CPD IN THE NEWS

A day after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, two of most powerful men in the state, said they are interested in passing major criminal justice reforms during next year's legislative session.

There is no need to wait that long to take significant action, says a coalition of groups operating under the banner "This Stops Today" (after words spoken by Eric Garner shortly before his death), that includes Communities United For Police Reform, Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road NY and the NYCLU, among others. The coalition and other advocates are calling on Cuomo to veto a bill passed in both houses of the Legislature that would allow the rules for police disciplinary action to be decided in collective bargaining with unions rather than by elected officials.

The bill, S7801/A9853, and Cuomo's veto of it, is a major platform item for those involved in action across New York City in response to the grand jury decision. For a second straight night on Thursday, protesters flooded streets, chanting, shutting down major roadways and staging 'die-ins.' The bill passed overwhelmingly in the Senate and Assembly. The only votes against in the Senate came from Sens. Liz Krueger and James Seward.

On Thursday, Gov. Cuomo told Susan Arbetter on The Capitol Pressroom that he wants to look at reforming police training and the grand jury system, and at instituting body cameras for police across the state. "I think long term this is something we have to look at this session," Cuomo said. "I think we need a comprehensive look."

Speaker Silver issued a statement saying he is committed to "working with Governor Cuomo, my colleagues in the Legislature, Mayor de Blasio and with law enforcement to improve the manner in which we police our streets and to restore the people's faith in our legal system."

Neither Cuomo nor Silver discussed the police conduct bill. The governor's office did not return a request for comment for this story.

New York City Council members including Brad Lander and Jumaane Williams have also called on Cuomo to veto the bill. "If signed into law, this bill would severely undermine the City's ability to hold police officers accountable for their actions," said the two in an August statement.

"The Council Member and many of his progressive colleagues are on record calling on the Governor to veto the bill. The need for strong civilian oversight of police discipline is more important now than ever," a representative from Lander's office told Gotham Gazette on Thursday.

The legislation has been pushed through the Legislature with the support of law enforcement unions only to be vetoed by Govs. David Paterson, Eliot Spitzer, George Pataki, and Mario Cuomo.

The Brooklyn NAACP is asking constituents to call and write to Cuomo to urge his veto. "This bill would strip local public officials of disciplinary authority over the police officers they employ, which would have a detrimental impact on the accountability of local police departments, and thus safety and public confidence in the police," reads the form letter offered by the group.

Cuomo did not veto any legislation before Election Day this year, but has used some controversial vetoes since.

The state's Court of Appeals ruled once in 2006 and once in 2012 that police discipline should be left in the hands of public officials and not determined during collective bargaining with unions.

"Police officers – who put themselves in harm's way for the sake of public safety – have the right to fair treatment and due process," reads the August statement from Lander and Williams, who co-authored the controversial NYPD-related Community Safety Act which passed in 2013 over a veto by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "At the same time the authority to investigate police misconduct, and pursue discipline when appropriate, must be held by government officials who are accountable to the public. As we saw just last week in the police union press conference blaming Eric Garner for his own death, the unions' inclination is to protect their members at all costs."

 

Source: Gotham Gazette

Oh, what a difference a year can make.

Last July, Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen endured criticism for House testimony in which she seemed to imply that there was little the Fed could do to address the disproportionately high African-American unemployment rate.

Not so on Tuesday. In her semi-annual testimony to the Senate Banking Committee, Yellen emphasized that the failure of the economic recovery to reach communities of color influences the Fed’s decision-making, and made a strong commitment to improving diversity at the central bank.

“Jobless rates have declined for all major demographic groups, including for African Americans and Hispanics,” Yellen said, according to her prepared remarks. “Despite these declines, however, it is troubling that unemployment rates for these minority groups remain higher than for the nation overall, and that the annual income of the median African-American household is still well below the median income of other U.S. households.”

Yellen’s policy argument has not fundamentally changed. It is the Fed’s job to maximize employment in the economy as the whole, she says, and it lacks the tools to target particular communities. And the Fed chief has clarified since last summer that she takes seriously how the Fed’s adjustment of interest rates can have an especially big impact on African Americans and Latinos, who have higher jobless rates.

But Yellen’s remarks and actions on Tuesday represent the Fed’s greatest demonstration yet that it is putting the concerns of communities of color front and center on its agenda.

The Fed Up campaign, a coalition of progressive groups that has led the push to make the Federal Reserve more responsive to workers in general, and communities of color in particular, was pleased with the focus of Yellen’s testimony.

“Each time since Yellen spoke last July, when she got pushback over what she said, she has gotten a little bit better,” said Jordan Haedtler, Fed Up’s campaign manager. “Now she is proactively showing that the Fed is assessing this data and does take this data into account.”

Diversity is an extremely important goal and I will do everything I can to further advance it.

This week’s hearings, held every six months in both chambers of Congress — the House will hold its hearing on Wednesday — are an opportunity for the Fed chair to update lawmakers about the overall state of the economy. As part of the briefing, the Fed releases an accompanying monetary policy report summarizing its economic assessment and research.

For the first time, the Fed chose to devote a section of its report to whether the “gains of the economic expansion [have] been widely shared.” That section focused on how the recovery affected different races and ethnicities differently.

The results are discouraging. Despite years of job growth, the rates of full-time work for African Americans and Latinos are a few percentage points lower than they were before the recession, while the rates among white and Asian-American workers have more or less reached pre-recession levels. And the median income of black households, which took the biggest hit of any group during the recession, has also been slower to recover, reaching only 88 percent of what it was in 2007, compared with about 94 percent for the other three groups.

Responding to a question about the new section from Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Yellen insisted that weighing the disparate impact of economic growth on a range of different groups is a key part of the Fed’s mission.

“There are very significant differences in success in the labor market across demographic groups,” she said. “It is important for us to be aware of those differences and to focus on them as we think about monetary policy and the broader work that the Federal Reserve does in the area of community development and trying to make sure that financial services are widely available to those that need it, including low- and moderate-income [households].”

Yellen also recognized the importance of diversity — of race, gender, professional background and ideology — within the Fed’s ranks in ensuring the bank remains sensitive to a broad array of Americans’ economic experiences.

She touted her creation of a task force in the Fed to improve its gender and ethnic diversity, but acknowledged there is more to be done.

“Diversity is an extremely important goal and I will do everything I can to further advance it,” Yellen said.

Progressive groups and their allies in Congress trying to make the Fed more accountable to the public have focused on increasing diversity and reducing Wall Street’s influence at the central bank. Eleven senators, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and 116 House members sent a letter to Yellen on May 12 urging her to prioritize the diversity of Fed officials, especially at the 12 regional Fed banks, which are privately owned. (Hillary Clinton expressed similar sentiments in a statement later that day.)

The makeup of the regional Fed bank boards is important because they are dominated by the big banks and have free reign to appoint their presidents. The regional Fed bank presidents hold five seats on the Federal Open Market Committee, the central bank panel that adjusts the benchmark interest rate. Currently, regional Fed presidents make up half of the FOMC’s influential votes.

As a result, the Fed officials with the power to raise interest rates and effectively increase unemployment are selected by people who are disproportionately white, male and from the finance and business sectors.

In the interests of changing that, the Fed Up campaign on Monday released a slate of 39 candidates for the regional Federal Reserve bank boards of directors. The candidates not only reflect racial and gender diversity, but also come exclusively from academic institutions, community groups and labor organizations.

“On racial and gender diversity there has been modest progress, though it has not taken place at the rate we would like to see,” Haedtler said. Haedtler added that there is even greater room for improvement when it comes to the diversity of professional backgrounds of board members and other top Fed officials, an area where he said there has been “regression” under Yellen’s watch.

By Daniel Marans

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But there’s a bigger risk-free payout the Fed makes to big banks, one set to rise exponentially as the economy improves. In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, hundreds of billions of dollars that would otherwise go into the federal Treasury will leak out to banks, including branches of foreign banks, in the coming years. If Congress needs to find money to pay for new programs, they could cancel the Fed’s recent practice of paying interest on bank reserves.

For nearly 100 years, the Federal Reserve managed the nation’s monetary policy without paying interest on reserves, including the 10 percent of the value of loanswhich banks are required by law to park at the Fed. But in 2006, Congress passed the Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act, authorizing interest payments. It was actually an old idea first promoted by conservative economist Milton Friedman.

Friedman thought that required reserves without compensation constituted a hidden tax on the financial industry. He also believed the strategy would make it easier for central banks to engage in monetary policy. If the Fed offered an interest rate on excess reserves just above the federal-funds rate (a.k.a. the rate banks use to lend to each other), then it makes more financial sense for banks to leave their money there. It sets a floor for the federal-funds rate, in other words, giving the Fed more control over its range. It also helps the Fed expand its balance sheet, critical to engaging in monetary interventions like quantitative easing.

Under the 2006 law, interest on reserves wasn’t supposed to kick in until 2011, but Congress moved up the date three years when it passed the law authorizing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The Fed set the interest rate on all reserves at a skinny 0.25 percent, which produces a small payout on required reserves. But excess reserves above the 10 percent requirement, which banks never left at the Fed until 2008, exploded as the Fed’s balance sheet expanded. From virtually nothing seven years ago, excess reserves hover around $3 trillion today.

Who owns these excess reserves? As the Cleveland Fed noted in a report last week, more than 80 percent come from the top 100 largest banks. U.S. branches of foreign banks, primarily from the European Union, have about $1 trillion in excess reserves parked at the Fed.

The Fed’s audited financial statement indicates that they have paid banks $25.2 billion in interest on reserves from 2008 to 2014. That number jumped from $2.1 billion in 2009 to $6.7 billion in 2014, a three-fold increase. The entire time, the interest rate has been the same: 0.25 percent. But that’s subject to change.

As the economy improves, the Fed is clearly angling to raise the federal-funds rate, which has been stuck around zero since 2008. Fed officials have already indicated they will accomplish this mostly through recalibrating interest on reserves. At theirSeptember 2014 policy meeting, Fed Chair Janet Yellen said the central bank would “move the federal-funds rate into the target range … primarily by adjusting the interest rate it pays on excess reserve balances.” While the interest rate on required reserves may stay constant, the Fed would raise the interest rate on excess reserves, allowing interbank lending only to rise so far.

In effect, interest on excess reserves is equivalent to the federal-funds rate. And the higher the interest rate goes, the more money banks make from the Fed. You can see this most clearly in Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections of Fed remittances.

Any money the Fed makes on investments gets returned to the federal Treasury. And business has been good for the Fed of late. They remitted $99 billion in 2014 and a projected $102 billion this year. But CBO’s latest update predicts that number will fall drastically, to $76 billion in 2016, $40 billion in 2017, and just $17 billion in 2018. The lion’s share of the difference comes from the Fed paying out their earnings to banks, with higher interest on reserves as they hike rates.

While it’s hard to pinpoint the totals because the CBO doesn’t separate out interest on reserves, by marking the difference between 2015 and subsequent years we can estimate that the Fed could deliver anywhere from $20 billion to $50 billion a year to banks, risk-free. That’s an enormous amount of money, based on the claim that interest on reserves is somehow an indispensible strategy for monetary policy, even though the Fed thrived for 91 years without such a tool.

This shift in how monetary policy is conducted occurred with practically no debate. Fed officials are reportedly worried about the “optics” of their exit plan, with its unjust enrichment of the largest banks. But outside of a few libertarians, nobody has raised alarms yet.

One progressive group that’s challenged the Fed from the left was stunned to learn that, in addition to depressing the economy, an interest-rate hike would have a secondary effect as a silent bank bailout. “Clearly this is under-covered, because I haven’t heard about it,” said Ady Barkan with the Center for Popular Democracy, director of Fed Up, a grassroots organization pushing the central bank to adopt pro-worker policies. “But we shouldn’t be shocked. It is the rule that the Fed prioritizes helping banks, and has over the last seven years.”

There are other ways to control monetary policy besides interest on excess reserves, unless you believe that the Fed was impotent from 1917 to 2008. For instance, the Fed could reduce their balance sheet, rather than letting it contract through attrition, the current strategy. That would reduce the money supply, which shows what a pickle the Fed has gotten itself into with its expanded balance sheet. But the Minneapolis Fed, at least, downplayed the risks of gradual asset sales into a global market.

Another option is to hold off on raising rates, allowing the balance sheet to slowly contract and encouraging banks to recirculate excess reserves into the economy by creating favorable conditions for more profitable investments. “It’s incomprehensible to us to think that the economy is getting too healthy too quickly,” said Barkan of Fed Up.

Members of Congress, who created this mess by authorizing interest on reserves, could take it away too, and in so doing could create a large pay-for that could be transferred into productive projects. You could potentially fund an entire six-year highway bill simply by eliminating interest on reserves.

We don’t even know if the Fed’s rate-raising strategy will work without drawbacks, as it’s never been tested. But if “working” equals paying the largest banks hundreds of billions in unearned money, the Fed should figure out something else.

MarketWatch - September 17, 2014 - Today, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Citi jointly launched Cities for Citizenship – a major initiative aimed at increasing citizenship among eligible U.S. permanent residents to forge more inclusive and economically robust cities.

Cities for Citizenship will enable cities to expand naturalization and financial capability programs, as well as access to legal assistance, microloans and financial counseling, boosting economic opportunity for immigrants and communities nationwide. The effort will be coordinated by two leading non-profit partners, The Center for Popular Democracy and the National Partnership for New Americans, with the aim of encouraging cities across the country to invest in their citizenship programs. In total, Citi Community Development, the founding corporate partner, is contributing more than $1 million to the program.

There are currently 8.8 million legal permanent residents in America who are eligible for citizenship. These are documented residents, who pay taxes and work lawfully, but 52 percent of whom remain low-income. Their naturalization would provide access to better paying jobs (up to an 11 percent increase to their personal earnings), academic scholarships, and a myriad of other benefits. It would also provide an estimated $37 billion to $52 billion lift to the national economy over the next ten years. This would mean up to $1.6 billion for Chicago’s economy, $2.8 billion for the Los Angeles’ economy, and a $4.1 billion boost for New York City’s economy, according to the “Citizenship: A Wise Investment for Cities” study. This report by the Center for Popular Democracy and the National Partnership for New Americans is a preview of a larger study that New York City will release next year with Citi Community Development’s support.

“Immigrants who become naturalized citizens make significant contributions to our communities, our city, and our country, and it’s in our collective interest to promote naturalization in Chicago,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “We are proud to join Mayor Garcetti of Los Angeles and Mayor de Blasio of New York in leading Cities for Citizenship, which will help thousands of immigrants in Chicago and in cities across the country through the naturalization process, leading to economic benefits for our immigrant families and city as a whole.”

“Immigrants are the backbone of our economy,” said Mayor Eric Garcetti. “It's time we encouraged their successful integration into our social and political tapestry to continue boosting our economy and not stand in the way of it. We are committed to expanding citizenship education and making sure people have the help they need to navigate this complex system.”

“I’m proud to stand today with my fellow mayors Rahm Emanuel and Eric Garcetti as we launch the national Cities for Citizenship initiative,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio. “This win-win effort will help us create more inclusive cities that lift up everyone. From increased economic activity to larger voting and tax bases, the advantages of citizenship will not only expand opportunity to our immigrant families, but to all New Yorkers and residents nationwide.”

“Citi believes that citizenship is an asset that enables low-income immigrants to gain financial capability, and building a national identity must go hand-in-hand with building a financial identity,” said Bob Annibale, Global Director of Citi Community Development. “We are proud to work with Mayors Emanuel, Garcetti and de Blasio to launch this comprehensive initiative, which will lead to direct economic benefits for immigrant families and their communities.”

Cities for Citizenship will connect mayors and municipalities with immigrant organizations and the business, faith and labor communities in public-private partnerships.

“The National Partnership for New Americans believes that Cities for Citizenship will encourage millions of immigrants to take the important step of becoming U.S. citizens and full participants in the economic, cultural, and civic life of this nation,” said Eva Millona, the co-chair of the National Partnership for New Americans and herself a naturalized U.S. citizen. “NPNA will bring immigrant organizations into partnership with Mayors to grow Cities for Citizenship in dozens of cities across the U.S.”

“We applaud the Cities of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles for making a wise investment for all of our communities,” said Ana Maria Archila, Co-Executive Director of the Center for Popular Democracy. “In addition to infusing local economies and workforces with a new vitality, Cities for Citizenship will strengthen our nation’s commitment to an inclusive democracy. We hope other cities will join us in this ground-breaking initiative, and join the growing number of American cities that are modelling progress for the federal government.”

Follow the initiative on Twitter with #Cities4Citizenship. Learn more at CitiesforCitizenship.org.

Local Impact of Cities for Citizenship:

Chicago

The City has pledged to help about one-third of its immigrants to become U.S. citizens through the Chicago New Americans initiative, in partnership with the Illinois Coalition of Refugee Rights and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The City of Chicago Office of New Americans will offer financial education and citizenship workshops in Citizenship Corners in public libraries in multiple languages, as well as support organizations that offer these services.

In addition, staff from Chicago public schools and community organizations will visit high schools with a large concentration of immigrant students and parents to create a one-stop shop for information about the naturalization process, free immigration legal assistance, and financial coaching.

The City’s Small Business Center will also provide services to immigrant business-owners through periodic visits. At the same time, the City will target large immigrant employers for citizenship and financial coaching support. The City will also recruit attorneys and legal firms to provide pro-bono services in naturalization workshops.

All of this information and more will be housed on the ‘City of Chicago Citizenship’ website.

Los Angeles

The nation’s largest population of legal permanent residents reside in Los Angeles, with more than 750,000 in the county.

The Office of Immigrant Affairs will work with businesses that have large numbers of eligible citizens, and immigrant populations will be directly targeted for citizenship and financial coaching support.

The City will employ a coalition of librarians to work in Citizenship Corners in public libraries and hold workshops that offer financial coaching and access to responsible products and services to begin building positive financial identities that are essential to long-term asset building.

New York City

The five boroughs are home to 684,000 legal permanent residents.

The Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs will expand NYCitizenship, the first large-scale coordinated effort by a municipal government to address the barriers to naturalization, currently supported by Citi Community Development. This expansion will significantly increase immigrant access to financial counseling and microloans, as well as access to immigration legal assistance.

In its first two years, NYCitizenship has already provided support to more than 7,000 participants. The City of New York will build on the existing school-based program and partner with the Human Resources Administration, a municipal agency that serves low-income New Yorkers, to dramatically expand.

The Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs will also commission a study on the economic impact of citizenship programs for mayors across the country to demonstrate the importance of new municipal investments in naturalization and fee assistance programs as a poverty-fighting tool.

Citi Community Development is leading Citi’s commitment to achieve economic empowerment and growth for underserved individuals, families and communities by expanding access to financial products and services, and building sustainable business solutions and innovative partnerships. Our focus areas include: commercial and philanthropic funding; innovative financial products and services; and collaborations with institutions that expand access to financial products and services for low-income and underserved communities. For more information, please visit www.citicommunitydevelopment.com.

About Citi

Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.

Additional information may be found at http://www.citigroup.com/citi/ | Twitter: @Citi | YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/citi| Blog: http://blog.citi.com | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/citi | LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/citi

About National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA)

The National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA) is a national multiethnic, multiracial partnership. NPNA harnesses the collective power and resources of the country’s 20 largest regional immigrant advocacy organizations to mobilize millions of immigrants to become active and engaged citizens, working for a vibrant, just, and welcoming democracy for all. NPNA sponsors the annual National Immigrant Integration Conference and, in the past two years, NPNA partners have assisted over 50,000 immigrants to become U.S. citizens and pursue legal status. Additional information may be found at www.partnershipfornewamericans.org | NIIC: integrationconference.org Facebook: www.facebook.com/newamericanspartnership | Twitter: @npnewamericans

About The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD)

The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and economic justice agenda. Visit www.populardemocracy.org and www.twitter.com/popdemoc.

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