CPD IN THE NEWS

Activists with a group pushing for changes at the Federal Reserve asked St. Louis Fed President James Bullard to accompany them on a bus tour of some of the poorest communities in St. Louis.

About a dozen activists delivered an invitation for the tour to a St. Louis Fed official at the regional Fed headquarters downtown. An equivalent number of police watched.

“You’re very removed when you’re in that rarified air of the Federal Reserve,” said organizer Derek Laney.

The group is affiliated with the national Fed Up campaign, which is pushing for more diversity on regional Fed boards and wants the Fed to put more emphasis on keeping unemployment low rather than controlling inflation. Laney is affiliated with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, a local activist group that speaks out on issues such as policing and coal companies.

The activists’ demonstration coincided with the Fed’s Open Market Committee meeting Wednesday, where Fed officials decided, as expected, to again hold off raising its benchmark interest rate.

Still, some expect the Fed could signal another small rate hike at the end of the year, similar to a small increase in December 2015 that was the first hike in almost 10 years.

Even discussing an increase will still affect market interest rates and economic growth — an unnecessary move while many people are still trying to benefit from the tepid economic recovery, said Nick Apperson, an executive from downtown tech firm LockerDome who participated in the demonstration.

“While it’s likely they’re not raising interest rates in this meeting, … they’re hinting that they’re going to, which will have a similar effect,” he said.

Laney said the group also wanted to call attention to comments Bullard made last month at the annual conference attended by Fed officials and other top central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Fed Up activists attended the event to speak with officials, and during an interview with CNBC, Bullard said that one of the group’s funders, Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, should have come in person rather than sending “all these people.”

“If Bullard wants to walk back those comments he made at Jackson Hole, he needs to walk our streets and talk to our folks,” Laney said.

By Jacob Barker

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CBS New York - June 16, 2014 - They are not U.S. citizens, but a plan is in the works to allow undocumented New Yorkers to become citizens of the state.

Chanting “New York is my home” and with the Statue of Liberty in the background, immigrants and their advocates rallied for New York state citizenship in Battery Park on Monday, WCBS 880′s Peter Haskell reported.

The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Gustavo Rivera, D-Bronx, said the legislation would grant state citizenship if “someone can demonstrate proof of identity, live here for three consecutive years, pay taxes for three consecutive years.”

Assemblyman Karim Camara, D-Brooklyn, said state citizenship would allow 2.7 million immigrants to legally drive, vote in state and local elections and receive tuition aid.

“We have the opportunity now to step in where the federal government has not and make New York stronger by strengthening the rights of new immigrants,” Camara said.

The bill is not likely to pass, but is being called a conversation starter, Haskell reported.

“We deserve to receive the aid necessary for us to go to college,” said Antonio Alarcon, 19. “We deserve to vote. We deserve to drive.”

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Community organizer Wintana Melekin was grabbing a soda in late June at a coffee shop near her office when she heard Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, had just been in.

Seeing her chance, she dashed out the door after Kashkari, caught up and asked if he would meet with her organization, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, to discuss racial and economic disparities in the Twin Cities.

He agreed, and to confirm that he meant it, retweeted Melekin’s tweet saying he was willing to meet.

On Wednesday, the meeting happened. Kashkari sat down with about a dozen people at NOC’s offices in north Minneapolis and committed to an ongoing collaboration between the Minneapolis Fed and some of the state’s most outspoken critics of a status quo in which blacks are not enjoying the benefits of economic growth.

“Some of the racial disparities are a crisis, and we need to treat them like a crisis,” Kashkari said. “One of the things I learned in 2008 is you don’t tackle a crisis with incremental solutions. You tackle a crisis with overwhelming force, and so if this is a crisis, and I think certainly parts of this are, then we need to bring overwhelming force.”

Kashkari, who became president of the Minneapolis Fed at the start of the year, is a former investment banker and Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration. He was appointed the first chief of the bank bailout program known as TARP at the end of the Bush term and start of President Obama’s administration.

Though his everyday work is at the very top of the national economy, Kashkari has a record of trying to understand its depths. As a candidate for governor in California two years ago, Kashkari spent a week living on the streets of Fresno, a midsize city, with just $40. He tried unsuccessfully to find work during that week and wound up in a homeless shelter.

It’s not clear how Kashkari and the nation’s central bank can directly address the challenges that were brought up at Wednesday’s meeting. The Fed controls interest rates, with the goal of creating maximum employment, but monetary policy can’t be targeted at segments of the population or certain states or cities. As Kashkari pointed out, black unemployment in the United States stubbornly tracks at roughly twice the level of white unemployment.

“There’s something structural in the U.S. economy, in good times and bad, that black unemployment is almost always twice as high as white unemployment,” Kashkari said.

He said driving unemployment downward will help everyone, and he is for low interest rates as long as they aren’t driving inflation upward. But he has not heard a satisfying answer for why the disparity in Minnesota is worse than in most places, though he committed to working with NOC to understand why it is.

From NOC’s perspective, the meeting with Kashkari was historic. Never before has a Fed president met face to face with its members in Minneapolis. As local ambassadors for the national Fed Up campaign, the organization has a fresh interest in the Fed and has taken the position that interest rates should remain low.

For Anthony Newby, the head of the organization, the meeting was a good starting point. Kashkari’s comment that the economic plight of black Minnesotans is a crisis requiring a response of “overwhelming force” was particularly satisfying.

“It sets the tone for how the Fed could, in unusual and unorthodox ways, use its power and position to solve some of these equity problems,” Newby said.

Kashkari agreed to spend a day with Rosheeda Credit, a mother of five at the meeting who said she struggles to pay for rent and child care. “The crime rate is high here, and the rent is high here and we’re not getting paid enough to work here,” Credit said.

He heard from Tenice Hodges, a former teacher who moved back to Minneapolis two months ago to help her sister’s family. She is living out of her car until she can get a teaching job because she can’t afford the city’s high rents with her restaurant wages.

“We are struggling out here,” Hodges said. “Yes, I’m employed. I work every day. But can I go out and get an apartment right now? No. I don’t have $1,100 by myself, or $2,200 for a deposit.”

Kashkari committed to looking closely at the résumés of people of color that NOC submitted for various board appointments at the Minneapolis Fed. He also said he will work with NOC on research and meet with people from the organization again in the future. He also committed to attending a workshop put on by groups affiliated with NOC at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, an annual conference in Wyoming where central bankers from around the world gather.

Kashkari, who has drawn national attention by calling for a transformative solution to the problem of banks that are too big to fail, explained that his role as a regional Fed president is to understand the problems people face in his district. While the tools of monetary policy are limited, and much of the heavy lifting that causes social change much happen in Congress, he said it is important for him to meet with people as he did Wednesday to understand their concerns.

“I appreciate that you think it is business as usual,” Newby told Kashkari. “I don’t think it is business as usual.”

By ADAM BELZ

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A two-day long housing protest outside the Department of Justice this week has resulted in nearly 30 arrests and several instances of law enforcement unnecessarily using tasers on activists, according to eye-witnesses. The action – which was organized by a coalition of housing advocacy groups, including the Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes – called for Attorney General Eric Holder to begin prosecutions against the bankers who created the foreclosure crisis.

"Everyone here is fed up with Holder acknowledging big banks did really bad stuff but [saying] they're too big to jail," says Greg Basta, deputy director of New York Communities for Change, who helped organize the event. Holder has previously suggested that prosecuting large banks would be difficult because it could destabilize the economy. The attorney general recently tried to walk those comments back – but the conspicuous lack of criminal prosecutions of bankers tells another story, one that Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has written about extensively.

Alexis Goldstein, a former Wall Street employee and current Occupy Wall Street activist who was also at the event on Monday, agrees. "I want Eric Holder to uphold the rule of law, regardless of how much power the criminal has," says Goldstein. She says the lack of criminal prosecutions has created a "culture of immunity" that only gets further entrenched by the small settlements that banks now consider a cost of doing business. "There's no risk," she says, adding that the DOJ is effectively "incentivizing breaking the law."

Around 400 homeowners and 100 supporters took part in Monday's actions outside the DOJ, according to Basta. One of them was Vera Johnson, of Seattle. "I've been dealing with foreclosure issues for three years," says Johnson, just minutes after being released from the jail where she was held for over 24 hours for participating in this peaceful protest. Bank of America recently granted Johnson a loan modification after the media picked up on a Change.org petition that she started to save her home; this reprieve turned out to be a time bomb, as her rates were set to return to their original levels after four years. It's an all too common story, and Johnson went to Washington, D.C. to "join in solidarity" with others in similar situations.

Many of this week's protesters have been black and Latino homeowners, who were hit particularly hard by the foreclosure crisis. Mildred Garrison-Obi – a black woman from Stone Mountain, Georgia – was evicted from her home in 2012, though with the help of Occupy Our Homes she was able to return to it after four months of facing homelessness. "It was devastating," says Garrison-Obi, who was arrested today in a related action held outside of a law firm where Holder was once a partner. "But I'm not alone."

Activists note with dismay that the government has been significantly harder on people who stage nonviolent demonstrations against Wall Street than it has on the crooked bankers responsible for the housing crisis. Goldstein and Basta both say they witnessed law enforcement using tasers on multiple protesters this week. Johnson says that several hours before her arrest, as she and others sat on planter boxes outside the DOJ, a Department of Homeland Security officer asked, "Do you want to get arrested?" and then, "Do you want to get tased?" Later, when she refused to unlock her arms with another protester after three warnings – hardly a violent act or a threat to public safety – she says she was tased from behind on her left arm. She turned around to see the same officer, who she recalls telling her, "That's what you get."

Carmen Pittman, an activist with Occupy Our Homes in Atlanta, suffered similar treatment at this week's protests. In video footage of her arrest, Pittman appears to have her arms interlocked with another protester.

Lawyers familiar with police codes of conduct note that this kind of passive resistance generally does not meet the official standards for when an officer can use a taser. "In a study of regulations around tasers, the National Institute of Justice found that most police departments do not allow taser use against someone who 'nonviolently refuses' a police command," says NYU law professor Sarah Knuckey, who co-authored a report on the suppression of the rights of Occupy activists. "The incident needs to be thoroughly investigated, there must be a public accounting of what happened and why, and any wrong-doing must be punished." 

A spokesperson for the Washington, D.C. police department directed requests for comment to the Federal Protective Service, part of the Department of Homeland Security. Scott McConnell, an FPS spokesperson, said that "a number of individuals" had "breached a security barricade after repeated warnings to leave the area" and that there had been 27 arrests as of Tuesday morning; he declined to comment on the video of Pittman getting tased or on FPS's taser policy generally.

Monday and Tuesday's actions came as the DOJ falls under increasing criticism for its investigations of journalists – first seizing records that cover dozens of Associated Press reporters, and now targeting Fox News' James Rosen. Many media observers have found the Rosen case especially troubling, due to the fact that he was investigated under the theory that he engaged in a conspiracy with Stephen Kim – his source – to leak government information. This is the same theory that U.S. officials have used to go after Wikileaks, and if applied more widely, it would effectively criminalize the basic act of investigative reporting. Some see the Obama DOJ's war on whistleblowers and leakers – and now journalists – less as a means of protecting national security than a way to crack down on who controls information.

As journalists start to get the feeling that their profession is under attack by Obama's DOJ, that department is saying something entirely different – though just as clearly – to the nation's financial elite. "The message," says Goldstein, "is that you can get away with anything."

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