamiliar with the law, do not have money for lawyers and having problems with the language, is unnecessary deportations, which lead to the separation of families and are an unnecessary financial ballast to the government.

Last summer, the New York city council has allocated 500 000 dollars. to fund a pilot program, whose task was to test the reasonableness of the initiative. The draft law school joined them. Benjamin N. Cardozo, and several organizations fighting for immigrant rights, and so created a program of assistance to 190 immigrants.

"It is a matter of justice - says Peter L. Markowitz, a professor at Cardozo Law School. - This is an opportunity to initiate changes in the way immigrants are treated in our country."

In the future, originator NYIFUP plan to organize legal assistance for all poor immigrants awaiting deportation in immigration detention: in New York, Batavia, NY, Newark and Elizabeth, New Jersey. Annually, these centers gets about 2,450 immigrants.

The full annual cost of the program is estimated at 7.4 million dollars. His supporters argue that reducing the time that immigrants spend in detention centers, and limit the number of deportations will bring savings of 5.9 million per year.

  W przeciwieństwie do oskarżonych podlegających systemowi sądownictwa karnego, osoby przebywające w więzieniach imigracyjnych nie mają prawa do prawnika z urzędu. W ramach New York Immigrant Family Unity Project około 190 imigrantów w ośrodkach zatrzymań, którym grozi deportacja, skorzystać może z pomocy prawnej.

New York Immigrat Family Unity Project (NYIFUP) to inicjatywa, która wyłoniła się siedem lat temu z badań i rozmów z prawnikami imigracyjnymi oraz obrońcami praw imigrantów. Opiniowali oni, że brak kompetentnej reprezentacji prawnej dla wielu nowojorskich imigrantów, nieznających prawa, nieposiadających pieniędzy na prawników i mających problemy z językiem, oznacza niepotrzebne deportacje, które doprowadzają do rozłąki rodzin i są niepotrzebnym balastem finansowym dla rządu.

Ubiegłego lata nowojorska rada miasta przeznaczyła 500 000 dol. na sfinansowanie pilotażowego programu, którego zadaniem było przetestowanie sensowności inicjatywy. Do projektu włączyła się szkoła prawnicza im. Benjamina N. Cardozo oraz kilka organizacji walczących o prawa imigrantów i tak powstał program pomocy dla 190 imigrantów.

"To jest kwestia sprawiedliwości – mówi Peter L. Markowitz, profesor w Cardozo Law School. – To szansa na zapoczątkowanie zmian w sposobie, w jaki traktowani są imigranci w naszym kraju".

W przyszłości pomysłodawcy NYIFUP planują zorganizować pomoc prawną dla wszystkich niezamożnych imigrantów oczekujących na deportację w więzieniach imigracyjnych: w mieście Nowy Jork, Batavia, NY, Newarku i Elizabeth w New Jersey. Rocznie do tych ośrodków trafia około 2450 imigrantów.

Pełny roczny koszt tego programu szacowany jest na 7,4 miliona dolarów. Jego zwolennicy argumentują, że skrócenie czasu, jaki imigranci spędzają w ośrodkach zatrzymań, oraz ograniczenie liczby deportacji przyniesie oszczędności w wysokości 5,9 miliona rocznie.

Source

As the movement for a $15 minimum wage grows, low-wage workers know the problem isn’t just the hourly pay rate. It’s also the number of hours scheduled. I’ve worked at Gap in multiple locations since October 2014. I’d like to earn a living wage – but a raise alone won’t help me pay the bills if exploitative schedules aren’t fixed too.

I spent most of 2014 unemployed while applying to dozens of jobs. Then, in October, I finally got a job at Gap. Our schedule comes out less than a week in advance. Some of the shifts leave workers “on-call,” meaning we don’t know if we’re going to be working at all that day. The earliest we find out is two hours before the shift is scheduled to start. At my first store, I had 18 hours of penciled-in shifts with only nine guaranteed hours some weeks. This is not uncommon in the industry.

The volatility of on-call scheduling, in combination with the low pay, meant my life at Gap wasn’t all that different from when I was unemployed. Though I was working, I still had to go to a food pantry for groceries. In winter, I had to choose between racking up heat bills I couldn’t afford and freezing in my apartment. My landlord would ask me when I’d have the rent money, but I couldn’t give her an answer because I never knew how many hours I’d actually work in a given week. I couldn’t afford to live in the city where I worked, so I had to transfer to a Gap store back home.

I’m not the only one struggling. Retail workers have the second-lowest average weekly earnings of workers in any sector in the US economy: $444 per week. We also have the second-lowest average weekly working hours. From 2006 to 2010, the number of people working part-time for economic reasons and not by choice, grew from 4 to 9 million. It’s called involuntary part-time work, meaning we want full-time employment but a lack of opportunities prevents us from doing so. 

Unpredictable last-minute scheduling makes it difficult to budget and turns even the most basic decisions into headaches. Will we need babysitters for our children? Will we be able to make a doctor’s appointment? Will we have to rush to Gap from our second jobs? 

One of my co-workers, started working at Gap as she was transitioning out of homelessness, but she wasn’t making enough to get stable housing on her own. Most so-called middle class jobs lost in the recession have been replaced by low-wage work like retail jobs. I’m thankful to be working, but gratitude born of desperation is no comfort and it certainly doesn’t pay the rent.

As the involuntary part-time worker population has drastically grown, so too has Gap’s executive compensation. Since 2010, total executive compensation packages exploded from $19m to over $42m by 2014. Former CEO Glenn Murphy’s compensation increased from $5.9m in 2010 to $16m in 2014. So-called ‘on-call scheduling’ creates a cheap on-demand workforce, enabling the Gap to pad its bottom line. The gains don’t go to us; they flow to the top-earners in the company. We make the sacrifices, they reap the rewards. 

Another co-worker began working at Gap, in addition to a second retail job, as a way to escape the illicit drug trade. My colleague once told me: “everybody wants a job, no one wants to really be out hustling in the streets.” But the on-call shifts became unbearable, and he struggled to pay rent. For him, the trade-off between street money and regular employment was costly. This structural combination of low wages and unfair scheduling pressures workers into the underground economy, and is a hidden pipeline to the prison system.

I do, however, feel hope. Here in Minnesota, lawmakers are considering new legislation, supported by workers and community groups like Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, that would require three weeks’ advance notice of work schedules. Across the country, low-wage workers are fighting for fair scheduling and the tide is turning. Just this summer, Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch have announced an end to their on-call shifts. The Gap can be part of this rising tide.

Source: The Guardian

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 put 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.

Rep. 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