La Reserva Federal debe ser un reflejo de nuestras comunidades
La Reserva Federal debe ser un reflejo de nuestras comunidades
Ocho años después del inicio de la Gran Recesión, a las comunidades de color todavía les cuesta recuperarse. La tasa de...
Ocho años después del inicio de la Gran Recesión, a las comunidades de color todavía les cuesta recuperarse. La tasa de desempleo de los afroamericanos a nivel nacional es de casi 9%, más del doble que la tasa de 4.3% de los estadounidenses de raza blanca, y entre los latinos es un lamentable 6.1%.
Las comunidades que siguen afectadas por la recesión han notado estas disparidades y han llevado sus reclamos directamente a la Reserva Federal, pues dada la facultad de esta de modificar la tasa de interés, sus medidas influyen enormemente en el desempleo y los salarios. En los últimos dos años, una coalición de líderes comunitarios, sindicatos y trabajadores mal remunerados se han quejado de la política y dirección de la Reserva Federal, que desde hace mucho tiempo opera fuera de la vista del público.
Pero eso está empezando a cambiar a medida que queda cada vez más claro que la recuperación sigue siendo enormemente dispareja. Hoy en día, se critica cada vez más a la Reserva Federal por no hacer lo suficiente para ayudar a las comunidades de color a recuperarse.
Este mes, más de 100 miembros del Congreso enviaron una carta a la Reserva Federal, con la cual se sumaron a las quejas y exigieron más diversidad racial, económica y sexual. Actualmente, en el sistema de la Reserva Federal predominan los hombres blancos y miembros del sector financiero, quienes están más protegidos de los efectos que persisten de la recesión.
Un informe reciente del Center for Popular Democracy señaló que un descomunal 83% de los miembros de la Reserva Federal son blancos, en comparación con 63% de todos los estadounidenses. Ni un solo presidente regional es latino o de raza negra. De hecho, nunca en la historia de la Reserva Federal ha habido un presidente regional afroamericano. Es más, solo 11% de ellos provienen de grupos comunitarios, sindicatos o el entorno académico, y casi 40% provienen del sector financiero.
Esto es un problema. Si casi todos los encargados de dictar la política son banqueros blancos, y no se oyen las voces de las mujeres, minorías y representantes de grupos de trabajadores y consumidores, se desatenderán las necesidades de dichos grupos.
Hillary Clinton, quien se tiene previsto sea la candidata demócrata a la presidencia, se ha unido a las quejas y ha dicho públicamente que si la eligen, se esforzaría por remplazar a los banqueros de los directorios de la Reserva Federal con más miembros latinos y afroamericanos.
Por fin se está cuestionando a una de las instituciones menos trasparentes pero vitalmente importantes del país. Ya que la Reserva Federal se dispone a tomar una decisión sumamente importante en junio con respecto a las tasas de interés, miles en todo el país seguirán exigiendo decisiones que beneficien a todos los estadounidenses, no solo a una porción privilegiada de la población. Ya que los latinos y otras comunidades en desventaja en todo el país siguen sufriendo las consecuencias de la recesión, no se puede dejar que la Reserva Federal siga operando a puerta cerrada.
By Rubén Lucio
Source
Opioid protest at Harvard art museum
Opioid protest at Harvard art museum
ctivists said that this was the fourth protest of its kind targeting an art gallery or school named after the Sackler...
ctivists said that this was the fourth protest of its kind targeting an art gallery or school named after the Sackler family. The Sacklers have their names on spaces at the Louvre, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Smithsonian, and the Guggenheim in New York, among others. The Center for Popular Democracy, the nonprofit that supports the Opioid Network, also participated in Goldin’s protest at the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in April.
Read the full article here.
The Housing Recovery Has Skipped Poor and Minority Neighborhoods
On October 11, 2009, when Isaac Dieudonne was two years old, his family moved into a new home in Miramar, Florida. As...
On October 11, 2009, when Isaac Dieudonne was two years old, his family moved into a new home in Miramar, Florida. As they began to unpack, young Isaac bounded out the front door in search of fun. The parents found him several minutes later, floating dead in the fetid pool of a foreclosed house.
Since the financial crisis began in 2008, approximately 5.7 million properties have completed the foreclosure process, and stories like this begin to answer the critical question of what happens to all those homes. While many are resold, too often they fall into disrepair, creating blight that drags down property values and turns communities into potential deathtraps, attracting not just mosquitoes and mold, but crime and tragedy.
According to expert reports, this neglect occurs disproportionately in communities of color, part of a disturbing pattern. While the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the ability to use the Fair Housing Act to challenge discriminatory effects in neighborhoods, the nation’s neighborhood layout looks more segregated than ever, exacerbating the racial wealth gap. There’s no point in having an anti-housing discrimination law if it isn't vigorously employed to prevent a real societal division that drags down minority families. The Justice Department, free of uncertainty about the Fair Housing Act’s future, needs to work to realize the law's intended purpose.
The housing recovery has skipped more low-income neighborhoods.Fifteen percent of homes worth less than $200,000 are still underwater, where the borrower owes more on the house than it’s worth. This is compared to only six percent of homes over $200,000. Property values in low-income neighborhoods have not bounced back to the degree of their wealthier counterparts.
An important study from Stanford University shows how this housing divide doesn’t align with socioeconomic status, but with race. Middle-class black households are more likely to live in neighborhoods with lower incomes than the average low-income white household. This creates fewer opportunities for minorities, as neighborhood poverty can predict the quality of schooling and the availability of jobs for the next generation. Areport from the American Civil Liberties Union shows that median household wealth for African-Americans continued to drop after the housing collapse, long after median wealth for whites stabilized. They project this to continue well into the next generation, with a drop in the average black family’s wealth by $98,000 more than it would have been without the Great Recession.
Foreclosures are largely responsible for this widening disparity. Predatory lending was directed at minority homeowners. Subprime mortgages weregiven disproportionately to minority borrowers, and after the housing bubble collapsed, these loans failed at higher rates. Racial segregation prior to the crisis turned these neighborhoods into targets, with subprime lending specialists going door-to-door and luring even those who owned their homes outright into refinances with dodgy terms. Banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America paid fines for pushing minority borrowers into subprime loans, even when they qualified for better interest rates. But these fines—$175 million and $335 million, respectively—were substantially lower than they paid for other bubble-era abuses.
More black and Latino borrowers had their wealth exclusively tied up in their homes, and when they lost them, more of their wealth dissipated. Even after the collapse, the Federal Reserve found that from 2010-2013, net worth of nonwhite or Hispanic families fell 17 percent, compared to an increase of 2 percent for white families.
This wealth transferred in part to Wall Street. Private equity and hedge funds scooped up hundreds of thousands foreclosed properties in low-income communities, and converted them into rentals. This prevented minority homeowners from benefiting from any return in property values, and displaced many from their neighborhoods. And a recent survey of community organizations finds that this has created higher rents and more transient neighborhoods.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development, along with quasi-public mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, auction off these homes to investors at a discount, according to a study from the Center for Popular Democracy. The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently passed a resolution urging these government lenders to sell instead to non-profits that would work to protect homes from foreclosure.
And then there is the disparate treatment of foreclosed properties repossessed by banks, known as real estate owned (REO). The National Fair Housing Alliance’s findings in 29 metropolitan areas indicate that REO in communities of color are twice more likely to have damaged doors and windows, overgrown weeds and trash on the premises and holes in the roof or structure. This violates the Fair Housing Act: Banks are responsible for maintenance and upkeep on all properties, and if they neglect that in black and Latino neighborhoods, the Justice Department can sanction them.
The failure to maintain foreclosed properties has multiple negative effects for communities. Blight creates health and safety concerns, acts asmagnets for crime, and lowers property values for neighboring homes. It also reduces the tax base for municipalities, as nobody pays property taxes on an empty house. The city of Detroit has already lost $500 million from foreclosures in the past few years; 78 percent of homes with subprime loans are know foreclosed or abandoned.
Last week, fifteen Senate Democrats, including leaders Chuck Schumerand Dick Durbin and ranking member of the Banking Committee Sherrod Brown, asked regulators to open an investigation into the treatment of foreclosed properties. “The same communities of color that were victimized by predatory lending may now be facing the double whammy of racial bias when it comes to the upkeep of foreclosed homes,” said Brown. But policing foreclosed properties would only begin to close the gap between white and non-white neighborhoods.
The entire point of the Fair Housing Act, passed shortly after Martin Luther King’s death in 1968, was to reverse the findings of the Kerner Commission, that the country “is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” But reading through these statistics, you wouldn’t know the Fair Housing Act existed. We are further than ever from what Justice Anthony Kennedy described as the act’s “role in moving the Nation toward a more integrated society.” It has been impotent in the face of multiple discriminatory shots at people of color, which has opened up a historically large wealth gap and crippled their opportunity.
Until we figure out another way for the middle class to build wealth other than purchasing a mortgage, the discriminatory effects of our housing system will further a permanent underclass among people of color in America. The Justice Department has an enormous amount of work to do.
Source: The New Republic
Tax reform stumbling block
Tax reform stumbling block
Don’t look for a tax reform roll-out as soon as Congress comes back despite the aggressive timetable laid out by White...
Don’t look for a tax reform roll-out as soon as Congress comes back despite the aggressive timetable laid out by White House legislative director Marc Short. Part of the reason is that it probably won’t be ready yet. But it also has to wait until after the GOP congress passes a budget resolution, people close to the matter tell MM.
Because if Republicans lay out their tax reform plan beforehand, Democrats could use the budget vote-a-rama process in the Senate to try and attack individual pieces of the plan.
Read the full article here.
Elizabeth Warren, Workers Take Aim at ‘Walmart Economy’
RH Reality Check - November 19, 2014, by Emily Crockett - When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. George Miller (D-...
RH Reality Check - November 19, 2014, by Emily Crockett - When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA) invited Walmart workers to brief Congress on Tuesday about the retail giant’s abusive practices, the conversation was about more than just Walmart.
“No one in this country should work full-time and still live in poverty,” Warren said.
“This is about the simple dignity of the people you have hired to work,” Miller said. “When you have a higher minimum wage, fair scheduling, and equal work for equal pay, the perception of the business goes up in the people’s mind, the customers go up and the revenues go up.”
Cantare Duvant, a Walmart customer service manager, said at the briefing that since Walmart is the nation’s largest retailer, it sets the standard for others in the industry. “So not only do we as Walmart workers deserve better, our economy also deserves better,” she said.
Duvant is a member of OUR Walmart (Organization United for Respect at Walmart), a union-backed group of Walmart workers who are, in Duvant’s words, “struggling to support our families on low pay and erratic scheduling” in what is now “Walmart’s low-wage economy.”
“Walmart specifically is worth discussing not only because of the 1.3 million workers it directly employs, but also because of the impact its employment practices have on the rest of our economy,” said Amy Traub, senior policy analyst at Demos. She said Walmart does this by “pushing down wages, limited workers hours, and squeezing its suppliers and its competitors.”
A majority of Americans are paid by the hour, and about half of early-career adults have no say in their work schedules, said Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy. “This isn’t just a narrow section of people,” she said.
Sen. Warren, a progressive hero who was recently appointed to a position in the Senate Democratic leadership, said that the issue of low-wage work in America is “deeply personal” for her.
When her father lost his job after having a heart attack, Warren said, her working-class family couldn’t pay the bills, lost their car, and almost lost their home. Then one day, “My mother, who was 50 years old and had never worked outside the home, pulled on her best dress, put on her lipstick, put on her high heels, and walked to Sears to get a minimum-wage job.”
“But here’s the key: It was a minimum-wage job in an America where a minimum-wage job would support a family of three.”
That could never happen today, Warren said, when “a momma and a baby on a full-time minimum-wage job cannot keep themselves out of poverty.”
Warren used the briefing to promote three pieces of legislation aimed at helping low-wage workers, including but not limited to people working at Walmart.
Those bills would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, give workers more reliable and flexible schedules, and help women address unequal pay based on gender.
Equal pay came up because women make up about two-thirds of the low-wage work force, and many are family breadwinners. Warren said that women in about half of American jobs can be fired just for asking whether their pay is unequal to their male coworkers.
The Schedules That Work Act, Warren said, is about the “basic fairness” of workers being able to plan for a second job, child care, or schooling. It would require employers to give workers their schedules two weeks in advance, compensate them for showing up for work only to be sent home, and not retaliate against workers for requesting more flexible or predictable schedules.
All three bills have been blocked by Republicans, which Warren openly acknowledged.
“I know that change is not easy. We might not pass these bills right away,” she said. “But don’t kid yourself about the importance of these bills, and the assurance that we’re eventually going to get them through.”
The Schedules That Work Act in particular would help Fatmata Jabbie, a Walmart worker and refugee from Saudi Arabia whose story was read at the hearing.
“Although I am not full-time yet, I am virtually on call seven days a week to pick up extra hours,” she said in her written statement. Her reward for that trouble is usually only 30 to 36 hours of work and $150 to $200 in take-home pay.
“I am a mom with two beautiful children, so I am not the only one who relies on that salary to survive,” Jabbie said.
OUR Walmart is pushing for bigger reforms than the three bills Warren promoted though. Members of the group are calling for their aggressively non-unionized employer to pay a minimum living wage of $15 an hour, provide stable, full-time schedules, and stop retaliating against workers who speak out against the company’s practices.
Duvant, for instance, already makes the $10.10 per hour that the federal minimum wage bill would guarantee—but that doesn’t do her much good, she said, when Walmart will only schedule her for 16 hours of work per week.
And Evelin Cruz, who worked for Walmart for 11 years, said at the hearing that the company fired her a few weeks ago for her activism with OUR Walmart.
“We spoke out for change, and Walmart did what it does best, which is bully, retaliate, and fire me,” she said.
Cruz told RH Reality Check that even though she no longer works at Walmart and is looking for other work, she’ll keep up the fight with OUR Walmart.
“That’s what they count on, for people to be out of Walmart and no longer want to participate,” she said. “But this is an issue that is not only affecting people in Walmart. It’s a widespread problem of scheduling, lack of hours, and a minimum wage that you can’t survive on.”
Source
Man with ALS confronts Flake on plane over tax bill vote
Man with ALS confronts Flake on plane over tax bill vote
A progressive activist who identified himself as diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS) confronted Sen. Jeff Flake (...
A progressive activist who identified himself as diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS) confronted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) on an airplane this week over Flake's vote on the GOP tax-reform bill.
Activist Ady Barkan, a staffer at the Center for Popular Democracy, questioned Flake on Thursday after the Arizona Republican voted in favor of the GOP tax-reform bill that passed the Senate in a late-night session last week. Videos of the 11-minute conversation were posted on Twitter.
Read the full article here.
Report: Black Unemployment in Bay Area More Than Three Times the Average
SF Examiner - March 6, 2014, by Chris Roberts - After 200 unanswered job applications, Ebony Eisler finally landed a $...
SF Examiner - March 6, 2014, by Chris Roberts - After 200 unanswered job applications, Ebony Eisler finally landed a $15 an hour position as a medical assistant in Mission Bay. But since she's a temp worker, she earns less than her co-workers, who make $20 to $25 per hour for the same work.
Still, as a black woman in San Francisco, she is fortunate. The unemployment rate for black people in the Bay Area is 19 percent, according to 2013 U.S. Census Bureau data crunched by the Economic Policy Institute.
Blacks are unemployed at more than three times the rate of workers of other races, according to this data. The Bay Area finished 2013 with a 6 percent total unemployment rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In San Francisco, unemployment has dropped rapidly since Mayor Ed Lee took office in January 2011, when the jobless rate was 9.5 percent. The most recent figures from the state Employment Development Department — which does not publish jobless rates by race — pegged The City's unemployment rate at 3.8 percent, by far the rosiest employment figures since the first dot-com boom at the turn of the millennium.
The wide gulf in the jobless rate between ethnic groups living in the same city belies the idea that The City and state have fully recovered from the Great Recession, according to advocates with the leftist Center for Popular Democracy.
The group released the unemployment figures by ethnicity Thursday as part of a national campaign to convince the Federal Reserve Bank to keep interest rates low in order for the economic recovery to trickle down to all workers.
So far, "the recovery is based on white America alone," said Eisler, 36, a Bayview resident who holds an associates degree and a certified nursing assistant license. Her current job, the best she could find, does not cover her $1,800 a month rent, she said.
Statewide, the jobless rate for black people is 14 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, compared to 6.1 percent for whites, 8.5 percent for Latinos and 5.9 percent for Asians.
Source
Ady Barkan launches new campaign asking everyone to “Be A Hero”
Ady Barkan launches new campaign asking everyone to “Be A Hero”
Activist Ady Barkan, who is fighting ALS, is starting a new fight - to get people to vote. He’s asking people to “Be A...
Activist Ady Barkan, who is fighting ALS, is starting a new fight - to get people to vote. He’s asking people to “Be A Hero” and vote for candidates who protect healthcare. Ady tells Ali Velshi that with all the challenges he faces that if he can get out and vote, everyone can.
Watch the video here.
Why Texans Are Fighting Anti-Immigrant Legislation
Why Texans Are Fighting Anti-Immigrant Legislation
Austin, Tex. — I’m a member of the Austin City Council, and this month Texas State Troopers arrested me for refusing to...
Austin, Tex. — I’m a member of the Austin City Council, and this month Texas State Troopers arrested me for refusing to leave Gov. Greg Abbott’s office during a protest against the anti-immigrant Senate Bill 4.
The bill, which Mr. Abbott signed May 6, represents the most dangerous type of legislative threat facing immigrants in our country. It has been called a “show me your papers” bill because it allows police officers — including those on college campuses — to question the immigration status of anyone they arrest, or even simply detain, including during traffic stops.
Read the full article here.
The Fed’s Main Job Is Jobs, And A Coalition Plans To Keep It On Task
Campaign for America's Future - September 4, 2014, by Isaiah Poole - A lot of eyes will be on the Federal Reserve...
Campaign for America's Future - September 4, 2014, by Isaiah Poole - A lot of eyes will be on the Federal Reserve Friday when the Labor Department releases its August unemployment statistics. But where will the Fed’s eyes be focused? A group of activists are planning the next steps of their effort to keep the Fed focused on the continuing unemployment crisis, and keep the Fed from taking actions that will make things worse for millions still seeking work.
“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” said Shawn Sebastian of the Center for Popular Democracy, who was part of a group of activists and unemployed people who confronted members of the Fed at last month’s economic summit in Jackson Hole, Wyo. That includes following up on a promise by Fed chair Janet Yellen to meet with the group in Washington and pressing a more detailed plan for how the Fed should proceed to help the Main Street economy grow.
“We are going to be looking at the full range of policy options,” Sebastian said.
The “inflation hawks” were poised to seize the narrative when the members of the Fed attended the Jackson Hole summit. These Fed members, egged on by conservative academics and policymakers, want the Fed to put the brakes on economic growth and turn its attention to fighting inflation, even though there are no signs that inflation is an imminent threat. On the contrary, wages as a percentage of economic output are at their lowest level since the late 1940s (while corporate profits as a share of the economy are at record highs), one sign that there are far more people looking for work than there are jobs for them.
What the hawks did not count on was the Center for Popular Democracy’s ragtag group of 10 unemployed people and activist supporters. They trekked to Jackson Hole to confront Fed members with their stories of struggling to find decent jobs, along with a demand that the Fed not abandon its unfinished role in rebuilding the middle-class economy, in the form of a letter endorsed by more than 70 organizations. Their biggest success, Sebastian said, was a two-hour meeting with Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Esther George, who just before Jackson Hole said in an interview with CNBC that it was time for the Fed to begin thinking about raising interest rates “when you see the economy getting as close as we are to full employment.”
But Sebastian and his group told George that the economy was nowhere near full employment and that the analysis of the inflation hawks was “lacking in relevance, substance and rigor.” One member of the group told of how she went from being an MBA who had risen to a management job over 15 years to being laid off and unable to find work for months, finally settling for a job that paid half as much as the job she lost.
It’s not clear what substantive effect hearing these stories had on George and other inflation hawks on the Fed, Sebastian said. “But I do hope we contributed to her thinking and we also started an engagement” with the Fed, he said. Fed members now know that when they discuss economic policy, “you can’t make decisions without public scrutiny anymore, because we’re paying attention now.”
One of the ideas that the group will refine and attempt to build consensus around would have the Fed invest directly in infrastructure bonds and similar government instruments, in much the same way that it purchased billions in bonds to prop up the financial sector in the years following the 2008 financial crash. The bond-purchasing program, known as quantitative easing, helped boost Wall Street share prices, according to most experts, but had no direct effect on job-creation or on bringing the economic recovery to communities around the country hardest hit by the crash – as the nation has now vividly seen in Ferguson, Mo.
Having the Fed directly buy bonds that would enable federal, state or local governments to fund transportation projects, school construction or other public facilities would put the Fed’s power to work in ways that directly creates jobs in the short run and assets that enhance the nation’s competitiveness and well-being in the long run.
The Fed could also better use its regulatory authority to prod the banks to pour into the economy the close to $2 trillion that is now sitting in its vaults. That hoarded cash could be put to work creating jobs and lifting the wages of working-class people.
Whatever policies take shape during the next phase of the Center for Popular Democracy’s campaign to keep the Fed focused on full employment, Sebastian says that the opening round has been a success in sending the message that “we’re not in an inflation crisis … we are in an unemployment crisis. You can’t ignore an ongoing crisis for the sake of a ghost of inflation that may or may not appear.”
3 days ago
3 days ago