CPD IN THE NEWS

Taipei Times - November 16, 2014 - US labor and community organizers meeting with US Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen challenged officials who are ready to raise interest rates to first come visit the poorest neighborhoods with them before saying that the economy has recovered.

Kati Sipp, one of about two dozen activists meeting Yellen, said at a press conference on Friday in front of the central bank in Washington that she would show Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser “what life is like in this economy” for his city’s unemployed.

“Clearly Charles Plosser hasn’t been coming out the way that I work,” Pennsylvania Working Families director Sipp said. “I work on 60th Street in West Philadelphia in a storefront office and every single day someone or a couple of people come in to my office because they are looking for work.”

Members of the group met with Yellen and Fed governors Stanley Fischer, Jerome Powell and Lael Brainard. The coalition of 20 community groups, labor unions and religious leaders from around the US wants the Fed to hear the concerns of ordinary US residents as it prepares to raise rates. It is part of wider public pressure, including from legislators of both parties, who want more accountability and transparency from the central bank.

The Fed has been criticized by Democratic and Republican party groups over its rescue of big Wall Street banks in the financial crisis that began in 2008, and over subsequent steps to support the economy through zero interest rates and massive bond purchases.

The group meeting with Yellen and her colleagues on Friday included individuals struggling to find work despite the improving economic picture in the US, Ady Barkan, senior staff attorney at the Brooklyn-based Center for Popular Democracy, one of the organizers of the meeting, said in an interview.

“They all listened very intently and asked questions,” Barkan said of Yellen and the three governors. “They were very interested in hearing about the personal stories of the folks we brought.”

Barkan said Rounds told the Fed officials that “sky-high unemployment” in the St Louis area had contributed to “desperation” in the town.

Another speaker was Shemethia Butler, an unemployed woman from Washington. She recounted for Yellen how she was laid off from a job that offered no paid sick days after becoming ill and missing time at work, Barkan said.

The jobless rate has fallen to 5.8 percent from a 26-year high of 10 percent in October 2009. Interest rates have been held near zero since December 2008 and most Fed officials project that they will raise borrowing costs sometime next year.

Still, millions of US citizens can find only part-time work, while average hourly wages have risen at about a 2 percent pace for the past five years, barely outpacing inflation.

“The economy is not working for the vast majority of people,” Barkan told reporters before the meeting in front of the central bank headquarters facing the National Mall. “It’s too important of an institution to be controlled and dominated by big banks and corporations, rather than the public.”

In addition to low rates to help the unemployed, the groups are pushing for a more open and transparent search process for regional bank presidents that includes more community input. Barkan said the group asked Yellen for support in arranging meetings with each regional Fed president.

While formal changes to the process of selecting regional Fed leaders would require legislation, Barkan said the Fed board of governors held significant informal influence over the process.

“I’m sure they could change the process if they wanted to,” he said.

Plosser and Richard Fisher of Dallas both plan to retire next year and the “Fed Up” coalition wants more public input in naming their successors. Both banks have said they have hired executive search firms to find candidates.

Economist Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said the Fed’s willingness to arrange the meeting was “incredibly encouraging” because the central bank “is one of the most important institutions in the world, but few Americans know it.”

While the unemployment rate has declined to a six-year low, there remains “too large a gap between today and a healthy economy,” he said, adding that stakes are highest for disadvantaged groups, including African-Americans. Their unemployment rate tends to be twice as high as the broader US level both “in good times and in bad,” Bivens said.

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A group of musicians will be using their music to help convince voters not to support Donald Trump. Titled “30 Days, 30 Songs,” the project will release one track each day between now and the election in the hopes of creating a “Trump-Free America.”

Related: Roger Waters Trashes Donald Trump at Desert Trip Festival

Death Cab for Cutie begins the project today (Oct 10) with the original track “Million Dollar Loan.”

Ben Gibbard said of the song, “Lyrically, ‘Million Dollar Loan’ deals with a particularly tone deaf moment in Donald Trump’s ascent to the Republican nomination. While campaigning in New Hampshire last year, he attempted to cast himself as a self-made man by claiming he built his fortune with just a ‘small loan of a million dollars’ from his father. Not only has this statement been proven to be wildly untrue, he was so flippant about it. It truly disgusted me. Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he is unworthy of the honor and responsibility of being President of the United States of America, and in no way, shape or form represents what this country truly stands for. He is beneath us.”

This week, Jim James, Aimee Mann, Thao Nguyen, clipping., and Bhi Bhiman will all share songs, and R.E.M. will premiere a never-before-heard track. New songs will be available every day at 9am PST on Spotify, and will appear 24 hours later on Apple Music.

Fans can also purchase individual songs with proceeds benefitting Center for Popular Democracy (CDP), which aims for Universal Voter Registration.

By Amanda Wicks

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Vox - August 22, 2014, by Dylan Matthews - The Jackson Hole conference, an annual retreat in Wyoming organized by the Kansas City Fed, is usually frequented by central bankers, private sector economists, and academics. It's not usually frequented by everyday workers.

This year was differrent. A group of community activists traveled to the conference to urge policymakers to not do what an increasing number of voices in the Fed system and in the financial sector have been urging them to do: raise interest rates.

"They need to stimulate the economy," says Kendra Brooks, a former bank manager from Philadelphia who's been unemployed for about a year. "Increasing the interest rate here isn't going to help the people without jobs. It's going to put us further into debt."

"I want to at least get our voices heard before they make their decisions,"Tyrone Raino, who recently took a job requiring a 40 mile commute from his home in Minneapolis, says.

Brooks and Raino are both members of local community organizing groups — Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change and Action United in Philadelphia, respectively — which have, with the Center for Popular Democracy, come together to try to do something that hasn't really been done before: grassroots lobbying of the Fed. And they're being heard.

According to the Center's senior attorney, Ady Barkan, the group met with Kansas Fed chief Esther George for two hours, and spoke to Fed chair Janet Yellen, Chicago Fed chief Charles Evans, and Minneapolis Fed chief Narayana Kocherlakota. The last three are sympathetic to Brooks and Raino's perspective — Raino called Kocherlakota "one of the voices in the Federal Reserve system who understands the economy is far from recovery for most of us" in an article for MinnPost — George has expressed support for raising interest rates. For people trying to lobby a generally unlobbied institution, that's an impressive start.

To some extent, the Fed is designed to be impervious to outside pressure like this. Many economists believe that central bank independence — that is, having a central bank that is not directly controlled by legislatures or other democratically elected officials — is crucial to effective monetary policy. In 1993, future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and his Harvard colleague Alberto Alesina authored a hugely influential paper arguing that countries with more independent banks have less variable prices and lower inflation overall. While that finding was controversial, the view that month-to-month policy decisions by the Fed should not be influenced by politicians — what Fed vice chair Stanley Fischer has called"instrument independence" — is widely accepted.

But Barkan argues that the independence the Fed currently enjoys is one-sided. "There are 108 board members across the 12 regional banks," he notes. "Under the law, 72 of them are supposed to represent the public interest and 36 are supposed to represent banking and financial interests. But of the 108, 97 are from financial institutions or corporations. Only 9 are from nonprofits, and even those are from major, wealthy nonprofits. Only 2 of the 108 board members represent labor organizations and workers."

"This desire for Fed independence really only goes in one direction," he concludes. "It's a desire for insulation from the needs of regular people."

Barkan, Brooks, and Raino avoid endorsing specific proposals for the Fed to get tougher on unemployment, like setting a nominal GDP target or abolishing paper money or allowing "helicopter drops." The emphasis is more on convincing the Fed that there is still a problem — that the labor market still has slack.

While some in the Fed worry that people are getting too many raises, Barkan argues that wage growth is still too slow — and that the labor market won't be healthy until it's significantly higher. "Real rising wages will represent tightening of the labor markets, and that's what you want to pull the long-term unemployed back into the market, and vulnerable workers back into the market," he says. "It's only once the labor market tightens that you can help vulnerable communities get out of this long recession."

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Fox News Latino - June 16, 2014, by EFE - A group led by New York state Sen. Gustavo Rivera launched Monday a campaign that proposes awarding state "citizenship" to the estimated 2.7 million immigrants who live in the Empire State, regardless of their immigration status.

"We have failed with immigration reform nationally and what we want is to provide an opportunity for the almost 3 million people who live and contribute to the public treasury in our state to take part in its political, civic and economic life," Rivera told Efe Monday before introducing the bill.

Dubbed the New York Is Home Act, the bill contemplates granting citizenship to immigrants who can show they have lived in the state and paid their taxes for the past three years, and who promise to obey state laws, continue paying their taxes and agree to serve on a jury.

Immigrants who fulfill these requisites will receive a new document allowing students to pay in-state tuition and receive financial aid to attend state universities, be eligible for healthcare under Medicaid, obtain a driver's license, have the right to vote in local and state elections and even run for public office.

"We're starting out here in New York but the idea is to extend this movement across the country to other states like California, Illinois and Texas, and to treat our fellow workers, students and store owners as they deserve," Rivera said.

The campaign that kicked off Monday at Manhattan's Battery Park, with the Statue of Liberty in the background, has the backing of political and religious leaders of the region, along with the support of organizations like the Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road New York and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

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