Campaign News

“A new report from the Fed Up coalition, an activist group calling for more inclusive economic policies, says the key regional Fed bank's conflicts lead to subpar regulation of Wall Street. As William Dudley, a former Goldman Sachs partner, prepares to retire as New York Fed president, Fed Up calls on the bank to "select a new president who will put the interests of the public before Wall Street. A new report from the Fed Up coalition, led by the Center for Popular Democracy, a Washington-based nonprofit, shows just how stark the lack of diversity in race, gender, and professional backgrounds has been at the New York Fed.”

Read the full article here.

Last Tuesday, Alton Sterling was shot and killed while pinned on the ground by Baton Rouge police. The next day, Philando Castile was shot and killed by a cop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as he reached for his ID. On Thursday, protests swept across the country calling for an end to police killings of black and brown men. At one of those peaceful protests, in Dallas, a sniper opened fire from a vantage point above the march, trying to kill white police officers. Five officers died.

It was against this backdrop of deep social turmoil that dozens of community organizing groups from across the country came together in Pittsburgh for the People’s Convention.

Over the weekend, more than 1,500 community organizers and leaders—many of them Black and Latino—convened to discuss ways to create a more cohesive, powerful progressive grassroots network. It was the first step by the Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive organization that is trying to fill the vacuum left in the wake of ACORN’s demise in 2010.

On top of the recent events in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Texas, the convention also came at a critical political moment—on the Republican side, Donald Trump’s campaign is increasingly stoking racial animosity; on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders has worked to push his party’s platform leftward.

“We wanted to make it both a statement in the electoral moment and really a statement that transcends the electoral moment,” Brian Kettenring, co-director of the Center for Popular Democracy, told the Prospect at the convention. “We’re trying to stand in this particular moment but also not be captive to the narrow partisan politics of our country.”

The convention started off Friday with a march of more than 1,000 activists through the streets of downtown Pittsburgh, including stops outside the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to demand fair wages for workers; the Pittsburgh Federal Reserve to call for equitable economic policies for working families; and Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey’s office to protest his anti-immigration stances. Some onlookers joined the chanting—“What do we want? Justice. If we don’t get it? Shut it down,”—and raised their fists in solidarity. Others were visibly angry at the marchers’ message of justice for undocumented immigrants and victims of police brutality.

The following day, activists heard speeches from heavyweights of the progressive movement like Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison and the Reverend William Barber III, leader of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement, who both spoke powerfully about the recent killings and the need for a unified response.

“The country needs healing, but you can’t heal a dirty wound,” Ellison pronounced. “A dirty wound needs disinfectant.”

He pointed to the “amazingly poised” Diamond Reynolds, the fiancée of Philando Castile, who streamed the immediate aftermath of his shooting on Facebook, as a model for the movement. “We need to push back with the same presence of mind of Diamond Reynolds,” he said.

With the killings of Sterling and Castile fresh on everyone’s mind, the specter of police violence loomed large at the convention. But the People’s Convention also wove together the threads of today’s social justice movements—not just Black Lives Matter, but also those campaigning for immigration reform, the Fight for $15, LGBTQ rights, and environmental justice, in a way that made clear the intersectionality of modern progressive organizing.

“We’re all dealing with the various layers of oppression,” said Jose Lopez, organizing director for Make the Road New York. “Whether it’s workplace inequality, housing inequality, or the recent decision from the Supreme Court, which to a degree sent a message to our families that we’re going to create opportunity for a limited number of children but we’re going to throw away the key to the gate to this country when we begin to talk about their parents.”

“[This convention] created the space and now we have to make sure we continue to stay in contact—using CPD as the vehicle—so that we can build out a network of power that can transform everything from immigration reform to worker rights to housing rights to the attack of black and brown people in this country by police,” Lopez said.

Groups attending the convention included New York Communities for Change, which helped launch the Fight for $15 back in 2012 and is now turning its focus toward addressing affordable housing needs in the city; Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, which, in response to the police killing of Jamar Clark helped organize a protest occupation outside a North Minneapolis police precinct that lasted 16 days; the Texas Workers Defense Project, a worker advocacy group that has improved labor standards in the Texas construction industry; and Make the Road state chapters that have led local fights against deportations. Some of these groups have collaborated before, while others have been somewhat isolated from other community organizing groups.

Community organizations lost much of their national clout in the wake of ACORN’s demise, which was brought about in 2009 by a conservative smear campaign. CPD’s goal now—and that of the organizations represented at the conference—is to rebuild such groups’ institutional power and make it a critical part of the broader progressive movement.

In recent years, that movement has had some signal successes, which conference workshops showcased: how SEIU successfully organized for a $15 minimum wage in Seattle; how black community groups in St. Louis helped create lasting momentum for policing reform in the wake of Ferguson; how the New York Working Families Party established a powerful electoral presence; how organizers in Florida worked for climate justice in communities vulnerable to climate change.

“We are beginning to launch a real national organizing framework—that’s something that really hadn’t been seen since ACORN went under,” said Jonathan Westin, executive director of New York Communities for Change. “I think this is the beginning of an intentional path forward to try to create real structural power for community institutions and neighborhoods that already exists in places like the labor movement.”

Creating such structural power, organizers admit, will be challenging. There’s a shortage of funding for community organizations, which has kept them closely tethered to more well-funded labor unions and foundations—and, in many ways, also tethered to their funders’ agendas. The central challenge is how to establish a sustainable and independent source of funding, as unions have done with member dues, in order for community power to become a singular force on its own.

Beyond that, a critical question for community organizers is how to capitalize on both the current social and political moment.  

“The genie is out the bottle with progressive politics,” Kettenring said. He believes that a strong force of community organizations can help direct the progressive movement’s current political capital in a way that avoids pitfalls of the past. “One of the historic strategic failures of the progressive movement has been its failure on race. So when you look at this convention and look at how diverse it is and how many of the organizations are rooted communities of color, you see the potentiality of how the community organizing sector can help root a more progressive, but also diverse politics.”

By Justin Miller

Source

Jamie Dimon and Stephen Schwarzman are facing renewed criticism for their ties to President Donald Trump.

Protesters will descend on JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s headquarters in New York on Wednesday with more than 400,000 petitions collected across the U.S., according to a statement from groups including the Center for Popular Democracy and Make the Road New York. The groups are calling for Dimon, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan, and Schwarzman, Blackstone Group LP’s CEO, to quit Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum.

Read the full article here.

WASHINGTON — One of the longest economic expansions in American history remains so fragile that the Federal Reserve said on Thursday it would postpone any retreat from its stimulus campaign.

Janet L. Yellen, the Fed’s chairwoman, described the decision as a close call and said the central bank still expected to raise interest rates later this year. The Fed has kept its benchmark interest rate close to zero since late 2008, when the nation’s economy was at the depths of crisis.

“The recovery from the Great Recession has advanced sufficiently far and domestic spending has been sufficiently robust that an argument can be made for a rise in interest rates at this time,” Ms. Yellen said at a news conference.

But, she said, “heightened uncertainties abroad,” including the Chinese economy’s weakness, had persuaded the bank to wait at least a few more weeks for fresh data that might “bolster its confidence” in continued growth.

The Fed’s decision, announced after a two-day meeting of its policy-making committee, had been widely expected by investors in recent weeks.

Fed officials spent most of the summer suggesting that they wanted to raise rates in September, only to lose confidence as signs of slowing global growth weighed on markets.

The 10-year Treasury note yield fell 0.11 percentage points to 2.189 percent. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index dropped 0.26 percent to 1,990.20.

There were signs, however, that the Fed might hesitate only briefly. It separately released economic projections showing 13 of the 17 officials on the Federal Open Market Committee still expected to raise the benchmark rate this year.

The Fed has said it is moving toward raising rates because it expects economic growth to continue, reducing unemployment and eventually raising inflation; on Thursday, Ms. Yellen said that outlook had not changed.

“There’s a tendency among some to think that they’re always going to get cold feet, and I thought Yellen really as much as possible discouraged that kind of thinking,” said John L. Bellows, a portfolio manager at Western Asset Management.

The policy-making committee still has scheduled meetings in October and December, and Ms. Yellen said a rate increase was possible at either meeting.

One official, Jeffrey M. Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, in Virginia, voted to raise rates at the September meeting, the first dissent this year. The economic projections suggest that Ms. Yellen faces more disagreements at the Fed’s October meeting, given that six officials predicted the Fed would raise rates at least two times this year, while four said that they expected no increases.

The latest postponement was welcomed by liberal activists and economists who argue that the recovery remains incomplete. Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, introduced legislation on Thursday directing the Fed to push the unemployment rate below 4 percent. While the bill has no chance of winning approval in the Republican-controlled Congress, Mr. Conyers addressed a rally organized by the Center for Popular Democracy outside an office building where Ms. Yellen spoke, joining in a chant of “Don’t raise interest rates.”

Critics expressed concern that the Fed has adopted increasingly ambitious goals for its stimulus campaign. “There is always a reason to chicken out,” said Dean Croushore, a professor of economics at the University of Richmond. “The Fed will lose credibility over time, as it fails to follow its own prior announcements about when it will increase rates.”

Ms. Yellen, asked about the efforts to put public pressure on the Fed, which have mounted in recent months, dryly observed, “We have been receiving advice from a large number of economists and interested groups.”

She denied that outside pressure had influenced the Fed’s decision. She also said it had not been influenced by concerns about a potential government shutdown, which could disrupt growth, though she said that it “would be more than unfortunate.”

The Fed’s decision is probably a “mixed blessing” for the global economy,” Eswar S. Prasad, an economics professor at Cornell, said in an email. Instead of new pressures, investors must deal with continued uncertainty.

A Fed increase, for example, might have prompted investors to pull money out of countries like Turkey or Brazil, damaging their economies, and reduced demand for imports from Europe and other developed countries. But the decision to stand pat also could weigh on Europe in the short term if it causes the euro to rise against the dollar, making things harder for exporters.

The American economy is outpacing the rest of the world, and Ms. Yellen said on Thursday that the Fed did not yet see evidence that growth was slowing.

Fed officials say they believe that labor market conditions have nearly returned to normal. In the new round of economic projections, officials estimated unemployment would stabilize next year at 4.8 percent, just below the August level of 5.1 percent.

Officials also remain confident that inflation will rebound, although perhaps a little slowly because of the recent downturn in the prices of oil and other commodities. Since the financial crisis, inflation has remained consistently below the central bank’s 2 percent annual target, lately rising just 0.3 percent over the previous year.

Fed officials argue that a tighter labor market will lead to higher inflation as employers are finally prodded to pay higher wages. But, Ms. Yellen said on Thursday, that will happen more slowly than the unemployment rate might suggest, because people not counted among the unemployed — like those who have stopped looking for work or have taken part-time jobs — may start looking again as conditions improve.

James A. Wilcox, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said that it was difficult to find evidence for a strong connection between inflation and employment, particularly over the last decade. Inflation fell less than expected during the recession, and it has increased less than expected in the aftermath.

“The events of the last 10 years have caused a lot of rethinking and stomach acid within the Federal Reserve and the research community,” Dr. Wilcox said.

Recent history has reinforced the more basic point that it takes a lot to change the underlying pace of inflation. That stability has allowed the Fed to press its stimulus campaign, but Dr. Wilcox said it also provided a good reason for the Fed to be wary of allowing inflation to climb, because reversing the trend could be very painful.

“If the heat builds slowly, and it can only be turned down slowly, then you have to move ahead of time,” he said. “That’s why there’s sympathy for the idea of starting to raise rates relatively soon.”

Given the weakness of economic growth, however, Ms. Yellen reiterated on Thursday that the Fed planned to raise rates more slowly than its past practice. Fed officials expect the benchmark rate to reach 2.6 percent by the end of 2017.

In June, they predicted the rate would reach 2.9 percent. Officials also expect the rate to reach a new plateau of about 3.5 percent, less than the June prediction of 3.8 percent and significantly below the level once regarded as normal. Such a low plateau would limit the Fed’s ability to respond to economic downturns.

The Fed has already held its benchmark rate near zero much longer than it once expected. It announced in 2012 that it would keep rates near zero at least until the unemployment rate fell below 6.5 percent. That threshold was crossed in April 2014.

Last winter, when the Fed ended its bond-buying campaign, officials pointed to June as the most likely moment for “liftoff” from the so-called zero bound.

Some officials have made clear they are not inclined to wait much longer.

Stanley Fischer, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned in late August that officials would not be able to postpone a decision until all doubts were resolved. “When the case is overwhelming,” he said, “if you wait that long, then you’ve waited too long.”

Ms. Yellen echoed that warning on Thursday. “We don’t want to wait until we’ve fully met both of our objectives to tighten monetary policy,” she said.

The Fed’s hesitation on Thursday echoed events of two years ago, when investors expected the central bank to announce at its September 2013 meeting that it was tapering its bond purchases. The Fed demurred, citing uncertainty about economic conditions.

Instead of September, it acted in December.

Source: New York Times