Campaign News

Take it as a given that the state General Assembly will pass legislation to increase teacher pay when it reconvenes for the short session on April 25, albeit somewhere below the 5-percent raise Gov. Pat McCrory wants.

Improving teacher salaries is the kind of popular public policy the governor can take to the voters, in addition to the infrastructure bond referendum that passed last month, in his reelection bid. He’s the only one who will have to face voters across the state in November, but the ultra-conservatives in the legislature who are protected by gerrymandering owe McCrory big time after he signed HB 2.

But also expect the emboldened Republican super-majority to aggressively push through a legislative agenda that radically promotes for-profit education while punishing students in poor, low-achieving schools.

The NC School Board Association is closely monitoring a proposal by state Rep. Rob Bryan (R-Mecklenburg) to create a so-called Achievement School District. The proposal, released in the form of draft legislation in January, would yank five low-performing schools across North Carolina from the control of local school boards and place them under the administration of a statewide Achievement School District to be operated by a private company contracted by the state.

The model of states superseding local control of education by turning academically struggling schools over to charters was pioneered in 2003 in Louisiana, where it rapidly expanded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Tennessee followed suit in 2010, and Michigan got in the game in 2013. Parallel to taking control of local schools, the state of Michigan also placed the city of Flint in receivership, with disastrous consequences when citizens were exposed to lead poisoning from the water in Flint River. It should be obvious that opaque administration and lack of local accountability invites abuse and undermines democracy.

A study by the New York-based Center for Popular Democracy found that takeover districts in Louisiana, Tennessee and Michigan failed to improve test scores, while metrics were “altered from year to year, confounding accountability and transparency.”

The authors wrote, “Additionally, lawsuits and student protests demonstrate that when local oversight is stripped away, children may face harmful practices such as discriminatory enrollment, punitive disciplinary measures, and inadequate access to special education resources. Students suffer in the wake of high teacher turnover and personnel instability brought on by the rushed firing of staff. Finally, we find that a consistent lack of oversight can create an environment rife with fraud and mismanagement, where private interests gain financially while taxpayers, students and teachers are left behind. We conclude that takeover districts actually hinder children’s chances of academic success rather than improving them.”

As further warning that the Republican lawmakers intend to take away control and funding from public education, take it from Bryan Holloway, a former Republican lawmaker who now works as a lobbyist for the NC School Board Association.

A remarkable story published by the Elkin Tribune on March 30 quotes Holloway as telling the Elkin City School Board: “There could be numerous education bills go through in this short session you may not like at all.”

Last year, the state Senate approved legislation to shift funding from public schools to charters, including federal child nutrition funds, even though many charter schools don’t provide free lunch, prompting sharp criticism from many Democratic lawmakers. The House could move on the legislation and present it for Gov. McCrory’s signature in the short session.

If that’s not strange enough, the article also quotes Holloway as saying, “A bill to eliminate school boards throughout the state we’ve been told is going to be introduced. I don’t think it has legs to go anywhere, but because they are brazen enough to even be willing to file it means you’ll probably have to deal with it in the future.”

The General Assembly started down this path in 2014 when they passed a law to give every public school in the state a letter grade from A to F. Predictably, the schools that consistently earn Ds and Fs are the ones that serve communities with concentrated poverty.

Fortunately, teachers and principals see very clearly what our lawmakers in Raleigh are trying to do.

“They are putting a big red X on the schools that already have a big red X on them,” Michelle Wolverton, the principal at Hunter Elementary in Greensboro, told a few intrepid souls who braved the blustery cold for a Rally for Public Education at Greensboro’s Governmental Plaza on April 9. “They have a big red X on them because of poverty. They have a big red X on them because a high percentage of the students are immigrants. They have a big red X on them because of poverty and because the economics are not equal.”

by Jordan Green

Source

Ady Barkan, the progressive health care activist whose video pleadings with U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake last year briefly became a viral hit, is starting a group to tout select Democratic candidates across the country, starting with Hiral Tipirneni's congressional bid in Arizona.

Read the full article here.

When the Federal Reserve was established, Congress called for its policy makers to have “fair representation of the financial, agricultural, industrial, and commercial interests, and geographical divisions of the country.”

But Fed officials have recently been drawn from just two backgrounds—academics, either at universities or Fed research departments, and alumni of the financial services firmGoldman Sachs & Co.

The announcement Tuesday that Neel Kashkari would become president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis marked the third Goldman Sachs alumnus in a row to be picked to become a Fed bank president. The other two—Dallas’s Robert Steven Kaplan andPhiladelphia’s Patrick Harker —took office earlier this year.

Mr. Kashkari is a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a former Treasury official who ran the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) during the financial crisis. He takes the helm of the Minneapolis Fed Jan. 1, 2016.

Of the 17 Fed officials in office next year—five members of the Board of Governors and 12 regional bank presidents—all but three will have professional backgrounds as academics or with Goldman Sachs. The exceptions will be Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhartand Fed governor Jerome Powell, who worked at other banking institutions, and Kansas City Fed President Esther George, who was primarily a bank supervisor.

“The obvious downside of this is there’s more of a groupthink within the Fed,” said George Selgin, the director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank, referring to the shift toward a narrow range of backgrounds at the central bank. “That can be very dangerous if the groupthink is based on ways of thinking about the economy that are not necessarily sound.”

Mr. Kaplan, a former Harvard Business School professor, had worked as a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., leading investment banking activities. Mr. Harker, the former president of the University of Delaware, served as a trustee of Goldman Sachs Trust and its Variable Insurance Trust.

New York Fed President William Dudley also spent most of his career at Goldman, ultimately serving as its chief economist.

Since the central bank’s founding a century ago, the background of Fed officials has undergone a dramatic shift.

In the early days after the Fed began in 1913, the people selected to run the nation’s central bank were primarily small bankers, reflecting that in the early days, the Fed’s key function was providing banking services to a highly fragmented banking industry. The notion of using Fed policies to steer the broader economy had not yet taken hold.

Through the Fed’s first 40 years, the backgrounds of officials grew increasingly diverse. In the late 1940s, for example, Fed officials included Chester Davis, a former agriculture commissioner and grain marketer; Laurence Whittemore, of the Boston and Maine Railroad and H. Gavin Leedy, a private practice attorney.

The central bank’s leadership also contained many functionaries who rose through the ranks as Fed administrators, such as Robert Gilbert, who in his 20s become one of the first 14 employees of the Dallas Fed. He worked as a loan and discount clerk and in the war loan department, before becoming manger of the Dallas Fed’s El Paso branch and eventually the Dallas Fed President.

Such quaint backgrounds were common among officials in the central bank’s early days but were beginning to dwindle by the 1960s. Today Fed officials who rose through the ranks are almost entirely Ph.D. economists who headed the regional banks’ research departments; the lone exception is Ms. George, who worked as a bank supervisor and Kansas City Fed administrator. Ms. George holds an M.B.A.

Gradually backgrounds in industry, law, and other aspects of government or administration fell out of favor.

“Keep in mind, for much of the Fed’s first half, the focus was really on financial stability,” said Sarah Binder, a George Washington University professor who is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “There wasn’t a well-worked out body of knowledge about monetary policy.”

As it became apparent that Fed policy held vast sway over the economic fortunes of the country, presidents and regional Fed boards increasingly turned to Ph.D. economists to guide the central bank and to be effective participants during the debates of the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee.

Ms. Binder thinks the narrow range of backgrounds among Fed officials may lead to a central bank that is thin on expertise when it comes to “the responsibilities that are laid on top of the board, in particular, that extend beyond monetary policy.”

The central bank is tasked, for example, with regulating much of the financial system, not only the giant Wall Street banks, but also community banks, insurers and other financial institutions. The Fed retains some responsibilities for consumer protection and community development, is responsible for the nation’s payment systems and continues to operate the discount window and other low-profile back-office banking functions.

Liberal activist groups, led by the Center for Popular Democracy, have pushed for diversity in the appointment of new Fed officials, pressing for representatives of workers and consumers or labor and community leaders. They have had no luck, and with the filling of the Minneapolis Fed presidency and inaction in Congress over two current nominees to the Fed board, there are no looming vacancies for the central bank’s composition to begin a shift.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

ABC News - March 31, 2015, Candice Choi - Fast-food labor organizers say they're expanding the scope of their campaign for $15 an hour and unionization, this time with a day of actions including other low-wage workers and demonstrations on college campuses.

Kendall Fells, organizing director for Fight for $15, said Tuesday the protests will take place April 15 and are planned to include actions on about 170 college campuses, as well as cities around the country and abroad.

At an event announcing the actions in front of a McDonald's in New York City's Times Square, organizers said home health care aides, airport workers, adjunct professors, child care workers and Wal-Mart workers will be among those turning out in April.

Terrence Wise, a Burger King worker from Kansas City, Missouri, and a national leader for the Fight for $15 push, said more than 2,000 groups including Jobs With Justice and the Center for Popular Democracy will show their support as well.

"This will be the biggest mobilization America has seen in decades," Wise said at the rally as pedestrians walked past on the busy street.

The plans are a continuation of a campaign that began in late 2012. The push is being spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union and has included demonstrations nationwide to build public support for raising pay for fast-food and other low-wage workers, although turnout has varied from city to city. Last May, the campaign reached the doorsteps of McDonald's headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, where protesters were arrested after declining to leave the property ahead of the company's annual meeting.

Fells, an SEIU employee, said April 15 was picked for the next day of actions because workers are fighting "for 15."

"It's a little play on words," he said.

Fells noted that while the push began as a fast-food worker movement, it has morphed into a broader push for low-wage workers and is now shifting into a social justice movement with the involvement of "Black Lives Matter" activists joining in in the April protests. Still, he said McDonald's Corp. remained a primary target.

"McDonald's needs to come to the table because they could settle this issue," he said.

In a statement, McDonald's said it respects people's right to peacefully protest, but added that the demonstrations over the past two years have been "organized rallies designed to garner media attention" and that "very few" McDonald's workers have participated.

In addition to the ongoing demonstrations, organizers have been working on multiple fronts to make the legal case that McDonald's Corp. should be held accountable for working conditions at its franchised restaurants. That finding is seen as critical in being able to negotiate with one entity on behalf of workers across the chain, rather than dealing with the thousands of franchisees who operate the majority of McDonald's more than 14,000 U.S. restaurants.

McDonald's and other fast-food chains have maintained that they're not responsible for hiring and employment decisions at franchised locations.

One closely watched case addressing the matter began this week, when the National Labor Relations Board began hearings on complaints over alleged labor violations at McDonald's restaurants. The board's general counsel had said last year that McDonald's could be named as a joint employer along with franchisees in the complaints.

The hearing is scheduled to resume May 26 and is set to be a lengthy legal battle. Whichever side loses is expected to appeal, with the possibility of the case eventually heading to the Supreme Court.

In a statement, McDonald's has said the board's decision to name McDonald's as a joint employer "improperly strikes at the heart of the franchise system."

"The SEIU put a target on McDonald's back more than two years ago; the Board has now joined in taking aim, and has done so by managing the McDonald's case in an unprecedented manner," the statement said.