Ana María Archila and Héctor Figueroa on Immigration Reform
Cuatro panelistas explican los logros y obstáculos de las marchas pro-inmigrantes de primero de mayo que llevan ya casi una década. Visitan el programa Héctor Figueroa, presidente del sindicato...
Cuatro panelistas explican los logros y obstáculos de las marchas pro-inmigrantes de primero de mayo que llevan ya casi una década. Visitan el programa Héctor Figueroa, presidente del sindicato 32BJ, la abogada, directora de la Coalición del Norte de Manhattan por los Derechos de los Inmigrantes Ángela Fernández, el pastor luterano Fabián Arias de la iglesia Sión y Ana María Archila, co-directora ejecutiva del Centro por la Democracia Popular.
Inmigrantes hispanos sufren más accidentes en las obras, indica estudio
NY1 Noticias – October 24, 2013 -
Un nuevo estudio indica que los trabajadores inmigrantes hispanos son más propensos a morir en trabajos de la construcción.
...
NY1 Noticias – October 24, 2013 -
Un nuevo estudio indica que los trabajadores inmigrantes hispanos son más propensos a morir en trabajos de la construcción.
La investigación, realizada por “Center for Popular Democracy”, que abarca desde los años 2001 a 2011, también señala que la debilitación de la Ley de Andamios de Nueva York, dañaría desproporcionalmente a los inmigrantes y a los afroamericanos.
El estudio halló que los trabajadores latinos del estado de Nueva York se enfrentan a mayores peligros en la construcción que otros grupos.
En Nueva York, el 60% de las víctimas investigadas por caídas desde posiciones elevadas fueron latinas o inmigrantes.
El 74% de estas caídas que resultaron mortales, fueron víctimas latinas.
Un número desproporcionadamente alto, ya que este grupo constituye sólo el 40% de los trabajadores de construcción.
De todos ellos, el 86% de fatalidades fueron de trabajadores sin sindicato.
Además de proteger la Ley de Andamios, el estudio recomienda, para que se eviten lesiones y muertes en el trabajo, la presencia de más inspectores, un entrenamiento más apropiado, y la utilización de equipos cuidadosamente revisados.
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Meet the Group of Feisty Urban Progressives Who Want to Transform the Country One City at a Time
The Nation - December 10, 2014, by Steve Early - A century ago, working-class radicals frustrated with the pace of change often scoffed at their more patient comrades in city government, calling...
The Nation - December 10, 2014, by Steve Early - A century ago, working-class radicals frustrated with the pace of change often scoffed at their more patient comrades in city government, calling them “sewer socialists.” The latter, however, numbered in the hundreds, and, in their heyday, were quite influential in cities both large and small. After being elected to municipal positions on the Socialist Party ticket, they labored mightily to improve local services, from public sanitation to street repair. They even encroached on private markets by expanding public housing and experimenting with municipal ownership of utilities.
The national expansion of popular democracy sought by these left-wing reformers was, sadly, never achieved under their party banner. But several decades later, their many ideas for putting government to work for the people found traction during the New Deal. Programs to promote social equality and economic opportunity first tested at the state or local level became a Depression-era lifeline for millions of Americans nationwide.
In the twenty-first century, many on the left still yearn for economic and policy victories on the scale of the 1930s and the emergence at the federal level of a counter-force that might one again curb the influence of corporate America. While waiting for that second coming, progressive activists have, like the “sewer socialists” of old, been forced to grapple with serious problems—national and even global in nature—at the municipal level instead.
Some of the bravest (or most ambitious) among them have sought and won local elected office. So, in city halls across the country, they are now trying to deploy the limited resources of local government to fight poverty, inequality and environmental degradation at a moment when higher levels of government have failed to address such problems or made them worse. To maintain public support, these reform-minded mayors, city councilors, county commissioners and allied civil servants must be as concerned about street paving and policing as saving the planet from global warming.
Until recently, most of these “pothole progressives” have toiled largely in isolation. They chipped away at local injustice or city hall dysfunction in ad hoc fashion with little national infrastructure to sustain or support them. But as their ranks have swelled in recent years, several networks have developed to promote greater coordination of this difficult work through systematic sharing of information, ideas, and technical expertise.
From December 4 to 6, the only of these groups to focus exclusively on cities, Local Progress, hosted a lively and racially diverse “convening” in New York City to celebrate recent municipal election victories and progressive policy wins, while laying the groundwork for more. Local Progress is funded by several national unions and social-change foundations. Its individual and organizational affiliates profess a “shared commitment to a strong middle and working class, equal justice under law, sustainable and livable cities, and good government that serves the public interest effectively.” Its mission? “To drive public policy at the local level—an area of governance that is too often ignored by the progressive movement.”
Among the “electeds” gathered in New York City for the Local Progress third annual meeting, there was little moping about the Democratic Party’s now much weakened condition in various state capitols and Washington, DC, as a result of last month’s midterm elections. Instead, they and their larger supporting cast of labor and community organizers, public policy advocates and social-change funders all resolved to expand their influence at the local level, where reform is still possible. To hasten this goal, the organizers distributed a sixty-page compilation of “case studies and best practices” from around the country, co-produced with the Center for Popular Democracy. This dense, well-documented guide provides an ambitious blueprint for improving local labor standards, housing and education, policing practices, environmental sustainability, treatment of immigrants, voting rights and financing of elections.
Local Progress has recruited 400 members in forty states; about a third turned up for its latest annual meeting, with impressive representation from the city councils of San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Tacoma, Denver, New Orleans, New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia. Mayoral participants included everyone from the high-profile chief executive of the host city, Bill de Blasio, to his far less well-known, but equally feisty, West Coast counterpart, Meghan Sahli-Wells. She hails from Culver City, California, a Los Angeles County enclave with a population smaller than some New York City neighborhoods.
But that difference in scale hasn’t stopped Sahli-Wells from making waves of her own, as an enviro-oriented “bike mayor” who helped secure a ban on single-use plastic bags and has been working tirelessly to ban fracking as well. Now her talk about property tax reform has local realtors organizing against her and wishing she had never been chosen by her council peers to be the city’s part-time mayor. “My Chamber of Commerce hates me,” she reported, but expressed confidence that “harnessing the power of community” would enable her to overcome business opposition to some of her future plans.
De Blasio welcomed such diverse colleagues amid the ornate surroundings of the New York City Council chamber. He was joined by Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Brooklyn councilmember Brad Lander, who both described the salutary effect of having a Progressive Caucus of nineteen in the city’s fifty-one-member leadership body.
The Big Apple’s affable, lanky mayor quickly gave what an alarmed New York Post called, the next day, “a fawning shout-out to Seattle.” And indeed, de Blasio did hail Seattle city councilmember Nick Licata, chair of Local Progress, and others from “the Left Coast,” for their leading role in the nationwide minimum-wage campaign that has now bettered the pay of seven million workers. “We all reference each other,” de Blasio noted. “We all build on each other’s work…. Every time we succeed, it builds momentum for other cities.”
The job of Local Progress members, the mayor argued, is to be organizers, not just elected officials. As a result of the group’s collective efforts, “change is coming from the grassroots and working its way up—real, sustained and lasting change.”
In the smaller strategy sessions that followed, participants shared information and ideas on a wide range of topics. These included “participatory budgeting”—an experiment now underway in New York City to solicit neighborhood input on spending priorities—and multi-state efforts to expand public financing of candidates for local and county office. According to Emmanuel Caicedo, state affairs manager for Demos who spoke at the conference, this election reform was a key factor in making progressives more competitive electorally in New York City and enabling them, once in office, to expand the reach of paid sick day legislation. “Without this matching funds system, councilmembers would not be able to do the right thing for their constituents, “ he said.
Local Progress workshop turnout and the intensity of discussion were both driven, in part, by the momentum of events unfolding outside the gathering. The latest round of national fast-food worker protests and street demonstrations in Manhattan over the grand jury decision in the Eric Garner case provided an urgent backdrop for brainstorming about workers’ rights and major reform of US police departments.
On the labor front, city officials were reminded by several speakers from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO that minimum wage hikes, statutory entitlement to paid sick days, and better enforcement of local labor standards still doesn’t give enough Americans the workplace voice that collective bargaining provides. More needs to be done, they argued, to help workers for government contractors or in public facilities, like airports, to win bargaining rights without management interference. “Having a union is necessary to sustain gains,” Héctor Figueroa, president of SEIU Local 32BJ, pointed out.
Few labor allies in Local Progress question the value of unionization—but some did express concern about unions being unhelpful in their own past municipal campaigns. For example, Anders Ibsen, an earnest 28-year-old city councilor from Washington State, sought advice from AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre about dealing with conservative “business unionists” who’ve tried to thwart progressive initiatives in Tacoma. In the same panel discussion, San Diego councilmember David Alvarez—a recent labor-backed candidate for mayor—recalled the initial opposition he faced from a major AFL-CIO affiliate. According to Alvarez, it took much patient relationship-building to win over this union, despite his strong commitment to local labor causes like taxi-driver organizing.
Before their gathering ended, most of the city officials present endorsed a Local Progress statement criticizing the “excessive use of force” by police officers in Ferguson, Cleveland, and New York City. They urged federal officials to ensure “that cities around the country end discriminatory policing practices and replace them with programs that respect and empower residents…”
Just how to do that, at the local level, was the subject of much debate at a session on “Winning Real Police and Criminal Justice Reform.” Panelists discussed remedies like requiring police body cameras, retraining officers, recruiting more from minority communities, and offering them financial incentives for local residency. Lisa Daugaard, policy director for the Public Defender Association in Seattle, cautioned against quick fixes, including indiscriminate body camera use and training programs unaccompanied by real institutional change. “It’s easy to hold a three-day training session. It’s very difficult to have training change behavior, habits, instincts,” she said.
Daugaard reported on Seattle’s Community Police Commission (CPC), an oversight body, which she co-chairs and includes two active members of the police force. According to Daugaard, the CPC has spurred a “deeply transformative” shift in the treatment of jobless, homeless, addicted, and/or mentally ill residents previously targeted for police round-ups and jailing, with a disproportionate racial impact. By expanding relevant social services and, in effect, decriminalizing vagrancy and low-level drug dealing, Seattle has been able to “re-humanize” at least some “daily interactions between police and the community.”
And just as cities like Seattle can’t arrest their way out of petty crime spawned by poverty and unemployment, Daugaard warned against a singular focus on prosecutions of police misconduct, after the fact. Many such cases are likely to fail, she noted, and, even if successful, don’t transform the departmental culture or quality of police-community relationships. Jumaane Williams, a New York City councilmember from Brooklyn, agreed with Daugaard that community policing done right “works better than the lock-‘em-up strategy” that still prevails in most cities, even some with Local Progress ties. “The problem, “said Williams, “is when we send policemen to do the job that everyone needs to do. Public safety is an everybody kind of thing.”
Turning the overall Local Progress agenda into actual public policy in more places is also “an everybody kind of thing.” As Seattle’s Nick Licata observed, urban progressives “need both an outside and inside game” to win because neither street politics nor electoral victories alone can change the status quo sufficiently. Instead, he said, “you need people on the inside and people protesting on the outside to provide insiders with backbone.”
By bringing both catalysts for change together, in one organizational network, Local Progress is not blazing an entirely new path or one as explicitly anti-capitalist as left movement builders a century ago. But, in a modern political landscape otherwise bereft of many bright spots at the moment, contesting for power locally, in ecumenical fashion, still makes sense for any group of progressives with higher aspirations and longer-term societal goals.
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Charter Schools are Cheating Your Kids: New Report Reveals Massive Fraud, Mismanagement, Abuse
Salon - May 7, 2014, by Paul Rosenberg - Just in time for National Charter School Week, there’s a new report highlighting the predictable perils of...
Salon - May 7, 2014, by Paul Rosenberg - Just in time for National Charter School Week, there’s a new report highlighting the predictable perils of turning education into a poorly regulated business. Titled “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud and Abuse,” the report focused on 15 states representing large charter markets, out of the 42 states that have charter schools. Drawing on news reports, criminal complaints, regulatory findings, audits and other sources, it “found fraud, waste and abuse cases totaling over $100 million in losses to taxpayers,” but warned that due to inadequate oversight, “the fraud and mismanagement that has been uncovered thus far might be just the tip of the iceberg.”
While there are plenty of other troubling issues surrounding charter schools — from high rates of racial segregation, to their lackluster overall performance records, to questionable admission and expulsion practices — this report sets all those admittedly important issues aside to focus squarely on activity that appears it could be criminal, and arguably totally out of control. It does not even mention questions raised by sky-high salaries paid to some charter CEOs, such as 16 New York City charter school CEOs who earned more than the head of the city’s public school system in 2011-12. Crime, not greed, is the focus here.
In short, the report is about as apolitical as can be imagined: It is narrowly focused on a white-collar crime wave of staggering proportions, and what can be done about it within the existing framework of widespread charter schools.
The report, co-authored by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education, makes the point that the problem of charter school waste, fraud and abuse, which it focuses on, is just one symptom of the underlying problem: inadequate regulation of charter schools. But it’s a massive symptom, which has so far received only fragmentary coverage.The report takes its title from a section of a report to Congress by the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General, a report that took note of “a steady increase in the number of charter school complaints” and warned that state level agencies were failing “to provide adequate oversight needed to ensure that Federal funds [were] properly used and accounted for.”
But, the report noted, it’s not just the federal government that should be concerned. Reform efforts are underway in several states; Hawaii even repealed its existing charter school law in 2013, and put strict new oversight measures in place, and “Even the Walton Family Foundation, an avid charter advocate, launched a $5 million campaign in 2012 to make oversight of charters schools more stringent.”
“We expected to find a fair amount of fraud when we began this project, but we did not expect to find over $100 million in taxpayer dollars lost,” said Kyle Serrette, the director of education justice at the Center for Popular Democracy. “That’s just in 15 states. And that figure fails to capture the real harm to children. Clearly, we should hit the pause button on charter expansion until there is a better oversight system in place to protect our children and our communities.”
The report explained that the problem has its roots in a historical disconnect between the original intentions that launched the charter school movement and the commercial forces that have overtaken it since. At first, the report noted:
Lawmakers created charter schools to allow educators to explore new methods and models of teaching. To allow this to happen, they exempted the schools from the vast majority of regulations governing the traditional public school system. The goal was to incubate innovations that could then be used to improve public schools. i The ability to take calculated risks with small populations of willing teachers, parents, and students was the original design. With so few people and schools involved, the risk to participants and the public was relatively low.
But the character of the movement has changed dramatically since then. As charter school growth has skyrocketed (doubling three times since 2000), “the risks are high and growing, while the benefits are less clear,” the report continued, adding:
This is not an uncommon occurrence in our nation’s history. In the past—in some cases, our very recent past—industries such as banking and lending have outgrown their respective regulatory safety nets. Without sufficient regulations to ensure true public accountability, incompetent and/or unethical individuals and firms can (and have) inflict great harm on communities.
The report found that “charter operator fraud and mismanagement is endemic to the vast majority of states that have passed a charter school law.” It organized the abuse into six basic categories, each of which is treated in its own section:
• Charter operators using public funds illegally for personal gain; • School revenue used to illegally support other charter operator businesses; • Mismanagement that puts children in actual or potential danger; • Charters illegally requesting public dollars for services not provided; • Charter operators illegally inflating enrollment to boost revenues; and, • Charter operators mismanaging public funds and schools.
Perhaps most disturbingly, under the first category, crooked charter school officials displayed a wide range of lavish, compulsive or tawdry tastes. Examples include:
• Joel Pourier, former CEO of Oh Day Aki Heart Charter School in Minnesota, who embezzled $1.38 million from 2003 to 2008. He used the money on houses, cars, and trips to strip clubs. Meanwhile, according to an article in the Star Tribune, the school “lacked funds for field trips, supplies, computers and textbooks.”
• Nicholas Trombetta, founder of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School is accused of diverting funds from it for his private purchases. He allegedly bought houses, a Florida Condominium and a $300,000 plane, hid income from the IRS, formed businesses that billed even though they had done no work, and took $550,000 in kickbacks for a laptop computer contract.
• A regular financial audit in 2009 of the Langston Hughes Academy in New Orleans uncovered theft of $660,000 by Kelly Thompson, the school’s business manager. Thompson admitted that from shortly after she assumed the position until she was fired 15 months later, she diverted funds to herself in order to support her gambling in local casinos.
Others spent their stolen money on everything from a pair of jet skis for $18,000 to combined receipts of $228 for cigarettes and beer, to over $30,000 on personal items from Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue, Louis Vuitton, Coach and Tommy Hilfiger. But the real damage came from the theft of resources for children’s future.
“Our school system exists to serve students and enrich communities,” said Sabrina Stevens, executive director of Integrity in Education. “School funding is too scarce as it is; we can hardly afford to waste the resources we do have on people who would prioritize exotic vacations over school supplies or food for children. We also can’t continue to rely on the media or isolated whistle-blowers to identify these problems. We need to have rules in place that can systematically weed out incompetent or unscrupulous charter operators before they pose a risk to students and taxpayers.”
Stevens was not just expressing a nebulous hope. The report also offered a set of proposals on how to go about reining in the abuses. Initial suggestions on how to respond to each kind of abuse are presented in each of the six areas mentioned above, but there is also a comprehensive framework integrating them into a coherent whole.
The report’s first proposal is that all states should establish an oversight “Office of Charter Schools.” It “should have the statutory responsibility, authority, and resources to investigate fraud, waste, mismanagement and misconduct,” including the authority to refer findings for prosecution. It should have “an appropriate level of staffing” so that “The ratio of charter schools to full-time investigators employed by the Office should not exceed ten to one.” It should have the power to place distribution of charter school funds on hold. And it should have the authority to intervene in funding or other decisions made by charter authorizing entities if they are violating state or federal law.
A second proposal is that states amend their charter laws to “explicitly declare that charter schools are public schools, and are subject to the same non-discrimination and transparency requirements as are other publicly funded schools.”
A third proposal is to require public online availability of each charter school’s original application and charter agreement.
Not surprisingly, a number of proposals target those running charter schools. Specifically, regarding charter school governing board members, the report proposes: 1) Require them to live in close proximity to the school/s physical location. 2) Require boards to be elected “with representation of parents (elected by parents), teachers (elected by teachers) and in the case of high schools, students (elected by students).” Other board members should be “residents of the school district in which the school/s operate.” 3) Require board members to file full financial disclosure and conflict-of-interest reports, similar to those required of traditional school district board members — and post them online on the school’s website. 4) Hold board members legally liable for fraud or malfeasance occurring at the school or schools that they oversee.
More broadly, charter schools — and the oversight entities that authorize them — should be publicly transparent in the following ways: 1) A full list of each charter school’s governing board members, officers and administrators with affiliation and contact information should be available on the school’s website. 2) Minutes from governing board meetings, the school’s policies, and information about staff should be available on the school’s website. 3) Charter schools should be fully compliant with state open meetings/open records laws. 4) Charter school financial documents should be publicly disclosed annually, on the authorizer’s website, including detailed information about the use of both public and private funds by the school and its management entities. 5) Charter schools should be independently audited annually, with audits published on the school’s websites. 6) All vendor or service contracts over $25,000 should be fully disclosed. No such contracts should be allowed with any entity in which the school operator, or any board member, has any personal interest.
If most of these sound like simple common sense, that’s pretty much just the point. There are plenty of issues around education that are controversial. Protecting ourselves, our children and their future against a massive white-collar crime wave should not be one of them.
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Latinos Presentan La Mayor Tasa De Mortalidad Por Accidentes En Industria De La Construcción De Nueva York
Latinos Post – October 25, 2013 -
La población hispana e inmigrante que es empleada en el sector de la construcción del estado de Nueva York es el grupo étnico más vulnerable a...
Latinos Post – October 25, 2013 -
La población hispana e inmigrante que es empleada en el sector de la construcción del estado de Nueva York es el grupo étnico más vulnerable a los accidentes fatales en su lugar de trabajo, según reveló este jueves 24 de octubre un reporte realizado por el Centro por la Democracia Popular.
De acuerdo con El Diario NY, Los datos arrojados por el estudio, muestran que entre 2003 y 2011, del total de muertes por caídas y accidentes en las construcciones registrados en La Gran Manzana, el 60% de los casos los fallecidos resultaron ser hombres hispanos y/o inmigrantes.
Se trata de una cifra alarmante ya que 75 trabajadores de la construcción mueren por accidentes de manera anual en el estado de Nueva York, según dio a conocer la periodista Blanca Rosa Vílchez a la cadena de noticias de Univisión.
La fuente señala que en Nueva York el 41% de los trabajadores del sector construcción son hispanos. Sin embargo, el informe dado a conocer este jueves demostró que el 74% de las muertes por accidentes corresponden al mismo grupo étnico.
Un problema de seguridad
El pasado 24 de septiembre, trabajadores de la construcción en Brooklyn se manifestaron para exigir mejoras en las condiciones de seguridad en sus lugares de trabajo, luego de que reportaran una importante alza en los accidentes relacionadas con la escasa inversión en esta materia que las compañías constructores ofrecen, lo que ha causado graves accidentes que en muchos casos han cobrado la vida de trabajadores que reciben un salario mínimo.
En su momento Diario NY dio a conocer que los obreros se manifestaron en el 227 de la avenida Carlton, en Fort Greene, lugar en el que el 10 de septiembre un trabajador de 62 años perdió la vida al venirse abajo el techo de uno de los apartamentos en los que trabajaba.
De acuerdo con los manifestantes, las compañías contratistas de Nueva York compran materiales de mala calidad con tal de ahorrar dinero y no invierten en cursos de seguridad para sus trabajadores, lo que deja a los constructores en una situación peligrosa.
Miedo a denunciar por falta de documentación legal
La comunidad latina que trabaja en la construcción es doblemente vulnerable a esta situación, ya que muchos de los obreros son inmigrantes indocumentados, por lo que en caso de sufrir algún accidente prefieren no denunciar a la empresa constructora por miedo a ser deportados o despedidos.
Por si esto fuera poco, en caso de reportar violaciones a las normas de seguridad, las multas a las compañías constructoras son por montos muy bajos, lo que facilita que se siga omitiendo la inversión en seguridad en los lugares de trabajo.
Según destaca Univisión, las multas a las que se enfrentan las constructoras no superan los 2 mil dólares en caso de accidente, y los 12 mil en caso de muerte de un trabajador, una cifra que refleja la dimensión de los riesgos con los que los obreros de la construcción deben trabajar todos los días.
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Activists Seek More Public Input in Fed President Picks
Wall Street Journal - December 11, 2014, by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa - A group of left-leaning activists is taking aim at the process for selecting the presidents of the Federal...
Wall Street Journal - December 11, 2014, by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa - A group of left-leaning activists is taking aim at the process for selecting the presidents of the Federal Reserve‘s 12 regional banks, saying it lacks sufficient transparency and public input.
Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser and Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher have announced they will retire next year and both district banks are conducting searches for successors. The two men have been critics of the central bank’s prolonged low-rates policies, saying they aren’t doing very much to boost employment or growth.
Federal law dictates the process for choosing the regional presidents. They are picked by a subset of the banks’ boards of directors, with approval from the Fed’s Washington-based board of governors. The regional bank boards include bankers, business executives and some community representatives, but directors from banks supervised by the Fed don’t have a vote in hiring the banks’ presidents.
Commercial banks that are members of the Fed system own the stock of their district’s reserve bank and elect most of its directors. Remaining directors are appointed by the Fed board in Washington.
The activist group, led by the Center for Popular Democracy, a national nonprofit organization, said it is in talks with the Dallas Fed about increasing transparency in its selection process and is planning a march in Philadelphia from Constitution Hall to the Philadelphia Fed on Monday. Members of the group plan to hold a press conference outside the regional Fed bank like the one they held in Washington in November, at which community members and leaders will tell some of their stories.
The appointments are “too important to be done behind closed doors, too important to be dominated by financial and corporate interests,” said Ady Barkan, a staff attorney at the center.
“We are concerned there is not going to be enough community and public engagement,” Mr. Barkan said. “Corporate and financial elites already have tremendous influence over monetary policy and interest rates. The Fed should also listen to the tens of millions of working families who are not experiencing a recovery.”
The Fed board, the Dallas Fed and the Philadelphia Fed declined to comment.
In response to the activists’ concerns, voiced during a conversation with Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen in November, the central bank has just published a new list of “frequently asked questions” about the regional president selection process.
Kendra Brooks, a member of Action United in Philadelphia, a community organizing group, said she and others have met with some officials at the Philadelphia Fed, but have yet to be granted a meeting they’ve requested with Mr. Plosser or received an answer to their offer to take top officials around local communities.
“We’re hoping we can push them a little harder about allowing a meeting or taking a tour of their communities,” said Ms. Brooks.
Her story is an all-too-familiar one in the Great Recession of 2007-09. Having lost a 15-year job as a program director at Easter Seals, a nonprofit that helps people with disabilities, Ms. Brooks, 42 years old, said it took her a year and a half to find work again—and she now makes just half what she used to. She also lost her home to a foreclosure.
Fed governors are appointed by the U.S. president, subject to Senate confirmation. They all are voting members of the central bank’s powerful policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee.
The New York Fed president is the vice chairman of the FOMC and a permanent voting member. The other 11 presidents vote on a rotating basis. The presidents run the regional Fed banks, which supervise the private banks in their districts. The presidents also move markets and influence Fed policy through their public remarks.
The center organized activists to appear at the Kansas City Fed’s exclusive annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., in August. They argued the Fed should not start raising its benchmark short-term interest rate from near zero until the labor market improves more.
U.S. unemployment has fallen to 5.8%, historically elevated but much lower than postrecession peaks. Some policy makers worry that number masks pockets of weakness including a large number of workers who are only working part-time because they cannot find full time jobs.
Many investors and top Fed officials expect the first rate increase in the middle of next year.
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Jenkins says Trump coming to West Virginia’s Greenbrier
Jenkins says Trump coming to West Virginia’s Greenbrier
Protest organizers, including the Center for Popular Democracy, say they expect more than 500 people from several states to show up and demonstrate against cuts in social safety net programs....
Protest organizers, including the Center for Popular Democracy, say they expect more than 500 people from several states to show up and demonstrate against cuts in social safety net programs.
Read the full article here.
The charter school movement needs greater accountability
A recent study published by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy, entitled “...
A recent study published by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy, entitled “The Tip of the Iceberg,” found $203 million lost to fraud, corruption and mismanagement in charter schools, with a projected $1.4 billion in losses in 2015 alone. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is concerned as well: It has investigated schools in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Connecticut, Arizona, Ohio, Massachusetts, Indiana and Illinois.
Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform released a report detailing the standards that should be required to raise the charter sector to the level of equity and transparency that public schools must meet. Such reforms are popular: A 2015 poll showed that 89 percent of respondents favored making charter board meetings publicly accessible, 88 percent supported routine audits of their finances and 86 percent desired transparent budgets.
Whether or not one thinks that charter schools are a good thing, we should be able to agree that greater accountability strengthens our school system. However, many charter advocates have stood in the way of reform.
In California, four long-overdue bills that would bring a higher level of accountability to the state’s 1,100 charter schools were introduced last March. A 2015 report from the Center for Popular Democracy documented how charter schools in California have lost $81 million in public funds to fraud and abuse. Over the last 10 years California’s Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team revealed multi-million dollar scams in Los Angeles, Oakland and Santa Ana, to name a few cities, as well as rampant abuse in what was the state’s largest charter operator.
Instead of supporting common-sense reform, the state’s charter industry, represented by the California Charter School Association, has fiercely opposed the bills. “We believe current laws address these concerns and these proposals are unnecessary,” the lobbying group wrote in a press release.
California, the state with the largest number of charter schools, should lead the way for reform. But progress is slow going: There is little indication that any of the bills will make progress in Sacramento this year.
In Connecticut, it took a scandal to spur this kind of reform. A 2014 study from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers ranked Connecticut as the seventh-lowest state with regard to charter accountability. In response, the state passed a law in July that makes all charter school records a matter of public record subject to the Freedom of Information Act. It also requires charter schools to have anti-nepotism and conflict of interest policies, and it empowers the state’s Department of Education to post each school’s certified audit statement on its website.
The reform was spurred by a massive scandal around a prominent charter school figure named Michael Sharpe. For years Sharpe led a chain of schools called the Jumoke Academy and advocated for unfettered charter expansion. Yet, in early 2015, in the midst of an FBI investigation and after more than six months of relentless investigative reporting by the Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s Department of Education found Sharpe’s network riddled with “rampant nepotism.” Its report also revealed that Sharpe had ordered “expensive and ornate modifications” to an apartment owned by his company, which he then rented for his own use.
In the aftermath of these revelations, Connecticut’s reform law was approved in May by a 35 to 1 vote in the state Senate and 142 to 3 in the state Assembly. While this is a positive development, other states should not have to wait for a scandal of this magnitude before demanding greater accountability.
Charter reform can be a bipartisan cause. In Ohio, Republican State Senator Peggy Lehner began pushing for laws to require greater disclosure of how public funds are spent after, she says, seeing “story after story” about charter school scandals. A recent investigation by the Akron Beacon Journal found that of the 300 charter schools reporters contacted, only a fourth provided basic information like board members’ names. Meanwhile, 87 percent of charters got Ds or Fs on the most recent state report cards.
Major charter advocates spoke to the need for reform. “Charter schools are public schools, and there should not be a veil of secrecy,” said Chad Aldis, vice president for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which sponsors 11 charter schools in the state. “We need to have transparency.”
In June, a bill that passed the state Senate that would require Ohio to annually audit all charter school operators to monitor the use of public funds. Charter schools would also have to obey open records laws and other transparency standards that are already the norm in public schools.
Such changes should be no-brainers. And yet the bill has stalled in the General Assembly. With much of the debate going on behind closed doors, the public has thus far not been able to get a clear sense for the cause of the delay.
Sunshine advocates fear that the inaction of the Ohio House bodes ill for the bill’s future. “It appears that the poor-performing charter school sector has again won the day,” argues Stephen Dyer, former legislator and Education Policy Fellow at the progressive think tank Innovation Ohio.
Rather than standing in the way of greater accountability, lawmakers should view the current bill as a first step. Not only should the measures be passed, they should be strengthened. Communications and overhead costs would not have to be disclosed under the state Senate’s bill, casualties of the charter industry’s lobbying.
Moreover, Ohio’s bizarre system of charter approval would remain largely unchanged under the bill. Instead of having a few authorizing agencies to approve charter schools, Ohio allows dozens of groups, including non-profits, to sponsor and approve charter schools. These authorizers receive payments from the schools and rarely close them as a result.
The public deserves better — in Ohio and beyond. If charter schools are to become a permanent and respected part of public education in America, their champions will need to clean up their sector and let the sunshine in.
Source: Al Jazeera America
JPMorgan boss: 'Trump is our pilot' even when we disagree
JPMorgan boss: 'Trump is our pilot' even when we disagree
Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and one of the few big-bank bosses to keep his job after the Great Recession, will keep advising President Trump even when...
Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and one of the few big-bank bosses to keep his job after the Great Recession, will keep advising President Trump even when they might disagree, Dimon told shareholders at the company's annual meeting at its Delaware Technology Center north of Wilmington.
"Trump is the pilot flying our airplane," and as "a patriot" Dimon will continue to serve on a Presidential advisory panel, even though he may not "agree with all his policies," he said during a shareholder question-and-answer session.
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Monday's MLK50 live blog
In addition to Wallace-Gobern, panelists will include Alvina Yeh, executive director of the Asian Pacific Labor Alliance; Tracey Corder, director of the Racial Justice Campaign at the Center for...
In addition to Wallace-Gobern, panelists will include Alvina Yeh, executive director of the Asian Pacific Labor Alliance; Tracey Corder, director of the Racial Justice Campaign at the Center for Popular Democracy; and Jeremiah Edmond, president of G.A.M.E. Local 101.
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