Immigrant advocates attack banks for financing private prisons
“Private prison companies and their Wall Street financiers stand to benefit from policies that increase detentions,...
“Private prison companies and their Wall Street financiers stand to benefit from policies that increase detentions, separate families, and cause irreparable harm to immigrant children," said Ana María Archila, Co-Executive Director of the Center for Popular Democracy, in a statement.
Read the full article here.
Immigration Advocates on SB 4: We’re Resisting in Texas
Grassroots leaders and local officials wasted little time organizing a coordinated campaign to fight SB 4, a new Texas...
Grassroots leaders and local officials wasted little time organizing a coordinated campaign to fight SB 4, a new Texas law that targets cities, towns and sheriffs that don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
Only nine days after Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the legislation, formally known as Senate Bill 4, into law, grassroots advocates announced a “Summer of Resistance” campaign May 16. The statute allows police officers, sheriff deputies and Texas state troopers to ask about a person’s immigration status – whether they are here legally – during a routine stop.
Read the full article here.
By A Thousand Cuts: The Complex Face of Wage Theft in New York
In recent years—at least as far back as the passage of the New York Wage Theft Prevention Act of 2010, through 2015,...
In recent years—at least as far back as the passage of the New York Wage Theft Prevention Act of 2010, through 2015, when a series of New York Times articles explored the shocking extent of wage theft and other workplace abuses in the nail salon industry—mainstream elected officials and the press alike have turned meaningful attention to the problem of wage theft in New York State and nationwide. The question is what remains to be done. This brief study does not attempt to answer that question fully, but begins the inquiry by delving into the shape that wage theft takes in New York City and statewide.
Download the report here
Case studies in this report focus on particular employers that low-wage worker advocates have identified as illustrating broader problems in sectors where wage theft is prevalent.
Though this study is merely an entry point to a much broader and deeper analysis, our results point to some common-sense first steps in improving wage theft enforcement in New York City, New York State, and beyond.
Recommendations include the following:
City, state and federal government should invest in rigorous social science and economic research to evaluate what types of education, enforcement, penalties, and damages are most successful in encouraging workers and others to blow the whistle on wage theft, compensating directly impacted workers, and deterring and reducing wage theft. Our legislative and regulatory approach to penalizing wage theft and retaliation should be reevaluated to take into account the impact that wage theft and retaliation have not only on the directly impacted workers but also on competing employers, entire geographic areas, sectors, and the economy. Outreach, education, and enforcement efforts need to be tailored to address the specific situations of certain sectors, ethnic groups, and communities. Government should partner with, and resource, community-based partners who have established trust in hard-to-reach communities of workers and employers. Government should partner with community and labor organizations with expertise in specific sectors and types of wage theft, to assist in bringing forward adequate and accurate testimony and evidence to evaluate compliance in that sector or type of employer. Government inspectors and investigators should receive regular training in sector-specific practices in order to rigorously evaluate testimony and facts presented by employees and employers for reasonability. Government enforcement needs to explore substantial regulatory, legislative and strategic changes to enable collection of unpaid wages, damages and penalties. Pilot projects should aggressively test the use of bonds in exploitative industries, the ability of courts and the Department of Labor (DOL) to freeze assets pre-judgment, and wage liens. Public procurement rules should prohibit convicted wage thieves from bidding on public contracts or dispositions at the federal, state and local level, or from receiving public subsidy, with permanent removal from bidding or eligibility lists in cases of egregious wage theft.Download the report here
Bad deals with Wall Street are costing the city as much as $1 billion a year
NY Daily News - December 2, 2013, by Phyllis Furman - Coalition urges city to change its relationship with banks as a...
NY Daily News - December 2, 2013, by Phyllis Furman - Coalition urges city to change its relationship with banks as a way to address income inequality.
Wall Street has put the squeeze on the city to the tune of $1 billion, a report due out Tuesday claims.
As much as $723 million worth of unnecessary fees and bad deals, coupled with $300 million in bank subsidies should be rejiggered, says a study from a new left-leaning coalition called New Day, New York Coalition.
"New York City could be saving $1 billion annually just by changing the way it does business with Wall Street," one of the report's authors, Connie Razza, director of strategic research initiatives at the Center for Popular Democracy, told the Daily News.
The study, dubbed "Leveraging New York's Financial Power to Combat Inequality," kicks off a week of events organized by the group, culminating in a rally set for Thursday at Foley Square.
The coalition, whose members include veterans of Occupy Wall Street, labor unions such as 1199SEIU, and faith organizations, says its goal is to "draw attention to the ways Wall Street and big corporations continue to siphon resources away from average New Yorkers and point toward solutions that would help reduce inequality and build economic fairness."
Mirroring a key campaign theme of Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, the report notes the huge disparity between the city's haves and have-nots, with the 1% controlling a whopping 40% of the city's income.
The city and its pension funds have tremendous leverage that can be used to bridge the gap, the study says: $350 billion that travels through the financial system.
"We should be using that leverage to demand a different relationship" with Wall Street, Razza said.
Among the key findings: the city, its pension funds and the MTA pay $563 million in Wall Street fees each year.
Rather than pay out megabucks to Wall Street big shots, the city should set up an in-house group to manage its pension assets and bond offerings, the report recommends.
That suggestion comes on the heels of a recent city report that showed fees paid by New York City pension funds surged by 28% to $472.5 million in the year ended June 30.
The idea of bringing the management of the city's money in-house isn't new.
New York's former chief investment officer, Larry Schloss, recommended just that before he recently stepped down. A number of public pension funds in Canada, including Ontario's $126 billion teachers' pension fund, have already moved in that direction.
But achieving that goal here is a long shot, said Leo Kolivakis, publisher of Pension Pulse Blog.
"Attracting and retaining qualified managers to manage money in-house is a huge challenge," Kolivakis told the News.
Patrick Muncie, a spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, noted the financial services industry's crucial contributions to the local economy.
"The financial services sector is a critical driver of New York City's economy, providing more than 400,000 jobs and generating $3 billion in tax revenue last year alone," he said.
A spokesman for outgoing New York City Comptroller John Liu said the report encapsulates many of the comptroller's efforts, including "better and more cost-effective in-house management of pension assets."
The report "effectively and succinctly aggregates the real underlying issues of deepening inequality," Liu said in a statement.
Reps for de Blasio and incoming New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, declined to comment.
Other recommendations of the report include holding banks to firm commitments to improve the community in exchange for the $300 million a year they receive in subsidies.
pfurman@nydailynews.com
What they want:
*Renegotiate financial deals to save up to $725 million each year
*Hold banks to commitments in exchange for $300 million in subsidies
*Banks should write down underwater mortgages to keep 86,000 families in their homes
SourceAustin becomes first city in the South to mandate paid sick leave
Austin becomes first city in the South to mandate paid sick leave
But Austin’s paid sick leave vote has implications for many other areas. Sarah Johnson, the co-executive director of...
But Austin’s paid sick leave vote has implications for many other areas. Sarah Johnson, the co-executive director of Local Progress, an organization that has worked to help Austin’s paid sick leave efforts advance, told ThinkProgress that the wider region stands to benefit from the city’s example.
Read the full article here.
Minneapolis Fed chief Neel Kashkari calls some racial disparity 'a crisis'
Minneapolis Fed chief Neel Kashkari calls some racial disparity 'a crisis'
Community organizer Wintana Melekin was grabbing a soda in late June at a coffee shop near her office when she heard...
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
Source
Interest rate clock ticks for Janet Yellen and the Fed – but is China a wild card?
In just a little over three weeks’ time, on 17 September, the US central bankers are going to have to sit down around a...
In just a little over three weeks’ time, on 17 September, the US central bankers are going to have to sit down around a table and decide whether to raise interest ratesfor the first time since before the financial crisis of 2008 unfolded. And just as the markets were preparing for the news, China has thrown a wrench in the works.
Just to put this in its proper context, the last time the Fed raised interest rates, it was June 2006. Microsoft was releasing a version of Windows Vista; Google officially became a word in the Oxford English Dictionary. The Da Vinci Code ruled at the movie box office. The iPhone hadn’t even been introduced yet; we didn’t yet live in a world of apps and selfies. Hey, you could even collect interest on your bank savings account!
If it all feels blurred and slightly unreal (especially the idea of earning interest from a bank account) in your mind, that’s OK. Time has a habit of doing that to us. Then, too, what has happened since then has rendered the events of 2006 pretty forgettable: the financial crisis, the recession, and the struggle to get back to where we were, all neatly summarized in the glib phrase that some use when describing the first part of the 21st century: the “lost decade”.
But the Fed really, really, really wants to get back to normal. And that would be the old normal – when its team of policymakers meets once every six or seven weeks to monitor the economy and determine whether it’s overheating or cooling down too rapidly. Then they whip out the key tool in their monetary policy arsenal – interest rates – and adjust it accordingly. If the economic environment is too robust and the threat of inflation looms large on the horizon, well then, higher interest rates should make money more costly, dampen demand for it and calm everyone down a bit. On the other extreme, if animal spirits are low and unemployment is high, low interest rates should generate some economic activity and get everything moving again.
For now, the Fed’s leaders have said repeatedly, they are waiting until they are reasonably sure that inflation is heading toward their annual target of 2%. For the last three years, it hasn’t approached that level, and there’s tremendous uncertainty about acting too soon – and causing the economy to stall altogether – or delaying and perhaps allowing bubbles to take shape and jeopardize the credibility of the Fed itself as a policy-making institution.
It doesn’t help that the post-crisis recession seemed to throw the ability of monetary policy as a tool to guide the economy smoothly through storms into question. It certainly wasn’t enough to get the economy going once the financial system had been rescued from bankers intent on dashing off a precipice like lemmings, carrying the whole structure with them.
And now policymakers must continue to grapple with economic news that can be used in whatever way a pundit wants, to advocate for pretty much whatever point of view one wishes. The housing market is recovering at its strongest pace in nearly a decade! But it’s still functioning well below long-term historical averages, when compared to total national GDP levels. It all depends on which data set you prefer to look at. Employment? Well, the good news is that unemployment levels have fallen. On the other hand, there’s absolutely no wage inflation to be found, much less to be contained: most Americans would find the idea to be laughable. Indeed, middle income earners have seen a significant erosion in their buying power. There is inflation, but it’s in the prices of goods and services, not in wages.
Yellen and her fellow policymakers need to wake up and smell the espresso, according to a consortium of progressive policy organizations led by the “Fed Up” campaign, a nonprofit created by the Center for Popular Democracy. They’re putting together an online petition to be delivered to Yellen and other Fed members at their annual Jackson Hole, Wyoming retreat at the end of August. “Working families haven’t made a full economic recovery, and now is not the time to declare victory,” the petition states, noting that higher interest rates would make it more costly for Americans to buy homes or cars, as well as boosting the costs of student loans and credit card or any other form of debt.
All of that is true, but the Fed policymakers aren’t just thinking about working families when they consider boosting interest rates. They’re considering the bigger picture, and specifically what might happen if they don’t act: inflation (in the form of a flood of new, cheap loans from banks) and, far more dangerously, asset bubbles.
The latter is a real risk: the Fed already is stepping up its scrutiny of one particularly risky and active party of the market fueled by ultra-cheap financing, the leveraged loan market. According to at least one source, since the Fed tried to crack down when banks were shrugging off the regulator’s guidelines, the market has only grown still larger, to nearly $875bn. And it is full of the kind of excessive risk taking that led to the 2008 crisis.
In a perfect world, Yellen and the Fed would rather not preside over a repeat of that event, and if the price to pay is higher interest rates, well, that’s a perfectly acceptable tradeoff, thank you very much. Indeed, some economists believe that they already are delinquent; that they should have begun “normalizing” interest rate policy a long time ago. Already, a Bank of America securities report has scoffed that keeping rates unchanged for so long has left the Fed suffering from “central bank policy impotence” – and no little blue pill in sight.
So, will the Fed act?
The minutes of the Fed’s last meeting, held in late July, which were released to the public last week, display a lot more dithering and a considerable amount of wariness. Inflation data just isn’t there; Federal Open Market Committee members say they want more evidence that economic growth is “sufficiently strong”. How Yellen will forge a consensus out of this group is baffling.
And then there is the wild card: China. Is it even possible for the US to consider raising interest rates with the yuan depreciating, stock markets plunging and the contagion spreading to other markets in Southeast Asia? The precise extent to which these events might affect the United States is hard to gauge, but in a globalized economy, of which China and its 1.4 billion citizens play a growing and significant role, the Fed can’t pretend that they are blips on the horizon.
For my part, I’m left with only one certainty. Charged with sorting through all these issues, weighing them, and making the right policy choices for the country, Yellen is earning every penny of her annual salary of $201,700.
Source: The Guardian
Advice From Seattle: On Local Level Citizen Activism After The Sanders Campaign
Advice From Seattle: On Local Level Citizen Activism After The Sanders Campaign
As the 2016 primary season ends and Bernie Sanders backers look beyond next month’s Democratic convention in...
As the 2016 primary season ends and Bernie Sanders backers look beyond next month’s Democratic convention in Philadelphia, many who’ve “felt the Bern” have their eye on local politics.
Hundreds, if not thousands, will be heeding the call of Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, a Sanders’ endorser and convention delegate.
“We need people running for school boards,” Ellison told the New York Times in May. “We need people running for City Council. We need people running for state legislatures. We need people running for zoning boards, for park boards, to really take this sort of message that Bernie carried and carry it in their own local communities.”
Fortunately of those seeking relevant political advice, former Seattle City Councilor Nick Licata has just published Becoming A Citizen Activist: Stories, Strategies, & Advice For Changing Our World (Sasquatch Books, 2016). His book draws on several decades of experience as a progressive elected official and varied campus and community organizing work before that.
Like Sanders, Licata was a Sixties’ radical. He belonged to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Bowling Green State University and learned retail politics, at the dormitory level, when he ran successfully for student government president.
Like some Sanders supporters who may become candidates in the near future, Licata had an unconventional resume when he first sought public office. He had lived in a well-known Seattle commune for twenty years and founded two alternative publishing ventures, the People’s Yellow Pages and the Seattle Sun. A Democrat with Green Party sympathies, he defeated a candidate who was backed by the mainstream media and out-spent him 2-to-1.
“In the previous 128 city council elections, only two candidates had won when both daily newspapers endorsed their opponent,” Licata reports, so “the odds didn’t look good.” Fortunately, his message that the city should invest more resources “in all neighborhoods and not concentrate them in just a few” resonated with an electoral coalition of “young renters” and “older home-owners.” Licata’s own track record of neighborhood activism gave him the necessary name recognition and grassroots street cred to win.
NIMBYism or More?
Becoming A Citizen Activist is full of useful tips about how activists and allied politicians can collaborate on issue-oriented campaigns. His book makes clear that “going local” is different from backing a presidential campaign focused on national and international questions. According to Licata, progressives must develop the ability to “see the small things that generate the big things.” By that, the author means linking voter concerns about global threats like climate change to concrete and achievable steps that city government can take to address local manifestations of the larger problem.
He describes how Seattle’s four years of skirmishing over plastic bag regulation originated in one neighborhood’s opposition to a new waste transfer station. What might have been just another exercise in NIMBYism evolved into a city-wide push for waste reduction, at its source, plus much greater recycling. A plastic bag fee, imposed by the city council, was overturned after a plastic bag industry-funded referendum campaign but the city’s ban on Styrofoam containers survived. In 2011, the city council passed a broad ban on single-use plastic bags, which the industry opted not to challenge either in court or at the polls.
Licata’s other examples of progressive policy initiatives include raising local labor standards, strengthening civilian oversight over the police, providing greater protection for undocumented immigrants, decriminalizing marijuana possession, and using cultural programs to foster a sense of community.
Several of his most interesting case studies reveal the tendency of legislators—even liberal-minded ones—to be overly timid and skeptical about policy initiatives that push the envelope. In 2011, for example, Licata tried to lower the expectations of constituents who met with him about a paid sick leave mandate opposed by local employers. “I cautioned that it was not likely that we’d see it anytime soon,” he admits in the book.
Yet, less than nine months later, he was “shown to be wrong.” Not only was there sufficient public support but “well organized advocacy groups” marshaled “a wealth of data to prove that the sky wouldn’t fall if paid sick leave passed.”
Several years later, when some Seattle fast food workers staged union-backed job actions to highlight their minimum wage demand, it was the same story:
“....Politicians like me were sympathetic but also felt that fifteen dollars was way too big a lift. In my own case, I thought there were more readily achievable goals—like fighting wage theft. I found myself initially offering cautious verbal support and not much more.”
What made Seattle’s “fight for fifteen” winnable was grassroots organizing by local labor organizations and left-wing activists, who were able to inject the issue into the 2013 mayoral race between incumbent Mike McGinn and his challenger, state senator Ed Murray. Shortly before the election, Murray endorsed a minimum wage hike to $15 an hour while McGinn insisted that Washington state should take action instead of the city.
Key Socialist Presence
That year, it also made a big difference to have an energetic and charismatic socialist candidate running for city council under the “Fight for Fifteen” banner. Kshama Sawant took on Richard Conlin, “a well-liked liberal politician” who cast the city council’s lone vote against paid sick leave and opposed raising the minimum wage without further study. According to Licata, Conlin, like McGinn, was defeated due to the votes of “many disaffected Democrats who wanted more aggressive council members willing to speak out on issues.”
Once elected, Sawant was quick to utilize what Licata calls “the unique means that public officials have to help mobilize the public.” Among these are holding public hearings, forming issue-oriented or constituency-based task forces and commissions, and backing ballot measures like the threatened popular referendum on “15 Now” that kept Mayor Murray and his allies from weakening minimum wage legislation more than they did in 2014.
Yet when Sawant—a generation younger than Licata—first ran against his longtime colleague, Richard Conlin, the council’s most left-leaning member didn’t support her. In Becoming a Citizen Activist, Licata now acknowledges Sawant’s unusual strengths as a radical politician, including her social media savvy, “dedicated following,” and ability to project “a message that resonated with the public.” Her tweets, blogging, and website use “helped her obtain 80 percent citywide name recognition after a year on the council, far surpassing all the other council members,” Licata reports.
According to the author, local pollsters surveying the relative popularity of city councilors prior to Seattle’s 2015 election found that Sawant’s “numbers were higher than all the others but mine, and I beat her by only one point.” These results might explain why Mayor Murray and the Seattle business community failed to unseat their Socialist Alternative critic when she ran for re-election last year, with Licata’s backing this time. (Licata himself chose to retire from the city council.)
New Forms of Organization
Readers interested in further detail about their over-lapping council careers will have to wait for American Socialist, a political memoir by Sawant (to be published by Verso next year) or Jonathan Rosenblum’s forthcoming book for Beacon Press about labor and politics in Seattle. Rosenblum worked on Sawant’s re-election campaign which, in his view, demonstrated “the indispensability of organization” and an “independent political base.”
Unlike Licata’s own more typical electoral efforts in the past, Sawant’s “campaign strategies and tactics were not directed by a single candidate or campaign manager.” Instead, Rosenblum points out, they were “developed through collective, thoughtful discussions” among Socialist Alternative members who live in Seattle and “are connected to a broader base of union and community activists.” (See http://www.alternet.org/activism/socialist-win-seattle-anomaly-or-harbinger)
One limitation of Licata’s book is the absence of any discussion about fielding slates of progressive candidates who are committed to a common platform that includes rejection of corporate contributions. To his credit, Licata did play a major role in creating the multi-city network of progressive elected officials known as Local Progress. In the Bay Area, this group includes Richmond, CA. city councilor (and former mayor) Gayle McLaughlin, whose Richmond Progressive Alliance only runs candidates who spurn business donations.
Nationally, about 400 mayors, city councilors, county supervisors, and school board members use Local Progress as a “think tank” and clearing house for alternative public policies. Assisted by the Center for Popular Democracy in New York, the group distributes a 60-page handbook for improving labor and environmental standards, housing and education programs, public safety, and municipal election practices. At annual conferences—like its national meeting in Pittsburgh on July 8-9—local victories of the sort Licata describes in his book are dissected and their lessons disseminated. (For details, see http://localprogress.org/)
Local Progress leaders believe that neither street politics nor electoral victories alone will make a sufficient dent in the status quo. As Licata told his fellow “electeds” when they met in New York two years ago, municipal government changes for the better only when progressives have “an outside and inside game...people on the inside and people protesting on the outside to provide insiders with backbone.” Licata’s new book provides many useful examples of that necessary synergy.
(Steve Early is a longtime labor activist and author of a forthcoming book about progressive politics in Richmond, California entitled Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City (Beacon Press, 2017). A version of this review appeared originally in Working In These Times, He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com)
By Steve Early
Source
Senator Jeff Flake won't make an ultimatum on DACA and tax bill
Senator Jeff Flake won't make an ultimatum on DACA and tax bill
In a video posted to Twitter Thursday night, Arizona Senator Jeff Flake appears on an airplane discussing the...
In a video posted to Twitter Thursday night, Arizona Senator Jeff Flake appears on an airplane discussing the controversial tax reform bill and explaining why he won't force an ultimatum on a program for immigrant youth.
Watch the video and read the full article here.
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...
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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