Aboard flight, dad battling ALS pleads with Sen. Jeff Flake to vote no on tax bill
Aboard flight, dad battling ALS pleads with Sen. Jeff Flake to vote no on tax bill
A 33-year-old father battling ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, was flying home last week after traveling to...
A 33-year-old father battling ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, was flying home last week after traveling to Washington, D.C., to protest the tax bill when he came face-to-face with one of the lawmakers he most hoped to influence.
Ady Barkan and others had spent a week trying to get lawmakers' attention and giving speeches outside their offices.
Read the full article here.
Second Draft of Scaffold Report Released
Times Union - September 3, 2014, by Casey Seiler - SUNY's Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government has released a...
Times Union - September 3, 2014, by Casey Seiler - SUNY's Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government has released a second draft of its controversial report on New York's Scaffold Law. According to the Institute's Deputy Director for Operations Robert Bullock, it's the only remaining version of the report that was shared with the report's funder, the state Lawsuit Reform Alliance.
The business-backed group, which opposes Scaffold Law, paid $82,800 to fund the report — sponsorship that has led critics to attack the study as advocacy in the guise of research. Its authors, however, insist the research was conducted in good faith.
Scaffold Law, which places "absolute liability" on employers for gravity-related workplace injuries, is supported by labor unions but opposed by business groups that claim it needlessly drives up construction costs — a thesis backed up in part by the report. Opponents would like to see New York follow other states by adopting a "comparative negligence" standard that would make workers proportionately responsible when their actions contribute to an accident.
The Center for Popular Democracy, a labor-backed group that supports Scaffold Law, lambasted the report upon its release last winter and requested copies of all communications between the institute and the Lawsuit Reform Alliance. That FOIL request produced a series of emails between researchers and LRA Executive Director Tom Stebbins, including Stebbins' suggested edits to a June 25, 2013, draft copy of the report that was not initially released by the institute.
The center appealed to SUNY, which ultimately released the June 25 draft. A comparison of the draft and the final report suggested that some of Stebbins' suggestions were reflected in the final version. Researchers, however, said any changes were the result of their efforts to sharpen their analysis, and not made due to pressure from the funder.
The newly released draft, dated Aug. 7, 2013, closely resembles the final report.
The center's Josie Duffy claims the six-week gap between the first and second drafts suggests that the institute moved quickly to follow the alliance's edits.
"SUNY says it has now disclosed everything it has, but given that LRANY and the authors held weekly conference calls to discuss the report's progress, we may never know the full extent of their influence over the final version," she said.
In an email, Bullock said the institute "has been open and honest about its contacts with funders and its research has been and will continue to be immune from influence."
"It is unfortunate," he added, "that a research organization known throughout the nation for the quality and character of its work should have to defend itself from accusations leveled by the Center for Popular Democracy, an organization well known for its partisanship."
Source
Hundreds rally in a DC church for DACA solution
Hundreds of people rallied Wednesday inside of a church near the U.S. Capitol demanding legislation to protect young,...
Hundreds of people rallied Wednesday inside of a church near the U.S. Capitol demanding legislation to protect young, undocumented immigrants and replace the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Read the full article here.
Be Our Guest: The downside of immigration reform is increased deportation of immigrants who don’t deserve it
New York Daily News - February 25, 2013 - Nisha Agarwal - President Obama and Congress have not addressed the federal...
New York Daily News - February 25, 2013 - Nisha Agarwal - President Obama and Congress have not addressed the federal Secure Communities program, which has created a deportation pipeline that tears apart thousands of immigrant families.
In recent weeks, the federal fight for immigration reform kicked off in earnest, with Congress and the White House issuing their legislative principles, and the White House “leaking” specific proposals for a bill. Reform offers the bright possibility of legalization for 11 million, including more than 700,000 New Yorkers who live and work in, contribute to and sustain our richly diverse city and state. But the dark side of reform — its painful compromise — may be an increase in federal immigration enforcement efforts.
The Senate and the President’s proposals demand further fortification of the borders and better tracking of visa-holding immigrants. They also do not address the federal Secure Communities program, which has failed utterly in its objective to identify violent and dangerous criminals and, instead, creates a detention and deportation pipeline that has torn apart thousands of immigrant families.
New York City is poised to alter the terms of the national debate, however, by pushing back against Secure Communities and highlighting the destructive impact of the program for New York’s immigrant communities and the city itself. Recently, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito introduced two bills that will limit the extent to which the Department of Corrections and the NYPD collaborate with federal Immigration Customs and Enforcement officials through the Secure Communities program.
These bills, which are due to pass this week, build upon a law enacted in 2011 that would prevent the Department of Corrections from turning over to federal immigration authorities certain individuals being held at Riker’s Island who posed no public safety threat. Before this law went into effect, thousands of immigrant New Yorkers were held at Riker’s Island every year in order to be turned over to ICE for eventual deportation. A large segment of those held posed no threat to public safety, including those who were long-term, legal permanent residents, juveniles, people seeking asylum and protection under the Violence Against Women Act, victims of human trafficking and many individuals who may have been arrested for minor infractions such as selling merchandise on the street or hopping a turnstile. What is more, the city was under no legal obligation to hold these individuals for federal authorities, but it continued to do so, spending nearly $20 million a year in city funds to subsidize a senseless and harmful federal deportation process.The new law ended this practice, better focusing the city’s limited resources, targeting enforcement and ensuring that immigrant families were not afraid to step forward as victims and witnesses to crime or to interact with their local government.
With the enactment of Secure Communities in New York in May 2012, ICE has been able to “flag” immigrants moving through the criminal justice system far faster and earlier in the process than had previously been possible because it allows for the sharing of fingerprint data almost instantaneously between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and ICE. A bad system of indiscriminate immigration enforcement was made much worse under Secure Communities.
Now, New York City is once again faced with the challenge of having to subsidize and support a broken and deeply flawed federal immigration enforcement system. Immigrant New Yorkers are coming into our courts and through our police precincts at risk of being siphoned into deportation proceedings, even if they have committed no crime, are themselves victims of crime or domestic violence or have committed only minor status-related crimes such as driving without a license. Perversely, many immigrant defendants now arrive at arraignments already having been identified by ICE and therefore find it in their best interest to be sent to Riker’s Island rather than released on bail because they are at risk of being turned over to immigration authorities upon release.
The new bills introduced in the City Council will put a stop to these perverse outcomes, ensuring that individuals who have no criminal record, immigrants who have committed only low-level or some status-based offenses, and immigrant youth, among others, are not ensnared by the deportation dragnet when they pose no threat to the public.
This legislation was developed in partnership with Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD, as well as in collaboration with the immigrant community and others impacted by the harmful and inappropriate conflation of the criminal justice process with civil immigration enforcement. It is New York City speaking with one voice, reaffirming our collective values: the importance of trust between government and the people it serves; the commitment to diversity, openness and inclusion; and the enduring, stubborn passion to be a city that attracts and supports a world of talent and human potential. The proposed legislation is also New York’s call to the rest of the country, as national attention focuses on the possibility of comprehensive immigration reform.
The era of exclusion and impunity is over. We must choose a path forward that protects our families, sustains our communities and promotes the hard work and opportunity that boosts our economy.
Nisha Agarwal is deputy director of the Center for Popular Democracy (www.populardemocracy.org) and a lecturer at Columbia Law School.
Source
Activists invite St. Louis Fed president on north St. Louis bus tour
Activists invite St. Louis Fed president on north St. Louis bus tour
Activists with a group pushing for changes at the Federal Reserve asked St. Louis Fed President James Bullard to...
Activists with a group pushing for changes at the Federal Reserve asked St. Louis Fed President James Bullard to accompany them on a bus tour of some of the poorest communities in St. Louis.
About a dozen activists delivered an invitation for the tour to a St. Louis Fed official at the regional Fed headquarters downtown. An equivalent number of police watched.
“You’re very removed when you’re in that rarified air of the Federal Reserve,” said organizer Derek Laney.
The group is affiliated with the national Fed Up campaign, which is pushing for more diversity on regional Fed boards and wants the Fed to put more emphasis on keeping unemployment low rather than controlling inflation. Laney is affiliated with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, a local activist group that speaks out on issues such as policing and coal companies.
The activists’ demonstration coincided with the Fed’s Open Market Committee meeting Wednesday, where Fed officials decided, as expected, to again hold off raising its benchmark interest rate.
Still, some expect the Fed could signal another small rate hike at the end of the year, similar to a small increase in December 2015 that was the first hike in almost 10 years.
Even discussing an increase will still affect market interest rates and economic growth — an unnecessary move while many people are still trying to benefit from the tepid economic recovery, said Nick Apperson, an executive from downtown tech firm LockerDome who participated in the demonstration.
“While it’s likely they’re not raising interest rates in this meeting, … they’re hinting that they’re going to, which will have a similar effect,” he said.
Laney said the group also wanted to call attention to comments Bullard made last month at the annual conference attended by Fed officials and other top central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Fed Up activists attended the event to speak with officials, and during an interview with CNBC, Bullard said that one of the group’s funders, Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, should have come in person rather than sending “all these people.”
“If Bullard wants to walk back those comments he made at Jackson Hole, he needs to walk our streets and talk to our folks,” Laney said.
By Jacob Barker
Source
Downtown Protest Held Over Racial Disparity in Employment
KMOV St. Louis - March 5, 2015, by Steve Savard - About 12 people rallied outside the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis...
KMOV St. Louis - March 5, 2015, by Steve Savard - About 12 people rallied outside the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Thursday to protest the racial disparity in employment in the St. Louis region.
White unemployment in the St. Louis area is 5.7 percent, African American unemployment is 14.1 percent. Organizers said they want the Fed to adopt policies focused on getting more people get back to work.
“It’s not easy getting a job, when you are qualified even when you look the part,” one demonstrator said.
Organizers said the story of one attendee demonstrates the problem.
“When you do get the job, it’s something to get you buy, but it’s not a livable wage,” Ray Rounds said.
Rounds said he left a low paying job to go back to school at the Green Technology Training Program at St. Louis University.
“I’m certified in lead remediation, mold, asbestos, permit required confined spaces, hazardous material. I’ve got 17 of those certificates I was really proud of and I was ready to go to work,” Rounds said.
Rounds said he has not been able to land a job in the two years since he finished school.
“It’s pretty frustrating because with all I thought that I had accomplished. It’s meaningless because there are no jobs,” Rounds said.
Rounds has been attending rallies, working with churches and other organizations to try and make a difference. He hopes the contacts he has made will help him land a job.
Demonstrators also said they want to see more diversity on the Federal Reserve Board.
Source
The resistance is making one last all-out push to kill the GOP health bill
The resistance is making one last all-out push to kill the GOP health bill
More than 300 health care activists, disability rights advocates, and organizers gathered on second floor of the...
More than 300 health care activists, disability rights advocates, and organizers gathered on second floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Monday morning to oppose Senate Republicans’ Graham-Cassidy health care bill.
The bill would sharply reduce spending for Medicaid by billions of dollars by tying it to medical inflation, blow up Obamacare’s marketplaces, and open the door for states to curtail protections for patients with preexisting conditions.
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
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
Activist Group Presses for Diversity on Fed Boards
An activist group on Monday named a slate of candidates it would like to see placed on the boards overseeing the...
An activist group on Monday named a slate of candidates it would like to see placed on the boards overseeing the regional Federal Reserve banks, saying these people would promote diversity at the central bank and de-emphasize the influence bankers have on policy makers.
The slate of candidates is in large part aimed at addressing what the left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign sees as a lack of minority and female representation in the leadership ranks of top central bank officialdom.
“Regional Banks’ boards are disproportionately white, male, and from the corporate and financial sectors,” the group said in a report. “Regional Banks have continually selected bank directors without transparency or public input, and most directors’ backgrounds suggest that they are likelier to be familiar with the interests of the wealthy than with the interests of low-income individuals and communities of color,” the group said.
The Federal Reserve’s Shifting Makeup
The group identified a slate of candidates drawn from academia, think tanks and unions who could serve as directors at the 12 regional bank districts. These prospective candidates are mainly women or people of color. None are bankers or financial market participants.
The group also said the continued role of bankers on boards continues to create conflicts of interest between the Fed and regulated financial institutions. “The potential for conflicts of interest will remain high as long as commercial banks and financial institutions continue to dominate Fed leadership,” Fed Up said in its report.
Fed Up’s Candidates
The boards overseeing the regional Fed banks have long been a flashpoint. While the Washington-based Board of Governors, now led by Chairwoman Janet Yellen, is explicitly part of the government, the 12 regional banks exist as quasi-private institutions overseen by boards composed of a legally mandated mix of bankers, community members and business representatives.
The most public responsibility of these boards is to guide the selection of new regional bank presidents and to reapprove these officials when their terms are up. Directors from institutions regulated by the Fed aren’t involved in this process, but they were until several years ago.
The regional Fed boards also help oversee regional Fed operations and provide intelligence on local economic conditions. Most Fed bank presidents have spoken very favorably of their boards and have pointed out these directors have no influence and have no special access to Fed monetary policy-making.
The Fed Up campaign has been pressing the central bank for some time on diversity issues, to some successes. In May many congressional Democrats signed a letter to Chairwoman Janet Yellen expressing concern about what they saw as a lack of diversity among the Fed’s top officials and boards of directors. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton also expressed support for getting bankers off Fed boards.
The Fed countered then that it is done a lot to improve diversity and that it would work to do even better in the future.
And speaking in early June with reporters, Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan acknowledged the problem, saying “diversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity of all kinds leads to better decision making and greater performance. That’s something we should be striving for at the Fed.”
Earlier this year, former Minneapolis Fed leader Narayana Kocherlakota indicated in a blog post that a lack of African-American representation in policy-making positions may have caused officials to pay insufficient attention to the needs of this group during the financial crisis.
By MICHAEL S. DERBY
Source
3 days ago
3 days ago