Campaign News

Niccolo Machiavelli would have been proud of the folks who support the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). At the end of September the U.S. Department of Education approved another $245 million in grants to eight states under the federal Charter School Program. That brings to nearly $4 billion in charters in the last two and a half decades.

The Center for Popular Democracy spelled out in its report “Charter School Black Hole” how tax dollars have gone to “ghost schools,” charters that never opened. In the case of schools that did open only to fail, there was no accounting for money spent or assets purchased.

There was no accountability to the school children affected by charter fraud, waste, and incompetence. Virtual charters like the K12 operation performed markedly worse. They are similar to fantasy football games — those that are bet on but are never physically played.

Scores of major companies have abandoned ALEC after protests from their stockholders and clients. Recently the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees wrote to the CEO of AARP urging that group to get out of the lobbying group. They asked that the senior citizens group stop “endorsing an organization that brings corporate lobbyists and elected officials from around the country together to write anti-senior, anti-family legislation in a process that locks out the public and subverts our democratic process.” Among other things ALEC has pushed for is repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

Enterprise, the largest car rental company in the world, owns Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National and Alamo, has moved away from the lobbying juggernaut. Part of the push to accomplish that divorce came from a petition by a petition with 89,000 signatures.

The company’s membership in ALEC, which has poured considerable resources into denying and minimizing scientific efforts to quantify climate change, was brought to the Guardian’s attention by the watchdog group the Center for Media and Democracy.

Growing concern about climate change has led many high-tech companies such as eBay, Expedia, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to abandon the ALEC ship. In 2015, environmental concerns pushed energy-industry giants, Royal Dutch Shell and BP, as well as the American Electric Power and the Canadian National Railway to quit.

A laundry list of model bills proposed in many state legislatures is very long — and very threatening.

For a listing of bills sponsored by ALEC, go to the website for the Center for Media and Democracy: www.alecexposed.org. Download the zip files of ALEC model bills for agriculture, energy, and the environment. Consider one such bill aimed at land use controls.

One bill would repeal all land use planning and zoning in rural counties by both county and state governments. Under the bill property could be put to any use, without regard for single-family, agricultural, or industrial zoning, or environmental land use restrictions. Under that restraint, no one could prevent a nude bar or body shop next to a school. Nor could local government prevent polluting industries from building in their jurisdiction.

If you want more information about the machinations of this cabal, simply contact Senator Josh Harkins and Representative Jim Beckett, who are chairmen of the Mississippi chapter.

In closing, consider these words from the ALEC website: “When states resort to tax carve-outs in a misguided attempt to grow their economies, they are ignoring the bigger problem — an uncompetitive tax climate. More fundamentally, government should budget for outcomes. This means identifying the core functions of state government and measuring results.”

Reviewing their handling of budgets and tax give aways in the past year, one can only wish they had taken their own advice.

TJ Ray is a retired professor of English at Ole Miss.

By Oxford Eagle Contributors

Source

What do Credo Action, MoveOn, Idaho Medical Advocacy, CPD Action, Daily Kos, People’s Action, Elizabeth Warren, Mom’s Rising, Our Revolution, Change.Org, AARP, and the Economic Policy Institute have in common?

Well, possibly lots of things — each is an advocacy group working to change America.

Read the full article here.

Buzzfeed - 05.21.2015 - Randa Jama, a wheelchair attendant at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, would be referred to as a “voluntary” part-time worker in the jobs data produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). She only works weekends, spending weekdays caring for her children, in large part because she couldn’t afford a babysitter without much better hours and pay.

Though Jama says she would prefer to be working full-time, that information doesn’t filter through to the nation’s monthly employment report. The same goes for many other workers — almost a million, mainly women, one advocacy group estimates — who can’t work the full-time hours they want to, and aren’t classed alongside other unemployed or underemployed people in official data.

The distinction comes from a question, asked as part of the BLS population survey, about underemployment caused by “economic” or “non-economic reasons.” It classes factors like child care as non-economic reasons people aren’t working more hours - and commonly refers to these workers as “voluntarily” part time.

“The number of people working part time for economic reasons is a closely watched economic indicator,” reads the interviewer’s manual for the survey, as “a measure of underemployment and of the inability of the nation’s economy to generate the types of jobs desired.”

Those working part-time for “non-economic reasons” (sometimes referred to as “voluntarily” part-time) are not watched the same way.

“They reflect personal, rather than business, reasons for working part time,” the manual says. It means measurements of the economy’s ability to create full-time work could be overlooking many part-time working women who are not working full-time because of a lack of child care, or other family obligations.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argues that while the terminology “economic” and “non-economic” is correct, describing workers in need of child care as “voluntarily” part time is misleading.

“What we’re trying to measure is the strength of the economy,” Baker told BuzzFeed News. “For that, they’re asking the right question: ‘If the economy were stronger, would these people have jobs?’ But if the economy were stronger and these women still didn’t have child care, they still wouldn’t be working full-time.”

Baker said the unemployment numbers also don’t account for women who would like to be working full- or part-time, but aren’t actively looking for work because they can’t afford child care. Similarly, workers who are part-time because of transportation issues — such as an inability to get to and from jobs in the suburbs — would be counted as “voluntarily” part time for “non-economic reasons,” despite wanting full employment.

A recent study by the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), a liberal advocacy group, estimated about a million women want to work full-time but can’t due to these “voluntary” reasons.

“In theory the economy could be robust enough where these women could have their needs met,” said Aditi Sen, a CPD researcher who co-authored the study. Policymakers may put less focus on full employment for women, she argued, if the official statistics don’t include their desire for full time work.

Justin Wolfers, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and professor at the University of Michigan, said that the BLS isn’t hiding any data.

“There’s no doubt that above and beyond the people we count as unemployed there is slack at a number of margins,” he said, giving the example of jobless workers who are not actively seeking work but who would take jobs if they were offered them. This group is also not included in the top-line numbers of the jobs report.

Wolfers said the BLS publishes extensive data and statistics on those margins, adding that the CPD report may not be a “reflection on the current moment, but something that’s been going on.”

Karen Kosanovich, an economist with the Current Population Survey program at the BLS, said the survey asks those who are working part-time for non-economic reasons if they would prefer to be working full time, but their answers are not released with the jobs report data.

“The reason for part time work and the desire for full time work are separate,” said Kosanovich. “They’re asked in separate questions, and we don’t have any tables that include that [latter] information.”

The last time the BLS population survey questions were revised was back in 1994. New questions helped capture a population of workers that previously went unrecorded.

“The biggest thing the new questions caught were women and men working at the part-time margin, especially women doing work outside the home,” said Brad Hershbein, a visiting fellow at The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institute.

Both Hershbein and Baker said adding new questions in the BLS survey could help capture the growing share of contemporary workers with irregular schedules — such as those moonlighting as an Uber driver for 15 hours a week. They could show more people in the workforce working part-time — with ramifications for overall data on unemployment — just like the questions added in the ’90s did.

“They made these changes [to the survey] to keep up to date with who’s working and what work looks like now, but they haven’t updated it in 20 years,” Hershbein said. “And it turns out the way they asked the questions increased the labor force participation.”

Source: Buzzfeed

When I worked my way through college with a job at Chipotle, I often worked a so-called "clopen shift." I was closing the store I managed at 2 a.m. and returning to open the restaurant at 6 a.m. The work schedule didn't leave much time for sleep, let alone schoolwork. But with graduation around the corner, I figured that soon everything was going to change.

I would graduate, and I would get a job that would allow me to pay the bills, take care of my 8-year old daughter, and sleep at night.

But, since graduating this past spring, I have sent out 75 resumés but have only been invited for one interview. I’m looking for jobs that just aren’t there.

When the Federal Reserve gathers Thursday at their Federal Open Market Committee meeting to decide whether or not they will raise the interest rate, I hope they will keep me and others like me in mind.

Congress created the Federal Reserve with a two-pronged mission: to control inflation andto promote maximum employment. All the data shows that there is no risk of inflation – in fact, inflation is still running well-below the Fed’s own conservative target. But the Fed is still considering raising the interest rates, even though raising rates would do real harm to American workers who are still looking for jobs or working for low-wages, like me.

A higher interest rate means that fewer jobs will be created, and that the wages of workers at the bottom will remain too low to live on. That’s because when the Fed raises rates, they are deliberately trying to slow down the economy. They’re saying that there are too many jobs and wages are too high. They’re saying that the economy is exactly where it should be, that people like me are exactly where we should be.

It was not supposed to be this way – after all, I have a business management degree. If the Fed chooses to slow down the economy I may have to give up on getting a job I'm qualified for – the kind of job that I went to school for. I could find a job at McDonalds or Taco Bell, and go back to a work life that will leave me sleepless and struggling to support my daughter. That would be painful for me and my family and bad for the economy. I cannot imagine that this is what Fed officials are looking to do.

And yet, the Fed is considering a rate increase, even though working families – especially Black and Latino working families –are still struggling. Today, 19.5 percent of Black people are unemployed or underemployed, and 15.8 percent of Latinos are unemployed and underemployed. For Black high school graduates in the 17-20-year-old range who haven’t enrolled in college, the unemployment rate is over 50 percent.

If the Fed raises interest rates, we are ones who lose.

That the conservative powers in the Federal Reserve would even consider raising the interest rates shows us a lot about who they’re prioritizing in their decision. It shows us who the Fed is looking out for: the wealthy, Wall Street, and bankers. They are willing to sacrifice the livelihoods and aspirations of young people like me, whole communities of color, and low-income workers all purportedly to fight an inflation threat that doesn’t even exist.

The Fed’s decision on Thursday should be simple. One of the Fed’s mandates is to foster full employment, and wages still have not shown signs of significant growth since the financial crash. That’s a clear sign that America is far from full employment — and the Fed has not yet fulfilled its mandate.

Many in the Fed are claiming that our economy is in recovery, but for who? For Black and Latino Americans, the recovery hasn’t come yet. This week, we’ll see if the Fed is serious about promoting maximum employment for all Americans or just watching out for the few who are already doing well.

Source: CommonDreams