Divest From Prisons, Invest in People-What Justice for Black Lives Really Looks Like
Divest From Prisons, Invest in People-What Justice for Black Lives Really Looks Like
Stahly-Butts, a facilitator of the Cleveland convening and deputy director of racial justice at the Center for Popular...
Stahly-Butts, a facilitator of the Cleveland convening and deputy director of racial justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, explains that our current criminal justice system is based on a premise of comfort, rather than safety: Instead of addressing the roots of uncomfortable issues such as drug addiction, mental illness, and poverty, we’ve come to accept policing and incarceration as catch-all solutions. This disproportionately affects African Americans.
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How Cities’ Funding Woes Are Driving Racial and Economic Injustice—And What We Can Do About It
The Nation - April 28, 2015, by Brad Lander & Karl Kumodzi - In August 2014, the municipality of Ferguson, Missouri...
The Nation - April 28, 2015, by Brad Lander & Karl Kumodzi - In August 2014, the municipality of Ferguson, Missouri erupted onto the national scene. In the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, we learned much about economic and political life in Ferguson and greater St. Louis County.
To many, it was no surprise to learn that, for years, African-American residents of municipalities throughout St. Louis County have been disproportionately and illegally stopped for minor offenses. Blacks are far more likely to be stopped, searched, ticketed, fined, and arrested. Many wind up jailed, leading to a cycle of lost jobs, drivers’ licenses, homes, or child custody. Some are beaten, terrorized, or—like Michael Brown—even killed.
It was more surprising to learn that in Ferguson, “Driving While Black” isn’t only about racial profiling: it’s also about municipal revenue. Fines and court fees have become the city’s second largest revenue source, and the over-criminalization of Black people has become a strategy for collecting taxes.
It is important to understand and address the revenue crisis facing U.S. municipalities. As cities have become unable to pay their bills, they often turn to regressive strategies that disproportionately harm people of color and low-income residents.
Ithaca, NY is like Ferguson. Up until January 2014, residents had to pay for installations and repairs of public sidewalks adjoining their properties—with one notable case in which 28 homeowners were forced to pay a combined $100,000 out of their personal pockets to the city for repairs. Detroit, MI is like Ferguson. After the city filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history, the city’s water department responded to pressures to lower their $90 million portion of the overall $20 billion debt by shutting off crucial water services to mostly Black low-income residents who owed over a mere $150 on their water bills. This April, Baltimore followed Detroit’s lead.
These cities are like Ferguson because of a common underlying problem: All across America, cities and towns are struggling to maintain enough revenue to provide crucial services to residents. The collateral damage of this revenue crisis—over-criminalization, utility shut-offs, the withdrawal of public services, and slashed budgets for schools—is dire.
Local Progress, a national network of progressive municipal elected officials, is working to address inequality from an often overlooked source: municipal budgets. In our new report, Progressive Policies for Raising Municipal Revenue, Local Progress lays out forward-thinking strategies and policy options that cities can pursue to restructure their revenue streams in a way that doesn’t fall disproportionately on the backs of their most vulnerable residents.
The roots of the municipal revenue crisis were decades in the making. Following the post-war desegregation of housing and education, and other civil rights victories of the 50’s and 60’s, racial animosity and the conservative backlash against taxation—referred to by historians as the tax revolt—helped to fuel the exodus of higher-income families from urban centers to suburban enclaves.
This “white flight” dramatically eroded the tax base of urban centers like Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis—and later of first-ring suburban municipalities like Ferguson.
The tax revolt also led directly to policies that dramatically reduced the ability of cities to collect enough revenue through property and other taxes. Most dramatic was the 1976 passage of Prop 13 in California, which contributed heavily to the erosion of California’s public education system and other public services.
In 2008, the Great Recession caused the municipal revenue crisis that had been brewing for decades to explode, spurring significant and rapid declines in general fund revenues for municipalities. In order to deal with the impacts of this dramatic shortfall, cities were forced to cut personnel, cancel capital projects (and their much-needed jobs), and slash funding for education, parks, libraries, sanitation, and more. These cuts hit low-income families the hardest. And they are especially harmful to Black families because African-Americans are 30 percent more likely to be employed by the public sector than other workers.
The strategies that many municipalities adopted to address the crisis hit low-income people of color the hardest. When property tax revenue declined in St. Louis County, fines-and-fees revenue increased in order to maintain revenue. Tickets are issued for everything from failure to cut one’s lawn to sleeping over at someone’s house without being on the occupancy certificate. In nearby Edmundson, the city averages $600 per person per year in court fines, and forecasts increasing revenue from these fines in their future budget proposals – essentially creating a hidden tax on the most vulnerable residents. Black residents throughout the region report feeling “as if their governments see them as little more than sources of revenue.”
Many towns have resorted to privatizing formerly public responsibilities such as trash collection, sewage, roads, parks, and introducing new fees to force residents to foot the bill directly. These fees and taxes are often extremely regressive, because as everyone is forced to pay a flat rate, poor people end up paying a higher percentage of their income. A recent study conducted by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that the nationwide average effective state and local tax rates are 10.9% for the poorest fifth of taxpayers and 5.4% for the wealthiest 1 percent. In fact, in the ten states with the most regressive tax structures, the poorest fifth pay as much as seven times the percentage of their income in taxes and fees as the wealthiest residents do.
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Addressing the municipal revenue crisis is, therefore, a central barrier to achieving racial and economic justice in our urban centers, and to rebuilding a more democratic, just, and livable America with genuinely shared prosperity.
Luckily, there are creative and progressive strategies that municipalities can adopt to generate more revenue in a progressive way, such as:
● Expanding the progressivity of existing local income taxes by creating more tax brackets with greater differences between brackets, and doing the same for property taxes in order to generate more revenue from commercial and high-end development.
● Eliminating corporate tax breaks at the city level, particularly Tax Increment Financing and business improvement districts that come with tax breaks
● Restructuring fines so that residents pay different rates based on income. A $200 traffic ticket has no deterrent effect for a millionaire, but can be devastating for a low wage worker; a more rational fine system, like the one adopted in Finland, would be more fair and generate more revenue.
● Mandating that major tax-exempt institutions like hospitals and universities make genuine and fair payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs) to help cover the costs of crucial city services that they use.
● Converting city services into municipality-owned utilities when possible, charging utility fees to all users, and applying conservation pricing so lower-income households pay a lower rate while bulk users—such as commercial and industry—pay higher rates
● Forming statewide coalitions of municipal elected officials, grassroots organizations, school boards, and other affected parties to change preemption and revenue policies at the state level.
These policy innovations and many more are detailed in our report.
Cities are America’s bedrock and its future: both for our country and for the progressive movement. Cities are home to 67% of the population, account for 75% of our GDP, and house our best public institutions and infrastructure.
The policy recommendations laid out by Local Progress in our new report can help municipalities develop progressive revenue solutions—so they can pay for public education, health, and housing programs that help families thrive, invest in the infrastructure of public transportation, climate resilience, parks that sustainable cities need, and stimulate inclusive economic growth that creates good jobs.
Through progressive revenue strategies, cities can turn the Ferguson-like cycle of disinvestment and inequality into a cycle of reinvestment and opportunity—and help make sure that our cities can become the models for our vision of a more progressive and prosperous America.
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JPMorgan's Dimon defends Trump advisory role, deregulation
JPMorgan's Dimon defends Trump advisory role, deregulation
JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) Chief Executive Jamie Dimon on Tuesday responded to criticism from angry shareholders...
JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) Chief Executive Jamie Dimon on Tuesday responded to criticism from angry shareholders of his role advising President Donald Trump on economic matters, saying he would help "any president" in office.
At the bank's annual meeting in Wilmington, Delaware, several attendees demanded answers from Dimon about his role on a White House business council and JPMorgan's involvement with financial deregulation efforts in Washington.
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Watch the video for Death Cab For Cutie's new anti-Donald Trump song Read more at http://www.nme.com/news/death-cab-for-cutie/97016#EkDo9zizovyxV1uy.99
Watch the video for Death Cab For Cutie's new anti-Donald Trump song Read more at http://www.nme.com/news/death-cab-for-cutie/97016#EkDo9zizovyxV1uy.99
Death Cab For Cutie have released a new anti-Donald Trump song. The track, 'Million Dollar Loan', is one of...
Death Cab For Cutie have released a new anti-Donald Trump song.
The track, 'Million Dollar Loan', is one of 30 tracks being released over the next 30 days in the final run in to the US Presidential election. Watch the video below.
Other artists who will feature on the anti-Trump '30 Days, 30 Songs' compilation, include My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Aimee Mann and Thao Nguyen. A previously unreleased live track by R.E.M will also feature.
"Lyrically, 'Million Dollar Loan' deals with a particularly tone deaf moment in Donald Trump's ascent to the Republican nomination,” said Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. "While campaigning in New Hampshire last year, he attempted to cast himself as a self-made man by claiming he built his fortune with just a 'small loan of a million dollars' from his father. Not only has this statement been proven to be wildly untrue, he was so flippant about it. It truly disgusted me.
“Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he is unworthy of the honour and responsibility of being President of the United States of America, and in no way, shape or form represents what this country truly stands for. He is beneath us."
You can purchase 'Million Dollar Loan' here. All of 30 Days’ proceeds will go to the Center for Popular Democracy and their efforts toward Universal Voter Registration in America.
Earlier today (October 10), the music world reacted to the second US Presidential town hall debate with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
By DAMIAN JONES
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Retailers' Goal of Challenging Amazon Hindered by Labor Woes
Retailers' Goal of Challenging Amazon Hindered by Labor Woes
Brick-and-mortar retailers hoping to fend off Amazon.com Inc. need to deploy the one weapon that could set them apart:...
Brick-and-mortar retailers hoping to fend off Amazon.com Inc. need to deploy the one weapon that could set them apart: top-notch customer service, provided by actual humans.
But making that goal a reality relies on something they’ve not really invested in -- well-trained employees with the kinds of wages and regular hours that make them want to stick around.
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Watch protesters descend on 5-star resort where GOP plots against American workers
Watch protesters descend on 5-star resort where GOP plots against American workers
Scores of protesters, gathered for a march organized by the Center for Popular Democracy Action in partnership with Tax...
Scores of protesters, gathered for a march organized by the Center for Popular Democracy Action in partnership with Tax March, converged on West Virginia Thursday from ten different states.
Watch the video and read the article here.
Anti-Racism March Passes Through Falls Church
Anti-Racism March Passes Through Falls Church
The March to Confront White Supremacy trekked 118 miles over 10 days to reach it’s final destination at the Martin...
The March to Confront White Supremacy trekked 118 miles over 10 days to reach it’s final destination at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. earlier today, but not before making a detour through Falls Church’s Washington St. where they were greeted with water and support from citizens, including members of the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation.
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Sexual assault testimony in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing triggers trauma, reports
Sexual assault testimony in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing triggers trauma, reports
The political became personal for many this week, as Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony of sexual assault reopened old...
The political became personal for many this week, as Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony of sexual assault reopened old wounds for other victims — including two women who dramatically confronted a key US senator Friday in a Capitol elevator.
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Schedule Rules Prove Difficult to Implement
San Francisco — San Francisco, the country’s premier laboratory for new Internet services, is also used to innovating...
San Francisco — San Francisco, the country’s premier laboratory for new Internet services, is also used to innovating in municipal regulation.
But in its latest experiment, it’s starting to find that legislating good corporate behavior isn’t as easy as pressing a button on your smartphone.
In July, the city started implementing a first-in-the-nation law aimed at curtailing the trend toward “just-in-time” scheduling, where managers call in employees to work on short notice. The new measure requires large-chain retailers — such as Safeway and Walgreens — to publish schedules at least two weeks in advance and to compensate employees with “predictability pay” if they make changes less than a week ahead of time. It also mandates that additional hours be offered to existing employees first before new hires are made, and that part-time workers be paid at the same rate as people who work full-time.
So far, it’s been easier to publish schedules than live up to the spirit of the law.
“The two-week notice seemed to be instituted right away, but the other stuff is lagging,” said Gordon Mar, director of San Francisco Jobs With Justice, a labor-backed group that pushed for the “Retail Workers Bill of Rights” and has been monitoring its implementation.
The sluggish response may be because fines don’t kick in until Oct. 3; the city is still hashing out the rules. But the spotty compliance so far highlights the difficulty of attempts to mandate worker-friendly practices — especially the kind that touch the most fundamental aspects of business operations, rather than those that simply require higher pay and better benefits.
San Francisco employers fought the new ordinance, but couldn’t prevent its passage. Now, they complain it’s affecting service.
“We’re hearing from members in San Francisco that it really is not working well at all,” said Ronald Fong, president of the California Grocers Association. Stores can’t always predict surges in foot traffic, which might be brought on by a sunny day, leaving managers without the option to bring in more staff. That was a problem during the heat wave that swept over San Francisco this summer.
“Supplies weren’t able to get out to the shelves,” Fong said. “It just kind of snowballed, and our customers have a bad experience, or the stores lose sales.”
Some businesses don’t mind the rules in principle, but object to the red tape. “Everybody pretty much operates on a predictive schedule,” said Bill Dombrowski, president of the California Retailers Association. “But the process of implementing this, with offering the employees hours in writing and waiting three days for a response, it’s a lot of government intrusion into very minute detail.”
Also, not all industries schedule their workers in the same way. Milton Moritz is president of the National Association of Theatre Owners’ California and Nevada chapter, and said the theater business is by nature unpredictable, making the new law particularly difficult to comply with.
“We might not know until the Monday before the Friday a film shows, and even then we’re hiring, firing, scheduling people based on the business that film’s going to do,” Moritz said. “This ordinance flies in the face of all that. It really complicates the issue tremendously.”
The San Francisco ordinance hasn’t just been irritating for big companies. Some workers grumble the law discourages employers from offering extra shifts on short notice, because they would have to pay the last-minute schedule change penalty — even if workers would be happy for the chance to pick up more hours.
Rachel Deutsch, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Popular Democracy who has been helping local jurisdictions across the country craft fair-scheduling legislation, said that’s something that might change in future iterations.
“I think that’s the thing with any policy where it’s the first attempt to solve a complicated economic problem,” Deutsch said. “It’s been a learning process.”
So far, fair scheduling laws aren’t spreading as quickly as minimum wage and paid sick leave laws. A statewide bill in California failed a couple weeks ago, and no other local ordinances have passed besides San Francisco’s, though there are active campaigns in several cities including Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, several companies have acted on their own to curb some of the practices that workers have found most disruptive, like on-call shifts, where workers have to be available even if they aren’t ultimately asked to work. But in some cases — like that of Starbucks, which committed to eliminating many of those practices — those voluntary changes haven’t been any more effective than government mandates.
Erin Hurley worked at Bath & Body Works and campaigned for an end to on-call shifts. After she left the job, parent company L Brands said it would stop the practice at Bath & Body Works as well as another of its chains, Victoria’s Secret. But Hurley said she’s heard from current workers that managers are still doing effectively the same thing, by asking employees to stay a little longer.
“On-call shifts were replaced with shift extensions,” said Hurley. “Basically what L Brands did was change the name of the practice.” Keeping people on-call is very convenient for employers, and letting it go can be easier said than done. L Brands did not respond to a request for comment.
Still, advocates in San Francisco think the Retail Workers Bill of Rights has already done some good, and will be more effective when the city’s enforcement kicks into high gear — just like overtime rules did, when companies got used to obeying them.
Take Michelle Flores, 21, who has worked part time at Safeway for two years to support herself while in going to college. Unpredictable schedules made that difficult: She would only know her shifts a few days beforehand, which sometimes didn’t leave her enough time to hit the books.
“I would study from midnight until 5, 6 a.m., sleep for two or three hours, and then go to the exam,” said Flores, 21, who attends San Francisco State. This year, she expects that to change. “If I know that I have a shift scheduled, I’ll just study another day,” Flores said.
Also, the law came with some funding for community organizations to make employees aware of what workers are entitled to. That has ancillary effects — like getting people interested in joining a union, which can be better equipped to make sure companies are following the rules.
“It just creates an opportunity to talk to more workers about their rights under the law, and that leads to conversations about other issues in the workplace,” said Gordon Mar, of Jobs with Justice. “And that could lead to getting organized.”
Source: Valley News
Seattle’s Lessons for Bernie Sanders Activists After the Elections
Seattle’s Lessons for Bernie Sanders Activists After the Elections
According to Licata, progressives must develop the ability to “see the small things that generate the big things,”...
According to Licata, progressives must develop the ability to “see the small things that generate the big things,” 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.
As the 2016 primary season draws to an end and Bernie Sanders backers look beyond next month’s Democratic convention in Philadelphia, many who have “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 for those seeking relevant political advice, former Seattle City Councilor Nick Licata has just published a handbook called Becoming A Citizen Activist: Stories, Strategies, & Advice For Changing Our World (Sasquatch Books, 2016). His book draws on 17 years 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 first 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 20 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 two to one.
“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.
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,” 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 of 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 15” 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 15” 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”: 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.”
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, Calif., 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.
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.
By STEVE EARLY
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